My Brother

 

 

Wednesday was the first day in 15,498 days where the sun rose and my brother, Jason Magrane, wasn’t around to see it. He passed away on Tuesday November 10, 2020 at 12:42 pm at Portsmouth Regional Hospital in Portsmouth, NH surrounded by his mother, father and me.

 

That last sentence is the type of “just the facts” information that I would throw down when I was a reporter writing obituaries. It’s not very personal and it doesn’t give much of a picture of who the deceased was, it was more of a record that this person existed for a time and then departed the world.

 

Like you, I’ve experienced death before, but the passing of Jason has hit me hard. He was much more than a range of dates, he was a father, a son, a husband, a friend, an employee, a boss, but most importantly to me, he was a brother. As I’m writing this blog post on November 12, I can only think of the future and the past. Jay is going to be laid to rest two days from right now but three years ago to the day, I gave the best man’s speech at Jason’s wedding. Below is a portion of what I wrote, this was supposed to be a toast to Jason’s nuptials, never did I envision it becoming part of a eulogy:  

 

“According to Magrane lore, when my mother came home and told me that she was going to have another baby and it was going to be a boy, I was inconsolable. I wanted a sister and the thought of having a brother muscling in on my territory and sharing my toys was too much.

 

Despite my best wishes, Jay never turned into a girl, so I was stuck with a brother for my childhood. And it turned out to be pretty awesome. Growing up, Jay and I were pretty much alone at any extended family gathering—and we used to see our family a lot. I would think about friends who had dozens of cousins and how they’d talk about hanging out with them at family gatherings and it sounded pretty great.

 

But with Jay and I growing up together, we had to be each other’s best friends. Whether it was at my grandmother’s house or Aunty Rita’s or at Cousin Kathy’s in New York, it was just him and me. That meant he and I would play He-Man and GI Joe, read comics, or draw or play Wiffle Ball. It was always Jay and By or By and Jay. With us being together that much, it could have gone a few different ways, but we became close.

 

A few years later, as I got into high school and had my own group of friends; I began to notice that my friends—all of them—took a liking to Jay. Was I happy about this turn of events? No, I was not. It used to drive me crazy that my friends always invited Jay to come with us whenever we did something, whether it was hoops or pond hockey, Indian ball or football, Jay was always a part of the crew. And not only that, but my friends genuinely liked him and respected him.

 

It wasn’t until a few years later that it dawned on me: some of my friends had younger siblings and they were never invited to do stuff with us. Jay was included because he was funny and smart, athletic and loyal; he was included because he was one of us.”

 

It’s funny, when you grow up with a brother, you’re inundated with a lot of media about how close brothers have to be: from Wally and the Beav to Greg, Peter and Bobby to Willis and Arnold, all of those brothers were the best of friends.

 

But real life isn’t like that. Life isn’t scripted, each person doesn’t know exactly what the other person is always thinking and problems aren’t solved in 30 minutes (minus time for commercials). The idea that two people could be complete and total best friends forever and ever and ever without any disagreements is a silly, unrealistic myth.  

 

As we grew into adulthood, Jay and I were close-ish. We were both independent men who had their own life and their own life’s philosophies. Mine was a bit more conservative in regard to risk and rewards. Jay was the opposite. Jay lived his life the way he wanted to live his life, which I found admirable and a little concerning, but that wasn’t how my brain worked. Jay could talk to literally anyone—he had no fear in that department, made everyone feel comfortable—which is an awkward endeavor was for his older brother, was fun, constantly laughing and wondering when the next good time was going to happen.

 

As we grew up we worked through our differences and over the last few years, we began to get closer. While we didn’t agree on everything, I could at least understand why Jay was doing what he was doing. And I think he could see things from my point of view too. Even though we were closer, Jay still wouldn’t (or couldn’t) tell me what was bothering him when asked. And it wasn’t just me, Jay didn’t want to burden anyone with what he considered his “trivial problems”.

 

“By, you have a family, focus on them,” he’d always say. But what I don’t think that Jay got was that even though I have a wife and two children, Jay was my family and I did want to focus on him. But his carefree persona or his pride or whatever he felt at the time wouldn’t allow him to tell me what was really going on. Would I have helped him? Would Jay be here today? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s a question that I’ll have to live with.

 

The thing is, Jason was 42-years-old and you could ask him what’s wrong, I could ask him what’s wrong, Bo Jackson could ask him what’s wrong and Jay wasn’t obliged to give us an answer. Jay’s stubbornness knew no bounds. He was the Michael Jordan of stubborn. Things were easier when we were kids and if I wanted to really know what his problem was, I could jump on him (I always weighed more than him), sit on his chest, put my knees on his biceps and tickle him until he told me his deal. I wish I thought of doing that a few months ago, but that approach seems sort of weird now that I think about.

 

You’re never going to get a straight answer out of tickle torturing someone and just because you ask someone to do something, doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it. For example, Jay went into the hospital last Monday and that prognosis looked grim even back then. While I was putting away that evening’s dishes, I decided to try and honor my brother by playing the Grateful Dead Pandora station. The Dead were Jay’s favorite band (he saw them at the old Boston Garden in 1994) and he was always trying to get me to listen to them. Aside from a few albums and a couple of singles, the Dead and jam bands never appealed to me. But last Monday night, I was going to listen to the Dead in honor of my brother.

 

I made it three minutes. I’m sorry Jay, and I know that you understand, but I just couldn’t do it.

 

Alas.

