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. 

Top 19 -- INXS: Kick

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.

When I was in junior high school, I was a good boy. This is not a brag, more of a declaration of fact. I was a member of the National Junior Honor Society, an altar boy and was so consumed by guilt that the mere thought of doing something bad* gave me a stomach ache. Make no mistake, it wasn't that I did good things due to a high moral calling. It's that I was afraid and embarrassed of being caught doing those bad things. 

* Two stories to illustrate my point. One, when I was in seventh grade, I received my first detention because the assistant principal, Mr. Gormaley, caught me running in the halls. I tried explaining that I was late for class, but he didn't care. He wrote me up. By the time I got home, I was so distraught that when I saw my mom, I started bawling uncontrollably over this transgression. "How will Harvard ever accept me now," I wailed. I'm sure my mom rolled her eyes, but she told me that everything was going to be okay and that getting in trouble was part of growing up. My mom was pretty cool, TBH. 

The second story is that pretty much everyone had gone through some sort of kleptomania phase when they were younger. I never did at the "appropriate time". Like I said, I was insanely afraid of getting caught and having to face my family, so I never took anything that wasn't mine. The one day I stole something was in my freshman year At Merrimack College. Every day I'd buy a copy of the Boston Herald and Boston Globe from the school store. There was an issue of the Hockey News next to the papers and on the cover was a picture of the new Toronto Maple Leafs sweater. It was the same jersey as the year before but on the shoulders was a maple leaf patch. For some reason, I had to have it and I didn't feel like paying the $2.50 for the issue. So I placed the News (which was printed tabloid style, so it looked like a newspaper) between the two Boston rags. I paid $1.00 (50 cents for each paper) and walked out the door. After awhile I threw away the Hockey News, but I still feel a twinge of guilt when I think about it. An issue of the Hockey News seems like a pretty lame thing to steal. 

I needed to set the table for this album because in order to fully get why I love it so much, you have to understand where I was at the time I first heard it. Growing up in the 1980s there were three things that I was sure of: AIDS was everywhere, drugs would definitely kill you* and Satanic Panic was real. 

I recall the first time that I heard INXS, it was a night in late March and I wanted to fall asleep, but the hall light was on. Either I had my radio on or my brother did and I heard "Devil Inside" floating over the airwaves. I had no idea who INXS was or where they were from of what they looked like, but I was convinced that they were devil worshipers. I had an idea in my head that even though they didn't sound like a heavy-metal band, what they were singing about definitely made them one. 

* I also thought that Huey Lewis and the News were "definitely into drugs" due to their song, "I Want a New Drug" which obviously glamorized drugs. Huey Lewis and his News might be one of the squarest bands of the 1980s. I'm sure they did drugs, but this song wasn't the 80s version of "White Rabbit". It was just a song about how being in love made you feel. As you can tell, I was a bit of an idiot. But if you read the Guns N' Roses entry, you knew that. 

Even though they had been around for a number of years, INXS blew up during the spring of 1988. "Kick" was massive and was everywhere. The videos for "Devil Inside", "Never Tear Us Apart", "New Sensation", "Mediate" and "Need You Tonight" were constantly run on MTV. The singles were played all over Top 40 radio. It became very apparent very quickly that INXS weren't devil worshippers like W.A.S.P. (it was an acronym for "We Are Satan's People", dontchaknow. And Blackie Lawless sang about fucking like a beast!) obviously was. They were just a fun pop band from Australia who made great hits and interesting looking videos. 

I know that I didn't get this album in the summer of 1988, mostly because I didn't need to. But I probably got this album for Christmas of that year and I wore it out. It was different than the metal that I was listening to at the time (again, see the Guns N' Roses entry for the trio of awesome albums that I first purchased) but "Kick" still rocked. It rocked in a way that Poison or GNR or Kiss or Def Leppard or White Lion didn't. The songs were catchy as hell and even the singles were great. The band did a cover of "The Loved One" that is so awesome, I listen to it a few times a month now, even 32 years later. I won't even bother listening to the original recording because this is the only version that I need. 

