Category Archives: Music — 1990s

Spring and summer 1992 — the warm months that closed out my junior year may have been the best time of my life. Afternoons of swimming and shooting pool at Bret K.’s house (was it elk jerky or bear jerky we were eating that one day?), long twilit evenings of “tennis” (see below) or spending quiet time with the girlfriend, nights full of innocent teenage fun (like the time Jeff O. sped through the Placer Video parking lot with Anthony on the hood of his car). We were easy to spot around town with our fleet of candy-colored early 70’s GM vehicles: my sky-blue Blazer, Bret’s shamrock-green GMC pickup, and Jeff W.’s Cheeto-orange Chevy pickup. Jeff O. and Eric L. broke the pattern with their turd-brown Mustang II (prone to overheating) and two-tone Eddie Bauer-model Bronco II, respectively. Bowling…movies…SNL…MTV…all backed by the soundtrack I’m featuring here…

#64. “Divine Thing” — The Soup Dragons

Those long, warm evenings of that particular spring were tennis evenings at Sam Brannan Park. Not that I played much — or at all. Jeff O. and Eric were the racket sports fanatics, and I was quite content to lounge along the baseline with a stack of magazines and keep up a running conversation with them as they lobbed the ball back and forth. Sooner or later, they would get tired and we could all go rent a movie, which was more my speed.

The tennis court was surrounded by a high wall of oleander bushes, and for several evenings running there was evidence that a poor soul in straitened circumstances was making these bushes a temporary domicile. After a week or so of noticing the tattered sleeping bag and empty government cheese boxes, the occupant himself finally made an appearance.

He was already there when we arrived. Seemingly asleep, he was curled up with his back against the tennis court’s chain-link fence. We all noticed, but said nothing. The game started. Fifteen feet away from us, he continued to sleep, or pretend to sleep. The game finished, and the next game in their set began. Conversation rambled from topic to topic. THWACK! went the ball as it volleyed between the two players. THWACK! The man stirred slightly. For almost forty-five minutes, it was as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Then Jeff O. piped up — loudly — between lobs:

“Hey, [Holy Bee].”

THWACK!

“What?”

THWACK!

“Wouldn’t it suck to live in a bush?”

Well, I thought it was funny at the time.

These Used To Be Surrounded By Oleanders: The Sam Brannan tennis courts as they are today. The skateboard park in the distant background replaced the homeless-friendly vacant lot

And the Soup Dragons? I was aware of them through their criminally inept cover of The Rolling Stones’ “I’m Free,” and I seem to recall Eric being a casual fan around this time. I have a clear mental snapshot of 3 or 4 of us listening to this in Eric’s Eddie Bauer Bronco in the Sam Brannan parking lot. In the very parking spot shown above. Eric was the only one of us who had a CD player in his car.

#65. “Friday I’m In Love” — The Cure

I spent most of my high school years actively despising two bands: The Cure and Depeche Mode. Emily was a world-class Curehead, however, so whenever we drove in her car I was assaulted by Robert Smith’s caterwauling. (Our deal was whoever drove picked the music. I was usually able to sweet-talk her into letting me pick the music even when she drove, though not often enough to escape learning Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Disintegration forwards and backwards.)

Why did I hate The Cure so much? Because they just seemed so antithetical to everything I wanted out of music — swagger, confidence, general ass-kickery. I most certainly did not want to hear some lipsticked, cartoon-character freak with a rat’s nest of hair and raccoon eyes expound in an adenoidal yelp about how forlorn and misunderstood he was. Fuck that noise! Plus, they used lots of synthesizers, which was a no-no in my book back in ’92. I’ve since realized The Cure’s “Goth” (TM) look was no more of a pose than any other band, and that under all the mopey whining were some tight little pop songs — “Friday I’m In Love” perhaps the best of them.

Why did I hate Depeche Mode so much? Because they sucked and still do.

