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 -- Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream

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 does this list.

A lot of times when I look back and write about stuff from the past, I'm not 100 percent sure that it's accurate. I'm not saying that I'm lying, but if you had a time machine and went back to verify the events as portrayed, I'm not sure if it would be completely true. (BTW, great use for a time machine. Geesh, get off my back and go kill
baby Hitler first.) Memories tend to fog with the passage of time, things sort of meld together and so on. 

With that preamble (two preambles! How lucky!) I think that one of the more important times in a young person's life is the first time he or she comes back home from college and visits their old high school friends. For me it was a little more than two months since I last saw them, when I came home during the 1992 Columbus Day long weekend, but it seemed liked a lot of things had changed. My friends seemed to dress a little differently, their hair was shaggier and they were filled with stories of the "craziest people" who did the "craziest shit" and "I should have been there". 

But I wasn't there. For the first time, I didn't experience the same things that they did. And here's the important part: I didn't give a shit. At all. I didn't care that they knew a guy who once drank 21 beers. I didn't care about that insane party at that frat house. I didn't care about the teacher who gave a mountain of reading on the first day of classes. And I really didn't care about the bands that they brought back to Amesbury. 

And to be completely honest, I'm sure they didn't care at all about my tales from Merrimack College. 

I recall that weekend, my friend Jesse brought home a tape of a local University of New Hampshire band called Groove Child and he played it constantly. They were a jam band, which, yeah. Groove Child obviously spent a lot of time listening to the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers and did their very best trying to emulate them. They were ... fine. I guess. I mean it was cool that UNH had their own band that everyone loved, but whatever. I couldn't give less of a shit about them. 

Merrimack didn't have that kind of music scene. There was a few campus bands, but they mostly played out-of-tune Pearl Jam covers. No one ever bought one of their tapes, as far as I know. So instead of some local band, I came home with Smashing Pumpkins "Siamese Dream". I was not the first person to land on the Smashing Pumpkins planet. They had release "Gish" a year or two prior and were on MTV here and there. But, I don't think my home friends had really listened to them. 

We listened to them a lot at Merrimack. Especially when we were drinking in the dorms. These parties, I guess you could call them that, was where some of my best college friendships were forged and this album was the soundtrack to that. I wanted to recreate the same scene at home with my high school buddies. The important thing to know about this story was "Siamese Dream" hadn't blown up yet* and I don't think that my friends really cared for the tape very much. 

* Smashing Pumpkins might be one of the last groups where I listened to the album a ton, but knew nothing about the band. I knew that Billy Corgan was the lead singer and guitarist, D'Arcy was the incredibly pretty bassist, James Iha was the guitarist and Jimmy Chamberlin was the drummer. That's pretty much all I knew. I assumed that they were from the Pacific Northwest (they were from Chicago, but at the time all bands were seemingly from Seattle) because of their sound and I had no idea that Corgan was a megalomaniac Svengali. I just thought that they were a normal band who made really cool music.  

We must have gone to a party that weekend and I suggest that we pop in "Siamese Dream" and we probably listened to "Cherub Rock" (the first song on the album) once and then Jesse popped Groove Child into the tape player and we'd have to hear that for the next hour. Jesse wasn't the leader of our crew, but one of our friends who held more sway in the group visited him at UNH a lot and he had a good looking sister whose friends were also drinking beers with us and all of them were into Groove Child, so I was subsequently outvoted. 

Which again, was, whatever. It was the first time that I wasn't in sync with my high school friends. I wasn't pissed at them (that would happen a few years down the road) but at the same time I remember thinking, "Hanging out with these guys isn't as fun as I remembered. I wish that I was back at college."

And that's what was important about this album. It showed me that I had changed and my friends had changed and we had different views from each other. That was scary. And I sorta felt that something was wrong with me--we were all supposed to be best friends forever (which sounds dumb now, but it didn't in 1992)--but people change. Circumstances change. It's okay not to unequivocally love the past. And yes, Thomas Wolfe, you're right, you can't go home again. 