 

There’s a lot of things that suck about my brother’s untimely passing, but I think that the biggest one is that he and I are never going to get the chance to be as close as we were when we were kids and that truly makes me sad. I was looking forward to the day when Jay and I take our kids to a Sox game. Or he could ask me for the millionth time why I don’t like Bill Simmons anymore. Or when we could have a moment and remember long-passed relatives who seem to exist in the fogs of our minds. Or he could recommend a podcast to me. Or when a tragedy happens and I need someone beside my wife to talk to, so that I can get through the latest malady without losing my mind.

 

All of that has been taken from me and it makes me very sad.

 

Earlier this morning I was thinking about a random memory of Jay and me. It had to be during the spring of 1990 and I was in my room probably obsessing over my baseball cards or reading a magazine while listening to Public Enemy’s newest tape “Fear of a Black Planet”. There’s a song on that album called “Welcome to the Terrordome” and if you know anything about PE—and especially that album—you know that it’s a wall of sound. It’s literally a pastiche of samples and cuts laid upon one another to make new beats.

 

At 1:47 into the song there is a horn that wails unsettingly loud and shrill. That day in 1990, I thought it was my brother calling, “Byyyyyyyyron!” from downstairs. And it wasn’t just that day, for like the first 10 or 15 times I listened to that song, hear that sound, amble over to my stereo, shut off my tape and yell, “WHAT DO YOU WANT JAY?” And he’d always say that he never called me, I’d press play and grumble to myself about Jay being a pain in the ass.

 

Today I listened to that song and in particular that shrill horn and it made me smile and cry. Jay may be gone, but he’ll never be forgotten.

Billy Ball: a Review

 

I don’t like Billy Martin. I never have, I probably never will. 

 

I don’t find him charming. Or funny. Or interesting at all. I think that he’s a mean-spirited, drunken bully who has a Napoleon complex. If you like him, you’re probably a Yankees fan and an old one at that. That’s okay, we all root for our laundry; especially the players who wore that laundry when we were kids. 

 

That being said, if your franchise needed a shot in the arm and wanted to be respectable, you needed Billy Martin to manage your ballclub. Whether it was with the Twins, the Tigers, the Rangers or the Yankees--aside from New York--weren’t very good before Martin took over the corner office. Through force of will and baseball brilliance Martin turned all of these teams around. Then he burnt out and was fired. 

 

The same was true with the Oakland Athletics. 

 

Dale Tafoya’s “Billy Ball” is a story about Billy Martin and the Oakland Athletics of the early 1980s. The Athletics of the late 70s were bad. Like really bad. So bad that no one was coming to their games. They were a shadow of their three-time World Series Championship teams of a few years prior and they weren’t drawing flies. 

 

A’s owner Charles O. Finley was angry that free agency had come into Major League Baseball. Ge was angry that his star players wanted to be paid what they were worth. And he was especially angry that no one told him how great he was every minute of every day. So yeah, Finley was a monumental asshole too. After moving the Athletics from Kansas City to Oakland in the late 1970s, Finley thought that it was time to move again. He set his sights on selling the team to investors from Denver. 

 

But first he needed to improve the club, while keeping expense down. 

 

This is the impetus for him to hire the Oakland-bred Martin. By this point in his life, Martin was kind of a persona non grata around baseball due to an offseason fist fight he got into with a travelling marshmallow salesman in a bar. Most baseball people thought that Martin was brilliant, but that he was way too radioactive. 

 

Finley didn’t care. 

 

The Oakland Athletics of the early 1980s were a fascinating team. After some awful years, things were starting to look up. They had a terrific outfield with rookie Rickey Henderson in left, Dwayne Murphy in center and Tony Armas in right. Their infield was fine—they prided themselves on not making mental or physical errors and hit well enough. Once Billy was named manager, the whole team played like Martin: they stole bases like crazy (including home a bunch of times), they always took the extra base, they bunted and hit behind runners, were fundamentally sound and just became giant pains in the ass to play against. 

 

In a sense, they played like their manager’s personality. 

 

But that wasn’t what was so fascinating. What was unique about the Oakland Athletics of that time was the amount of complete games that Martin’s starters through. Mike Norris, Ray Langford, Steve McCatty, Matt Keough and Brian Kingman threw 93 complete games in 1980,  106 in 1981 before crashing down to Earth with 37 in 1982. This last number was due to a few things: one, 1982 Spring Training was wacky for the A’s with Martin demanding to see every player in the organization at once. This meant that major leaguers were giving up innings and reps to minor leaguers so they never had a chance to fully stretch out and get ready for the season. And two, with two years of blatant overuse the pitching staff’s arms were about to fall off. 

 

Martin felt that his bullpen sucked and needed to ride his starters for as far as he could until they fell apart. He did that. And then the pitchers fell apart. While it can be argued that it was smart that Martin relied so heavily on his starting staff, they were the only players who could pitch. But it could also be argued that he destroyed the careers of five young pitchers who could have been good throughout most of the 1980s. Instead, they were husks of themselves for the rest of the decade. He bled that resources dry and didn't give a damn about tomorrow.  

 

Once he gets the story to Oakland, Tafoya does a good job of telling the tale of Martin and his Athletics. He walks through Martin’s hiring, his relationship with his players, the sale of the A’s by Finley to the Walter Haas and his family and the overall triumphs and ultimate crash landing of Martin’s three seasons in Oaktown. While I enjoyed this book a lot, I think that it could have been copy edited a bit better. There were a few mistakes, a lot of repetition and some grammatical syntaxes that sometimes made the narrative hard to follow. For example, I don’t think that Tafoya meant this but when talking about Martin's family tree, he wrote that Martin’s grandfather landed in San Francisco after taking a raft over to the city from Italy. 

 

Which, if true, I mean Wow, that’s your next book. 