So The Cure’s Wish album came out in late April, right around the time everyone was gearing up for prom. In fact, it was probably blasting from the tape deck in Emily’s Datsun Z as we went dress shopping. (We had been spinning Wish so often at the time, I felt as though I should go ahead and get a dress too.) My junior prom was also directly responsible for me learning how to drive a standard transmission (“stick shift” for you non-gearheads.)

“I am not getting all dressed up and and going to a nice dinner and prom in that thing,” she said, gesturing at the battered but serviceable Blazer.

“We’ll take your Z,” I suggested.

“No. The guy drives to prom. That’s tradition.” [NOTE: I may have been the one to insist that driving to the prom was the male prerogative, but this is how I remember it, and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can get their own long-winded blog. E. definitely vetoed the Blazer up front, though.]

So began several nerve-wracking practice turns around south Yuba City in my mom’s non-Eddie Bauer Bronco II with the hair-trigger clutch that popped if you looked at it hard enough. I eventually got the hang of it, but I spent much of the month of May with a sore left leg.

#66. “Breaking The Girl” — Red Hot Chili Peppers

It was also around this time that I became a member of a band — we lasted one rehearsal. I was an admirer of the Chili Peppers’ Flea, plus I had, shall we say, limited musical ability. Those two facts about Your Humble Narrator made him perfect for the role of bassist. Jason Van Zant played lead (he owned two guitars — a blonde Telecaster and the arctic-white Stratocaster fetishized in the Wayne’s World movie.) Brian Cunningham and resident school weirdo Mike L. were also involved, but I forget in what instrumental capacity. I do remember we were drummer-less.

Cunningham conned someone’s grandma out of a Frankenstein’s monster of a bass guitar. It looked like it started life as a some kind of Fender knock-off, but its formerly solid body had been stuffed with cotton wool for some reason, and a piece of old leather had been thumbtacked over the enormous hole that had been gouged out of the body’s backside. Its never-been-changed roundwound strings had been worn smooth by the seventy-year-old woman who played in the country-western cover band that had been her late husband’s hobby.

Rehearsal time came. I plugged in, stood stock-still in Mike L.’s garage, clenched in concentration, and plunked the notes Jason told me to plunk. The bass sounded so terrible, it covered my lack of skill nicely. I made a warm, bass-y wash of sound that was at least in the neighborhood of the same key Jason was playing. We made it through two (or possibly one-and-a-half) Dead Milkmen-style snot-rock originals. (We didn’t get to my edgy songwriting effort, “Hatefuck.” Hoagy Carmichael I was not.)

We then began a 45-minute discussion of how our first video should look. In one of our nocturnal countryside cruising sessions, we had already ran across a perfect location — a set of grain elevators out in Sutter, a small(er) farming town about seven miles away. From a distance, they looked like a gigantic pack of twenty-four ounce beer cans. Up close, at night, they looked like a whirring, hissing, Gilliam-esque industrial futuristic nightmare-scape. All color washed away against the towering white silos floodlit by powerful flourescents. How cool would it look to set up band gear and rock out with all this as a backdrop? Security at the place was clearly minimal/non-existent as we had already paid it a night-time visit or two. In fact, it was clear we could simply back up a truckload of gear and film our video till the wee hours.

The Sutter grain dryers, still whirring away…

We never got that far. No one was motivated enough to plan even a second rehearsal. The old bass moldered under my bed until I handed it off to Jason when he got out of the army(!) the following summer. The grain elevators would re-enter my story, however.

On prom night.

But in between my first/last band rehearsal and my junior prom, something terrible happened. Check out the previous entry, “Interlude,” for the story.

