Respectfully King of Rain

Zoo Freaks, settle in. The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on “Respectfully King of Rain” by The Rave-Ups, track three off the 1990 Epic album Chance, and this one still feels like a late-night drive with the windows cracked. It opens like a joke told in a dream. Jimmer Podrasky sings that he dreamt he had a dream last night, a dream as real as he is, a dream within a dream, a funny little dream. Then the moon almost gets lost, traded for the king of rain and poured into a coffee cup made from the Hoover Dam. A king without a country claims he is better than the moon. A queen bargains twenty rifles for the king. Everybody in the room is thinking the same thing. It is the kind of lyric a college English major writes when he has been listening to John Prine in secret and playing punk clubs in public.

The song was written by Podrasky and guitarist Terry Wilson, cut in Hollywood at the Dog Haus, and produced by David Leonard. Epic put it out as the lead single from Chance, and it became the closest thing the band ever had to a radio hit. It picked up some video play on MTV and climbed to No. 12 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. A limited promo, Hamlet Meets John Doe, had already slipped the song out ahead of the album, paired with two non-album cuts, “Train to Nowhere” and “The Night Before Christmas (Hey Baby).” Epic even pressed a radio sampler called A Chance Conversation With Jimmer Podrasky, with the single sitting right next to interview bits about fatherhood and why the band landed in Los Angeles. For a minute it looked like the long club grind was finally going to pay off.

Chance was not a marketing word. In a July 1990 Los Angeles Times interview, Podrasky said the record was named for his son, whose baby face is on the cover. “There were a number of songs on the record that dealt very directly with Chance and Chance’s mother, the whole family thing and the newness of being a father,” he told the paper. He was scared of messing it up and happier than he had ever been, and he wanted both feelings on the record. On the liner notes he wrote to Chance’s mother, his partner of eight years, “Now that we have a chance… will you marry me?” By the time the band was out on the road, that story had already gone sideways. He told the Times she married while he was touring, and that he had not had his hair cut in a while. The band’s own line about it was pure Rave-Ups: they could still laugh when it would have been easier to cry. On MTV’s Week in Rock that spring he shrugged off the proud-dad charge and said a lot of the record simply dealt with his relationship with his son and with family. Asked where they got the kid for the cover, the band cracked that they rented him. It was Chance, the one and only.

That is the weather this song lives in. AllMusic later called Chance a record of thick, clean riffs and endless hooks, with “Respectfully King of Rain” among the tracks that sounded written for the radio, more unearthed time capsule than copy of the Who or the Kinks. Jimmer’s own site still describes Chance as the band’s valedictory, more introspective than what came before, with Podrasky stepping forward as an open wound and taking on loss, heartache, and fatherhood on “The Tallest Tree” and “Respectfully King of Rain.” The follow-up single, “(She Says) Come Around,” was ready to go, video and all. Epic decided not to work it, then dropped the band. They still made the “Spring Dance” episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 and opened some dates for the Indigo Girls. By 1992 the frustration won. Podrasky later said he walked away because his son needed a father more than the world needed another singer-songwriter. The Rave-Ups came back around in the 2010s and put out Tomorrow in 2022, their first full album in three decades. The rain song never really left the set list of people who heard it the first time.

The band started in the fall of 1979 at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. Podrasky, a Natrona Heights kid with an English degree, a satchel of songs, a punk streak, and a closeted love of John Prine, put the group together with Michael Kaniecki, George Carter, and drummer T.J. Junco. They were filed with the local punk and new-wave crowd, but they were really a stew of punk, pop, country, blues, and folk. Early rooms were Fat City in Swissvale, the Decade, the Electric Banana, and campus ballrooms. The first version did not hold. Podrasky chased the idea to Los Angeles, came back, then booked another flight west. The lineup that stuck met in the A&M Records mailroom and shipping department: Podrasky, drummer Tim Jimenez, guitarist Terry Wilson, and bassist Tommy Blatnik, rehearsing at night in the basement of the A&M lot among posters and album flats. A 1983 EP, Class Tramp, sold out its 3,000 copies. Town + Country in 1985 sold more than 40,000 and made “Positively Lost Me” a college-radio favorite. Dating Beth Ringwald put them in Molly Ringwald’s orbit. The band’s name was scratched into her binder in Sixteen Candles. She brought John Hughes to a club date, and they ended up on screen in Pretty in Pink playing “Rave-Up, Shut-Up” and “Positively Lost Me.” The hit soundtrack left them off. Epic signed them anyway. The Book of Your Regrets arrived in 1988. Chance followed in 1990. That is the long road into this song.

You can hear the whole spin, and a lot more deep cuts like it, over at THE ZOO. Jimmer keeps the story, including the page that still names Chance and “Respectfully King Of Rain,” on his official site at jimmermusic.com. The band posts from the garage and the road on The Rave-Ups Facebook page, and Podrasky’s own page is at facebook.com/jimmer.podrasky, with the music page at Jimmer Podrasky Music. No separate official Instagram or X account checked out as a working band home, and no active fan site turned up that we could stand behind, so we are leaving those off the card rather than send you down a dead end. Turn it up. The king of rain is still out there somewhere between the moon and a bad cup of coffee.