opted to balance his journalism and music careers, and he continues to write and edit for the newspaper to the present day. The group was working on their first album between March and June 1996. Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? was released July 29, 1997, to local critical acclaim. The record performed well on college radio charts, and it sold steadily in Seattle and New York, among other cities. By late 1997, however, the band felt as though the record had lost its momentum and the group began to contemplate breaking up. Shortly before taking January 1998 off to contemplate their future, Nelson gave a copy of Merrymakers to KNDD DJ Marco Collins. Within weeks, "Flagpole Sitta" had become KNDD's most-requested song. The band toured extensively from March through December 1998, playing headlining and support gigs with some of the most popular artists of the year and appearing at many radio festivals. Influential L.A. radio station KROQ-FM picked the track up, and stations across the country shortly followed suit. When Greg Glover of The Arena Rock Recording Company was hired at Slash Records, a subsidiary of London Recordings, Harvey Danger were signed to the label. "Flagpole Sitta" made Billboard magazine's Top 40 and appeared in a number of films and television shows. Its video got heavy rotation on MTV and VH1. The song also became famous globally as one of the most memorable songs featured in the film American Pie, despite not being on the official retail soundtrack. It also appeared in the movie Disturbing Behavior and its trailer. More recently, the song was used as the opening theme to the British sitcom Peep Show for the second series and onwards. In August 2019, "Flagpole Sitta" was ranked No. 25 on Rolling Stone's "50 Best Songs of the Nineties" list. The band had wanted to release the song "Carlotta Valdez" as the follow-up single to "Flagpole Sitta", but they were overruled by Slash Records, who released "Private Helicopter" as a single instead in the fall of 1998. The single received lukewarm reception and did not reach any Billboard music chart. In December 1998, Harvey Danger began writing songs for their follow-up album. Delays and King James Version (1999–2001) Harvey Danger began production of their second album in March 1999 at Albert Grossman's Bearsville Studios, near Woodstock, New York. Slash/London was unusually uninvolved in the recording process, a harbinger of