Music Friday: "My Hometown"

On the way up to Waterloo, my hometown, one of the CDs I listened to was Dead Man's Town: A Tribute to Born in the U.S.A. 

The band that covers "My Hometown" is none other than the great band North Mississippi All Stars.

But let's leave it to The Boss for this Music Friday. 

Random Notes from a Crank

At the end of every Inside the Actor's Studio, a program that I watch on occasion, the host James Lipton ends with a gauntlet of questions he got from some French talk show host (if I remember right). One of those questions is "What is your favorite curse word and why?" I watched the program that featured Tom Hanks when it aired, and his favorite curse word was "horse shit" because, if I recall correctly, it doesn't get used enough and it's very specific. Like Hanks, if I were to pick an underrated curse word, I'd have to go with "dog shit." Lowly old dog crap is what I'd pick. In comparison to Hanks' favorite, the poo of dog is not highbrow at all. Only the wealthy have horses, right? The hoi polloi have dogs, and they shit a lot. That stuff is common. Just think of saying something like, "That proposal is dog shit." That means it not even worthy of horse shit found in stables. It's common shit. 

Recently I picked up some stuffed jalapeno peppers wrapped in bacon at the local supermarket. I won't be doing that again. The bacon was incredibly fatty, even for bacon, and the filling had a bland sausage intermixed with some manner of cream cheese. So, since my bell pepper plants and poblano pepper plant croaked because of a cold spell, I plan to get a jalapeno pepper plant and do my own stuffed peppers, but I'll be using Laughing Cow cheese shoved inside them, and I plan to wrap them in turkey bacon. Healthy choices and all that stuff.

On a TV channel (Inspiration) I had never heard of before until recently, they've been playing episodes of The Brady Bunch. I used to watch that show all the time when I was a kid, and now my kids are watching it too. What an anachronism. One of yesterday's episodes we taped was the Johnny Bravo one when the whole gang becomes a musical group. I was troubled by one episode though that has the plot line of Marcia wanting to a female "Frontier Scout" like her brother Greg. As one would imagine, the plot focuses on Greg making it extra hard for his sister to become a Frontier Scout, but Marcia perseveres. Then in a twist at the end, Marcia suddenly decides not to become a scout because that's "boy stuff," and then Marcia turns to Carol Brady and asks about checking out some "fashion magazine" since she's a girl. Luckily, I usually watch these programs with my kids. After the plot twist, I loudly stated, "That makes me mad. That's wrong" in front of my two kids. My eight-year old daughter asked why, and I went into a diatribe about sexism, about how women can and should have equal opportunities and not have to necessarily do what people consider "girly" things. She agreed and said, "Yeah, that is wrong." Stoopid sexism.

On a more humorous note, I had forgotten about how often "groovy" was used as a descriptor on that program. People are groovy. Events are groovy. All sorts of stuff is groovy. Groovalicious I tell ya.

In addition, there's the hair. Oh, the hair styles. When I went to Alabama from '98 to '02, I thought those Southern fellows had shaggy hair. But the Brady boys, especially Greg and Mr. Brady with those white dude 'fros, that male lineage is lousy with shaggy hair.

I've been listening to The Hold Steady quite a bit recently. Today in the car I was playing the band's latest album Heaven is Whenever, and the opening track on the disc is "The Sweet Part of the City," which is song that's an homage to a certain part of Minneapolis, the band's hometown.

The song got me to thinking about the cities and towns I've lived in and their sweet parts. And these are all personal connections of course, but I thought I'd share. Heck, it's a blog. If you don't like it, get your own blog for your own solipsism.

In Waterloo, I'd have to go with my dad's stores, Virg's Foods and Independence Ave. Liquor, that he was able to start with the grace of small business loans somehow. I spent a lot of my working youth in those two establishments, learned a lot, and grew up in them. Likewise, the practice range at Byrnes has a great deal of significance to me since I at one time in my life was obsessed with golf and being the best golfer I could be, practicing till my hands started to bleed, stressing out about my swing plane, practicing my natural draw, trying to hone mindfulness (because once you get a decent swing, most of the important work in golf is done inside one's head). And the park on the outskirts of town with the concrete dinosaur my friends named "Fugly" is a place that rings of sweetness. I'll admit to a picnic there with one of my girlfriends once that led to spontaneous nookification.

And then the house at 1051 Wisconsin St. I grew up in, of course, a home my parents lived in since the early 50s. They sold it a couple of years ago and now live in an assisted living facility.

