The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day 8

On the eighth day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me...



Eight Chapters on Music in a Post That's Got Way Too Many Words in It, For Which I Apologize
Seven Books For Reading (Seriously)

Six Beers Worth Drinking

A fiiiiifth Golden Ring..... (please?)

Four Years of Marcus;

Three Scummers Picking;

Two albums to look forward to; and

A fat guy in a jersey

Several other Gheorghies put together strong, concise posts about their musical favorites. I tried to do the same. I failed. I give up. I can no sooner distill my musical preferences to ten songs than dunk a basketball. All is not lost, though. In the course of trying and failing to make a list, I had an opportunity to stroll down melody’s memory lane. The result: something resembling an audio autobiography. To borrow a song title, here’s the Story of My Life in songs:

The Early Years

My father’s musical tastes ran heavily to country & western and singer-songwriter types. He loved Hank Williams Jr., George Strait, Simon & Garfunkel, George Jones, the Oak Ridge Boys, and Billy Joel (in particular, I remember him singing the chorus to the latter’s ‘You May Be Right’ with gusto, reveling in telling my mother that she’d married a lunatic), among others. And so the first song I can remember calling my ‘favorite’ was Glen Campbell’s ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. I didn’t grasp that tune’s essentially sadness until later. I just liked hollering the chorus.

We listened to a steady mix of Alabama, the Statler Brothers, the Gatlin Brothers, and Anne Murray during our family road trips. The Statlers’ ‘Counting Flowers on the Wall’, in particular, resonates in my recollection.

Growing Up, Breaking Out

I bought my first cassettes when I was 12, purchasing ‘The Game’, by Queen, and Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’. I don’t recall much about my reasoning, but I wore those tapes out, particularly the former. For all the great songs on that Queen album, the one that sticks in my head all these years later is the relatively obscure ‘Dragon Attack’. 

It was shortly after this that The Police released ‘Synchronicity’, and changed the course of my musical future. That record was the gateway to alternative rock for me, and for a long time thereafter, ‘The Biggest Band in the World’ was at the top of my personal charts, too. I still know all the words to nearly every song on that album, and while ‘Ghost in the Machine’ has surpassed it as my favorite of the band’s catalogue, it’s still one of the great rock records in history.

High School, and a Missed Opportunity

For better or worse, I grew up on military bases and in majority white upper middle-class suburban areas. My idea of rebellion was listening to progressive rock and getting a high and tight haircut at the local Marine Corps base after getting suspended from school for drinking. (We actually got suspended for telling the truth about drinking, as all the kids who lied about it escaped punishment. Lesson learned.) I missed out almost entirely on rap/hip hop, something I’ve only recently started to try to rectify.

I went to my first real concert in 1984, catching Chicago at the old Capital Center. I’d like to think I redeemed myself three years later by being one of the few kids in my high school to make a show at the original 9:30 Club. I saw They Might Be Giants as a high school senior at that dingy, dank, sweaty, glorious dive with my then-21 year-old girlfriend. (I was kind of a stud, as you could probably imagine.) Fitting, as their ‘Don’t Let’s Start’ was one of the first songs I saw on MTV’s 120 Minutes, the show that cemented alternative rock’s primacy in my adolescent soundtrack. 

From there, it was on to Echo and the Bunnymen, The Waterboys, The Church, Love and Rockets, The Housemartins, Crowded House, The Clash, and The Violent Femmes, whose ‘Blister in the Sun’ brings back fond memories of frantically trying to fast forward while driving with my mother as ‘Why can’t I get/Just one fuck’ played from the speakers of my Plymouth Horizon. We dabbled in Guns 'n Roses and AC/DC, too, mostly as pump up music before lacrosse games.

I was a little bit late to R.E.M., but jumped in with both feet after the 1986 release of ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’. While I can’t pick a top 10 songs, that album has been in my top five records for as long as I can remember. Don’t ask me to pick a favorite tune from it, though.

The Beasties’ ‘Licensed to Ill’ was my first foray into rap, followed by LL Cool J’s ‘Bigger and Deffer’ and Kool Moe Dee’s ‘How Ya Like Me Now’. J’s ‘I’m Bad’ remains one of my favorite rap tunes - I can vividly recall playing that tune and ‘Bristol Hotel’ all the way up at 11 as we tore out of the driveway after one of the great parties of my high school era.

The record that resonates the most with me from that era, though, came out in early 1987. The Smiths’ ‘Louder Than Bombs’ was a revelation. Morrissey and Marr’s double album sounded like nothing else, with Moz’s mixture of melancholy and bombast and Johnny’s textured, melodic guitar. The Smiths’ lyrics and themes made a naive suburban kid wonder what was out there in the scary wide world. 

