For about two weeks or so each year, leading up to the spring term graduation, the Sample Gates become a a photographic centerpiece of the campus. Already, it is a bustling place. This is one of those places where town meets campus, there’s a busy bus stop there, a Starbucks is just across the street, and so on. But now, there are crowds there for photographs.
The Sample Gates are a signature image on the IU campus. The gates appear old, and indeed they are to the modern student. It only took 80 years or so to get them built. Students had raised money for them at the turn of the 20th century, but the board had the same plans, so the student-raised money went to another project. After that, the university put the gates on hold. Different plans for the gates came and went over the next few generations. Then, in the 1960s, there was a new move to build those gates, but loud criticism stalled the project. People said it a wasteful expenditure when the money could go to scholarships and financial aid. (Can you imagine?) That brings us to the 1980s. The man who ran financial aid for the university donated money for the gates we see today and named them in honor of his parents, and so we have the Sample Gates — the place where IU folks see it as much as a welcome to the world as a welcome to the campus. That’s been the icon since 1987.
And now, at graduation, young men and women show up in coat and tie and nice dresses and caps and gowns and take their photographs. It ramps up and, by today, there are small crowds patiently waiting their turns, and graduates wasting cheap bottles of sparkling white wine for photographs.
Yesterday, someone had dragged out a professional photographer. They’d brought reflectors and the whole set up. Someone else, in the brightest part of the day, had dragged out a ring light for some reason. Someone else brought their full length mirror.
I have never understood why the university doesn’t close this to foot traffic for the week. Let the IU Student Foundation run things. A few bucks here for a few moments with a clean background. None of these other people in your shots. Or, for a few more bucks you get a few moments and a few professional shots with a photographer they provide. Sure, there are some instagram pros out there, but if you’ve ever asked someone to take a group photograph for you, you know that not everyone is a natural shutterbug. And the graduation pose is definitely one of those moments you don’t want to be cropped at the shins.
We return to the Re-Listening project, where we are listening to all of my old CDs, and in the order that I acquired them. I’m chronologically in late 1998 (or very early 1999) here, and we’re talking about Texas blues, and a 1995 posthumous greatest hits release from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s catalog.
I have the glimpse of a recollection of some news coverage after he and three others were killed, in 1990, in a helicopter crash. It was foggy and the helicopter was living a concert and crashed into a nearby ski hill. The news featured him, or him in Double Trouble, reducing small venue stages to ash, and then one of his contemporaries, I forget who, discussing how it seemed unfair that here you had one of the most talented guitarists in all of the world, he’d finally put his drug use behind him, only to die at the peak of his powers. He was 35.
He would have been 40 years old when people put this on for the first time.
Every song on here I know. I think almost every song on here I knew at the time, somehow, despite this not being my main genre, but sometimes the virtuoso goes mainstream. Indeed, SRV and Double Trouble dominated MTV in the early days. Also, every song on this record absolutely cooks. But you need to see him live. Thankfully, someone invented video and, later, YouTube, where you can see the man play his machine behind his back.
This song is also on the record, though this performance is from Austin City Limits, looking for all the world like the velvet bulldozer, Albert King.
For whatever reason, I don’t really associate a lot of memories with this CD — that’s one of the main points of the Re-Listening project — but the music is absolutely amazing, which is the other, more important, point.
Musically, SRV is critical to resetting the genre of pop and rock stations. He helped kill the synth-pop, and took some wind out of the hair metal scene. Most importantly, his cords held open the door for people like Robert Cray and Walter Trout, and maybe even the renaissance of John Lee Hooker a few years later.
In the next installment of the Re-Listening project we’ll have a debut album, something I came to a decade too late. Also, it’ll be really, really good.
