Stop! – Jane’s Addiction
Closer – Nine Inch Nails
Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
Down With Disease – Phish
South of the Border – The Simpsons
The Summer Wind – Frank Sinatra
The Choice is Yours – Black Sheep
Louder Than A Bomb – Public Enemy
I Stay Away – Alice In Chains
Drive In, Drive Out – Dave Matthews Band
Egg Man – The Beastie Boys
Rocket – Smashing Pumpkin
Never Tear Us Apart – INXS
Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad
The Reflex – Duran Duran
Let’s Stay Together – Al Green
Heart Shaped Box – Nirvana
Crush With Eyeliner – REM
Love Fool – The Cardigans
Crazy – Seal
This is part two of a two-cassette tape set that I created
in the spring of 1997. You read about the first half in Tuesday’s mammoth
entry. I don’t think that this Blog post is going to come anywhere near 3,000
words, so let’s dive right in.
This tape has two bands that I don’t like very much anymore:
the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. Add the Grateful Dead from last entry’s mix
and you have an unholy trinity of jam bands that love nothing more than to
waste their audience’s time. That’s my biggest issue with jam bands as a whole,
I don’t like being at a concert and waiting 20 minutes to hear the next song.
And this goes double for bands that I do like, I have a Led
Zeppelin live CD and there is a 33-minute version of “Dazed and Confused”. You
know how many times I’ve listened to that track? Never. Not once. You know why?
Because I have better things to do with my time than listen to Jimmy Page act
as if he’s never seen a guitar before. Moby Dick is on that album too. Who
wants to listen to a 20-minute drum solo? TWENTY MINUTES of John Bonham banging
on the drums. You’re right Slater, you do need strong acid to handle that shit.
Actually my problems aren’t entirely with the bands—I likea
bunch of the Dead’s studio stuff*, there are a handful of Phish songs I can tolerate
and DMB, ugh—but it’s the fans of these bands who, for the most part, drive me
crazy. Dead fans are the most benign of this lot, as they get high, trade tapes
and stay smiling in the corner. Though there are some exceptions. When I was in
college, nothing was worse than the newly minted Dead fan, the guy (and it
usually was a guy) who “just found the Dead”. Ugh. There’s not a more annoying
person alive than the person who was recently baptized in lake Jerry. And
they’re all so eager to convert you. No, I do not want to hear the Dead live in
Munich from 1973, Larry—especially if the band is going to jam on a “Box of
Rain” for 37 minutes.
* Do I think it takes
talent to jam on a song for more than 10 minutes? Sure. But lots of things take
talent and there are a lot of things that I don’t have the patience to watch.
Much less spend $100 for a ticket. The Dead have some good music, some nice
harmonies and wrap songs up in less than five minutes on most studio albums. I
enjoy that. Music isn’t like baseball, I don’t want it to go on forever. Like
David Spade once said, “Play the song like it is on the record. NO TRICKS!”
Ugh. I can’t believe I quoted David Spade. See what you’ve done to me, Grateful
Dead fans?
On a personal note, I had to live through that very sad day
in August of 1995 when Jerry Garcia died. That was a truly troubling day. Not
because Garcia died, but because I had to listen to every two-bit Dead fan cry
about how “Jerry” and how his death was “really going to affect them”. No. You
got over it, just like people got over the death of Kurt Cobain, John Bonham
and Shannon Hoon. You just got extra high that night, because “that’s what
Jerry would have wanted”. The same Jerry Garcia who died of a drug overdose,
yup that’s exactly what he would have wanted.
I was working in the Merrimack College library that summer
and my friend came in all dejected. I lived with this guy for a year and he
knew about my musical taste and he solemnly said, “Dude. Dude, did you hear? Dude,
did you hear about Jerry? What a bad day. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I
can’t sit in class.” Ugh. You just started liking this band six months ago,
which was a year after your Saigon Kick phase. You’re going to be fine.
The one interesting aspect of the day Jerry Garcia died was
that Dead member Bob Weir was at the Hampton (NH) Beach Casino that night
performing with his band. Since I lived six miles from the venue at the time, I
took a drive to see what the scene was like.
I wasn’t a big fan (obviously) but the scene was sad as
hundreds of people from around the area came to sit outside the small theater
to pay their respects to the man that they loved so much. That was amazing
because Hampton Beach is about as far away from the Dead’s stomping grounds as
you could get. But people were sad and didn’t know what else to do with their
grief but they collectively thought to go to a place where they knew that there
would be a collective of their people. And that was nice. There were tons of
television crews outside, interviewing Deadheads and talking to them about
Garcia and his impact on their lives. That was therapeutic too, I imagine.
I did try hard to be a jam-band guy when I was in college. I
did. I tried my best to grow my hair out*, not care about my appearance, and
really get into the music, man. But I couldn’t. I just don’t have the patience.
And no band tested my patience more than Phish.
* This was a disaster.
When my hair gets long, it gets incredibly bushy. I already have a long head, I
don’t also need a house plant sitting on the top of it.
The first few dozen times I heard Phish, they were okay.
They had some interesting melodies, clever-ish lyrics and a nice mythology.