Not only did I unequivocally love this album, but it also brought me back to my eighth grade Spanish trip to Montreal (yeah ... I know. Amesbury Middle School was a strange place). Even though I didn't own this tape, I remember listening to it a lot in the hotel room and on the bus trip up to Quebec. This and "Appetite for Destruction" were the two tapes that were played over and over and over again. 

And while Junior High School was the worst three years of my life, when you are an ignored freshman in a big school, it seemed like a fond time. Listening to "Kick" as a ninth grader reminded me of the one truly fun time that I had during those three years. I guess it was my first taste of nostalgia and I liked it. 

This was the only INXS album that I owned, though I was a big fan of their newer albums. I thought that it was cool when my uncle and aunt bumped into band member Andrew Farris when they were in Hawai'i. I was really bummed out when I heard that Michael Hutchence died. My wife and I even watched their reality show when they were trying to find a replacement for Hutchence. They sorta fell through the cracks when people discuss 80s bands, but they shouldn't. They were excellent and an important part of my musical maturation. 

Top 19 -- Guns N' Roses: Appetite for Destruction

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.

Looking back with rose colored glasses, one of the things that I liked about living in a pre-Internet world was that as a naive young boy, the world was much more interesting. I believed just about every story that I ever heard. Amesbury High School is a pretty small school in northern Massachusetts, the town sits at about 16,000 and the sports team are meh at best. But I heard two stories of AHS athletes who turned down full-boat athletic scholarships because each wanted to "stay in state due to their girlfriend" and completely believed both of them. Years later I found out that both of those stories weren't true at all. 

I'm not sure why I believe them, but they seemed plausible (at least for one of the guys) and it didn't seem like a malicious rumor (neither one of those guys would have started a rumor about themselves) but I think that I wanted to live in a world where I went to school with two super star athletes who turned down potential fame and fortune for a girl. Not that I would do that. But for someone else, that seemed sorta romantic--though I'd never admit that--and also sorta cool. "Yeah, I could have gone to a Division One school but I decided not too." Lots of self restraint there. At least that's how I looked at it. If this was true, the other perspective is that the athlete was too afraid to test his mettle in the big time. But like I said, this story was not true. 

This belief of off-the-wall stories wasn't just limited to Amesbury High School athletes. If you told me a story about a celebrity, chances are I'd almost 100% believe it. Not only that, but I'd tell the next person I saw. When Guns N' Roses first popped into my universe, they seemed to come out of nowhere. Who were these guys? Why were they dressed like that? Why did they act like that? Why did they look like? They appeared really fucking dangerous. I was in eighth grade when I first experienced GNR and I know that they'd kick my ass for my lunch money. And they were adults. 

They sneered, they appeared completely out of it (I don't think that I understood what being drunk was, never mind being high), they fought every body and they were all skinny and gross. But the most mysterious Gunner was Slash. Slash wasn't his real name, right? What does he even look like, you never get to see him with his mop of hair in his face or that goofy top hat. Like, seriously, who the fuck wore a top hat in 1988? Irony wasn't a heavily traded commodity back then, so the answer to that question is no one. I was top the reason why you never saw Slash's face and the reason why he wore a top hat is because he had AIDS in his face. 

AIDS. In. His. Face. 

Yup. I was such a dum dum, I thought that AIDS can be transmitted to specific body parts and poor Slash had it in his face which is why his hair was always hiding his eyes and nose and ears. Like I said, I pretty much believed anything and I sure as hell bought this. I probably told everyone I knew and I everyone thought that I was a big dipshit, but it's cool. Live and never learn. That's what I say!

Face AIDS aside, I remember buying "Appetite for Destruction", Poison's "Open Up and Say Ahhhh" and Kiss' "Crazy Nights" with my eight grade graduation money. They were the first tapes that I bought that were a bit out of my comfort zone. One tape was pretty terrible, the other one was okay but "Appetite" was incredible. I had never heard anything like that up until then. 