 

But like a rookie hurler in his first game, the book settles down and the mistakes become less and less. Tafoya definitely did his homework and his research into the club is tremendous, and that’s when I started to enjoy the book more. While I will never be a full-blown Billy Martin fan, I came to respect the guy and can understand why he was always a hot property no matter how many bridges he burnt at his previous job.

So congratulations Dale, because of you I dislike Billy Martin a little bit less than before I started this book. 

 

I was sent Billy Ball  free to review and comment on. This did not have any effect on my review. 

Alaa Abdelnaby 1994 Upper Deck

About two weeks ago, my daughter found just this card in the mailbox. It seems to me that this may be from a new BCB--a BASKETBALL Card Bandit--but at the same time it has the hallmarks of the original BCB. The original BCB, Casey McGee, admitted to me that he would slip a card in my mailbox while out for a walk. The newer BCB, who has never been formally unrevealed, would mail the cards from post offices from around the world. 

Is this a new BCB? I cannot say. Could it be the second, non-McGee BCB, is back with a new M.O. of leaving a card for me along from a new sport? Again, I'm not sure. Is this a copy cat of a copy cat? That would be very interesting, true believer. 

The only thing I know is that this Alaa Abdelnaby card is pretty awesome. Look at Alaa throwing one down against his old team, the Milwaukee Bucks in front of Future Hall of Famer (and member of the 1996-97 Chicago Bulls*) the Chief, Robert Parish. 

* I bet that you forgot that Parish was on that team didn't you? They didn't really talk about him during the ten-part Last Dance documentary did they? Nope the didn't. And they also didn't talk about NBA free spirit Bison Dele who was also on that team too. Jesus, Bison Dele and Dennis Rodman, that must've been some locker room. if memory serves me correctly, Dele and a few friends were murdered by pirates in the Pacific Ocean after he retired from the NBA and tried sailing around the world. His story is so damn interesting. 

Once upon a time, the Boston Celtics were bad. I mean, really bad. The Celtics of 1993-94 finished with 32 wins and poor Robert Parish was literally the last link to the glory days of the 1980s. I wonder if he would walk into practice and expect to see Larry Bird or Kevin McHale or Dennis Johnson, but is saddened to see Chris Corchiani and Sherman Douglas and Todd Lichti. It must have been so depressing. Alaa Abdelnaby was also a member of that team and he averaged a hair under five points per game that year. 

He was a center out of Duke* who was born in Egypt, which is cool. According to his basketball-reference page Abdelnaby was nicknamed the Pharaoh (seems really obvious), the Black Hole (I would assume because that's what his offensive game was likened to) and the Alphabet (which is sort of funny). 

Abdelnabby played for the Blazers, the aforementioned Bucks before becoming a Celtic and then finishing his career with the Kings and the Sixers after he was let go by Boston. 

* Unlike most self-serious Duke players, Abdelnaby told the press that the only way he'd ever get five A's at Duke is if he signed his name. That's a pretty funny burn on yourself. That quip puts Abdelnaby as my third favorite Blue Devil after Jayson Tatum and Grant Hill. All other Dukies are tied for last. 

I don't have a lot more to say about Abdelnaby as I don't remember him too much. I remember his type and I remember the Celtics front office falling in love with guys like him. Like most players acquired after the first Big Three moseyed into the sunset, there was some hope that the new guy would be a replacement for the old guy. But Alaa was never even in the same zip code as Parish. He was an Egyptian Eric Montrose (who also played for the Celts the following year and did his college time down the road from Duke at the University of North Carolina) in that he just stood in the paint and tried to take up space. 

They even have similar stats:

Abdelnaby: 256 games, 5.7 PPG, 0.00% three pointers (kind of unfair) and 70% FTA

Montross: 465 games, 4.5 PPG, 0.00% three points (also unfair) and 47.8% FTA (gross)

The only thing is that the Celts took Montross in the first round of the draft that year and he proceeded to give them the exact same production as the guy who they let walk to the Kings. 

Remember when I said that the Celtics were bad once upon a time? This is one of the reasons for that. 

Steve Curry 1989 Fleer

Do you remember a time when we were able to leave our homes without masks? Do you remember a time when we could gather together in public places and shake hands or hug and didn't have to stand six feet from one another? I barely recall these days of long ago--actually it was at the end of February--but it was during this time that the Baseball Card Bandit emailed me (YES! EMAIL!) this card. I'm now only getting to writing about it mainly because I had time remembering Curry and wasn't sure what to say. 

Curry, who looks almost exactly like Deadspin founder Will Leitch, pitched three games in the summer of 1988. Curry pitched three games in his entire pro career, and here is his line: 0-1, 8.18 ERA, 11.0 innings. He gave up 15 hits, 10 runs, walked 14 (!) and struck out four. The only good thing is that he didn't give up a home run during his trio of starts. 

His first MLB appearance was July 10 and his last appearance was July 23. Do you know what this means? Steve Curry lost his first decision and his next two appearances he received no decisions. Let me explain. 

At the beginning of 1988, the Sox were scuffling along. 1986 World Series goat John McNamara was still the manager and it was apparent that he lost control of the club house. So Boston canned him right after the All-Star game. They negotiated to get a few high-profile managers, but in the interim they named Walpole, MA-native Joe Morgan (not that one) manager on July 14. The Sox ripped off a 12-game win streak that the press dubbed "Morgan Magic". 

I remember Morgan Magic and it was insane how the Sox were winning for those two weeks. It seemed as if every game was won in walk-off fashion. One out in the bottom of the tenth and Todd Benzinger hits a game-winning dinger off of Minnesota Twins reliever Keith Atherton*. It was crazy. The Sox would ride this hot streak into the fall before losing to the Oakland Athletics in the American League Championship Series. 