“Dude. They’re from Vermont and they love their fans because they let them tape
their shows for free and someone I know knows someone who knows them and he
says they are really good people.” But my college roommate was really into
Phish and he got my other roommates really into Phish and he got some of my
hallmates really into Phish. After a while, it was wall-to-wall Phish, around
the clock. And when they weren’t playing Phish, they were talking about Phish.
“Do you know that Phish drummer John Fishman plays the vacuum cleaner on
stage?” That makes sense, because they both suck.
After a few months of listening to Phish and the endless
supply of bootlegs* that my roommates procured, I couldn’t take it any more.
The interesting melodies had become ponderous, plodding guitar solos that had
become boring and masturbatory. The clever-ish lyrics had devolved into a bunch
of random words thrown on a page and sung quickly to masquerade the fact that
they held zero meaning. By 1995, the sight of the Phish logo made me want to
gut some neo-hippies.
* I will say this,
Phish fans were one of the first to understand the power of the internet. One
of my roommates used to logon to Usenet (a prehistoric Reddit) and scour
alt.music.phish for people trading tapes. He’d contact them, they send a tape
(often for free) and my buddy would have two hours of new music to listen to.
That was Jetsons-like in 1995.
This leads me to the question: if I hated a band so much in
1995, why did I constantly add them to a mix tape over and over and over again?
I can’t answer that question. Maybe I just liked these particular songs. Maybe
on some level I enjoyed being the only anti-Phish outsider* and listening to
the songs reminded me of my college friends. I don’t know why I did it then,
but listening to Phish now, maybe I took my hate for the band a little too far.
* To be truthful, I
did enjoy being the Big Bastard on this one. I remember one night where my
frustration got the most of me and ripping into Phish in front of my roommates,
deriding the bands’ entire catalog as a “four assholes mindlessly noodling on
their instruments”. I had to leave the room because I thought that they were
going to hit me. And looking back, they had every right to. I was being the
asshole that night, not Tre Anastasio.
I’ve seem to have made my peace with Phish and the Dead in
the last few years, but I can’t do it with Dave Matthews. I don’t know whether
I just outgrew them or what, but listening to a DMB song now is like
fingernails on a chalkboard. Like the Phish phungus, DMB was brought into my
life by the same college roommate – he also was fond of Blues Traveller (before
they went commercial), Rusted Root (I still can’t believe they nabbed a
national commercial), God Street Wine, New Riders of the Purple Sage and another
band whom I can see the cover of their CD but can’t remember the name. Each
band was terrible, aside from Dave Matthews.
We played “Under the Table and Dreaming” a lot in my room
during the spring of 1995 and I liked it. In fact, I liked Dave Matthews quite
a bit; eagerly anticipating their follow-up to UtTaD, “Crash”, watching their
videos on MTV and seeing them in concert in the fall of 1996 (which was really
good—though the next day I saw Pearl Jam in concert and that was wayyyyyy
better). Yeah, DMB were a jam band, but they were an interesting jam band –
they had a saxophone AND a violin! That made for some totally different music.
I don’t consider myself a hipster—and if you look back at
these Good Songs entries, I’m sure you don’t either—but as DMB got more and
more popular, I liked them less and less. Which is dumb, I know, but I couldn’t
stand to be lumped in with the same people who I saw at the second Dave
Matthews Band show I went to. I stood behind one girl who screamed for
“Satellite” for the entire show. By the end, she was losing her damn mind
pleading and yelling for “Satellite” over and over and over and over again.
Side note, the group did not play “Satellite” that night and the wailing
banshee went home very sad.
It was at the very moment that I decided, “I don’t want to
become part of this” and started to distance myself from the band. I bought the
group’s third album and half-heartedly gave it a listen, but I was done. My
friend was a super Dave fan at the time and he got a bunch of tickets to a show
in Foxboro* which I went to. But I only stayed for the opening acts (Ben Fold
Five and Beck) and then I went back to the party bus that he rented to
transport us to the gig. I’m a notorious cheapskate, if I paid money to see a
movie that turns out to suck, I’ll stick with it, but I didn’t feel bad about
leaving that show early on that night.
* The Dave Matthews
Band is the first band I’ve ever seen in concert where the shows moved to
progressively larger arenas. First one was at the TD Garden, second was at
GreatWoods and the last one was at the old Foxboro Stadium.
I am all done with Dave.
The rest of this tape is still really good. Some quick hits:
The Simpsons – they actually didn’t sing “South of the
Border”, Gene Merlino did, but I first heard it on the “Kamp Krusty” episode
and it blew me away. Maybe it was because that episode was one of my favorite
episode endings of all time, “Get ready for two weeks in the happiest place on
Earth! TIAJUANA!” and then the drum hits. What a song.
Beastie Boys – this song reminds me of a lip sync my friends
did in high school, but aside from the high school nostalgia the song itself is
pretty awesome. This whole album (Paul’s Boutique) was the beginning of a long
stay at the top for those guys—even though no one knew it at the time.
Duran Duran – “The Reflex” is the best pop song of the
1980s. I believed it when I was in fifth grade and I continue to believe it
now. DD may have bottomed out in the 90s (find their album of covers) but they
knew what they were doing when they were famous.
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