College, the Parts I Can Remember

I remember talking to my soon-to-be freshman roommate on the phone a month or so before heading to school. He drove an IROC and listened to Van Halen. I don’t think he was particularly impressed when I listed The Smiths, The Cure, The Primitives, and The Connells among my favorites. I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate, though his taste in music never got all that much better. That first year is a bit of a blur, musically, though we did have a hallmate who might’ve been the biggest U2 fan I’ve ever met.

It was sophomore year, though, that I moved in with Dave and we killed vast millions of brain cells playing the CD shuffle game, loading six discs into his player, hitting the random play button, and guessing which song and album would play next. Correct guesses entitled the clairvoyant to write their name and the details on the wall of our otherwise neatly maintained room. The Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ played an outsized role in our soundtrack that year, and remains one of my very favorite records.

The summer after that year, I lived with Clarence and a rotating cast of idiots, who to a man thought that Clarence and I were the weirdest kids on the planet. Our summer-long Strat-o-matic replay of the 1986 baseball season and my stubborn insistence on remaining unemployed for as long as was fiscally prudent (long past that point, actually) were key pieces of prosecution evidence.

Between watching the full runs of Miami Vice and Crime Story that summer, we were also turned on to Social Distortion after seeing ‘Ball and Chain’ on 120 Minutes. We drove to the mall to buy that CD the next day, and it stayed in heavy rotation for much of the year. 

At some point during this period, I also bought Bob Mould’s ‘Workbook’, which may very well be my favorite record. ‘See a Little Light’, in any case, ranks atop my personal list of songs. I can’t pick a top ten, but I can give you a top one. The juxtaposition of melodic and melancholic, the pain wrapped in a hook, the plainspoken emotion of that song never fails to move me. 

Dave and I spent an entirely degenerate and absolutely unforgettable summer in Nags Head between our junior and senior years. We redefined squalor, living with as many as ten guys in a three-bedroom shotgun shack on the beach road. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Musically, I remember singing the Stones’ ‘Dead Flowers’ at the top of my drunken lungs, accompanied by Dave on guitar, and catching local indie faves Everything, Boy O Boy, and the Waxing Poetics at a dive of a beach bar called The Atlantis (may it rest in hurricane-destroyed peace).



I've already written about the Chilis’ ‘BloodSugarSexMagik’ and its role in the soundtrack to my senior year. Music, place, and time come together for me when I hear that record. My fraternity house neighbor also introduced us (and through us, the world) to Nirvana that year. As is often the case, we were trendsetters. At some point this year (or perhaps the previous one), we started putting The Pogues’ ‘Fiesta’ on the CD player and destroying our fraternity rooms in impromptu mosh pits. Our gleeful stupidity was surpassed only by our ability to entertain ourselves.



Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’ got played so much my senior year that we began to cringe when it came on the jukebox at the College Delly, but I still dig it. 

At some point in college (really, most of my life runs together at this point), I saw the BoDeans open for the Hoodoo Gurus at the late, lamented Boathouse in Norfolk. I was driving, so I chose not to drink. Alcohol, anyway. We moshed for the better part of the headliners’ set, and I was so drained that I chugged a 64 oz. bottle of Gatorade in the parking lot of a 7-11 after the show. Puked it up on 64 West a few minutes later. Rock and roll, man.

We weren’t quite as lucky when several of us tried to catch the Ramones at the same venue. Our driver pulled off to the side of the road midway through the trip, telling us that he was too drunk to finish the drive. I stepped into the breach, despite having no business doing so. A few hours and several destroyed Norfolk lawns later, we headed back to Williamsburg having been unable to find the show. We never even got close, as it turns out. Rock and roll, man.

Growing Older But Not Up

I spent the first year of my ‘adult’ life driving up and down the East Coast visiting colleges while ‘working’ for my fraternity. It was, for the most part, as forgettable a year as it sounds. The job did afford me the opportunity to spend hours at a time behind the wheel, blasting Arrested Development, Spin Doctors, Barenaked Ladies, and Sugar CDs at road-appropriate volumes.



Moved into a house in Arlington with Clarence and a fellow named Spoid and commenced (or continued, really) living in mostly squalid, and certainly less than healthy conditions. I wouldn’t trade that drunken, silly, stupid, generally female-repellent period of my life for just about anything. We got drunk and sang David Allen Coe at the top of our lungs. When we weren’t getting drunk and singing They Might Be Giants. Or getting drunk and watching Dumb ’n Dumber. And getting really drunk at Jimmy Buffett concerts and doing stuff that we can’t write about publicly, even in a place as obscure as G:TB. 

Sometime during that period, I discovered Wilco and Son Volt, and my long love affair with smart, jangly guitar rock was consummated.

