I was just wondering … have you ever felt like a tree?
I’ve sat under trees and slept under trees and measured trees. I’ve watched trees and identified trees and cut parts of trees away. I’ve climbed them and used them for lean-tos and projects and umbrellas. I’ve planted them and dug them up and helped haul them away and, once, I portrayed a tree in an acting exercise. (Some of these things I’ve done poorly.) But every so often, I look at this tree behind our house and I wonder if I have felt like this tree.
Not yet. But in a few days, this tree hits a particular moment in its annual cycle and I can relate. It isn’t a one-with-the-earth moment, but recognition of the versimilitude of another living thing. And there’s a good, real moment, where I feel like I have a basic sense of what it must be thinking.
He said, determined to start the week off with some proper anthropomorphism.
Anyway, after a late evening on campus I went to the deck to supervise the starting of the grill and looked up and there was the tree, sending the maple tree signal in a beautiful warm day’s gloaming hour, and I thought, “I know. I understand.”
Exactly what, I can’t say. But it seemed important to feel empathetic at the moment.
I need to catch up on notes to the Re-Listening Project, before it all gets out of hand.
Get it? Out of hand? You got it.
Man, not even the tree laughs at that joke.
Anyway, I’m just listening to all of the old CDs in the car. Second time through them all as a chronological study of my music acquisition in this specific medium. These aren’t reviews, but sometimes they are the memories that mark time. All of these discs (eventually) cross a few genres and periods. They’ll do so in a haphazard way; there’s no larger theme. It is, a whimsy as music should be. And at this particular point in the CD book I’m both buying new music and replacing things from cassettes.
Hey, it was the ’90s.
Here’s some 1995 alt rock from Dishwalla, the pop-version of industrial music. Who cares. The lead singer, J.R. Richards, had a great voice, and they put on a fun live show in April of 1996 when I saw them in support of their debut album, “Pet Your Friends.”
Richards split his pants on stage. He was quite embarrassed by that, but was eventually able to laugh it off. Rock ‘n’ roll jokes were, no doubt, made. They were opening for Gin Blossoms, who were the musical King Kong of the moment. For half a second, maybe, it seemed like Dishwalla would join them up there. “Counting Blue Cars” hit number one on the alternative charts. The record went gold and sat atop the Heatseekers chart. They were musically adventurous.
Here’s the second track off the record.
If this song doesn’t make you want to rush, rush, to a mall and buy 1990s clothes I don’t know what else I can say.
I always thought — and apparently modern me agrees with young me — that the first half of this record was the best part. There are six really nice tracks on here, but there’s a fall off. And the back half of the record has a different mood.
Then, in September of 2015, this happened.
Dishwalla is playing over the PA in this grocery store. Who in 1996 could have seen that coming?
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) September 3, 2015
Richards liked that tweet. I like to imagine he was just sitting around in-between production sessions (Dishwalla is still a band and Richards is still making music, though he has left the group) doing random word searches.
I say it was random because the next month, in a different grocery store, I heard Dishwalla again, but he didn’t like that one. Maybe he was on vacation.
After Dishwalla comes Joshua Tree. And my memory is a little fuzzy here, but I’m fairly sure this was one of those that I bought to replace the cassette version. Worth it in every respect, though, right?
I remember this clear: At my college radio station everyone was tasked with listening to new music. What songs were good? What were radio friendly? What had profanity and where? They’d always done this. I assume they still do. It was a rite of passage. Anyway, when U2 released Joshua Tree the label sent the station an actual vinyl album. And on the bottom right corner of the album jacket was a little sticker. The practice at that time was to list three or four songs and put some stars by it. (This was U2’s fifth album, and the one that would set the standard for the rest of their career, but whoever reviewed this had no way of knowing that, of course.) That person also wrote on the sticker “And on the eighth day God handed down this record …”
Some other DJ had come along later and slapped another sticker next to that one. “We get it. You like this album.”
Some 25 million copies later, having sat atop the charts in nine countries, run up the flag pole for a 20th and a 30th anniversary re-release … safe to say that reviewer wasn’t the only one.
I wonder how that second person felt every time they heard one of the five singles on the radio, because that happened to that poor cynical soul a lot.
The only problem with this record is that it demands long, wide open roads, and woe unto you if you have to run the gauntlet of red lights when Larry Mullen Jr. is setting up the rest of the band.
The last disc was a greatest hits collection of Prince’s work. Some of it, I felt then as now, you should have a copy of close at hand. Some of the tracks here are aging poorly. Some still stand as seminal classics of a pop music genius.
Also, “I Would Die 4 U” is due a renaissance. (Odd that Stranger Things hasn’t licensed that.)
Prince’s falsetto, while impressive, gets too much attention. The genius is everywhere else. I’ve always wanted to know who said “What happens if you record a blues song as Iggy Pop?”
And why does that work? It works, I’m pretty sure, because it is Prince.
And that should be enough music for today. Not to worry. I still have a few more records to catch up on. Come back tomorrow for more tunes!