The songs were grimy and slick, enticing and off-putting, electric and aggressive and tough and drugged out and boozy and vulnerable and honest. Axl Rose was like a chameleon in his voice--I was sure that old AIDS face himself, Slash, was singing on "It's So Easy" because Rose didn't look like he could sing like that. I'm not sure what that meant, but I believed it. 

AFD was what I thought an adult album sounded like. There were lots of songs about drugs--though I didn't understand what they were singing about, sex--ditto and swearing. I knew the last part. To be completely honest, I'm not sure if I was ready for this yet, but I dove right into that pool. I can recall one day my brother and I were on the floor of my room playing with Legos and listening to this tape and on "It's So Easy" Axl (or was it Slash, I'll never know) sang loudly, "Why don't you just ... FUCK OFF!" before a guitar solo squealed in. At that very moment my entered my room and asked us a question. I don't recall what she asked about, but I do remember Jay and I looking at each other, eyes wide and mouths agape. 

"Do you think she heard that, By?"

"I think so. She was right here when he screamed it."

"Do you think that we're going to get in trouble?"

"I'm not sure."

I remember wondering whether I'd ever hear this tape again. And I remember trying to come up with an excuse as to why Axl (or Slash) said that and whether I knew about it prior to the purchase of the tape for plausible deniability purposes. But my mother never mentioned it. Ever. I doubt that she even heard it, or if she did, she was cool with it.

But that's the type of kid that I was. At the time, I was still sitting on the floor playing Legos with my nine-year-old brother listening to a tape of depraved junkies sing about the worst parts of humanity that they run into on the streets of Los Angeles. Unlike "Straight Outta Compton" I definitely didn't think that I was a bad ass. I was too young for that. I cared that people thought that I was a good boy, especially adults. I mean, I was still an altar boy during this time in my life* and would be for another year. 

* I've discussed this before, but my first job was working for the church where I served as an altar boy. I got paid $10 a week to open the church before Mass and get it ready for the day's celebration. If I didn't serve, I'd either go hang out at the rectory or sit in the sacristy and listen to my Walkman and wait until Mass ended. One day I was listening to my Walkman and the church pastor** came up to me and asked what I was listening to. I answered, "Kiss". He said, "Oh you mean Knights in Satan's Service?" and I'm sure that I stammered something out, but that made me feel like I was doing something wrong. I mean, he wasn't incorrect, I was doing something wrong (Kiss' "Crazy Night" fucking blows) but Paul, Gene, Bruce and Eric weren't devil worshipers. They were just four dudes who liked wasting money and trying to hold on to some semblance of relevance. 

** About 15 years after this interaction, the priest who asked me about this was found in the middle of the Massachusetts Archdiocese sex scandal. Though he wasn't into kids, he had a fondness for prisoners. He'd go to jail on the first Tuesday (in the article he called it "fresh meat day", which gross) and find his prey. 

No matter how you slice it, "Appetite for Destruction" is on a short list of the best debut albums ever. Guns N' Roses never again reached this level of greatness. They got bloated and couldn't deal with being famous, but for a little while, they were the absolute pinnacle of the rock world. They were mysterious and ubiquitous at the same time. "Sweet Child O' Mine" ran every hour on MTV, yet I knew nothing about them. 

It was a fantastic time to be a fan. 

Top 19 -- Veruca Salt: American Thighs

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.

On the list of these 15 or so albums (it actually might be more, I'm having a lot of fun writing these blog posts), this might be the album that I've listened to the least. I like it a lot, but this album and this band is really an amalgam of all the female bands that came out in the mid-90s that I enjoyed. From the Breeders to Juliana Hatfield to Belly to L7 to Garbage to Liz Phair to Jewel (yeah, I know) to Letters to Cleo to the Cranberries to Luscious Jackson to Hole*, there was something about a woman with a guitar that just got me. 