In Kirksville where I got my B.A. and M.A., the core places for me were Pickler Library and my fraternity house at 207 E. Normal, a place that was nothing close to normal. We eventually got a new house at 815 S. Davis, but for those of us who went through the chapter during a certain era, the 207 house was our house. It wasn't a pretty place. It got the job done. It worked. From people turning up the volume on our shitty living room TV with a pen because we didn't have a remote and the volume button was broken to our brilliant idea of having a band, aptly named Shaft, play on the front porch mid-afternoon on Friday right in front of Baldwin Hall when classes were in session, it was a good place to be. Now that area is plot of grass next to a parking lot for the university.

Likewise, the place where Mrs. Nasty and I first lived together as a married couple has either been wiped off the face of the Tuscaloosa landscape, or it possibly just was severely damaged. The tornado of April 27 did its diabolical work. Then there's Bryant-Denny, Morgan Hall, and our crappy GA office in Rowand Johnson.

With St. Louis, I'd have to go with my office at Meramec with my good friend. Not an aesthetically pleasing place, but I got a lot of work done there, and we laughed a lot--even wrote parts of my first major published article in that office. I still miss my neighborhood in St. Louis--Lindenwood Park and Francis Park. My daughter doesn't remember St. Louis much at all, but most summers, unless it was raining, we went for a stroller ride to either Lindenwood or Francis Park every day. Our two-bedroom home was/is tiny, but I still really like that house. We were only the third owner of that house that was built in 1939.

As for our current patch of land on Cedar Drive, I'd have to go with the Nasty backyard.  

Class Issues

In the process of cleaning up/reorganizing some stuff around home, I came across an issue of Utne I had held back because I wanted to feature an article in it because the essay connects to some of my own "class issues."

In "Cutting Class" from an issue of Utne a year ago, Brad Zellar explores his working class guilt.

If you have to boil my "issues" down to a basic statement, it would this: rich people usually piss me off.

It's not that I grew up poor or anything. Sure, when my dad got laid off by National Tea when I was quite young, I remember there being stress within the house. He moved on to selling insurance for a while and then was lucky enough to acquire a small business loan that helped him start his business. For a major part of his life, my dad was a meat cutter and then carried over some of his meat cutting skills to when he ran his own small grocery store on what people considered the "wrong side" of the industrial town in which I grew up.

So I guess I understand the working class pretty well because I come from that stock (both parents were children during the Great Depression--one from rural northeastern Missouri, the other from an essentially single-parent home in northwestern Iowa), and I was raised in what could be called a "factory town" -- factories, mills, and meat packing plants. The stores I worked in were visited by folks who worked putting together tractors or slaughtering hogs.

And the thing is I was envious of the kids whose dads worked at the John Deere plants, or to use the phrase in my hometown, they worked at "Deere." It was always pretty clear what kids' parents worked at Deere because they were the ones who got braces. Those of us who didn't have great insurance plans, we were left with what was in our jaws unless our collections of teeth were especially horrific.

Like Zellar recounts in his essay, my parents would also take me on car rides to look at the big houses, which when I reflect on that practice now, it kind of sickens me -- the gawking at the big homes in the fancy part of town or the oversized houses on the edge of town where the darkness is, as Springsteen informs us.

I fooled around with some of the girls from the rich part of town though, sitting in their homes watching movies and doing other things, often admiring what they seemed to have so easily.

I waited on very good people who came into our grocery or liqour store with pig blood on them, their hands aching from their duties on the cutting floor, cashing their checks as they bought a bottle or to visit a local bar.

Where I worked was an interesting mix of black and white folks. The stores I worked at had trailor "parks" right across from them. Not that far away was the area where many working and middle class black families lived. There was rarely any open racial hostility during store hours, but sometimes you noticed tension among "mixed" clentile.

What Zellar's article also got me to thinking about is how as a country I wonder what all we really produce anymore. At one time, we Americans, well, we made stuff. Sure, we are no longer the manufacturing giant like we once were because of globalization -- for better and for worse. Now it's just that we hawk stuff while the 1% get even  richer. Or heck, I don't know, let's just say the 5-10% get richer while they have natural inroads for success and safety nets along with McMansions on the Hills.

Like Zellar, "[t]ime and time again I committed the terrible sin of envy, until it became wholly ingrained in my makeup and I eventually developed a chip on my shoulder that I felt no amount of accomplishment would ever manage to erase."