* I could have sworn that Benzinger hit his homer off of seemingly untouchable closer Jeff "The Terminator" Reardon, but apparently it was Atherton, which isn't as good of a story. 

Back to Curry, with his start on July 10, that may have been one of McNamara's final moves as a Red Sox manager. According to RetroSheet.org, Curry didn't pitch too badly in that game, losing 4-1 to the White Sox. He gave up four hits, three runs and walked seven--which sounds to me like the dude was nervous. 

His second start came against the Twins where he had a reverse split of walking only three (good!) but giving up seven hits (bad) in 4.1 innings. Lucky for Boston, they scored 11 runs and that took him off the hook. Though he wouldn't get the win because he didn't pitch five full innings. Just two more batters and you would have got the "W", dude! Damn. 

Curry last start was also against the White Sox and he gave up four hits and four walks but also five runs in a little over two innings. The Red Sox scored 11 and cranked out 20 hits. And that was it for Steve Curry. The bullpen and the offense saved his ass big time in two of his three starts, Morgan and General Manager Lou Gorman had apparently seen enough and he was banished to AAA Pawtucket and was never heard from again, which seems kind of crazy because he was only 22-years-old. 

A couple of things:

1. I have a feeling that Steve Curry was definitely rushed to the Big Leagues and completely spit the bit. He pretty much got his ass kicked, BUT he was in the Show and like I say, that's something that no one can take away from you, no matter how much you stink the place up. I'm really surprised that no one gave him at least one more shot, especially in 1993 when the league expanded and they needed pitchers. A 27-year-old Steve Curry couldn't have been handy to anyone? Really? 

2. It's kind of crazy to me that the 12-game winning streak had two starts by someone who pitched so damn poorly. Like I said above, I was under the impression that these games were mostly close--and according to the game logs they were as 8 of the 12 wins were decided by three runs or less--but they also scored a ton of runs too. I guess I forgot that the pitching staff gave up a bunch of runs too (44 in those 12 games, which isn't great considering that there was a Mike Smithson shutout mixed in there too (exactly who you would have thought). 

3. When I Googled "Steve Curry Boston Red Sox" I got his Wikipedia page and his Baseball-Reference.com page and that's it. The next bunch of links were about how Golden State Warrior future Hall of Famer, Steph Curry is a huge Red Sox fan. I kinda feel bad for the baseball playing Steve Curry, but that's the way it goes, I suppose. 

Hopefully the BCB drops more cards in the mail soon. Not email though. So impersonal. 

Top 19 -- Tenacious D: Tenacious D

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

Unlike when I relisten to yesterday's album, which reminds me of optimism, listening to this album now fills me with foreboding. Which is odd because Tenacious D is a comedy album and it's funny as hell, where Ice-T's "OG" is an album about how much everything sucked in the early 1990s. 

I got this album in the fall of 2002 on the advice of my roommate. At the time, I had moved into a place in Wakefield, MA where I had no idea who the two people I was living with were. We met on Craig's List and I got really lucky, because both guys turned out to be pretty normal and cool. The way that our place was set up was: you walk into the apartment and you enter the kitchen. To the right was my bedroom, down the hallway and to the right was a living room and to the left was a stairway that lead to my roommates' two rooms. I don't think I ever stepped foot up there. 

It was an awesome setup because we all just chilled in our rooms, unless we needed to use the kitchen--there wasn't even furniture in our living room. Each guy had a girlfriend and each duo pretty much kept to themselves. It was like having your own apartment but not having to pay full freight for rent and utilities. 

Anyway, this album reminds me of driving from my place in Wakefield to work in Marblehead. I didn't really love my job very much, but I was being paid to write and I figured that at 28-years-old, I better suck it up because this is pretty much what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. My relationship with my girlfriend at the time seemed to be going pretty well too. 

 At the time I was starting to get into the alternative comedy scene and this, along with Adult Swim's original lineup, was my introduction to it. I had already watched "Mr. Show with Bob and David" and Tenacious D member Jack Black was on that show more than a few times. So with those bonafides, I gave it a listen and I grew to love this album so much.

It's funny as hell, the musicianship is actually really good and the idea that "Tribute" is a story about the greatest song in the world, but NOT that song is so fucking brilliant, that I can barely wrap my head around it. Black and Kyle Gass are terrific in their alter egos of JB and KG. I finally watched the Tenacious D trio of specials that were on HBO during the late 90s, early 2000s about a month ago. Again, awesome. The locations for the series was pretty much how I thought that mid-90s LA was all about.  

But how did this hilarious comedy album bring about so much foreboding? In late November of that year, our landlord came to us and told us that we all had to move out by January 1. He was sick of living beneath us, which was strange because we were barely around and when we were, we made zero noise, and wanted our apartment. He said that if we wanted, we could move to his place, but he was doubling the rent and there were only two bedrooms. He was a real dick about it too, like he read up on how to be aggressive in negotiating and just went over the top. I guess we probably could have fought him on this, because this seems highly illegal looking back on it, but we were all like "whatever" and went our separate ways. 

By Christmas, my roommates moved to different places with their respective girlfriends and I moved ... home. To my parents' house. Where I had no real bedroom. When I moved out, my Dad turned my room into his office, so I slept on a mattress on the floor. That sucked. 

Also around this time, my liaise faire attitude toward my job caught up with me and my manager really let me have it about taking a bigger interest and straightening up. It was then that I realized, writing about healthcare every month absolutely sucked and that I needed to make a change. I just wasn't sure what that was yet, so that uncertainty also sucked. 

