Your humble narrator grew up in the 1980’s.  I don’t recommend that to anyone.  We had Ronald Reagan, yuppies, and AIDS. About the only thing I remember positively about the 80’s was the great American underground music scene.

Of course, every teenager will grow up believing the bands they  had growing up are/were the best.  This is because teenagers don’t know shit.  That and they have no experience yet.  At that age, we’re primed to have a religious experience over a book, song, band, film, painting.  Pete Townshend once compared the first moment to a person’s first fuck.  There’s only one of those and you never forget it.

So, I’d love to say I was one of those super cool 10 year olds that listened to Minor Threat when they first came out, but I was living in Winchester, VA and I had no older siblings .  My initial album purchases were Queen’s Greatest Hits and my mom bought me AC/DC’s Back in Black and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.  I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, people.  And we listed to that stuff along with Rush, Ozzy, and some Maiden.

My dad was an accountant in Wincherster and after a couple of years living there, we all hated it.  So, we moved to Roanoke, VA and lived in the county.  By that point, it was the extremely glamorous year of 1983.  Yours truly had entered the swampy long march called puberty.  I was wrestling and running track for a bit and flat out sucking academically.  I would probably attribute that to all the Hall & Oates and Phil Collins’ era Genesis I listened to.

When you are significantly uncool as I was, and am, you lean on your friends to learn about new things.  By about 1986, I was beginning to get interested in playing music.  Mostly playing bass.  Why?  Well, all my friends wanted to play guitar and they all needed a bass player.  Plus, I thought (and I was wrong) it would be much easier than guitar.

Mostly, I got my hands on a crappy Cort bass via my pal Carl.  Carl and his pals Steve and David had a “band”.  And by that I mean they would drink beer in the David’s parents’ basement and play Motley Crue’s version of “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room”.  This was augmented by the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove” and Metallica’s “Leper Messiah.”  We’d all drink a beer and smoke cigarettes and feel pretty fucking cool.

So, my buds Pete and Lee and I had a “band”  Which meant, I needed to learn to play the damn thing.  So, I went and got lessons at Kelly’s Music on Brambleton Avenue.  I learned a lot of classic rock stuff like the Beatles and Stones while Pete was a camp counselor in the summer of 1986.

One good thing about Pete being gone was I got to house sit which meant I raided his record stash.  I had started getting into different music finally courtesy of my pal Todd who worked at Record Bar in Tanglewood Mall.  I think the first purchases were Love & Rockets, Hoodoo Gurus, and Screaming Blue Messiahs.  But it was all hit and miss.

Fortunately, Pete was one of those nuts that organized his lp’s and had them in alphabetical order rather than randomly jammed in a bookcase like I did.  So, I started flipping through them and hit this record called New Day Rising.  And that’s all she wrote.

Now, I had kinda heard of this Husker Du band before.  We had a Record & Tape Exchange in Roanoke.  They had Zen Arcade on cassette there and I don’t think it ever sold.  I was fascinated and repelled by the album cover because of the crayola color scheme. “What in the fuck is this?” I’d also heard “Crystal” and that had really done nothing for me. But listening to Pete’s copy of New Day Rising (as well as Flip Your Wig) tore my head off.  There’s never been a contest as far as my favorite band of all time.  They were my Beatles.

And then I actually got to tour and play bass with one of my Beatles:

More coming to you Monday or so.

Phil