Deadeye Dick Rescues "New Age Girl" from Bankruptcy Limbo

The song that made the Orleans’ alternative rock band famous has been lost for a decade, until now.

In 1994, New Orleans’ alternative rock band Deadeye Dick had offers from all the major labels. They had a radio hit out of the blue with “New Age Girl,” and it got every label’s attention. The band went with the Atlanta-based indie label Ichiban instead, and while it’s now clear that they could have done better, circumstances made that decision hard in the moment. The offers came in because Atlanta’s alternative rock station 99X started playing “New Age Girl,” and the speed with which it caught on with other stations in Atlanta and Chicago and the stations that took the leads from 99X prompted the offers including Ichiban’s. The catch was that the version 99X was playing was a glorified demo recorded on ADAT—eight tracks on VCR-like tapes. “What 99X was served was the final studio mix with no commercial mastering,” bass player Mark Miller recalls. 

Because of that, all the labels wanted Deadeye Dick to go back in the studio, re-record the song, prepare a proper album, and get back in the game six months to a year later. They offered money and corporate muscle, but their offers meant the band had to walk away from a hit and hope that the results could be reproduced later. In 1994, alternative rock was a new radio format created in large part by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, grunge, and the army of bands signed in the search for the next Nirvana. There was no guarantee it would still exist in a year, and the band wondered rightly if America would keep the porch light on for “New Age Girl.”

Ichiban, on the other hand, was ready to go, and that mattered. 99X said that Deadeye Dick needed an album in the store soon, and that they couldn’t keep playing a song with no real product behind it. Ichiban could get a CD to market in two weeks, had good distribution, and had radio promotion people that the band had heard good things about. They also figured that with a smaller company, they would be Ichiban’s priority. An indie label also appealed to the band’s conception of itself. “We don’t need a big advance; just buy us a van to tour in. We’ll be a team,” singer and guitarist Caleb Guillotte recalls. “We’ll get out there. We’ll pound the pavement, and we’ll be successful together.”

It didn’t work out that way. 

The success of “New Age Girl” seemed improbable from the start. Guillotte and Miller didn’t envision a radio hit as their future. In the early 1990s, they looked at R.E.M. and The dB’s as models for a career in music. Those bands were part of the first wave of America’s independent underground along with Sonic Youth, The Replacements, The Minutemen, X, Black Flag, Husker Dü, and Pylon that parlayed campus radio play and gigs in college town dive bars into incremental progress so that when or if something reached a broader market, the growth would seem earned and less flukey. 

Their material seemed well suited to that approach. You could hear the influence of Elvis Costello and The Beatles in their songs, and they were comfortable with those roots being clear. “We wanted to make a British pop record,” Miller says. “New Age Girl” was an outlier for Guillotte as a songwriter, and when he passed a cassette of songs to Miller to figure out bass parts for, it wasn’t on the side that Guillotte intended for him to hear. Miller liked Guillotte’s songs, so it didn’t occur to him not to flip the tape. When he found “New Age Girl,” he heard the skeleton of a song with a ton of potential. 

They knew “New Age Girl” didn’t quite fit with the rest of their material. Guillotte’s songs didn’t usually rely on riffs or schoolyard double (being kind) entendres, but they thought about the R.E.M. model and pursued the song anyway. They were confident that their concerts and body of work would show that there was more to them than “She don’t eat meat / but she sure likes the bone,” and if the song helped them step up to larger venues where they could show who they really were, the trade-off was worth it. 

Deadeye Dick recorded the song in three days with Cowboy Mouth’s Fred LeBlanc producing and Billy Landry on drums after only a few weeks in the band. When they sent the disc to 99X, they imagined that any play that they might receive would help them get gigs in Atlanta and expand their audience. Instead, it blew up. “Zillions of people wanted to know what that song was,” Guillotte says. 