Which is why I have interal reactions like I did a number of years ago when I was talking to one of my colleagues. I asked him how his summer was, and he said it was great because he spent quite a bit of it in Paris. For someone like me who has only been to Ontario for a couple of fishing trips and family vacations were spent visiting family or going to exotic places like South Dakota, the idea of going to Europe doesn't seem probable. My reaction to a really nice man's statement that he spent time with his wife in Paris angered me, not because I don't like him or his wife (they're nice people by all accounts), but because of envy, of the fact that some people over the course of my life always seem to have it so easy -- my internal, jaded sense of justice.

And it's pride, which as we know comes before the fall. Even if I have accomplishments, I'm wary that I'm gonna get screwed eventually. Healthy...

One of the events that got me thinking back to Zellar's article is, of course, Christmas and the deluge of presents my children received. As he relates toward the close of the essay, "The dream of our parents' has become a reality of millions of us, but it also, inevitably, comes at someone else's expense and, to a lesser extent, at our own."

For me, I want my kids to be able to both know the sciences and philosophy and art and poetry, but I also want them to appreciate the majesty of Hank Williams, master the art of talking to and being open to diverse people (diversity based on class and ethnicity and creed), and most importantly know how to get things done.

I acknowledge that this post is a bit scatterbrained, but it might also reflect that, like Zellar, sometimes I feel that I'm "an interloper in all worlds."

So it goes.

Music Friday: "American Girl," "I Won't Back Down," & "Running Down a Dream"

As someone whose hometown is Waterloo, Iowa and as someone who is decidedly left of center on most issues, it's unfortunate what happened not long ago.

Tea Party darling Michelle Bachmann announced his candidacy for President in the city she was born in, my hometown.

Not only does that event give Waterloo a black eye from my perspective, but she also thought John Wayne was from there when in reality serial killer John Wayne Gacy has a link to Waterloo since he spent part of his childhood there, he eventually became a prominent businessman in the area, and then he got himself locked up for abusing kids.

Jesus, one of her low level staffers could have at least checked out these simple facts. Hell, Wikipedia would have helped her flunkies with basic information on either John Wayne, who was born in Winterset, and John Wayne Gacy.

But this is a Music Friday post, folks. It's not a post primarily aimed to note the lunacy of Michelle Bachmann. There are plenty of people out there doing that.

There's a connection to music though.

As Rolling Stone relates, the management of Tom Petty has issued a cease and desist letter to Bachmann's campaign to quit playing "American Girl" at her rallies. Petty wants no part of being associated with her.

Good for you, TP. Good for you.

In honor of Petty's cease of desist letter, I offer a trio of songs from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The first, of course, is "American Girl."



Next is "I Won't Back Down."



And finally, I hope you enjoy "Running Down a Dream," from Full Moon Fever like "I Won't Back Down." Both were often played at a fine establishment called The Gin Mill in Kirksville, Missouri when I was in college.

Random Notes from Home & the Road

I got back from Waterloo late this afternoon. I left Friday morning to visit my parents--my mom in their assisted living facility and my dad in a rehab facility since he got sprung from the U of Iowa Hospital on
Thursday. He's doing better, getting stronger each day it seems.

But I thought I'd share some of my random notes from the road trip since on six-hour drives I encountered some stuff, and the mind tends to wander in various directions.

I don't know how truckers do it. On the drive back, my lower back was getting achy. Driving a big rig for such an extended period of time has to entail some lower back doodads that keeps a body loose.

At a gas station, a sign informed me that because of "in climate weather" the electronic pay pads weren't working properly.

The wind farm northeast of Bloomington-Normal is an impressive sight, so impressive that I wonder if they rotating blades cause bad driving as some people get transfixed by those rotating blades that create energy. What's really cool is seeing one of those blades being hauled on the road. You feel small.

About a decade ago, I vowed to turn the channel whenever an Aerosmith, Styx, or REO Speedwagon song came on. I hate that shit. I am especially disgusted by Aerosmith for some reason.

I ate at the I-80 monolith in eastern Iowa this afternoon, at the Wendy's inside. I had a fancy side salad and some of their fries. They were good. I was surprised by how decent the salad was--quite good for fast food.

No cicadas in Waterloo. I suspect they'll get the 17-year variety in four years.

I heard The Wailin' Jennys on NPR this morning on the Mountain Stage program. They are damn talented ladies.

I get angry at people who consider the Midwest "flyover" country or a boring landscape. There are many beautiful woods, rolling hills, and flatlands on my drive in a northeasterly direction. With people's addiction for sublime-like landscapes, they miss the beauty of nuance, the power Bryant writes about in the "The Prairies." Flat isn't necessarily ugly, clowns.

