Summer Memories - Part 1

Blues Traveler was on the TV program Austin City Limits about 2 weeks ago. I thought it was strange – couldn’t those assclowns just willingly shrink into obscurity and surface every year or so to headline the Basilica Block Party with the Gin Blossoms? Then again, I live in Austin where the intersection of pot and Ron Paul backers yields an actual demand for white guy, Stevie Ray, noodle blues. (No shit, people pay money to see their dentist riffin’ and guitar-facin’.) As such, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for KLRU, my local PBS station who produces Austin City Limits, to put an unkitschy relic of the Clinton years on the airwaves. As an aside, the lead singer—one Jon Popper—is once again fat after a gastric bypass surgery. Fortunately for me, I only caught their set-closer, the hit song Hook. It was at that point I had a rather vivid flashback that took me back about 12 years when that song was, for lack of a better term, popular.

At the end of my sophomore year in 1995, Al Woitas got me a job at Jake’s Pizza. It was probably the best job a 16-year old could have, and still one of my all time favorites. Jake’s overlooked/spat upon the relevant child labor laws and allowed me to deliver pizzas for $4.25 and hour plus tips (since they were a small business, they got to undercut the “real” minimum wage of $4.75/hr.). It seems almost unthinkable to me now, but they provided vehicles for the drivers. Not that they were anything special, but in retrospect, it seems like a pretty damned stupid idea to allow newly-minted drivers to take the wheel of a car towards which they had no responsibility.

Right, Blues Traveler. It was probably July, and dusk was creeping over one of the truly nice summer days in Minnesota. I was driving south on Broadway on the south side of Albert Lea (the rougher part of town) in a blue (with some slight rust coloration) 1983 Chevy S-10, whose engine had been “overhauled” with the V-8 of a salvaged 1985 Camero, getting about 7 miles per gallon, windows down (a necessity since the truck had little more than a heater), with the factory-installed AC Delco AM/FM manual-dial radio locked onto KRGR 95.3 (now 94.9) listening to Blues Traveler’s Hook. The air from the rusted-through floorboard was tickling my nascent leg hair as my right foot played with the half-inch metal circle that doubled as the truck’s gas petal. I had summer thoughts on my mind. I didn’t much notice of the radio rising above the roar of the 32 cylinders until Popper started in on the fast-talking:

Suck it in suck it in suck it in

If you're Rin Tin Tin or Anne Boleyn

Make a desperate move or else you'll win

And then begin

To see

What you're doing to me this MTV is not for free

It's so PC it's killing me

So desperately I sing to thee

Of love…

The spell of the summer night was broken. Despite the fact that I was a born-again Christian trying to live a swear-free and pious (the same thing to my juvenile mind) lifestyle, I thought, “Wow, this is complete shit.” It’s probably the only lasting wisdom I possessed at that age. And while I am as shocked now as I was then that people would willingly listen to Blues Traveler, I was happy to recover a little corner of my youth. Unfortunately for my local PBS affiliate, their decision to spend good donations on such shit makes me reconsider my thoughts of possibly donating money at some as of yet undetermined point in time in the future.