Some people who like music got into really good music when they were really young. I grew up out in the middle of nowhere with no MTV and no rock n’ roll radio. Most people listened to pop country and didn’t care about anything else. As for older kids getting cool music out to the next generation, this one older kid made a friend of mine a mixtape with DC Talk, Klank, and Gravity Kills, and I thought it was pretty wicked. Still, one of the most influential records and bands on my budding years as a music listener was Soul Asylum’s Grave Dancers Union. My father bought a copy of it on cassette tape back when Runaway Train was on the radio, and neither of my parents cared for any of the other songs on it, so it collected dust for a long time, before I decided to check it out.
I remember being blown away by the range of music on the record. There was 99%, a twisted, distorted song that dealt with the more unpleasant and taboo sides to a romance, and directly after, was The Sun Maid, a cute innocuous little tribute to an a female unsung hero, and while all these songs carried very different ideas and tones, they all felt like the fit snugly together to make a diverse emotional experience of a record. I was about 11 or 12 at the time, and the whole thing just blew my mind. You weren’t going to find that kind of virtuoso emotional depth from Gravity Kills (though I definitely thought Gravity Kills was the bee’s knees).
Also, on the two sides of the cassette tape, instead of labeling them sides 1 and 2, like most tapes, the labeled the sides 13 and 14, which I found both baffling and cryptic.
Anyway, I was talking to a friend of mine who makes fun of me for liking the Runaway Train song last night, and it inspired me to look up the video for Runway Train. I think the video is really cool, because it features photographs of missing children, along with a number to call if you’d seen them, and a number of children in the video were found thanks to it’s help. They also changed the video when it was played in other countries, so that it would feature lost children from the country it was playing in.
I also ought to add, that I got made fun of a lot my youth, and my preference for alternative music instead of whatever was on the top 40′s/pop country stations got me a lot of weird looks from a lot of kids at school. Well fuck you kids from junior high! Soul Asylum rules balls. Check it out, they did videos for a few other songs on the album. I didn’t know that until last night.
Oh man, back in the day I was so envious of people with straight hair, because they could grow it long and have it flop around in their face like Dave Pirner, and Kurt, of course.
Okay, enough reminiscing.