Eric Hetzel 1990 Fleer

On October 17, 2018 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: After an extended vacation, the BCB returned with an Eric Hetzel 1990 Fleer card yesterday. 

To be blunt, Eric Hetzel sucked. This isn’t just my opinion, but that of the good people at Fleer who pretty much said the same thing on the back of his card (it actually said he had the worst ERA on the team). But I remember that even though Hetzel stunk and his numbers in the minors were poor, people were kind of excited about him. 

This is during a time when the Sox couldn’t develop a pitcher to save their lives and dudes like Hetzel and Tom Bolton and Rob Woodward and Jeff Sellers and Steve Ellsworth were considered the next big things. 

In the 80s, Sox minor league system cycled. In the early part of the decade they developed a ton of pitchers: John Tudor, Roger Clemens, Oil Can Boyd, Bruce Hurst and Bob Ojeda. Aside from Wade Boggs and Marty Barrett, no real position players. But after Clemens, the pitching pipeline dried up. From then on, it was all hitters. 

It was in the middle of this fallow pitching period when Hetzel debuted and people thought he might be something. He wasn’t. Though I assume his arm injury that caused him to miss an entire year also had something to do with his poor performance other than just plain ineptitude. 

Too bad Eric Hetzel, if you did well you could have endorsed some knotted bread and we’d all be eating Hetzel’s Pretzels today.

2019 Notes: I think that I was a little rough in my initial post on Eric Hetzel. 

Unfortunately, there isn't much to say about Eric Hetzel. I looked him up on Wikipedia and his entry (yes, he has an entry -- I'd wager that there aren't many professional athletes who do not) said that a shoulder injury forced him out of MLB after two seasons. 

I've written a lot about wondering how athletes feel about being on the downside of their careers. How they have to retire before they were ready to -- I assume that Hetzel didn't want to stop playing baseball after two years in the bigs. But on baseball-reference, I noticed that Hetzel was drafted four different times: once in the fifth round by Boston in 1983, once in the second round of the January 1984 amateur draft by the Pirates, once in the first round of the June 1984 amateur draft (for awhile, there were two amateur drafts, which seems really weird) and finally in the first round of the 1985 June amateur draft by the Red Sox. 

It's not like Hetzel went to a college baseball factory and this sort of stuff happened all the time, he was at East Oklahoma State University when he was drafted by the Royals and Pirates; so I bet that was big news. He then transferred to Louisiana State University for his last year before he was drafted his last time by the Sox. 

But still, at EOSU Hetzel was a big fish. I wonder why he transferred? He was drafted in the first round while at his old school, why go to LSU? You can't get drafted any higher and there's a lot of downside, like what if you get your ass handed to you by the SEC boys. Your stock will plummet. Though I assume that's not how a high-profile athlete thinks. He probably knows that he'll kill it anywhere he goes. 

When I went to Merrimack College, the hockey team stunk. We played in the best league in the country, Hockey East, and the team routinely got their heads kicked in. But there were a couple of guys on the team who were drafted by pro teams and would go to college to get more seasoned. 

One night I was at a party and I started talking to a couple of guys from the team -- this was something that never happened, the hockey team was royalty on campus and I was never in their social orbit. Anyway, I was kind of drunk and I start falling all over myself talking to these guys about how cool it was to get drafted and how that they're going to be pro athletes and how they'll probably play with the famous names on the big club.  They were like, "Yeah, we can't wait!" or something polite and then they excused themselves to talk to someone who wasn't a complete idiot. Even the next day, I was so embarrassed.

Anyway, I'd like to think that somewhere in the early 80s, Eric Hetzel was at a party at EOSU and some drunken dork said something similar to him. Maybe that made him feel good. Maybe when he gets sad about how his pro dreams didn't turn out the way he wanted them to, that there was a time when he was the best pitcher in his league and everyone knew it. And how he went from the fifth round to the second round to the first round (twice!). Also how he went from a small school to a big time baseball factory and still excelled. That's what I would focus on. 

