Music and whatnots

I take the minor victories pretty seriously these days.  Example?  Of course.

I heard Jesus Fever twice yesterday and that nauseating tickle of a teenage memory would not be relieved until I bumbled onto youtube to listen to it again.  And again.  And again.  Good song.

And I wanted to know where the hell I'd heard it before.

Something... something about the guitar... something in the ghostly way it resonates in that damn song was making me think of a long bus ride to Encinitas when I was probably too young to take it but who was paying attention anyway?  I used to hop on at the beach and transfer near UCSD with a book that I read for only as long as it took to get beyond the familiar.  When I couldn't name the streets, I watched the suburbs blur in the salt-sticky window and the coastal fog linger in old Torrey Pines.  When I was a little older, I took the same bus leaning into a friend who got sent away-- for something or other-- to a military school beyond even the unfamiliar.

But on the particular trip nagging my craw, I was alone.  Maybe I had my walkman on.  Or maybe I didn't.  Either way, eventually I got off the bus in front of Lou's Records.  And there, I acted like I knew what I was doing even though I didn't.  I went straight to The Smiths because that was the best way to pretend.  From there, I searched for vinyl-- judging the music by its cover art-- hoping that the music in the sleeve would play the smarts or darkness or confusion or gravity or whimsy of the album design.  Hoping, I guess, that it would play just for me and all my supercharged adolescent angst.

At Lou's, I memorized the posters on the walls and the album covers that I wanted and the t-shirts I could never afford but would covet on the widening shoulders of boys I knew.  I found REM and Alien Sex Fiend and Echo and Psychic TV and the Buzzcocks and Bauhaus and Siouxsie and I wished, back then, that music stores could be more like libraries, so I could sit and listen undisturbed as I gauged an opinion on whether the songs would do anything to make me feel a little... better.  A little... something.  A little... cool.

Lou's would let me listen to an album but only with permission.  And that required human interaction that, at 13 as at 36, put me off.  I never liked authority and I didn't want to talk to some pompous, world-wise 18-year old in an over washed version of the shirts I wanted.  Or t-shirts that introduced me to bands I didn't know so eventually, I would covet the shirt.

On this one afternoon, I remember the guy's fading shirt.  It was The The.  And so I bought an album because the guy wore horn-rims and I'd noted, under the torn cardigan he was wearing on a previous visit, a Smiths shirt.  So, after a long trip back on the bus, I heard Uncertain Smile for the first time.  Or so.

Yesterday, as I listened to Jesus Fever, I heard The The again, buried in a ditch so shallow I could still recognize its form.  So I searched for Uncertain Smile.  And I listened to it.  Again and again.

And that was the minor victory.  Finding it.  Someday, maybe I'll get a fiefdom or sell a screenplay or be able to play the crazy hard chop chord on mandolin that seems more impossible than either of the other goals.  Maybe.  But for now, the minor victory of linking the good in the old and the new is cool.  The memory was too.