I like sports a lot and all, but I wonder if the collective citizenry spent more time paying attention to politics and policies rather than obsessing about what's wrong with LaBron James, we'd be a hell of a lot better off. Or rather, at least citizens would be more engaged with what's going on. Sports are the new "opiate of the masses," but speaking as a fan of college football and MLB, man, that's a good opiate. Me like.

I miss Ron Santo on the radio.

Taking Home

The picture above is from when my father was in boot camp during the Second World War. As far as military uniforms go, I've always liked the Navy's. Then again, both my dad and my oldest brother were in the Navy although my grandfather (WWI) and two uncles (one in WWII and the other in Korea) were in the Army.

My sister scanned this old photo of Virg and sent it to me since the local TV station in my hometown, the city that was the home of the Five Sullivan Brothers, is doing some segment on veterans. She sent it to the station and then me.

There was a time when I thought about going into the Navy right out of high school. I never took the military test or contacted a recruiter because that would have put the hard-press on me with military recruiters constantly pestering me.

I would have gone in right before the first Gulf War, which didn't involve the Navy as much as other wars have, though I may be wrong in that assumption. I'm no scholar of military history.

But I was too interested in college instead of learning a trade such as being an electrician. I traveled to Kirksville, Missouri for schooling, which strangely enough is just north of where Virg went to high school in La Plata, birthplace of Lester Dent, author of Doc Savage pulp fiction. Virg's family settled in northeastern Missouri after my grandfather didn't do well farming in Minnesota and found better prospects in the Show Me State.

But to get back to learning a trade, as I was fond of telling my colleague where I worked previously, there are some days when I think to myself, "Maybe I should have been an electrician."

Just like anyone else who gets some years behind them, you begin to think about the past choices you've made and how little decisions have greatly affected how you got to be where you are now or who you're with or what's happened in your life in general. If you think too much about such things, the alternate causal chains may drive you crazy.

So where the am I going with this? Hell, I don't know. I've all over the place in this post.

I guess I'm thinking about living a full life and the choices I've made since Virg will head down to Iowa City at the end of the month to have major heart surgery.

One aspect of my dad's personality that I might have picked up on is that, as many people know, Virg is not afraid to give you his opinion. He can be brutal with his honesty. He's demanding. And he sometimes says exactly what's on his mind. Unfiltered.

For some jobs, like being an electrician or a meat cutter or a manager of a grocery store, those tendencies are perfectly fine. For other professions, they can be a detriment on certain occasions.

Regardless, this weekend the Nasty family heads up to Waterloo to gather belongings and other artifacts from my parent's house that is now going to be sold since they've moved into an assisted living facility. I'll be bringing back a deep freeze, gardening tools, and other assorted stuff.

I'm not going home; I'm taking home.

And that makes me sad.

The Power and Warmth of Personal Attention

Last night we went to one of our favorite restaurants in the area, Thai Noodle in Mattoon.

We hadn't been there in a while since Mrs. Nasty stays up north to work during a good portion of the winter and spring's weekdays, so it was good to enjoy the establishment's tasty dishes. I'm no expert on Thai cuisine, but I like what they provide.

Another aspect of Thai Noodle that keeps us coming back is the charisma and warmth of the owner. She seems genuinely nice, and we've frequented the restaurant since it opened. Since we usually visit the place when Hannah is at dance practice, it's typically Quinn, Mrs. Nasty, and me who get to enjoy the spicy goodness the restaurant offers.

The owner is fond of calling Quinn "little man," and she's one of the few "strangers" he seems to take a shine to, which is a contrast to most folks since he's likely to act quite shy around people he doesn't see on a regular basis unlike his sister who seems to want to talk at length to everyone.

But the first title I had of this post was "The Power and Warmth of an Independent Business," but I decided to edit it to "Personal Attention" because some independent businesses are not necessarily "warm" and don't excel in "personal attention." Some independent businesses, in fact, don't make it because they don't offer those qualities of customer service.

The original title reflects my own bias for small, independent businesses since my father, initially through the grace of a small business loan, started his own grocery store and then then opened a liquor store after his retirement from the grocery store (sold it to my brother) during my childhood and early adulthood.

