Well, the start of it anyway.
These aren't 'the greatest songs ever' or 'the deepest thoughts about the greatest songs ever', nor are they in any particular order. I was just thinking the other day, that so many of my memories are attatched to certain songs. I guess it was bound to happen, random songs are playing in my head nearly all the time. Anyway, the main purpose of this is really just to get some of my memories -- however strange they may be -- documented. I've got this fear of getting alzheimer's and forgetting my entire life. Even the small stuff.
I figured some of you may be bored enough to get a kick out of some randomness, so why not post them here??
haha I know *I* like reading things like this about other people. anyway, here goes -- I'll be adding more when I think of them.
OOH, I almost forgot -- the name of the song is a link to the mp3, just in case you're REALLY bored, or haven't heard the songs --just right click and open it in a different window
. ....aaaaaaaaaand ACTION!!
Ah, a favorite since I was a kid. I remember being absolutely blown away by the video because their faces were in the sky. (ya know, cause I was a little kid!). One of my absolute favorite lines ever is Johnny Cash's "or I may simply be a single drop of rain". But more important is Waylon Jennings' verse.. his verse is the point of the song I can't make it past without getting a little misty. Mainly because he's always reminded me of my dad, and even though the song is about livingon after death, it's basically still about death, and it's still a huge reminder to me that someday, everyone I love IS going to die.
"I was a dam builder, across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around, I'll always be around"
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around, I'll always be around"
Gah, it KILLS me! Every single time! Oddly enough, I always hear 'Grey Tomb' instead of great. It just sounds better to me, so I guess my brain automatically changes it.
and going hand in hand with Highwayman, is always gonna be Pancho & Lefty, even though it was just Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. I don't really have a big write up on this one, just to say that "The day they laid poor Pancho low, Lefty split for O-hi-o; where he got the bread to go, there ain't nobody knows" is another one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE lines.
I must have watched a lot of the country music channel when I was really little, cause now that I'm thinking hard about this, I remember how much I loved Anne Murray's 'Time don't run out on me', the song was good and I thought the video was cool too. Oh god, and Lee Greenwood's 'Proud to be an american'.. shame on me, but my clear memory of this song, revolves around how I used to just pick up our phone and dial the operator, just to hang up on them. This video was playing once as I harrassed yet another poor telephone operator.
Can you still dial '0' and get an operator these days??? Probably not, and probably because of kids like me. I'll have to check that out.
Can you still dial '0' and get an operator these days??? Probably not, and probably because of kids like me. I'll have to check that out.
Don't even try to tell me every single one of you (who were alive in the 80's and were old enough to have control over your hands) didn't learn this little ditty on your keyboard .. and I'm sure that keyboard was a casio, and a couple years later I'm sure you probably wished that same keyboard was the kind with a guitar strap like that dude had in Psuedo Echo's cover of Funkytown, instead of just a tabletop model. Hell, maybe some of you even tried to MacGyver it, by tying kite string to your keyboard that broke as soon as it was tested, thus rendering several critical buttons on the console useless or missing.. IF the whole board itself didn't crap out.
Yeah, ok, fine.. my brother and I tried it.
& I'm sure that I'm the only one who thinks the singer was hotter as a cartoon, cause cartoons can pull off the sweaty look and not be gross.. when he went back to being human, he was just, well.. sweaty (...what?? there are only a handfull of situations where it's acceptable to be a sweaty human.. and my brain says this video, even though he's running all the way thru it, doesn't count!). I'm even more sure that I'm one of maybe two people that still know the guy's name is Morten... the other person being my old photo lab manager, Charlie - aka King of 80's Music Trivia.
WHERE ARE YOU CHARLIE?!?!
*PHOTO LAB GANG SIGN*
I freakin love this song, even though the memory attatched to it is pretty bad. So the song is in my opinion, the very last of any great Ozzy material. Hardcore fans would probably nail me to the cross for saying that! Anyway, this is one of those never-forget-what-you-were-doing-at-that-exact-moment stories.
It was the year I was a sophomore in highschool, my brother Joe was a junior, and he was driving an electric-blue camaro, with those fuzzy, white tiger-stripe seat covers (that I later inherited, and still have, and should put in my car but I don't want them to ruin. bah!) oh, and a pair of handcuffs hanging from the rearview mirror (which I also inherited, still have, and considered hanging them from my mirror, but decided I might be sending the wrong message with that), it always smelled like his cologne, and was always roughly the same temperature as a hospital morgue, give or take a couple degrees. I don't care what season it is or ever was, the air conditioner in my brother's car was and always will be blasting. COOL AS ICE!
We were on our way to school that morning, come up on the straight stretch leading to the park (which really shouldn't be called a park, cause it's essentially a rest stop with more grassy area than most others), and as we get closer, traffic is creeping, flashing lights everywhere, with every manner of emergency personnel camped in between the little grocery store and the actual park itself, which is just up the road a bit (for those that don't know the area, the park was where we'd make the left turn to be on the school road).
Turns out, two girls in my class were at the store, waiting for the bus, when they were ambushed by a guy that one of the girls had just broken up with. He shot her there, and then ran to the park and shot himself. He was a couple years older than us, and the only memory I have of him prior to this was watching someone pay him to eat earthworms on the junior high parking lot when I was in 6th grade.
She survived, and he lasted a couple days in a coma, I believe.