#67. “Why” — Annie Lennox

Yes, she was slightly taller than me in heels. But look at that fucking hair. God, I used to be beautiful…

Continue reading →

#43. “Alive” — Pearl Jam

Ohhh, Pearl Jam. The perpetual #2 in the Great Early 90s Seattle Band ranking. The Stones to Nirvana’s Beatles. The Wyatt Earp to their Tombstone. The Munsters to their Addams Family. Pearl Jam were much more open about their classic-rock influences than Nirvana, and P.J.’s slightly-less-experimental approach gave Nirvana the much sought-after credibility edge. Kurt Cobain once summed up Pearl Jam in one sneering word – “jocks” – the implication being that cool, popular guys like Pearl Jam were once the guys that beat up arty misfit punks like Nirvana. It was all a crock, of course — neither band really matched those reductive descriptions. It was all a part of a “feud” between the two bands whipped up by the media to sell the magazines that were beginning to pile up in the corner of my room.

Sometime in early ’92, I was cruising aimlessly around town on a Friday night in Brian C.’s much beloved sky-blue Chevy stepside (mentioned in a previous entry.) Also on board was Jason Van Zant, a free spirit who favored floppy denim hats and those rough-hewn, loose-fitting hemp pullovers that I thought had a name, but I guess are just called “rough-hewn, loose-fitting hemp pullovers.” The proper social order was maintained, as I rode in the middle of the truck’s bench seat (as a junior) while Cunningham and Van Zant occupied the proper “adult” seats befitting their status as seniors. Van Zant was very into music, like I was, but his taste skewed a little more toward metal. He was one of those dabblers who always knew a few guitar chords and occasionally scribbled some lyrics into a Mead notebook.

“Vedder stole my thunder,” Van Zant was saying.

“Huh?” I asked, never having heard the name at this point.

“Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam. I’ve been working on getting that tremolo into my singing voice for years, and now this Seattle clown is making a mint off it.” Continue reading →

There are many pieces of advice floating around out there when it comes to dating, most of them grade-A horseshit. It’s in matters of the heart where human behavior least conforms to set patterns. (Matters of the crotch are where human behavior most conforms to set patterns, but that was still a couple of months in my future.) “The prettiest girl never gets asked out because the boys are too intimidated” was one old saw that came a-cropper with the Holly Van Stone Christmas dance invitation. “Girls are attracted to confidence” was another bald-faced lie. I was far more confident than my track record entitled me to be, and was getting skunked left and right. “It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.” I never stopped looking for it, and it happened.

On Wednesdays and Fridays in Creative Writing, we put our desks in the “sharing circle” and read aloud our works in progress. When circle time came, I usually ended up next to a senior named Ronny Williams on my right, and on his right was another senior named Emily. Ronny and I had grown into a comfortable acquaintanceship, and he was clearly a close friend of Emily’s. I don’t recall ever saying a word to Emily before, mostly because she was a senior girl, and I didn’t quite pack the gear to talk to senior girls. One Wednesday in mid-December, Ronny was reading some of Emily’s poetry aloud for her. For reasons described earlier, I was in a fairly irritable and snarky mood that month, and certainly ready to call any feminine prima-donnaism on the carpet, even if it was a senior.

This Used To Be My Creative Writing Class, YCHS. Now it’s a computer lab for the Art Dept.

“Is she not capable of reading her material, Ron?” I asked in a slightly-too-loud voice. Emily looked at me with an expression that would become all too familiar in the coming years: withering contempt, but it was intermingled with a bemused shock that caused her mouth to drop open momentarily.

“She has laryngitis, Matt,” Ronny said. Emily snapped her mouth closed, and offered me an up-close look at the shiny metal cast on her middle finger that had been broken in an earlier mishap.

It was damn near love at first sight–although I had seen her plenty of times in class before that, so I guess it was love at first vaguely hostile confrontation. (There would be more of those.) Continue reading →

Upon returning to high school for my junior year, I found myself in the unique (to me) position of being something of a known commodity. I had spent two years maneuvering my way up from being a friendless and awkward nobody from a nowhere middle school to rubbing shoulders with folks in letterman jackets and cheerleader skirts. I was by no means a member of the elite, the inside circle, but the elite knew me. I was no longer a cipher. In dramatic moments of adolescent self-pity, I still thought of myself as the neglected outsider, but I could no longer really play that card, even to myself. In the brutal high school social strata, I now outranked the morbidly obese, the harelipped, the bad-skinned. I had bit and clawed my way into the comfortable middle. Enough acceptance to keep me from slitting my wrists or experimenting with auto-erotic asphyxiation, but enough angst to keep my edge and feed my growing cynicism.

