Monthly Archives: May 2010

#89. “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” – Lenny Kravitz
#90. “No Rain” – Blind Melon

First day of summer! The noonday sun tried desperately to penetrate my bedroom blinds as I slept off Grad Night, but it was all for naught. My room remained dark as a tomb. If it wasn’t for the fact I had a hip-pocket full of Wherehouse gift certificates and graduation cash, I would have slept another two or three hours. But I crawled out of bed and drove to the Wherehouse, where I bought Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek & The Dominoes, the Who’s double album Quadrophenia, and two albums of more recent vintage: Blind Melon’s self-titled debut, and Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way.

What a burn. Loved, loved, loved the Kravitz title song, so I bought the album…and there were no other good songs in evidence. Not a one. I would repeatedly fall into this trap until the dawn of the mp3 age. Kravitz would go on to never make a good song ever again. I deduced later that he never made any good songs before “AYGGMY,” either. I guess that proves that even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in his life.

The Blind Melon album fared much better. Known mostly for the massive hit single “No Rain” (and its iconic “Bee Girl” video), the rest of the album was solid and unpretentious, and has held up surprisingly well. The same could not be said of its follow-up, 1995’s Soup. Lead singer Shannon Hoon was a notorious drug ingestion machine, and it’s too bad the atrocious Soup was his last statement to the world before he went tits-up. (Note to aspiring musicians who are considering acquiring a My First Drug Habit kit: Drug use doesn’t always result in an Exile On Main Street or Appetite For Destruction. More often than not, it results in Soup.)

By the by, there’s nothing more boring than watching someone else negotiate to buy a car. While Emily was taking seventeen hours to trade in her old Datsun Z for a new Honda Civic del Sol at some point that June, I wandered over to the Underground to spend the last of my graduation cash on Primus’ live debut Suck On This, and Nirvana’s 1989 Sub Pop debut Bleach. Em’s new vehicle reflected her decision to eschew college for the time being and enter the full-time workforce as a medical records clerk for Chico Community Hospital. A real, adult-type job. The beginning of the tiniest crack in our relationship foundation. But she celebrated by buying me the Kinks’ Greatest Hits and the book The Films of Sean Connery, so it was all good. For now.

#91. “Two Princes” – The Spin Doctors

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Most Overplayed Song of 1993! Featured on movie soundtracks, movie trailers, a video that by federal law was played twice per hour for ten to twelve months, and as background music on dozens and dozens of MTV shows, including The Real World. I spent a lot of afternoons that summer glued to the groundbreaking “reality” series’ second season, the one in Los Angeles with the drunken Irish “music critic,” (he was shown fleetingly at a club show holding a notepad, so that makes him a music critic, right?), the obnoxious, glowering “stand-up comedian” who got kicked out of the house for general assholery, and didn’t seem to have a funny bone in his body, and the jaw-droppingly awful “country singer” (his act was shown at least a dozen times, and it always consisted of one song: “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.”) Some argue that The Real World reached its peak with the next season in San Francisco (a.k.a. “Puck and the AIDS Guy”), but I was already growing bored with the format by then.

It reached a point where “Two Princes” seemed to saturate the very air itself that summer. You would be out for a quiet walk, and then suddenly…a whiff of patchouli, and Chris Barron’s lazy, beard-y voice would be carried faintly through the breeze: “One, two princes kneel before you, that’s-a what I said now…” And you would curl up on the sidewalk and wait for help to arrive. This album had been kicking around since ’91, and showed no signs of going away.

(But never fear, a follow-up was in the works. And if there was one follow-up that was worse than Soup, it was the Spin Doctors’ Turn It Upside Down. It’s a poorly-kept recording industry secret that most artists try to front load their albums with the stronger tracks. The Doctors’ idea of a lead-off track? A gem called “Big Fat Funky Booty,” followed by the single (!) “Cleopatra’s Cat,” an exercise in scat-singing so repugnant it would make Cab Calloway claw his own eyes out.)

#92. “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles” – The Proclaimers

Originally released by Scottish folk-rock duo the Proclaimers in 1988, and a fair-sized European hit at that time. As we all know, Europe doesn’t really count, and it remained unknown to American ears until its re-release and inclusion on the soundtrack of 1993’s Benny And Joon, a good-natured movie so slight that it dissolved in your mind upon viewing, like cotton candy, leaving only the sweet, sticky residue of Johnny Depp’s Buster Keaton imitations, and the Proclaimers singing over the closing credits in their thick Scottish burrs about “havering” and other nonsensical Euro notions that aren’t really words. The film was in theaters for about a day and a half, but the accompanying re-edited music video – now featuring clips from the film interspersed with the rather spastic Proclaimers (“Dah-DAH duh, dah-DAH duh”) – stayed in rotation for the rest of the summer.

I wanted to get hold of the song in an idle kind of way, not to the point of buying it or anything (still jobless, remember?). I resorted to an old trick from my younger days. I propped a cassette recorder against the television speaker and recorded the audio right off of MTV. In my formative years, I did this with the audio of George Carlin VHS tapes the clueless liquor store clerk would rent to me. (Remember when liquor stores rented movies?) Yes, I was the only twelve-year-old on the middle-school playground who had hours of George Carlin material memorized flawlessly. Explains a lot. Continue reading →

#85. “Everybody Hurts” – R.E.M.

