Five Song Friday: My Criminal Record
This Week: Boomboxes, Multiverses and Learning to Love Yourself
I committed a crime against music.
It happened forever ago, but now is the time to confess.
To revisit the scene of the crime, we need to go back to the early 1980s.
I’m riding my bike one afternoon in the summer of 1984. I worked a newspaper route, so my beach cruiser had a large metal basket.
I wasn’t working that day. My Hitachi boombox rode shotgun inside the basket.
Boomboxes were the ultimate music machines in 1984. They were like giant iPods, but instead of holding thousands of songs, they held one cassette and 36 “D” batteries. If you’re too young to remember iPods, they were small iPhones that played music but couldn’t make phone calls.
And if you’re too young to remember iPhones, then you’re probably reading this decades in the future. In which case, “Hello future person! I’m sorry we left such a mess!”
Breakdancers and rappers loved boomboxes because they were powerful, portable stereos that could turn any sidewalk or street corner into a dance party. Teenagers loved boomboxes because it gave them something to listen to while drinking, smoking and doing premarital sex.
Old people hated boomboxes because old people hated everything in the eighties.
I did not breakdance or rap. I did not drink, smoke or “do sex.” I used my boombox to listen to my favorite music, which just so happened to be terrible.
There’s nothing wrong with godawful music, as long as you keep it to yourself.
On the day in question, I put a cassette of the Ghostbusters Original Motion Picture Soundtrack in my boom box, pressed play and proceeded to ride around the neighborhood, broadcasting my shit music like some kind of psycho.
In my defense, it WAS the summer of 1984 and everybody loved the Ray Parker Jr. theme song.
Back then, you could walk up to a crowd of strangers in the mall and ask, “Who ya gonna call?” They would all yell back, “Ghostbusters!” Then everybody would high-five and we’d all form a conga line to Sbarro.
It was a much simpler time.
What I did would almost make sense if I played that one hit song over and over. But that’s not what I did.
I pedaled through the neighborhood, cranked the volume as high as it would go and forced strangers to listen to deep cuts by the BusBoys, The Thompson Twins, Air Supply and Laura Branigan.
Maybe the young me just wanted everybody to hear Mick Smiley’s “Magic” at full volume? Maybe it was a cry for help?
Years later, I still I don’t know what I was thinking. The memory has always haunted me.
Maybe this doesn’t sound like a big deal to you. Was this even a crime?
Every lawyer I asked said it’s not. And when I showed up in tears to turn myself in at the police station, they just got mad and told me that I had to leave or else they’d “give me something to cry about.”
Whatever. Even if society can’t see it, I know what I did was wrong and I deeply regret my actions.
I played bad music very loudly.
And some of that music was Air Supply.
I can’t go back and change the past. All I can do is try to make up for it… five songs at a time.
Thanks for reading.
Have a delightful weekend.
Sincerely,
DJ Crankypete
Five Song Friday 010
“You Got It” - Goldenface
This song reminds me of the time I told my wife, “I DON’T LIKE SONGS WITH HORNS.”
I didn’t so much say it as I DECLARED it with confidence and conviction, like it was something I’d been waiting my whole life to admit out loud.
I don’t know why I said it, and it didn’t make sense for me to blurt it out like a revelation. Me and horns have always been cool.
Sure, I had one bad experience sitting too close to a sax player at an Open Mic Night, but who hasn’t? That wasn’t the horn’s fault.
That’s why I felt bad as soon as I said it. I demanded that I take it back. Things got tense.
I called myself a “goddamned liar” and wanted to write a formal apology to Gerry Rafferty for besmirching his masterpiece “Baker Street.”
I love “Baker Street” so much and that song is hornier than the third season of Jersey Shore.
You know which other song has horns? “You Got It” by Goldenface.
And I like this song too, so… case closed I guess.
My horn beef is squashed.
“Easy Motion” - Jacuzzi Boys
I like Jacuzzi Boys, the band.
I’m not a fan of “jacuzzi boys,” the plural noun.
For starters, hot tubs aren’t my thing. Any kind of steamy, bubbly tub gets an automatic hard pass from me.