The Holy Bee and Holy Bee the Elder in front of the “Mattmobile.” (I had the sweatshirt long before I attended the school.)

I was secure in a fairly tight circle of friends, I had a conspicuous (read: ugly) vehicle that announced my presence with noise and color, and was meticulously putting together some emotional armor thanks to some hard lessons. Shelby? I was one of about fifteen boys that she expressed an interest in that month. Gina? She liked reform school boys. (May eventually have stopped liking boys altogether, if her mullet and Toyota 4X4 were any indication.) Amanda? Didn’t like me. Never did. Never would. But liked the fact that I liked her, and shamelessly played upon that for over two years whenever she was bored with the thousands of other things she had going for her. She was my Ideal Girl, from the first week of high school when I saw her in Introduction to Physical Science (IPS) to halfway through junior year, when I met…well, wait for song #41 in the next installment. Continue reading →

Having a car meant a number of things, not least of which was not having to bum rides off of Kevin S. and his vintage Volvo. Kevin had scored his license during the last quarter of sophomore year, and when he grudgingly granted my request for a daily lift (round-trip), I knew my royal blue Schwinn Neu Citi (“The Ford Edsel of Schwinn 10-Speeds”) was retired forever.

It wasn’t a free ride, by any means. I paid every day in ritual humiliation as Kevin and fellow passenger Rob L. would slowly approach where I stood outside my parents’ glorified apartment (“townhouse”) then quickly accelerate, forcing me to trot after them, until I got just close enough to reach the back door, at which point the acceleration was repeated, to the delight of all except Your Humble Narrator. If Kevin and Rob got a really early start, they would park the Volvo a block or so away, and crawl into the dense shrubbery that surrounded my domicile, make a few Monty Python-esque yelps of “Ni!” or “Meep!” then dash back to the car with me in hot pursuit. Every so often, they would call my answering machine and fill it with chants of “we hate your speed bumps, we hate your speed bumps, we hate your speed bumps, God, they suck.” (Yes, the interior driveways of my townhouse facility were practically corrugated with speed bumps.)

But I took it. Because all that was still better than riding my bike to school. And I knew my license was coming soon.

In one of life’s cruel coincidences, I received my license the same month that the city of Marysville banned “the cruise.” I’m sure every medium-sized town with a lack of better things to do has had some version of the cruise ever since the advent of paved roads. To see an example of this in action you can rent American Graffiti, which depicts a northern California cruise circa 1962, or come along with the Holy Bee for a moment as I walk you through a northern California cruise circa 1991. On Saturday nights, hundreds of kids aged about 16 to 20 (old enough to drive but too young to get into bars) would drive slowly up the main street of the town, reach the outskirts, turn around, and drive slowly back. There were frequent stops at Carl’s Jr, and AM/PM, frequent switching of cars (each car usually carried no fewer than five kids), and shouted conversations and come-ons between cars at stoplights. This rite of passage for several generations of young motorists, celebrated in hit songs and major motion pictures, I got to be a part of exactly once before The Man shut it down permanently.

It was after we had all left Joanne B.’s Hawaiian-themed 16^th birthday party held at some roadhouse’s rented party hall out on Lindhurst Ave, which I don’t think is there anymore. A group of us ended up in the back of a Toyota pickup (I forget whose), on the cruise for the first and last time in my life, with a large box of those leis made out of plastic garbage bag material. Of course, this provided us with an absolutely sublime proposition for other cruisers: “Wanna get lei’d?” Who could resist that? As it turns out, everyone.

