. . . and this is your brain on 90s music
Any questions?
This Saturday night my 90s cover band will play a concert at Lemonade Park in KCMO. It’s our best set list yet, and I hope you can make it. (Get tickets HERE.) Since playing a long set requires a lot of preparation, and because said preparation mostly involves listening to, practicing, and thinking about 90s music nonstop, you might say it’s occupied a lot of mental space.
SO. Because my brain has been fried on 90s music for weeks, what I’m able to offer today are some snapshots and scenes from my so called 90s life, in no particular order.
1. Weezer’s blue album had already changed everything by 1995. So when I heard the deejay on Kiss 107.3 say that the Weezer’s first single from their second album would be played on the radio at 7:00 p.m. on this particular night, I knew I had to drop everything and listen. It felt important. No, more than that: It felt momentous. Then my dad told me I had to go with him to the grocery store. I saw on the clock that it was 6:48. It was only a five-minute drive to the store. I explained to him that we might need to sit in the car until this song came on. We sat in the parking lot for a while. Dad didn’t seem to mind. I guess I had conveyed how important this was to me. We sat. We waited. And then a few minutes after 7:00 the deejay introduced the new song and let rip. The song started with gargling sound, two tom drums, the kick drum, some weird acoustic guitar, and then the lyrics: “God damn you half Japanese girls / you do it to me every time!” My ears itched. I looked at my dad because I sensed his disapproval. “What is this crap?” he said. He turned off the radio and we went inside.
2. When I was twelve, I saved up all of my money to buy a Sony CD boom box from Sears for $89. I think it was the first CD player in our house. I spent all of my money on the boom box. Now I wanted CDs. A few weeks later for my 13th birthday, I went to visit my grandma’s house. I can’t remember any other gifts I received that year, but when I arrived at my grandma’s house, my uncle had left a gift of two CDs: Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Greatest Hits. I enjoyed the Elvis CD, but I treasured the Tom Petty disc. Correction: I treasure it still. That album is something of a phantom limb for me – I somehow feel it wherever I go. Those first three chords leading into “American Girl” make up one of the greatest sounds in the entire world for me.
3. Then I discovered Columbia House and BMG. That’s not entirely true. I had already discovered them; I knew about them. But it wasn’t until I was desperate to grow my personal CD collection that I discovered how to scam Columbia House and BMG. Here’s what you had to do back then: You would pull the page out of the Parade magazine that included the order form for Columbia House. Then you pulled tiny stamp-sized stickers from the page, each square sticker showing the image of a popular new release album. You stuck the stickers of your choice onto the order form that proclaimed “Buy One Album Get 12 Free!” You completed the form with your name, address, and “credit card information,” then stuck it in a mailbox. Then repeat the exact same steps with BMG. A few weeks later, HALLELUJAH! A box of CDs arrives and the GATES OF HEAVEN OPEN, all thanks to this quasi-innocent credit card fraud scheme!! This is how I came to be in possession of R.E.M.’s Monster, Counting Crows’ August and Everything After, Ben Folds Five’s Whatever and Ever Amen, Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory, and so much more. I’ve repented for many transgressions in my life, but this is not one of them.
4. My older sister drove a crappy white Civic with no power steering, so by the spring of her sophomore year her biceps were jacked. She would drive me to school every morning, and every morning we’d choose a different cassette from the small stash she kept in the console. They were mostly white cassettes that we had repurposed from the sermon recordings that our parents purchased from church: We would scotch-tape the top corners of the cassettes so that we could record over the sermons with the albums we’d borrowed from our friends—the albums we knew our parents might not want us to buy. The most well-worn tape had Sublime’s eponymous album on one side, Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication on the other. One morning, I can’t remember why, my dad decided to drive us to school in my sister’s car. As he started driving down the street, Sublime’s “Caress Me Down” started playing: “Mucho gusto, me llamo Bradley / I’m hornier than Ron Jeremy.” Our dad said, “What is this crap?” He hit Eject, grabbed the cassette, and threw it out the window of the crappy Civic as we drove 40 down Holmes Road. The tape was gone.
5. My friends Neil, Joey, and I drove to Sandstone Amphitheater one July night before my junior year of high school to see Aerosmith in concert. Joey drove a late 80s Corolla. The radio had quit working long before that hot July night, so he kept a small boom box plugged into the cigarette lighter so that he could still play CDs in the car. The traffic for the Bonner Springs exit to the amphitheater was backed up half a mile on the interstate, so we crawled in a long line of cars, windows down, sweating like mad, me in the back seat playing deejay with the boom box on my lap, swapping out one Aerosmith album after another to make the best pre-game playlist on the fly, the three of us singing along. I don’t remember much about the concert itself. Monster Magnet was the opening band, and that’s all I have to say about that.
5. My older sister had a friend named Morgan. Correction: She still has a friend named Morgan. Anyway, when we were in middle school Morgan used to come over to our house and practice her hairstyling skills on me. Why? I don’t know, because I was young and dumb and I liked older girls and wanted my hair bleached blond. So every few months Morgan came over and dumped bleach on my scalp. Why did I think this was this a good idea? I don’t know. It was the 90s. Anyway. One time, Morgan brought over her CD of The Fugees’ The Score. I don’t remember if I officially asked to borrow it, or if she accidentally left it. All I know is that I did not return Morgan’s Fugees CD for a long time. And by “long time” I mean I still have it. By the law of adverse possession, it’s been more than 20 years, and so now it is mine. But then recently, during Covid lockdown, when my family of five had not had proper haircuts for nine months and had begun to look Neanderthal-esque, I called up Morgan. She came over with her scissors and combs and gear, because now Morgan is a legit hairstylist. She cut all of our hair in the kitchen of our house because we needed haircuts, and because we asked her, and because she graciously said yes. And it was then, for the first time in several decades, that I started to feel a bit of guilt that I never returned Morgan’s Fugees CD. But what could I do? Like I said, due to law, that Fugees CD had technically become mine. At some point I had even put a sticker with my name on it. So what did I do? I bought a brand new CD of The Score, and I gave it to Morgan the next time I saw her. Because that’s what good friends do. I think I even apologized.
Postscript: My dad appears twice in these stories, and he appears perhaps more curmudgeonly and villainous than he actually was or is. I’ll stand up for him as a person. He’s a good guy. But I can’t disguise his actions here as being anything other than complete crap. What is this crap, indeed, DAAAD?! ;)