Finally in early January, my girlfriend decided to give me my walking papers too. To be honest, I knew that things weren't great for a few months, but I ignored all of the signs. I didn't know what her deal was, but I wasn't going to ask because I was afraid of exactly what that conversation would lead to. And I wasn't ready for it -- though is anyone really prepared for that talk? The best part is that my (now ex) girlfriend and I worked at the same place and on the same team. So trying to forget her was made a little bit more difficult when I saw her eight hours a day, five days a week. That was a lot of fun. 

So now I was living at my parents' house, unsure about my future employment and newly single. And it was the dead of winter after the holidays. When I think back on the down moments of my life, this might have been the worst ebb that I've ever had to face. The good news is that these things don't last. You wallow for a while--I actually may have wallowed for more than a bit--but time marches on and things get better. 

As the months warmed up, I found a new job that I actually enjoyed in the same company. I got a new place to live with three cool guys in Somerville. And I didn't know it yet, but I was  about to meet the love of my life. To use sports as a metaphor for a moment--no one ever does this, right? I'm the first?--the end of my 2002 was like the end of the 2003 Red Sox season. Shit is as bleak as it ever was going to be, but then 2004 comes along with its brilliance and wonderfulness and it's like that shitty year was just what you needed to appreciate the greatness that is coming next. 

Unfortunately there needs to be a score for that shitty time and that score was Tenacious D. But when I hear that album, I know that it's dark; but it's going to be light again soon. And that's all that I need. 

Top 19 -- Ice-T: OG

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

One of the best things about being 17-years-old is that if you don't have your license yet, undoubtedly, you know someone that does. That means freedom. Freedom to go where you want to go. Freedom not to walk anymore. Freedom from asking your parents to drop you off somewhere. 

One of the best freedoms of an automobile free from parental control is the ability to play whatever you want whenever you want on the car stereo. I don't go down this road a lot, because while the Walkman was ubiquitous (I wrote all about it in my Public Enemy entry) it wasn't like today where every toddler has an iPad and headphones allowing them to crank whatever they want in their own bubble. Back in the day, you're listening to what your parents want to listen to and that was going to be powerfully lame*.

* There's one exception, is that is when my kids forget their devices at home and have to listen to my music. That's just ME giving THEM an education in awesomeness. 

I was one of the youngest of my group of friends and the laziest. I wasn't in any particular hurry to get my license; I finally got it when I was 17-and-a-half, more than a year after I was legally allowed to drive in Massachusetts. My thought process was, why bother? I wasn't going to get a car of my own. At parties, I didn't have to be the designated driver. Most of the time, at least one of my friends was more than up for picking me up and going somewhere together. So when I talk about listening to music in a car while driving, 90% of these remembrances are going to be about me as a passenger. 

When we were bored, we'd just drive anywhere. Sometimes, when we had a little money, we'd go to the malls in New Hampshire. Sometimes, when we were looking for things to do, we'd drive around our small town and see if anyone was hanging out at usual teenage haunts. In this case that was the Millyard, a parking lot across the street from the pizza place (Pizza Factory) where everyone congregated. But most times, if we were really bored we'd drive to Salisbury Beach. We'd park at our friend's grandparents house and waste time and money at the batting cages, playing pool, bubble hockey and video games while eating beach pizza. 

In the summer, we'd add Hampton Beach, which was two or three miles down the road, to the mix and add in trying to pick up girls too. We usually didn't get too far with the latter*.

* I remember myself and all of my friends being steamed that girls our age would barely look at us. They only seemed to be attracted to older guys walking the strip. "When we get out of college, we need to come back here and scoop some high school chicks," one of us said. And we all agreed. Thinking about that statement now? Ugh. 

While the passengers changed from night-to-night, the one thing that was consistent was the music. We all loved hip-hop, especially the hard stuff: Geto Boys, N.W.A. and Public Enemy. But the two cassettes that got the most action were the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" and Ice-T's "OG". 

In the early 90s, the view of Ice-T is much more different than it is today. The media made it seem like Ice-T was one of the most dangerous people on the planet. His raps were self-described true-life stories of his neighborhood and his history as a street hustler. I'm not sure how exaggerated his stories are, but it didn't matter. To us, they were exactly how things went down in South Central Los Angeles. 

Ice-T looked the part; jacked up, black hat, locs and a sneer. He didn't rap his lyrics, he spit them out syllable by syllable*. To us, he was another in a long line of people telling it how it really is. And we listened to "O.G." over and over and over again. 

* I think it's comedian Paul F. Tompkins who talks about this in his act, but Ice-T has a very profound lisp. I never noticed it before when I listened to his stuff, but that's all I can hear now. I think that if I had heard it back then, this might be a different blog entry. 

Not only did Ice-T rap, but he fronted a hardcore band called Body Count that had its single in the middle of the album. It was preambled by Ice-T talking about how rock n' roll isn't just white people music, it was pioneered by people like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and that he "happened to like rock n' roll." In a flourish he continued (and I'm doing this from memory, so forgive me if I mess up a word or two), "As far as I'm concerned music is music. And if anyone said that I sold out, they can basically suck my dick."

That song was pretty fucking great mostly because they sounded a lot like Black Sabbath. But this song really reached all of us. It showed that hip hop doesn't have to be its own thing, hip hop can be fused with rock and that can lead to some good stuff. Faith No More also did that in the early 1990s and lead to the Anthrax and Public Enemy collaboration, Rage Against the Machine before completely bottoming out with Nü Metal. That last thing wasn't great, but the inclusion vibe that these bands gave off wasn't too bad. 