I can still see this in my head.. and I'll never, ever forget inching past that park, with all the lights going crazy, and seeing him lying there in police tape as the last chorus of this song played.
oh crap I love this song so much. I decided a while back that it's probably my favorite ever, just because I've listened to it for over 20 years and never gotten sick of it. Back when the disney channel was still pretty good, they had a video put to this song.. for years and years I thought it was a bunch of cartoon dog clips (pluto, lady & the tramp.. etc..) but I found a write up about it the other day, and apparently it was clips from an elephant cartoon. Either way, I'd kill to have it. I guess disney released 3 d-tv videos, and of course youtube has the other 2 that I DON'T care about. Gah, seems like this one's gonna be almost as hard to track down as Clyde the Safety Frog (if you remember THAT one, you gain automatic brownie points with me) --- as far as that one goes, I'm about to contact the tv station where it originated. Oh god, I really AM that nerdy. 
I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who even liked this song. I don't like Carlos Santana, and of all the duets he was doing that year, Put Your Lights On was by far the best, IMO. That same Halloween, after I graduated highschool, a guy I'd had a huge and lingering junior-high crush on was killed in a car accident. This song was playing a few days later, just as I drove past what looked like his smashed truck at a body shop near my house. I remember (and will forever appreciate) him always being nice to me anytime he was around, at a point when it could have very easily been the opposite. I hung with a vicious crowd of girls in those days (Ever watch 'Heathers'?? Yeah...) and since I don't make fun of people unless they deserve it or will think it's funny, I spent my junior-high prison term fending off whatever it took for them to feel better about themselves.
I'm sad to say that guys can be so easily roped into being part of some pretty heinous pranks. & so many were. 
People always wonder how anyone could end up caught in a situation like that, but that's any kind of abusive relationship.. Things are fine, and then one day you look around, and you're in a hole so deep you're not sure you can crawl back out. No matter how tough anyone is.. somewhere along the line, you'll lose yourself, and you'll believe whatever they're saying about you. Maybe worse is that you stop trusting anything good, and start thinking that everyone who is nice to you or acts like they like you, must be in on some kind of joke, and it's only a matter of time before the bomb drops.
I'd say that's the hardest thing to get past.
I'd say that's the hardest thing to get past.
Anyway.. another song marked forever.
Ah yes, the best song off the Legend soundtrack. (no talk of other sountracks to this movie!! this is the only one I count!) I never get sick of this song either. Granted, the video is stupid, but it comes from one of the best movies ever.. even if Tom Cruise DID spend a good portion of it covered in glitter. Actually, it may have been his best role.. hmm. Aside from just loving this song, it's included because for some reason, I have dumb memories attatched to this cd purchase.
Does anyone want to know the reason I don't have enough room in my brain for anything past basic mathematics????
Guesses???
No, you're wrong.. it's because I remember buying this cd.. on february 7th, 1997 to be nerdily exact. It was Trish's 16th birthday, she skipped school.. which, conveniently happened to be shark-disecting day in biology. At least I was there with Ann, who was actually always a little too excited about disecting anything in biology, as she took such joy in hacking off bits that wouldn't be easily missed by our teacher, and then hiding them in strategic areas all around the school. Anyway, we met up with Trish later that evening to celebrate.. first by going to Rio Grande for munchies.. swear to god, I still remember what I ordered... WHY GOD?!?!
Guesses???
No, you're wrong.. it's because I remember buying this cd.. on february 7th, 1997 to be nerdily exact. It was Trish's 16th birthday, she skipped school.. which, conveniently happened to be shark-disecting day in biology. At least I was there with Ann, who was actually always a little too excited about disecting anything in biology, as she took such joy in hacking off bits that wouldn't be easily missed by our teacher, and then hiding them in strategic areas all around the school. Anyway, we met up with Trish later that evening to celebrate.. first by going to Rio Grande for munchies.. swear to god, I still remember what I ordered... WHY GOD?!?!
It was the enchilada platter, if you wanna know. AND somebody in the kitchen dropped an eyelash in the nachos... which I wasn't told about until AFTER I'd eaten a bunch of them.
Then it was on to the mall.... and yes, the cd. Picture it -- Ashland Town Center mall, in NRM, looking like a cross between a young Roseanne Barr and a gay lumberjack. (Picture it! hilarious! I still love flannel shirts, but I actually wore them in public back then. whatever.) Can you imagine my elation when I found this cd for six bucks?? I'm so easy to please, it's SICK!! Six bucks.. that's why I loved NRM. I was sad when they left.
Ah, another NRM gem... I got this one on cassette for five bucks. I figure some of you are laughing at the cassette part. I don't mind, I'm consistently behind the times.. I didn't even buy a dvd player until peer pressure got the best of me. I would have just stuck with my crappy old vcr.. which I NEVER learned how to program, by the way. Anyway, this song's probably the best thing to come from The Lost Boys soundtrack. I find it strange that Corey Feldman still looks EXACTLY the same as he did then.. does he sleep in tupperware or something?! Why didn't Jason Patrick do that? Pfft!
So I spent that entire summer blasting this song anytime I was driving at night, usually coming home from Trish's after hanging out way too long in her pool. Actually, I just remembered, this song was playing the time we decided to see how long my cavalier would coast on one of the roads around lake vesuvius. We came to a stop right outside some dude's garage, he just happened to be in there. Probably confused the crap out of him too.. he looked at us, we looked at him, maybe 10 seconds passed, and then realized what we were doing and floored it.
About 10 seconds after THAT, we realized how funny the whole thing was, and so, the famed 'country drive-by' was born.
...good times.
FIN!!!
for now anyway!
for now anyway!
......Alright.. so there's the first installment. Hope you at least got one or two laughs out of that. I'll be waiting for everyone else's 'random memories' blog. CHOP CHOP!! ;)
"..In a noisy bar in Avalon, I tried to call you
But on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away.."
But on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away.."