Ichiban released A Different Story, the band’s debut album, on time in 1994 as promised. Deadeye Dick had the original tapes properly mastered to open the songs up and make them sound more professional, but it didn’t take them long to realize that the team Guillotte thought they had assembled weren’t all pulling in the same direction. They thought Ichiban shared their vision of building them as a band and a draw, but the ads in trade papers trumpeted “New Age Girl” in giant letters and “Deadeye Dick” in a much smaller, more discreet font. Ichiban was in the “New Age Girl” business, not the Deadeye Dick business, and when the song had largely run its radio course after three or four months, Ichiban was slow to release a second single. “Releasing a follow-up single was a cardinal rule for record companies in the ’90s,” Miller says.

Miller believes Ichiban refused to move on from “New Age Girl” because the label sold Vanilla Ice’s stagnant “Play That Funky Music” single to SBK Records in 1989. A year later, they watched its flip side, “Ice Ice Baby,” earn SBK millions. Miller says Arista Records’ Clive Davis liked Deadeye Dick and tried to buy their contract from Ichiban, but the label wouldn’t let “New Age Girl” go anywhere. But managing a runaway success proved overwhelming.

“I don’t think they knew what to do with it on a breakout level because it was the speed of light that all this was happening,” Miller says. “It had this life of six months for a single, which is unheard of. Ichiban, instead of seeing this as a fantastic, runaway first single success and follow it up in three months—that’s what every record company would do—I think they were so myopic on what it was doing that I don’t think considered the rest.” 

“New Age Girl” got a second life when it appeared the soundtrack to the Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels film, Dumb & Dumber, and that helped ease the frustration. Miller figured, “Everyone’s a one-hit wonder until your second hit. We’re a one-hit wonder. We’re about to have our two-hit wonder, and we’ll see what happens after that.” Unfortunately, nothing really came next. Ichiban eventually released the singles “Perfect Family” and “Margarite,” and they did fine on college radio—well enough to make the band feel like it was making progress where it mattered. But outside of college radio, the lone hit made A Different Story seem shallow. The band recorded a second album for Ichiban, Whirl, but that situation wasn’t promising. Ichiban lined up producer Don Smith who produced Cracker’s first two albums, and his focus on an alternative Americana was at odds with Deadeye Dick’s Beatles-influenced pop. After Whirl, Deadeye Dick and Ichiban parted ways, and the band released an independently produced album through their MySpace page. It played for another seven years after “New Age Girl,” but their path had been irrevocably changed. 

Along the way, they discovered that the Ichiban radio promotion team that they had heard so much about came with baggage. There were stations where it had pull, but others simply said no to Ichiban product after feeling shabbily treated. Still, Deadeye Dick played on. They always saw their live show as their pathway to success, and they were having a rock ’n’ roll adventure. One night, a late-in-the-career southern rock band Molly Hatchet opened for them in Pensacola. They played a number of gigs with The B-52s, and shared bills with a young Widespread Panic and Rob Thomas’ pre-Matchbox 20 band, Tabitha’s Secret.

Eventually, their relationship to “New Age Girl” had started to curdle. It wasn’t full-fledged toxic because when they played markets that knew them from airplay on alternative or college rock stations, the audiences were more likely to have heard a few more songs and be there for the band. In markets that heard “New Age Girl” on pop radio stations, there were people who were only there for one song. That grew tiresome, particularly when Deadeye Dick was trying to promote the second and third single. At some point, they worked up a swinging, lounge version that reflected their changing relationship to the song, and according to Guillotte, “Mark is the most genial out of the three of us, but he was the one who wanted to be the most subversive.” 

Miller started advocating for the swing version in concert, and even though he was entertained by the idea, Guillotte doesn’t remember them ever going through with it. “My first five years of playing music were in cover bands,” he says. “I have a built in desire to make the crowd react. I want to please them. I want them to be happy.” Miller, on the other hand, says they went with the swing version once. He remembers that they would tease a lounge first verse before switching to the familiar arrangement on occasion, and they played a full, swinging jazz version when booked on an incongruous Christmas show with The Go-Gos and Boys II Men. 