Ice-T went on to make more albums, including a controversial one with Body Count which featured the single "Cop Killer" which made Ice-T a pariah for a summer, but this was the only one that I really loved ("Power" and "Freedom of Speech" were also good, but never got into the rotation like "O.G" did). When I hear songs like "Original Gangter" or "Midnight" or "New Jack Hustler", I'm instantly brought back to my senior year in high school. A year that I had some of the swagger of Ice-T because we were finally the top dogs of the school and because things were looking pretty good because we were ending one chapter and going to start a new one. 

It's ironic--especially in the light of recent events--that Ice-T's music represents a sense of freedom for me. Everything that Ice-T talked about was about how the government is keeping everyone down and that one has to take action to get power. But when I hear these songs and close my eyes, I think of a bright blue sky, plenty of sunshine and beaches  with my future as vast as the horizon. 

I am positive that's not what Ice-T had in mind when he recorded this album, but I also doubt that he thought that in 30 years people would know him for playing a cop on a "Law and Order" spinoff. Once a person enters the public conscious, things tend to change. 

Top 19 -- "Weird Al" Yankovic: Polka Party

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

I can't be 100% certain of this, but if you grew up in the 1980s; there's a good chance you had a "Weird Al" Yankovic phase. I know that I did. I got Al's biggest album "In 3-D" (the one with "Eat It") back in 1984 and I listened to that tape a lot. In a lot of ways, it was a primer on classic rock due to his "Polka on 45s" medley. He mashed "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix, "LA Woman" by the Doors and "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, among other songs, into one really hyper polka. It was a strange experience to hear one of those songs year later for the first time and think, "I know this song, but where do I know it from?"

So for me, Al is the source for my pop culture deja vu. 

My best friend at the time, had Al's follow-up to "In 3-D", called "Dare to Be Stupid". Even though I didn't own the cassette at the time, we listened to it a lot. And laughed a lot. That was the thing about Weird Al tapes, the musicianship was really good, but the lyrics were also really funny. For a guy that's labelled only as a "parodist", I am certain that Al and his band don't get a lot of credit for how well they play their instruments*, nor for how well Yankovic writes his songs. 

* I've read someone make the claim that Yankovic's band has to be the best touring bands ever due to the different types of music that they have to master. From hip hop to pop to country to metal to grunge to doo wop to punk, they need to be able to play these genres and make sure that they sound great. I don't know, this guy made a really good argument. 

For Christmas of 1986, I really wanted Al's follow up to "DtbS", entitled "Polka Party". I saw  the James Brown/Rocky IV parody video, "Living with a Hernia" all over MTV and needed to hear what other tricks Al had up his sleeve. December 25 came and under the tree was "Polka Party". I'm sure that I busted out the tape player and gave that bad boy a listen as I put together my He-Man and M.A.S.K. toys or while I was reading comics and looking at baseball cards--the 1986 Topps Traded Set, dontchaknow. 

I did a very brief bit of research on this album and found that it was one of Yankovic's worst selling albums ever. The release was met with commercial and critical silence. But I didn't care, I loved this album so much. At the time I owned probably about six tapes, two of them were Weird Al, two were Men at Work, one was a Billy Joel's "Piano Man" (I wanted "An Innocent Man" but I got this instead) and I'm not sure what the other album was. The only two that I ever listened to were from Weird Al. 

The influence that this tape had on me was pretty big. My favorite song was the El Debarge "Who's Johnny" parody, "Here's Johnny", which was about Johnny Carson's sidekick Ed McMahon. In 1986, I was 12-years-old and I doubt that I ever stayed up later than 10:00, but I laughed at that song like I've been watching Carson for 25 years. The only thing that I knew about McMahon was that he and Dick Clark used to host, "Foul Ups, Bleeps and Blunders" and he used to give away big checks once a year for Publisher's Clearing House. Al's song made me want to learn more about McMahon and his full-time job so that vacation, I stayed up to watch the Tonight Show. Since it was during the dead time between Christmas and New Year's, I was shocked to find a rerun. And if I remember right, I don't think that my hero Ed McMahon was even on the show that night. 

I can't tell you how long my Weird Al infatuation lasted. It probably wasn't much longer after that I decided that him and his music was "kids stuff" and that I needed to listen to more adult music like Poison or Mötley Crüe. You know, songs with real meaning in them. 

But a funny thing happened, people kept trying to bury him in the late 80s, but Weird Al Yankovic is still pretty popular. He has his ebbs and flows, but there are a lot of comedians that I respect who cite him as an early influence. And from what I've read, he's one of the nicest people in showbiz. 

My daughter's first music obsession was Weird Al and that was her first concert too. Al was great, he put on an awesome show and my daughter had a blast. It was really cool to be able to pass that down from one generation to the next and I know that it stuck. My daughter doesn't love Weird Al as much as she used to, but she can be as goofy as he can be. We still talk about "Christmas at Ground Zero" (first released on "Polka Party") and not a week goes by without one of us referencing "Just One of Those Days" (another "Polka Party" jam). It's like our own secret language and one that I love speaking. 

I never would have guessed that the first time that I listened to "Polka Party" under the Christmas tree that I'd be sharing a love of Weird Al 34 years later with my daughter. But it happened and that's good. 

Top 19 -- Dazed and Confused: Soundtrack Volumes 1 and 2

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

I mentioned this yesterday, but I wasn't the world's greatest roommate in college. I thought that I was, but on further evaluation, I really wasn't. I was stuck in my ways, I wanted things to be my way, I wanted my roommates to be into the same things that I were in. Any pushback and I'd get offended. I didn't do act this way on purpose. A lot of times when you're the oldest child, you don't have to compromise mostly because if you do get pushback, you can just squash that little insurrection with a physical beating or psychological warfare. 

That's a bit difficult to do when your roommates are your age and can make up their own minds about who and what are cool. 