Yes, all of these women were good looking and I'm sure that had something to do with it initially. And I know that sounds chauvinistic but beauty sort of wears off once you buy their CD and spend a lot of time listening to it. I'm not sure why the record industry started pushing female-lead bands, but I'm glad they did. It was a great alternative to the male-dominated rock songs that were ruling the charts at the time. 

What made the female-lead rock band explosion so interesting is that for years, the music industry seemed to ignore females and guitars. Through the 80s (when I was growing up in music), rock and roll was male dominated. If you were a woman, you played pop. Maybe some R&B. The only women who rocked were Joan Jett, Lita Ford (who both were in the 70s sexploitation band "The Runaways") and Pat Benatar. They were considered anomalies and curiosities, not real "rockers" like Warrant or Winger. But they were. Those women fucking rocked harder than a lot of guys, because they had to. But they never seemed to be taken too seriously. 

* Did I like Courtney Love? No. Like a lot of "serious" music fans, I spent a lot of the 90s blaming her for the death and subsequent profiteering of Kurt Cobain. Even before Cobain took his life, Love was cast as the Yoko Ono of the 1990s. Was this fair? I don't know. Possibly. Possibly not. Cobain was a troubled guy and I think that people who put their faith in him as the voice of a generation couldn't face that it was him that was letting them down, so they turned their vitriol towards Love. That being said, Love was also a loud, obnoxious, opportunistic, drug addled mess (though it's funny, we tend to worship men who are loud, obnoxious, opportunity, drug addled messes -- but that's a discussion for another day). But her band rocked. Whether Cobain or Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan wrote their songs, it doesn't matter; Hole fucking delivered. And I think that what was so maddening about Courtney Love. If she was a no-talent, it would be easier to dismiss her. But she was talented and she controlled the narrative and sometimes that's tough to wrap your brain around. 

Veruca Salt was fronted by guitarist Nina Gordon and Louise Post with drummer Jim Shaprio and bassist Steve Lack marking up the rhythm section. You didn't really see Shapiro and Lack very much, the focus was on Gordon and Post. Their first single, "Seether" was a pretty big hit on MTV and that's when I first discovered the band. I recall hearing the single in 1994 and that's all I thought about. 

I bought the album some time later and it's excellent, my favorite song of the 90s is on it: "Number One Blind". The video only aired on MTV a handful of times, which is borderline criminal. It really captures a time in my life when things were in a strange upheaval of where I knew that I was in one place, but I wasn't going to be there for too long. My educational journey was ending soon and the real world was coming on fast. I was an English major, but what the fuck does that get me in the job world? 

The chorus, "Levolor, which of us is blind?" is haunting and has continued to stay with me for a long time. Not just because of the words, but the way that Gordon so ablely sings it. The dueling guitars through out the song also bring a sort of sadness that adds to the melancholy and diachotomy of the lyrics. "Be my blind. Be it all the time. Be it night or day. Take my sun away. Away." There's a push and pull in this song that just grabs me. I can't explain why or how, but every so often you land on a song that just nails you right. 

"Number One Blind" from Veruca Salt does that. 

A few years ago the band reunited (there was a rumor that Gordon and Post dissolved the band because one found out that the other was sleeping with Foo Fighter Dave Grohl) and I wanted to see them. This was during our time in Burlington when we had close to zero friends, so I couldn't ask anyone around here. None of my college friends wanted to go and for some reason, I didn't feel like going by myself, so I asked the priest who married Aly and I if he wanted to go. Our priest is an incredibly nice man, whose close to my age and has incredibly awesome musical taste. He deferred too. What sucked about not seeing them is that they played "Number One Blind".

The following year the came back into town in support of their newest album "Ghost Notes" (which is actually pretty awesome, you should check it out) and we suddenly had a group of friends in town. I asked my friend Ken if he wanted to go (he had never really heard of them before) and he agreed. And it was a great show. They didn't play "Number One Blind", but that was okay. The club that we saw them, the Paradise, is pretty small so we got really close to the band. And again, they ripped it up.