However, people consistently shopped at Virg's Foods and Independence Avenue Liquor (and at one time, Virg's Better Burgers, a diner) because my father was/is friendly, paid attention to his customers' needs, and provided fair prices while consistently using a loss leader strategy to attract new customers. When you price a 40 oz. of Old Milwaukee for 79 cents in Waterloo, Iowa, people flock, buy them, and buy other goods. When you run a special on chopped ham (a luncheon meat I hated to slice), people buy it and other items. When you run a special on baby back ribs, people need other foodstuffs or maybe some beverages. When Black Velvet is cheap that week, customers will buy 7-up to mix with it.

What I find, however, is that small, independent businesses do generally provide stronger customer service than the corporate clones, the big box retailers.

Personal investment and personal attention matter.

Or, to put it another way, as Quinn stated in the car as we left the restaurant, "That was good stuff."

Lack of New Year Traditions

Yesterday Daiva Markelis on her blog The Adventures of Mighty Bear Woman provided a post about a past tradition for New Year's Eve when, as part of the title, says, "...I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get drunk."

I got to thinking about my own lack of traditions associated with New Year's Eve. While I've been known on occasion to howl at the moon (metaphorically speaking), I don't really care for New Year's Eve much. After close to forty years on this earth, only one New Year's Eve celebration really stands out, and that was a big blow-out for the millennial New Year's Eve at "Chuck's Place" in O'Fallon, Missouri. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to midnight that night. But for the most part I turn a jaundiced eye toward the holiday since it is a hollow one for me.

As my dad told me when I was younger, "Life is a struggle." And Virg knows something about that since he grew up on a farm in rural northeastern Missouri during the Great Depression. Since life is a struggle even though some English professors will try to sell you on the "life is a journey" metaphor provided by The Odyssey, New Year's Eve is just like any other day: another day closer to death.

When I think about my own family's traditions around the holiday, well, we didn't have any that I can remember. Back when I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get sloshed, I think I probably just brainlessly watched the New Year's celebration TV shows with my parents as my Dad read the Waterloo Courier.

When I was really young, my dad worked as a meat cutter for National Tea and then got laid off. He then sold insurance for a few years, thankfully got a small business loan to open up his own small grocery on the East side of Waterloo, and once he "retired" from the grocery business, he got bored and started a liquor store near the grocery store he sold to my brother.

I worked at both the grocery store and the liquor store. And December 31st was always a day when we were wonderfully slammed with business. Hours flew by because you were busy. The date is a gold rush for liquor stores as you can imagine. By the time I got off work at 10 or 11 on those New Year's Eves during high school and later when I worked over breaks during college, I was tired and tired of drunks.

But as we said in both stores, New Year's Eve is "amateur night." Rather than serving our regular customers who wanted half-pints, fifths, or Texas fifths (1.75 liters) of "bumpy face" (Seagram's gin), "Mad Dog" (Mogan David 20/20), "Erk & Jerk" (E&J brandy), and all manner of hard liquor, we trucked more in various cheap champagnes and spumante. Andre champagne or Cold Duck (one of my favorite names for a libation) for $5, people. And for whatever reason liquers sold well then but more so around Xmas. Nothing says booze like the holidays. You can even get your beloveds gift sets of booze with glasses and whatnot: liquor as gift ~ a gift that gives and gives.

I also dislike how New Year's spawns resolutions, but maybe that's just because, like most people, I rarely keep them. I've had better luck setting goals and working toward those goals irrelevant of the time of the year.

So why do I still lurch toward making New Year's resolutions though? Damn you socialization.

Lately, I've been drawn to something I read about in Brian Haycock's Dharma Road. As the author details in Chapter 18 "Thank You, Thank You," "Most of us have much more than the bare necessities. A Mahayana Buddhist practice is to make a list of everything we are given in the course of a day--not cab fares, but the small blessings that come our way. A tasty snack. A song on the radio. A water cooler with really cold water. They add up. If we keep a list, we can look back at the end of the day and realize just how lucky we are. And we can be thankful for that."

"Much of Zen practice is just to develop an appreciation for everyday life. Whether it's a glorious sunrise over the green hills of Texas or a frantic street scene anywhere in the world, we should take it all in and see the beauty behind it. And we can appreciate that and give thanks for it. Wherever we are, we're lucky to be there. We're lucky just to be." (120-1).

As he details in the paragraph after those two, "[t]he hard times are valuable as well" since "[w]e can be grateful for the trials we face, the obstacles we have to overcome" (121).

Okay, I admit it. I almost made a resolution to do exactly what he details above: listing the everyday blessings or positive negatives that happened in my day. But I didn't. I'm mulling it over. For a short while a few years ago, I was writing a daily tanka, which was usually fun and interesting but sometimes it just turned into work. And I got enough work. I got enough.