I was spending most of my free time with Emily (my senior prom was out of the question, as she had already graduated and would not countenance a return to a high school function), but I was also gravitating toward more eccentric, off-beat characters like McKinney, whose every word was intended to entertain, confuse, or shock. My kind of guy. I was also having more and more conversations with a quiet, long-haired bass player named Allen Maxwell, whom I’d met in English class junior year. Consequently, I was spending less time with some of the old friends like Jeff O. and Eric. We were like foxhole buddies, fighting down in the high school trenches, but as the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, we realized we didn’t really have all that much in common. They wanted to watch baseball and Faces of Death, I wanted to watch the Marx Brothers and Fawlty Towers. To their credit, they laughed their asses off at Duck Soup, but I don’t think I made them lifelong fans. They were on the tennis and cross-country teams, I was in drama. We didn’t split up and go our separate ways right then (community college, remember?), but there was a definite elegiac feeling in the air. Friendships would never be the same, and we were all very conscious of it. Joy at our impending graduation was tempered with a good deal of melancholy. (Not “Everybody Hurts”-level melancholy, but you fit things where you can.)

#86. “Creep” – Stone Temple Pilots
At some point in early May, I sat in an almost-empty classroom, facing the entire Student Council. I felt like a Supreme Court nominee being raked over the coals by fat-cat Senators. But no, I was merely interviewing for the position of Director of the Senior Showcase, the big Class of ‘93 talent show. It was the most ambitious thing I ever did in high school, and it came in the last four weeks.

The Student Council decided to choose the top two applicants as “co-directors.” I would be sharing the task with Tricia H., my co-star from Dracula who played my wife (as unenviable a position in fiction as it was in fact – she can be seen sitting next to me in the picture in the previous entry.) Far from being disappointed, I was ecstatic. Less work, and someone to share the blame if things went terribly, terribly awry. Tricia was a tough, sharp girl who used stay in character backstage at Dracula – but that character was “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher, who was dominating the headlines at the time. She would rant and curse at us all in a broad Noo Yawk accent (“I’m stayin’ wit’ Joey forevah, muthafuckah! Donchoo try’n stawp meeeeeee…!”) right up until she made her entrance onstage, when she would switch to the plummy British tones of Mina Harker without batting an eye.

McKinney also found himself involved. I don’t know if he tried out for director, but he ended up attaching himself to the show as “producer,” meaning he ran the soundboard, ran errands, and ran his mouth.

There was a time when the Senior Showcase was the “Senior Follies,” a much more freewheeling and bawdy night of “adult” entertainment. I’ve seen the videotapes from some of my friends’ older siblings with my own eyes, or I never would have believed what they got away with. Then as now, high schoolers never met a gay joke they didn’t like, and hammer into the ground ad nauseum. That sort of thing was considered good clean fun in the 1980s in the same way minstrel shows were considered harmless in the 1880s. While I wouldn’t have gone down that road, I did wish that our show could have had a little more comedic bite. By the early 90’s, things were safe and sanitized. Our edgiest sketch was the a re-hash of Robert Townsend’s “Farters Anonymous” – bowlderized into “Flatulators Anonymous.” Since the comedy element had been de-fanged, the Showcase was more of a musical recital, and didn’t require much in the way of “direction.” Just some minor blocking, some editing for time, and arranging the sound and light cues.

We decided to set the dangerous precedent of running the show without an M.C. With the judicious and well-timed use of stage curtains, an act could be performing downstage while another prepared upstage, and the show would flow like a stream of consciousness. After two weeks of meticulous rehearsals…it wasn’t close to working. Oh, well. We figured the Show Business gods would smile upon us, and the adrenaline of opening night would cause the whole thing to miraculously pull together.

It didn’t. And I wasn’t there to see it.

I was busy failing my Algebra 2 final out at my Yuba College night class on opening night. Tricia and McKinney did their best, but it was a clusterfuck. Again, oh well. Opening night was just a glorified dress rehearsal, anyway. Night two, Friday night, was when we’d have a packed house. During a tense huddle fifteen minutes before showtime on night two, we decided it just wouldn’t work without an M.C. The task fell to me. I felt very show-bizzy as I stood backstage in the last five minutes before curtain, sweating profusely and furiously thinking up what I hoped were funny remarks. The curtain went up, I did my best David Letterman saunter into the spotlight, and the glitches began. Luckily, I had McKinney to abuse. I hollered at him down in the tech pit from the stage, even when it wasn’t his fault (which wasn’t often), and he hollered back at me, and we turned it into a desperate little time-filling routine that just barely kept things on the rails.

The comedy sketches were a shambles, filled with inside jokes that only the performers got (I tried to cut as many of those as possible during rehearsals, but they sneaked them back in). Musically, we fared a little better. Allen’s band, Pink Viking, had played in the quad at lunchtime several times that year, and they were the Showcase highlight, offering an instrumental “Dazed and Confused” and Allen on vocals for ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man.”

The show closed with a so-called “Class of ’93” slideshow, which featured the same ten or twelve people in each picture. I loudly pointed that fact out to the audience as the show came to a welcome end. I can’t remember much of my own performance from the haze of that night, except that it was deemed adequate, and the second (and mercifully last) night of Senior Showcase 1993 was put in the books as a success. I would never put myself forward or volunteer to do anything again. Ever. Continue reading →