“Cruising Prohibited” signs went up shortly after that early August night. Continue reading →

The line marking the cultural beginning and end of a decade is a fuzzy one. Any one who doubts 1980 was still part of the 70’s can just take a look at a 1980 JC Penney’s catalog and marvel at the width of the bell-bottoms, or look at a list of the top-selling 1980 songs and count up the disco tracks. Anyone who doubts 1990 was still in the clammy grasp of the 80’s need only look at the Yuba City High School 1990 yearbook, and observe the enormous Vuarnet sunglasses, Reeboks, and feathered hair.

#9. “Vogue” – Madonna

#10. “Blaze Of Glory” – Jon Bon Jovi

In piecing together the smoking ruins of my ego after the First Breakup, I realized I had to expand my social circle. Mr. Tackmier’s Geography C class seemed like

a good place to start. I became friends with guys like Jeff W., Kevin S., and Bret K. Through Anthony W. in math class, I met up with guys like Jeff O., Eric L., and Pawen D.

On the last day of school freshman year, I went to see Dick Tracy with Jeff W., which featured lots of Madonna songs, but not this one. It came from the album I’m Breathless: Music From and Inspired By The Film Dick Tracy. How Warren Beatty’s brutal evisceration of the Dick Tracy character with his engorged ego inspired a treatise on dance moves from gay discos is anyone’s guess, but I’m Breathless kicked off a trend of “inspired by” albums where artists loosely associated with a movie’s soundtrack could unload their B-sides and outtakes. (The Madonna video hit around the same time, featuring our pal Madoo in a see-through shirt that wasn’t quite see-through, though not for lack of trying on my part. A Holy Bee Tip of the Hat to the original queen of titillation.)

That summer, Jeff W. and I rode our bikes out to Movies 8 to see Young Guns II, which is better than the original (and if that isn’t damning with faint praise, then I don’t know what is.) The accompanying Jon Bon Jovi (solo) music video serves as a reminder that they used to drop some serious fuckin’ coin on music videos. Jon strummed his acoustic and mouthed his watered-down remake of “Wanted Dead Or Alive” on a massive, detailed set built on the edge of a cliff, and was photographed with more swooping helicopter shots than you can shake a stick at.

#11. “Moneytalks” – AC/DC

When school started up again in the fall of ‘90, I must have spotted half-a-dozen The Razor’s Edge T-shirts under the denim jackets of the metal kids heading for the smoking area across from the front of the high school on Frederick Street. I didn’t stare too long, as the wearers surely would’ve singled me out for a beating, and blood would’ve been hard to get out of my preppy Cosby sweater.

Hey, folks, does anything suck more than Baby Boomers talking about the 60’s? Did you, like me, watch that Just For Men “Summer Of Life” commercial and wish a lingering death from some kind of impacted anal fissures on the fifty-something douche pretending to play guitar while some blonde thirty-something douchette pretends to be attracted to him through gritted teeth while visions of her Just For Men commercial paycheck dance in her empty little head? Maybe Generation X-ers talking about the 90’s is just a tad more irritating and pointless – but that’s not going to stop me. I’m going to walk you through 300 of the best, worst, and/or most memorable tracks from 1990 through 1999.

Christmas 1989

Inspired by our Idle Time Decades project, I spent my 2009 spring break  painstakingly compiling a 300-song 1990’s iTunes playlist, cued specifically to my own recollections. To quote the Jack Rabbit Slim’s slogan, it’s “The Next Best Thing To A Time Machine” (and if you don’t know what Jack Rabbit Slim’s is, turn in your 90’s card.) Listening to this playlist is akin to spinning the dial on the best Top 40 radio station of that decade. (Ironically, the 90’s marked the death of true Top 40 radio.) The 1990’s saw me going from a scrawny, gawky, 15-year-old high school freshman to a chubbier, only slightly less gawky, 25-year-old college graduate, father, and (soon-to-be-ex) husband. And of course, all of this growth and drama had a soundtrack. Continue reading →