“Crush Story”, Too Much Joy

This way: Crush Story

Too Much Joy is an American alternative rock music group, that formed in the early 1980s in Scarsdale, New York.

The band, originally called the Rave, took the name Too Much Joy after a phrase that Quirk had seen after his first mushroom trip.

After the success of their third album Cereal Killers, TMJ released several other studio albums, but none achieved the same popular success. In 1997, TMJ announced a hiatus, saying that the commercialism of the music business had taken the "joy" out of performing. Too Much Joy emptied its vaults in 1999 and 2001 to produce the album Gods and Sods, composed of studio outtakes and demos from the period between Mutiny and ...Finally and the live album Live at Least. The later incarnation of the band briefly reunited in the early 2000s to record the one-off holiday single "Ruby Left a Present Underneath the Christmas Tree." Its members have also formed the sometimes-overlapping subprojects the ITS, Surface Wound and Wonderlick. In 2021, the band self-released the album, "Mistakes Were Made." 

Penn and Teller are fans of the band. Teller directed the video for "Donna Everywhere,"and Penn Jillette would often jam with the band in studio.

In 1990, the members of Too Much Joy were taken aback to learn that hip-hop group 2 Live Crew had been arrested on obscenity charges in Florida, and that a record store owner had been arrested for selling 2 Live Crew's music. In response, the band planned a protest concert in which several acts would cover a 2 Live Crew song in Miami. Failing to drum up much commitment among other bands, Too Much Joy played a number of selections from 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album and were arrested, spending a night in jail.

Too Much Joy went on trial for obscenity in Fort Lauderdale in January 1991. The jury took just minutes to acquit the band members. Following the abrupt acquittal, the Broward County prosecutors dropped obscenity charges in the trial of the Hollywood, Florida, nightclub owner of the venue where 2 Live Crew and Too Much Joy had been arrested and suggested that no further arrests of musicians would be made.

[Spotify] Crush Story