Rock legends come and rock legends go, and then there are the Thrown Ups - proof that the cool kids in school (Steve Turner, Leighton Beezer, Mark Arm, Ed Fotheringham) can get away with anything.

As Steve points out, "It was really great performance art - or at least Ed was." Their raison d'etre was this: make up a set list with wacky titles ("Eat My Dump," "Person In My Bowel (Is Sad)," "My Love Is Simple") and improvise songs around them. For each show, they came up with ridiculous costumes built around a theme of Ed's imagining. If nothing else, the Thrown Ups were, and still are, an opportunity to "bug Ed" - everyone's best friend and the Greatest Showman on Earth. As he himself said, "An article on the Thrown Ups? How perfectly ridiculous."

The band's posthumous "greatest hits" record, Seven Years Golden (Amphetamine Reptile) - as well as everything else they did - is what you'd come up with if you went to the practice space to jam with your friends at 3 in the morning, drunk as hell, and everyone traded instruments. However, if there were tapes of you screaming about "smiling panties" and "flubber mates," you might not be so thrilled with this release. "Vocalist" Ed wasn't. Being the resident artist, Ed simply refused to complete the cover art, thinking that would foil the whole embarrassing spectacle. But Art Chantry-to-the-rescue took the job. The record, produced by niceguy Jack Endino, is not exactly easy on the ears, although I'm sure it'll be a collector's item.

As folklore has it, during a Hollywood Underground "Battle of the Drunks," Mark began a club-wide, rhyming chant. "Make Ed na-ked." The crowd obliged and Ed was 86'd. Another time, at a Moore show, Ed was to begin the first song, alone on stage, singing in his low, sex-crazed voice, "The ladies love me." Although expecting to be joined by the others, he was left alone on stage singing the line over and again, looking nervously over his shoulder, while the rest hid and giggled - I'm certain like school boys. Alas, "The Thrown Ups will never get back together because Leighton fired all of us. Except me and Mark would consider it just to embarrass Ed," confides Turner.

All I have to say is, poor Ed.