I may just do the list like I do my tankas, when I feel like it. But I'm drawn to the discipline of a daily practice.

For example, for today I could note how Hannah, who starts back at first grade tomorrow, held my hand as we went to and from the mall today. And I could also record how my first attempt at making Swedish meatballs didn't go so well. They came out more as Swedish meatblobs. I failed to remember a lesson I've learned before: adhere strictly to the recipe on your first try making a dish. And Mrs. Nasty joked with me about whether I'd write about that dish.

Well, there you go. I did. Duly noted.

Music Friday: "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

As we got closer to Waterloo on Wednesday, I tuned into 107.9 FM, which is the radio station I listened to when I was living in this area along with KUNI because those were the two best options. And 107.9, whatever its name is now, still plays lots of hard rock and metal.

To go along with the fare the station dishes out, I offer one of my favorite songs by Metallica. Click HERE to watch the band perform it in Moscow.

Over the Cedar

I don't know why I've been thinking about this lately, but I've been pondering my childhood and where I grew up. I guess it's inevitable as I make the slow lurch toward 40, but I'm pretty confident some of the reading I've been doing lately is part of the cause (see "Thoughts on the Midwest").

But when I think back to growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, one image that I come back to is going across the Cedar on the green 18th Street bridge most days when I would work at my Dad's grocery store--crossing over from the west side to the east side, the "bad part of town," a phrase that is so racially-tinged and socio-economically tangled that it deserves its own post or essay.

I made that trip over the Cedar all the time when I was much younger than working age when my Mom and I would stop in at my father's store to shop, and that was when Rath Packing Co. was still in business. When I was young, I remember it being huge--trailers stacked up waiting to unload pigs and cattle for the killing floors, the musky stench of death and dirt and diesel, the white water tower with the Rath logo on it-a red, rudimentary image of an Indian chief, the Packer's Inn bar across from the plant whetting the appetites of working folks.

Later on, once Rath went belly up in '85, the city was hurting. Bad. The 80s were not a good time to be in Waterloo with Rath closing and John Deere (the city's largest employer) with its multiple layoffs throughout the decade. Reagan espoused "Morning in America," and Waterloo's America exemplified job losses and hard times. The mornings were pretty damn dark.

While I can't describe my parents as white collar by any stretch of the imagination, I also think growing up in Waterloo gave me a certain blue collar mindset that usually serves me well but also creates crankiness since I work in academia, a place where sometimes being straightforward and at times blunt and also prone to being intolerant of bullshit are not prized characteristics.

But I'm still hung up on these questions: Why Rath? Why is that trip over the river and a now defunct packing plant so emblematic to me about my hometown? Maybe it's mere repetition because that's what I did since I made that trip across the bridge so often.

But the academic in me (damn you!) makes me think it means something more.

Wintry Mix and Counting Crows

The forecast for driving tomorrow doesn't look good. Weather.com provides the menacing "wintry mix" descriptor of what'll be like on the roads. Thank goodness it's all interstate from Chucktown to Waterloo.

But we'll be taking our time.

A friend from high school quoted a snippet of "Anna Begins" from the Counting Crows as one of her Facebook statuses (or stati?) today, which then turned me on to listening to August and Everything After.

That's a great album, and like Blind Melon's first album, August... reminds of a certain place and time (Kirksville and in particular the "Gin Mill"). Good times were had, people.

Random Thoughts on Music

I was listening to Blind Melon's debut album today, and like other albums and songs out there, certain songs or bands rekindle memories.

When listening to Blind Melon, I recall the Gin Mill, its parties, Anchorman, and brotherhood. "Tones of Home" reminds me of Roy.

Songs from Gun 'n Roses provide multiple memories: "Paradise City" (theme for senior year homecoming), "Patience" (living with Chuck), and of course "Welcome to the Jungle." 

Camper Van Beethoven, R.E.M., and The Replacements remind me of high school. I listened to them a lot.

The Kudzu Kings & Blue Mountain recall Oxford, Mississippi in all of its splendor.

The Drive-By Truckers are quintessential Alabama--"Never Gonna Change."

The Gourds' version of "Gin & Juice" brings back a memory of when I was listening to the song at a stop light on Bryant Drive in Tuscaloosa and I noticed two frat boys in a 4Runner next to me smoking a huge Bob Marley joint. 

And Jay Farrar's "Cahokian" and "Feel Free" remind me of St. Louis because of the references.