Toss in a batch of gangly simps with hairy backs and poor bathroom hygiene? No thank you. A slow, sweaty simmer with strange men? I respectfully decline.
But that’s just me.
For some folks, the idea of a jacuzzi full of boys is about the best thing that they can imagine.
God bless them. To each his own and all that.
I’m going to stick with the band.
“I’ll Be Your Everything” - noonday underground
You can thank pizza for this song.
If it wasn’t for pizza, DJ Simon Dine and singer Daisy Martey would never have formed the group known as noonday underground (a name taken from a Tom Wolfe essay about 1960s London mods sneaking off to dance clubs on their lunch break).
Back in 1997 or so, the pair allegedly bumped into each other at a London pizza joint, got to talking about music and the rest is Brit-Pop, trip-hop history.
What would have happened if DJ Simon felt like fish and chips that day?
You’d be listening to three minutes and seven seconds of silence, that’s what.
What if “chanteuse extraordinaire” and former Morcheeba singer Daisy had a hankering for a hamburger?
Everything would be different.
In the non-pizza timeline, she never meets DJ Simon and bumps into Phil Collins at Five Guys instead.
Collins starts up a conversation and says, I’m thinking of recording a sequel song to “Sussudio.”
She says, Don’t you mean a su-su-sequel?
They laugh and reach for the last french fry at the same time which causes them to fall madly in love with each other.
They live happily ever after and he records more song sequels (“Still In The Air Tonight,” “I Missed Again, Again” and “One More One More Night”).
Fun Fact: In the present day of that non-pizza timeline, whenever somebody mentions “noonday underground,” nobody even thinks about music. People just say, “Oh, you mean that dumb essay from the 1960s that was nothing but words?”
“Blue Mountains” - Diamond Rugs
Diamond Rugs is a band made up from pieces of other bands.
You’ve got some Deer Tick and Black Lips in there. A dash of Dead Confederate. A pinch of Los Lobos and a smidge of Six Finger Satellite.
I’m not saying that this band sounds like those bands, this band is actually made up of members of those bands. Diamond Rugs is like a Frankenstein’s monster, but instead of body parts, it’s made up of whole people and their instruments.
“Blue Mountains” is a track from their 2012 self-titled album. It’s a groovy, goofball of a song with a nonsense chorus that sounds like singer John McCauley forgot the words, which would be hilarious and super-embarrassing if true.
Can you imagine? The ONE day he forgets the words is the day that they record the song?
Now he has to perform it that way live, because it’s the only version that people know? Poor guy.
But maybe he wouldn’t be in this situation if he used his free time to study the songs instead of lounging around like a rock star.
If Mr. McCauley wants to spend his days floating in a hotel pool, drinking cheap canned beer and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, then Mr. McCauley will have to sing “Duh, duh-da-dah” all the doo-dah day.
I don’t make the rules.
“I Walk the Earth” - King Biscuit Time
When the Beta Band broke up in 2004, I felt like I’d lost family member.
Not one of the good ones. Maybe a distant second or third cousin. A half-uncle, if that’s a thing.
My grief was not crippling. I felt sad for a minute, then got on with my life.
I enjoyed the Beta Band, but it wasn’t like they all burned up in a plane crash. They probably yelled at each other, stopped hanging out and then moved on to new things. It happens.
Beta Band member Steve Mason started King Biscuit Time as a side project while his day gig was still going strong. He recorded two EPs: one in 1998 and No Style in 2000.
“I Walk the Earth” is the first track on No Style. And for anyone who misses the sublime salve of a long-playing, low-tempo Beta Band track, this song hits the sweet spot.
After the band ended, listening to this tune felt like those scenes in movies where the surviving spouse sits around drinking whiskey and watching their old wedding videos on an endless loop until they reach the point in the plot where they realize it’s time to get their shit together and start living again, because you can’t learn how to love another person again until you relearn to love yourself and maybe that person at the office who was there for them after the accident has something more to offer than just a shoulder to cry on and a warm smile.
It felt just like that.
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That’s all for now.
Thanks for reading!
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“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” - Kurt Vonnegut