The Slow Road to Maturity

The woman I eventually married has somewhat more mainstream musical tastes than I do, but we did find common ground in The Dave Matthews Band early in our relationship. It’s cool these days to slag Dave, but I’ve never seen a DMB show that was less than entertaining, and I still count myself a fan.

Clarence turned me on the Old 97s shortly after the release of ‘Fight Songs’. As any careful GTB reader knows, that band and lead singer Rhett Miller remain my favorites today. And after 25 years together, they’re still cranking out killer punkified alt-country and delivering as good a live show as a fan could want.

Green Day found its way back into my life with ‘American Idiot’, a record that blew me away, and spent months in nearly exclusive rotation in my car. It’s probably my favorite concept album. I remain bummed out that never caught it live.

I did, though, get to see The Police in concert, years and years after I thought I’d missed that chance. 

My wife bought me an iPod, and had the wisdom and intelligence to send it to Clarence for him to load it. With more than 20,000 songs. I may have received better gifts, but I can’t recall many of them. The first song that ever played on that iPod was Billy Bragg and Wilco’s ‘California Stars’, and every time I hear that sublime collaboration, I’m reminded of two of my very favorite people. Music wins again.

A Dipshit Looks at Forty(ish)

I’m a dad now, and I fight to make my kids listen to my music so I didn’t have to listen to theirs. They Might Be Giants’ detour into kids’ music didn’t hurt in the early years. I listened to my share of Dan Zanes and Laurie Berkner, to be sure, and today I hear more Taylor Swift and Meghan Trainor than I’d prefer, but I’ve got one kid who loves Vampire Weekend, and another who’s a budding concert fan, headed to see Pierce the Veil live in a few weeks, so I’m doing something right.

The purchase of Sirius satellite radio several years ago was a huge boon for my musical discovery. Nearly all of my favorite music of the past several years was played first on Sirius XMU. Bands like The National, The New Pornographers, Mumford and Sons, Sleigh Bells, Fleet Foxes, The Postal Service, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst, and a dozen others made my playlists after I heard them on XMU.



I’ve always had a thing for female rock singers (see Kay Hanley, Tanya Donnelly, Delores O’Riordan, Susanna Hoffs, et al), but the genre seems to be exploding of late. Neko Case, St. Vincent, Jenny Lewis, the Dum Dum Girls, Haim, and CVHRCHES, to name just a few, get a lot of airtime in my house.

Thanks to Mark and Zman, I’m expanding my rap palette. Mark turned me on to Murs, whose ‘Murs for President’ might be my favorite rap album, non-Beasties version. My travels to the Twin Cities exposed me to Brother Ali, the Doomtree Collective, and Dessa (who’s part of the former). Mark also made me a Rap 101 playlist. You can find it here:

The Greatest Musical Weekend Ever

I’ve seen a ton of live shows, and there aren’t many things I like to do more than see a really great band in a small venue. Increasingly, my musical tastes are expanding, or at least I can appreciate stuff that isn’t necessarily in my wheelhouse. I’ve seen a couple of jazz shows in the last several years, for example, and while I didn’t exactly get everything, I appreciated the hell out of the musicians and their chops. Live music, man.

Live music (and great friends) was responsible for the best weekend of my life, non-wedding category, which deserves a chapter of its own. 

In 2009, I made my maiden voyage to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, under the tutelage of Clarence and a pair of our lady friends from college, Fest veterans all. Most of you know the stories, as Clarence has recounted them in this space previously, so I won’t bore you with the repeats. But that weekend is as vivid in my memory as it was the day I flew out of New Orleans, hoarse, strung out, and exhilarated. From the late morning to the wee hours of the evening, we reveled in the Crescent City’s sounds and tastes - both of them everywhere in that incredible town. We saw the most amazing gospel bands, the good-timiest local zydeco acts, emerging talents like The Avett Brothers (on a stage that might’ve held 500 spectators, max), to crowd favorites like Amanda Shaw & The Cute Boys and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue (right as they were getting ready to blow up, and justifiably so), to mid-major veterans like Wilco, Galactic, and Spoon and headliners like The Dave Matthews Band. We caught a 10-piece funk combo from Brooklyn in a bar so small that the band had to stand in two sections to make a path to allow patrons to go to the bathroom. We danced, and drank, and ate, and smoked weed 25 feet from a trio of New Orleans cops who obviously saw us, and even more obviously didn’t care.



I posted this comment in the thread that accompanied Clarence’s Fest recap, “it's a bit hard to explain this, but being in new orleans really made me feel like a different person. it's like the usual laws of personal physics don't apply.” 

Music, man. It’s the best.