(especially in Seattle in January)
R.E.M.
Insight from R.E.M.
True story. This song came on the radio while stuck in LA traffic after dropping our oldest off at college. In heavy air, it clicked with both my husband and me right away, and I pulled up the video on YouTube to explain to our daughter. Ironically, it provided us all with a much-needed laugh.
Although tempted, I did not get out of the car and start walking on the freeway.
Quarantunes are Back?
We got a little sidetracked on our nightly family #quarantunes vinyl, but tonight Scott and I called the shots and had some good tunes spinning. @waysidebandseattle happened to be the last show we saw before everything went dark. Dreaming of better days, live music, and hopeful for good times with the camping crew this summer.
Should I Ride the Wave Where It Takes Me?
I heard these three songs on my way in to the office this morning: “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (U2), “Find the River” (REM), and “Release” (Pearl Jam). Think the universe is trying to tell me something?
Even Sadder Than a Wedding Dress in a Thrift Store….
….it turns out, is a mix tape in a thrift store. I never realized this until I found a stack of them at my local Goodwill. I was intrigued by the one called “Wedding Music/Favorite Love Songs #1″, so I picked it up (What happened?! Was the wedding cancelled?). I glanced at the list of songs only long enough to see Mariah Carey well-represented, but then I felt compelled to put it down. It was too much like reading someone’s diary. I couldn’t do it.
Ah, mix tapes. Our kids will never know the magic of a mix tape. They will craft digital playlists, I’m sure. But nothing so time-stamped and permanent as a mix tape with their handwriting on it.
I freely admit that I am a sentimental hoarder. I’ve got all of my old tapes, even my earliest mix tapes made with my sister and cousin (if you can really call them mix tapes… really it was just us talking into a Panasonic tape recorder, telling stupid stories and singing songs).
Another gem is the “Workout Mix” tape that I made in college, with appropriate-tempo songs for a routine of exercises. Given that it was 1989, of course the lineup included INXS, Prince, and Neneh Cherry. The last song, the “cool down”, was – what else – “Nite & Day” by Al B Sure.
Then there was the mix tape trilogy made for a post-college road trip (“Driving Tape #1, #2, and #3”, of course.) Number 1 has got you covered with your basic R.E.M, Pearl Jam, and U2, with some Naughty by Nature thrown in for reasons I don’t recall. Number 2 was the mellow tape, with Luther Vandross and Johnny Gill – you know, for when the road asked you, “come on, let’s bring it down now….”. Number 3, sadly, is no longer with us. But it’s quite possible that it contained country music.
My favorite mix tape, though, is one that my long-distance boyfriend sent me in college. Oddly enough, I only remember one song on it – “Cars that Go Boom”, by L’trimm (wasn’t he romantic?). But what I love about that tape is that, inter-mixed with songs, my boyfriend talked about what was going on in his apartment, or what he was studying. He introduced each song like a DJ. “Cars that Go Boom” reminded him, he said, of me and my best friend/roommate (were we like “Tigra & Bunny”?). I haven’t listened to the tape since then, but I love the idea that his 1989 voice is preserved on it. I can’t even remember what his voice sounded like then. I’m saving the tape like a fine bottle of wine. Someday the time will be right, and he and I will listen to it with all the reverence it deserves (through a series of twists and turns, we ended up getting married years later.)
I really hope that the mix tapes I made for others never made their way onto a thrift store shelf (in the garbage = fine!). And now I’m feeling like I should have purchased those thrift store mix tapes and given them a proper burial. I need to think more about that one. As should you — what mix tapes do you treasure, and what mix creations of yours might still be floating around out there?
In the mean time, though, welcome to McMahon Hall, and enjoy the mellow grooves of Al B Sure (closing your eyes and pretending that it’s on a cassette tape, of course).
Quality Time in the Back of a Van
Only two of my major life decisions have an exact date of origin, meaning that I can pinpoint exactly when they were made. One of these is the decision to not move back to my home town.
Since New Year’s Eve, I’ve had U2 on the brain. (“A 1987 Bono for the New Year”). I’ve pulled out all of the old albums, so it was only a matter of time before this nugget came my way.
There is a short list of music that I associate with the Fall of my Freshman year of college, for all the obvious and not-so-obvious reasons: R.E.M., Guns n’ Roses, and U2, with a dash of The Doors on the side. These were the albums playing in the dorm halls, fueling our parties, and bonding us with new friends.
U2’s Rattle and Hum was released that fall, and for many of us, it was cause for an expedition out of the dorms, to purchase it at Tower Records on the Ave (on cassette tape, of course. And by the way…..R.I.P. Tower Records). The day it came out, you could walk down the hallways of McMahon Fifth South and hear it wafting from every other door.
Those first few months away from home, I didn’t have reason to venture much farther than the University District. But my RA had an internship that gave her access to free passes to movie premieres. When she scored enough tickets, we headed out of the U District for the night (one of these outings, of course, was to see the U2 movie “Rattle and Hum”). The movies were held at theaters all over town, giving me a chance to see other parts of the city.
On the night when the Big Decision was made, whatever movie we were seeing was playing at Uptown Theatre on lower Queen Anne. I had never been to Queen Anne, although I would later live there for four years. We piled into a van, and I loved the feeling of not knowing where we were going, and not being in charge of getting us home. I was along for the ride.
We traveled down I-5, towards the sparkling lights of downtown – very far from the wheatfields and desert vistas of my hometown. I had never consciously thought of it, but maybe in the back of my head, I assumed that, after college, I would move back home.
But on this night, looking out that van window, I thought to myself: This is my city now.
In a strange way, the world just opened up. I said to myself — I don’t have to move back there. I could live here (or anywhere else), forever. And in that moment, I knew that I would never again live in my hometown.
I had fallen in love with a city. The hook set even further with the onset of grunge music a few years later, when Seattle became the self-proclaimed music capital of the world (and maybe it was, for a while). If there was a better place to be in college during those years, I don’t know where it was.
I’ve now lived in Seattle longer than I lived in my hometown, a milestone that did not go unnoticed. The University District haunts that I knew are mostly gone. The entire city has cocktail lounges where once there were dive bars, and the grimiest of my old college bars, although still in business, now proclaims itself to be a “nightclub”. I’ve watched the influx of California and East Coast transplants, with their incessant whining about the rain. But I still don’t see myself living anywhere else.
And the other life decision with a precise point of origin? I’m keeping that one to myself, but I will say that, in true Pacific Northwest fashion, it happened on a crystal clear September day, on a trail about halfway up the side of Mt. Rainier.
Corduroy Notes 