Located against the wall below a window in my home office/computer room, is a very large green trunk. This trunk contains a unique view into my personal history, as it holds within it the vast majority of my music collection, from the yellowing fold out labels of the first cassettes I ever bought with my own money (Springsteen’s “Born in The USA,” and ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic’s “In 3D,” for the record), to compact discs I’ve acquired as recently as a few years ago. It’s a strangely telling cross section of the tastes and attitudes of my misspent youth and young adulthood, laid bare across an eclectic assortment of several hundred hours of recorded sound.
It had been a while since I cracked open the trunk, though during my extended spring break vacation, a conversation on twitter with Geekdad guitar teacher John Anealio prompted me to dig into the bowels of the crate to find and listen to my copy of Winger’s In The Heart of The Young for the first time in at least 15 years. It was better than I expected (well, except for “Little Dirty Blonde,” which was just trying way too hard).
That expedition into the depths re-kindled my interest in that treasure trove, and before heading out on the road this week, I grabbed a seemingly random handful of discs from the trunk to take along for the ride.
What I pulled out looks remarkably like the cutout racks of a mall record store or a dusty radio station prize closet circa 1993. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to chronicle my experiences of re-listening to these records after so many years, and maybe examine what sort of memories, if any, the experience dredged up in the process. If I find it worthwhile, it might become a returning feature. In any case, here are some of those reflections:
♦ Ugly Kid Joe: America’s Least Wanted: I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember buying this one – it’s highly probable that I didn’t; it could have easily been left in my dorm room anywhere between 1992 and 1996 by any of several dozen people, and just got absorbed. In any case, I remember enjoying the ultimately disposable snark of “Everything About You” back then, and heard the cover of “Cat’s In The Cradle” a handful of times on the radio in the intervening years, but hadn’t much thought about it at all. Relistening to it now, it’s an interesting artifact of it’s time: 1992, straddling the line between 80s hair metal and 90s grunge; but not doing either style particularly well; it’s too technical, crisp and clean to be the latter, but not nearly flamboyant and bombastic enough to be the former. In short, it’s pretty much exactly what the early 90s sounded like, with lots of mid-song tempo and key changes, wrapped up in skateboard shorts and a special appearance by Julia Sweeney as “Pat.”
♦ Shadow King: This one was definitely purchased out of a cut out rack, given the notched spine, probably from the Park City Mall in Lancaster PA. Shadow King was a “supergroup” of sorts, at least as super as you call a lineup featuring Foreigner’s Lou Gramm, Vivian Campbell (Dio, Whitesnake, Def Leppard) and a couple of studio musicians. I picked this one up because I’ve always liked Vivian Campbell; he’s one of those unsung hard rock guitar heroes who always puts in a solid day’s work but never got particularly flashy, and therefore, never particularly famous. According to the wiki page, Shadow King performed live exactly once in 1991 before breaking up because Campbell got the offer to replace Steve Clark in Def Leppard, which, honestly, was probably a better gig, since the record itself is only okay; the guitar work and rhythm section is top notch, as one might expect from a troupe of professional studio sidemen. In the end, though, it sounds pretty much exactly like Foreigner trying to make a heavy metal record, and it ends up being about as successful as you’d expect that kind of effort to be.
♦ The Replacements – Don’t Tell A Soul: I picked this disc up very recently, certainly within the last year, used at an indie record store in downtown Richmond. This is the second-to-last ‘Mats record (but really the last, because All Shook Down was mostly just Westerberg with a bunch of hired studio guns anyway), and by 1989, they’d mostly lost the brash punk aesthetic for a more introspective singer/songwriter vibe, but it’s still got a bit of sarcastic pop sensibility, that iconic chorus/flange on the guitars, and “I’ll Be You,” the group’s highest charting single that I liked from MTV before I even knew I was a Replacements fan.
♦ Beth Hart – Screaming for My Supper: Not sure where I got this one either – it’s got an Atlantic Records “for promotional use only” stamp on the cover, so either used record store or radio giveaway. It’s from 1999, and it sounds like it, though hazy memories want to put it back a few years – it seems like exactly the kind of thing that would’ve been pressed into my hands by a WTPA personality on remote at an event where I was manning a catering truck, though I’d already been down south for a couple of years by the time this record came out. Music’s funny that way; the feeling you get from something doesn’t always match up with what was happening according to the official chronology. The record itself is turn of the millenium bluesy chanteuse singer-songwriter*; in an alternate universe with slightly different temporal rules, Ms. Hart became famous instead of Sheryl Crow, and mirror universe me (the one without the vandyke) is sitting down typing about Tuesday Night Music Club (which yeah, came out in ’93, but bear with me – so did the first Beth Hart record). Screaming is really very listenable, solid pop songwriting with harder vocal edge than one might expect from the single “LA Song (Out of This Town),” which I’m surprised doesn’t turn up on more Hot AC stations today; an excellent torchy pop ballad that’s way better than it should be, given the genre.
…And that’s what I listened to in the car this week. Anyone have an opinion on whether I should keep revisiting this sort of thing? I’m pretty sure the remaining stack on my front seat has Poison’s CC DeVille-less Native Tounge record in it…
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* – This record is pretty much the female counterpoint to Pete Yorn’s musicforthemorningafter as described in this avclub piece.