“It went over perfectly well because we were in a scenario that was a holiday, fun spirit,” Miller says.

Things didn’t get better for Deadeye Dick, but they didn’t fall off a cliff either. They weren’t going to be an R.E.M.-like band and a college radio darling with a resumé that included a pop radio hit based on a spring break hook. It didn’t help that in 1999, Ichiban went bankrupt. It did so while owing the band money, but Deadeye Dick didn’t find out about the bankruptcy until after the assets had been sold and there was nothing left for them. Even their master tapes had been sold, so not only could they not receive what they were owed, but they couldn’t earn future income from “New Age Girl.” They held out hope that maybe they’d be able to buy them back, but when the company that bought their masters went bankrupt too and the masters were bought by a company in Michigan that specializes in acquiring distressed assets, they realized their masters were gone and moved on. 

Streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music pulled “New Age Girl” when its legal home became complicated by multiple bankruptcies. Even though they doesn’t translate to meaningful money, streaming would give the song the endurance that they’d like to see have as well as the opportunity to be placed in movies, shows or games. Generation X nostalgia being what it is, its absence from the musical world is more consequential than the song’s merits alone would suggest. And, now that they have distance from the frustrations that surrounded “New Age Girl” at the time, Guillotte and Miller are proud of the song. “It’s a good song,” Miller says. “My daughter knows about it. My wife knows about it. It’s fun to hear it on the radio.”

Recently, Deadeye Dick addressed that gap by releasing a version of the song they recorded in 2003. Taylor Swift has begun the project of re-recording her old albums with the idea of replacing the versions she no longer has control of in the marketplace, but Miller insists that there was no such intention when they re-cut the song. They weren’t trying to devalue the now-lost version; they simply wanted to take advantage of an opportunity A show on the Lifetime network wanted to use “New Age Girl,” and since Ichiban and the band had gone their separate ways, “we decided to record a perfect version of it,” Guillotte says.  “It’s fatter sounding with better drum sounds, but a pretty faithful simulacrum of the original.” Because they own it, Deadeye Dick can get the mechanical royalties from the use of that version. 

Miller and Guillotte make music for fun these days, and work in the film industry has paid the bills for more than 20 years for both of them. Billy Landry’s a doctor now. Guillotte still enjoys playing the songs he wants to play to an audience that’s there to hear him, not just the song they heard on the radio. Deadeye Dick had time to be angry and calculate the ways they believe they were ripped off, but they decided long ago that process of trying to get what they were owed wasn’t worth the effort. Guillotte was 31 when Deadeye Dick signed with Ichiban—old enough to know how rock ’n’ roll fame works. “We knew it could be very ephemeral,” he says. “We’d seen the history.” Today he’s grateful for the song. 

“Once we stopped touring and started doing other things, my attitude toward the song started evolving. I started becoming much more sanguine about the whole thing. The vast majority of bands never get a chance to be a one-hit wonder. We were lucky to have the ride we had.” 

That doesn’t mean they can’t What if … the experience. Miller thinks Ichiban’s decision not to expand the Deadeye Dick brand really hurt, and it became clear that the label had no plan for what would come next. “That’s the critical element where a major [label] would have changed the trajectory of everything,” he says. “I don’t think it would have changed anything from the beginning; I think it would have changed second single and on.” 

Guillotte wonders if the band’s fortunes would have been different with another lead singer. “I think we needed a charismatic man or woman who could own the stage,” he says. “Mark and Billy were great at what they did, and I was good at what I did.” He also thinks that they might have done better if they had a clearer, tighter band identity like Better Than Ezra, who clearly knew who they were as a recording and performing act when they signed with Elektra. “I don’t think we had a solidified identity,” Guillotte says. “We were three guys who showed up and played music.”