Here are some fun facts about singer-songwriter Jules Shear:
1. He’s from Pittsburgh. So is actor Jeff Goldblum, who stars in a 2006 pseudo-documentary called Pittsburgh that chronicles his homecoming performance in a production of The Music Man five years ago. It also stars Illeana Douglas, a friend of Goldblum’s, who was dating Moby in ‘04 and learning more than she wanted to know about the musician’s appetite for pornography.
2. Illeana Douglas and Moby never dated, hence Pittsburgh’s status as a “pseudo-documentary.” But Moby did research his role by borrowing Jules Shear’s extensive collection of amateur porn.
(Okay, so that “fact” about Shear’s porn collection is a lie. And it’s possible he wouldn’t consider it to be “fun,” either. But why should Jeff Goldblum be the only person who’s allowed to blur the line between fact and fiction? On that note …)
3. For a brief period in the early ’90s, Shear cut his own hair. When he was finished with a trim he’d yell, “Shear genius!” Sadly, no one was around to hear it.
4. Jules & the Polar Bears was originally going to consist of Shear and three actual polar bears, but due to his unwillingness to relocate to the North Pole — and polar bears’ general inability to play instruments — he eventually settled for human musicians David Beebe, Richard Bredice, and Stephen Hague. However, he insisted on treating them like real polar bears, going so far as to contractually limit them to an all-fish diet.
5. Jeff Goldblum starred in the 1988 movie Vibes with Cyndi Lauper, whose hit song “All Through the Night” was written and first recorded by Shear. The soundtrack of 1985’s The Goonies includes two songs performed by Lauper as well as one by the Bangles, “I Got Nothing,” which was cowritten by Shear. The Bangles then recorded Shear’s “If She Knew What She Wants,” another song he recorded first on one of his own LPs, for their album Different Light. Goldblum sings in Pittsburgh for his role as Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, but songs like “Seventy-six Trombones” probably would’ve sounded better coming out of Lauper’s mouth.
6. “Jules Shear” is a stage name. His real name is Julianne Shear.
7. Did you know that legendary author Jules Verne used rival sci-fi scribe H.G. Wells’s time machine to travel forward in time to 1984, where he declared Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” to be “not as good as that one Shear wrote”? And that after watching The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension he declared costar Jeff Goldblum to be “quirky as hell but fun to watch”?
8. Jeff Goldblum, Jeff Goldblum, Jeff Goldblum!!!
9. The Pittsburgh Penguins recently won the Stanley Cup, but don’t talk about the reigning hockey champions around Shear or he’ll go into a loud, profane tirade about how there aren’t any penguins in Pittsburgh. There aren’t any polar bears either, but you’ll only make things worse if you bring that up. Just change the subject to Happy Feet and you’ll see that he loves penguins — it’s lapses in geographical logic he can’t stand.
10. Though it hasn’t been confirmed that either Jules Shear or Jeff Goldblum has read Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, it’s nice to imagine them being members of the same book club. Especially if one’s a big fan of Jules Verne and the other’s a big fan of H.G. Wells and they’re willing to wrestle over who’s better.
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You know this album. Even if you have somehow managed to miss it over the years, you know it from the countless other albums it has influenced in the 31 years since its release. Music From Big Pink is the closest thing we have to a sacred album in the annals of rock and roll. But let’s put the myth aside for a moment, and discuss the music.