In September of 1993, a movie called "Dazed and Confused" directed by Richard Linklater was released. It didn't do very well. I remember seeing an add of an obviously stoned smiley face on a teal background (the first album in the above image) with the tagline, "See it with a bud". My first thoughts were, what is this movie about? But there were no other indicators about plot or character. I was stuck at school without a car to get to the movie theater, so I forgot about it. Apparently a lot of other people did too because it was gone from the theaters by October. 

Fast forward to the summer and I'm home and my friend Jesse said that I have to see this movie. "What is it?" "Dazed and Confused," he answered. "It's great." So we sat down and watched it. And he was right. It was great. At that point in my life, the best movie that I had ever seen was Oliver Stones' "The Doors" and this blew it away. I became completely and totally obsessed with this movie. 

The movie was about the last day of school in 1976 at a Texas high school. The incoming juniors spend the day terrorizing the outgoing eighth graders. Once the town-wide hazing ends, the kids get together and have a kick-ass party and then go try to get Aerosmith tickets the next day. That's it. That's what the movie was all about. If you never saw it, you should. It's well worth your time. Lots of actors got their start in that movie including Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams and a bunch of other people that you'd no doubt recognize. Not only is the acting good, but Linklater's script and direction is excellent. He really immerses you in this world and makes you care about the characters*.

* I cared so much about these characters that I spent a lot of time thinking what they did with their lives. Did they go to college? Did they get married? Did they ever leave their town? If so where did they go? What did they do? What were they doing in 1994? Would I be friends with them if I was in high school? How would I handle the hazing (both as a junior and an eighth grader)? Like I said, this was a complete obsession.  

I bought the movie on VHS tape and I watched it at least two or three times a week. I bought both soundtracks, and listened to it constantly. I even bought the Dazed and Confused companion book* (which was absolutely hilarious and added a lot of backstory to the characters). And I brought all of that shit back with me to college for my junior year. Like I wrote about yesterday, junior year was a bit of a rocky year for me and my roommates. We were getting along, but just barely. There was an underlying tension in the air, but we were all too cowardly to talk about it. The bottom line is that we all needed some space between us. And the space that we were in, practically being the only juniors in a underclassman dorm where we were still under the thumbs of the RAs, wasn't that place. Add in a dude who is wound way too tight, but now "loved" the 70s lifestyle and again, it was too much. 

* The first time that I went on the Internet and used a search engine was to look for stuff about "Dazed and Confused". I found an interview with Linklater who talked about the behind-the-scenes stories of making the movie and how much of a pain in the ass it was for him to realize his vision and all of the fights that he had. One of the interesting ones was that he wanted Led Zeppelin's "Rock n Roll" to be the first song in the first scene. He heard that if Jimmy Page gave his blessing, Robert Plant usually followed suit. Linklater got in touch with Page who loved the idea and said yes. Plant demurred saying that he didn't want to be remembered for Zeppelin, that he wanted people to focus on the music that he was making now. Linklater went bananas in the article recounting his interaction with the Zep front man. They used Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" instead. I printed out that interview and still have it. Bonus trivia: "Sweet Emotion" and Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" were two of the songs that were in the movie but not on either soundtrack. 

Like I said, I pretty much went all out on the whole 70s aesthetic. I bought a couple of tapestries and a lava lamp. My girlfriend at the time bought me beaded curtains--I was hinting around for months about this--that I put up in our room. And I played these soundtracks over and over and over again. 

These albums contain a lot of popular hits from the 1970s, it was basically a K-TEL Best of the 70s hit collection with a different package. KISS, Black Sabath, The Runaways, Ted Nugent, Peter Frampton, Sweet, The Edgar Winters Group, Black Oak Arkansas, The Steve Miller Band, ZZ Top and more were all part of the set. And a lot of these songs are quite famous and ones that you've heard before if you spent more than ten minutes listening to a classic rock station. But I didn't care, I listened to the over and over and over and over again. 

It got so bad that the one roommate that I was not angry at snapped the CD over his knee. We were all hanging around one night have a few beers and I announced, "I'm putting in Dazed and Confused." He said, "No you're not." "Yes I am, I can do what I want." And he said, "If you put that CD into my stereo (we were in his room) I am going to break it in half." "Fuck you, I'm doing it," was my response. 

I put the disc in the stereo, pressed play and sat down as "Rock N' Roll Hootchie Coo" started blaring out of the speakers. My roommate, Scott, was one of the nicest, most passive (in a good way) guys that I know. He stood up, walked over to the stereo and, true to his word, snapped it over his knee. I was stunned. The room was quiet -- not just because there was no "Rock n Roll Hootchie Coo" but because this was an act of war. What would I do to counter this aggression? I did nothing. I sat there gobsmacked. I wasn't going to beat him up, he was one of my best friends and, to be honest, he did warn me. And it was his CD player. I wasn't going to cry, but when you're broke and having your favorite CD busted in front of you is a tough pill to swallow. 

Scott worked part-time at a record store called the Wall. Their policy was, as long as you have a Wall sticker on the disc casing and if there's something wrong with the CD--no matter what--you can return it for a brand new album. It's an awesome policy, but it probably cost the place millions, which may explain one of the reason why it's no longer in business. After what seemed to be like hours, Scott said, "Before you put the disc in, I had a couple of Wall stickers and put it on the back of the case. I have to work tomorrow, so I'll exchange this for a brand new one. Dude, I just couldn't listen to this shit tonight."

I think that little lesson changed my behavior because sitting there with a broken CD in my hand really sucked. Hearing my friend tell me that the music I was listening to was driving him nuts, sucked. I hope that I became a better person after that incident. I don't know if I did, but I can say that I became a bit more conscious of how things that I like affect other people. 

