Hey! That was a good song!

Whilst working over at the comic shoppe yesterday, Manager Joe and I were talking about music. I think generally we like pretty much the same kinda stuff. He knows WAY more about '90 Brit-Pop and current alternative stuff than I do, but what he plays that I don't know, I DO enjoy.

He was talking about growing up in Perry County and how much music meant to him, which I would think can be said of the majority of of us since we tend to be a bit angsty at that age. There's an question posed in the excellent movie "High Fidelity" (which could be taken right from the excellent book "High Fidelity" but I'm too lazy to get up and check!) :

"Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? "

Anyway, I'm not here to answer that question, I just went off on a tangent. He said that growing up, he somehow discovered all these bands that weren't popular in his school - Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, The Smiths - and like me, he would pour over import fanzines and music magazines, saving money to get weird imports and bootleg videos. I did the same thing - I mean, in 1986 I was prepared to lay down my life for Depeche Mode. If Martin Gore called me up when I was in eleventh grade and said "I need you to step in front of your school bus tomorrow" - man, I would have done it! I obsessed with anything with Vince Clarke on it as well - Yaz, Assembly, Erasure....

Joe then said that he was the only one he knew that was into these groups and he strutted down the school hallways alone with his cool import t-shirts. It made me realize that I was pretty lucky...

I rarely think about those days of yesteryear unless I'm sitting around the bar with a bunch of friends and we are engaging in the lowest form of conversation - "Remember when...?". And because I rarely do, I always assume that I was pretty miserable back then. Truth is, I really wasn't.

I had a good number of friends who shared the same musical interests as me. We certainly weren't the mainstream, but we were a small band of knowledgeable snobs. My friend to this day Colby got me into Yaz and The Cure. My buddy Beil got me into Depeche Mode. My wife Sarah and I never dated back then, but we talked a lot about music and generally dug the same stuff. There was a bunch of us that hung out and listened to each other's tapes - Communards, Human League, Erasure, Sigue Sigue Sputnick, Human League, etc. Looking back, it was really lucky that I had a group like that, even if I haven't seen most of them in 20 years.

One of my very best memories from those years was at a cast party after one of our musicals. It was at Greg Morgan's house - I don't know what became of him and I was never really all that close to him, but he was a good guy. There was a group of probably 15 of us standing in a circle dancing and singing along at the top of our voices to the Communards "You Are My World" - a song that ever since takes me back to 1986. Putting it in words here makes it seem quite under whelming, but at 16, at a party late Saturday night, with a bunch of friends, sharing in this album with which I was obsessed, it was a great experience. I remember having such a blast laughing and trying to sing as high as Jimmy Sommerville, until someone came down to the basement to say that his parents wanted us to either shut up or play some good music! Oh well, it was fun while it lasted and then we moved on to the next dumb thing....

I hadn't thought about it for years until talking with Joe, but I thought it would be valid to write about it here. Maybe adding it to the blog will prevent me from having a mid-life crisis when I hit 40!

I don't have any great observations or lessons to impart based on this pointless bit of reminiscencing, so I hope you weren't too bored by it. I guess I'll proofread it and then maybe head downstairs and crank The Cure's "Just Like Heaven." Or maybe some Depeche - "Master and Servant" might be good....

So much good stuff to choose from!!