BTW, the two dudes I was fawning over, one made it to the NHL for a handful of games. The other did not, as far as I know. 

Pat Mahomes 1992 Upper Deck and Tony Pena 1990 Fleer

On December 12, 2017 I received these cards from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: last week the Baseball Card Bandit brought a bit of summer to the Northeast as he warmed my mailbox with these two cards. 

Both feature men who would eventually play with the Red Sox. 

Pat Mahomes was supposed to be a good prospect when he came up with the Twins. He never reached his potential and settled into a long career as a situational righty in a bunch of bullpens. 

2019 Notes: Today you might know Pat Mahomes as the father of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Pat's son has had a bit more success in his chosen field than his dad, he was named the 2018 NFL MVP and led the Chiefs to the AFC title game. Did they win? They played the Patriots, so of course they did not. But Mahomes was a breath of fresh air in a very stale football league, slinging the ball all over the place and running up a lot of impressive passing stats. 

I didn't have a lot to say about the elder Mahomes because he didn't leave much of a mark in Boston, but I just looked at his baseball-reference page and man, he was not good. For a guy that played 11 seasons in the big leagues, Mahomes got hit hard and often. His career ERA is 5.47, his WHIP is 1.59 and he walked a bunch of people and didn't strike out anyone. 

The cool thing is that even though he wasn't a great ballplayer, it's obvious that his son thought that he was something special. After one of his big games last season the younger Mahomes stepped to the podium for his post game press conference in his dad's Mets jersey. That's all a father really needs.

---

Tony Pena was a marquee free agent signing and was supposed to bring stability to the Sox catching position. Defensively, he did well. Offensively? Well, Tony Pena was offensive. The thing about Pena was that his defensive was so respected, I don’t recall too many people being angry that he couldn’t hit. 

2019: Red Sox fans were sold on two things about Tony Pena: his defense (he had a cannon arm -- when he was younger and instead of the normal catcher's squat, Pena sat with his right leg behind him and with his front leg extended) and that he wasn't Rich Gedman or Marc Sullivan or Rick Cerone. The latter was great news to anyone who watched these guys try to catch for three seasons. 

While fans in Boston never saw the sit-down style of catching that Pena made popular it Pittsburgh and St. Louis, he still knew how to call a game and was a favorite of many Boston hurlers. 

2019: See above for that sit-down style. 

After Boston he had a stop in Cleveland where, ironically, his bat is what sunk the Sox. Pena teed off on a Zane Smith extra inning flat “fastball” for a Game One winning homer. The surprise of who beat them submarined the Sox and they meekly bowed out of the 1995 playoffs. 

2019: That 1995 Cleveland Indians team was a wagon*, there was no way in hell that the Sox were going to beat them. But to lose to a home run by Tony Pena? Ugh. That was a killer. I remember that game like it was yesterday, I was sitting in my favorite corner on the couch in my on-campus apartment at Merrimack watching the game by myself in the living room. As soon as Pena hit that shot, it seemed like the entire apartment groaned at the same time -- it was that loud and that unexpected. The 1995 ALDS was the only time that the Red Sox or Patriots made the playoffs while I was in school**. It seems like a really long time ago -- because it was. 

That’s life in the big city, kids.

* That 1995 Indians team had: Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle (who got jobbed out of the 1995 MVP), Kenny Lofton, Eddie Murray, Omar Vizquel, Sandy Alomar, Dave Winfield, Carlos Baerga, Brian Giles, Jeromy Burnitz in their lineup. That's three Hall of Famers, three dudes who could be in the HoF and a bunch of All-Stars. They were unbelievable to watch at bat. Their pitching was okay with Orel Hershiser and Dennis Martinez, but they just didn't have that number one pitcher. 

** The Celts and Bruins made the playoffs a few times during the early 90s, but they were usually beaten in the first round. I remember the Hornets-Celts first round matchup in 1993 when Alonzo Mourning hit a game -- and series -- winner with no time left. That was a tough one.