I still hold a soft spot for this movie. I think I bought three different versions of it on DVD/Blueray, but it's not my favorite movie any more. In fact, I can't recall the last time that I saw it. And to be honest, a lot of emotions come back when I hear the soundtrack or watch the movies. Mostly about the embarrassing way that I acted, how I wasn't always the greatest friend and how obsessed I was about this film. However there are a lot of good memories too; I mean this is an awesome movie. The soundtrack is pretty good. And I did have a lot of fun immersing myself in this world. 

I guess once you leave your teens and 20s, you never find yourself that deep in something anymore. There are bills to pay, work to do and kids to take care of; but every so often it's cool to go back and reminisce about something that you truly and deeply cared about. 

Top 19 -- Jane's Addiction: Jane's Addiction

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

By the time I started my second semester of my junior year at Merrimack College, I was done with two of my roommates. And they were done with me. We had lived together for two years and those peccadilloes that we thought were funny and quirky when we were sophomores were now annoying and grating. We spent a lot of time with each other going all the way back to freshman year, but these last four months were a slog or passive aggressive bitterness. 

I was a dick and would get really drunk every weekend at some party and go on and on about how "they missed out" and how the party at the apartments "was just so fucking good." My roommates were homebodies and didn't like going out, so I knew what I was doing and which buttons to hit. They were getting into jam bands like Phish, the Grateful Dead, Blues Traveller and Dave Matthews and I'd constantly tell them how bad these bands were while listening to my music (Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Public Enemy) over and over again at loud volumes. 

And then they'd do stupid shit to me too. Like rearrange the room that my roommate and I shared. One day my roommate let his girlfriend, who I couldn't  stand, wear one my hats--which when I spotted her across campus with it, I went fucking bananas when I got back to our suite. "Who the fuck do you think you are, thinking that your girlfriend can wear my 1961 pinstriped Cincinnati Reds hat? That's my hat, not yours," which is pretty much word-for-word something that I once said in all seriousness and anger.  

So the feeling was more than mutual when around March of 1995, I just wasn't interested in hanging out with them that much any more. One of the guys that I really started hanging out with a lot during this time, was a big Jane's Addiction fan. He especially loved this album and before we'd go out on Friday and Saturday nights, we'd end up playing drinking games and listening to this album over and over and over again. 

When I was doing some research on this album, I found out that this was recorded in late January 1987 and released that May, which seems like a pretty quick turnaround. And it sounds like it. Even though the Wikipedia page said that the crowd noises were goosed by a Los Lobos audience, there is an energy here that you don't get in a lot of debuts. I think that's because most debut albums aren't recorded live. 

Jane's Addiction is very much a Los Angeles band. During their ascent they were sharing the Sunset Strip with all of the hair metal bands that called LA their home: Motley Crue, Poison but mostly the second-wave of hair bands that were coming up in the late 80s like Warrant and Slaughter. For Jane's Addiction not to copy that style of both dress and music is a remarkable tribute to Jane's Addiction classic lineup of Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, Stephen Perkins and Eric Avery. 

By the time that I had found Jane's Addiction and really enjoyed them, they had released two other albums, headlined Lollapalooza and broken up. So to me, Jane's Addiction was the "band that got away". Between drinks, my friend and I spoke a lot about how awesome it would be to have seen Jane's Addiction and how stupid it was for them to break up. "They had so much more left in the tank," I probably said. 

Over the years, I saw Jane's Addiction twice: once was a really good show, the other was a complete shitshow. They reunited in 1997 and played a college tour. My friend and I went with his girlfriend and a few other friends to see them at Brandeis University, which is outside Boston. Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea was subbing for Avery, so I was incredibly excited about this show. I wasn't alone. The show was held at a smallish gym that was packed with people eager to see the reunited band. I don't think that Brandeis understood what kind of concert that this was going to be because even I could see that security was lax and the barrier between band and audience was barely existent. 

Navarro came out and played the first note to either "Mountain Song" or "Ocean Sized" (I can't remember, it was a long time ago) and the entire audience rushed the stage at once. Farrell begged for the crowd to back up, finished the song and the band left the stage citing safety concerns--who could blame them. About an hour and change later, the band came out and played a handful of acoustic songs and that was it. Curfew came and Jane's was gone. 

A few years later, I saw Farrell's second band, Porno for Pyros during the WBCN River Rave, which was an all-day festival. There was a rumor that Navarro and Flea were going to jet up from Washington DC to reunite with Farrell, but it never happened. I'm not sure where I heard that, but I was taking it as gospel and was completely disappointed when Farrell and his band left without Flea and Navarro playing a note. 

The last time I saw Jane's Addiction was at Lollapalooza 2003. The show was great and nothing went awry. They played all of the songs that I wanted to hear without any shenanigans and it was great. I guess third time is the charm. But after spending money and time waiting to see a good Jane's show, it put to rest any romantic notions of the mercurial band. It sucks when you are disappointed by a performance and there's nothing fun about saying, "Yeah, that show was a complete disaster. But at least I have a cool story!" 

I'd rather have heard a good show. 

To wrap this blog up, I want to say that my roommates and I made up during the following year. We didn't room together and that was for the best and we became better friends. I still text with these guys a few times a week and we joke about how we were assholes to each other when we were younger. It sucks, but it happens. Looking back on it, when you're in your late teens and early 20s, it's probably not a good idea to room with the same people for more than a year. You're way too self-absorbed for anyone to handle you for more than 12 months. Add in the crucible of the cinder block or a small dormitory suite, alcohol, other illicit substances, the pressures of school and the opposite sex and this was  tinder box. I'm surprised that we didn't murder each other.