1998- IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA

In the days when entire cd collections couldn't fit in the palm of your hand, you had to be careful about choosing the right handful of cds to take on a trip. A flight to another city to train for a new job meant a lot of time alone in a hotel. I wanted a cd to be more like a novel. Something I could really sink my teeth into. Something I could start on the plane and really get into by the time I had to head back.

I had just accepted a job. A big job. Not in a criminal sense, but a job where college was finally going to pay off. I'd go from having a supervisor time my potty breaks to a boss who would phone me once a week to see how things were going. Laptop. Company car. Four state territory. Life was looking up.

Then I got seated in first class. Nice. I'd yet to meet these people that offered me a crucial step in career advancement. I'd charmed the HR person with my cover letter, and gotten through a couple phone interviews. Now I had to fly to Atlanta for training. A couple questions went through my head. Most notably, how did they know I'm not some really freaky looking dude? After all, I was in sales. Image is supposed to be everything. Well, and an ability to schmooze.

First class was great though. I almost didn't want to put my headphones on because I was afraid they'd offer me something and I wouldn't be able to accept it. But I also had a really intriguing album in my bag.

I'd stopped by the Fetus before my trip. I knew exactly what I wanted from a review I read in City Pages. When the guy at the Fetus couldn't find it I was a little surprised. Right before I left another worker overheard him and found a box.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. It doesn't exactly roll of the tongue. But I had it in my bag. All I had to do was pull out my Sony Discman, slap on my headphones, and keep an eye on the flight attendant while I slipped what was to become one of my favorite albums of all time into my cd player.

But there were other issues to attend too. The seat next to me was open, which meant I could either remain in my aisle seat, or I could move next to the window and look out at the night sky.

Then there was the issue of beverages. Wine sounded good to me, but I would have to decide which red I'd want to go with. I thought I'd make sure that whatever I selected went well with my dinner, but I knew there'd be a few more cocktails before that happened. I'd like to say I picked out a fine Pinot Noir, but I think I was all about the box wine back then.

Somewhere around 35,000 feet I finally played the album. From the first track I was smitten. "When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers." I had no idea what that meant, but by the time Mom was stabbing Dad with the fork as he threw the garbage on the floor and the narrator was busy hanging out with his girl and discovering what each others bodies were for, I knew I was hearing something profoundly unique.

Then the song cycle explodes. Jeff Mangum screams "I love you Jesus Christ", only this time religion in music doesn't bother me. It seems so sincere it makes me blush.

Death is part of life in some endless cycle. Anne Frank. World War II. Birth. Mutation. Sex. Reincarnation.

It's all too much. I know from this first listen that it'll take me weeks beyond my stay in Atlanta to find all the treasures in this album. Years even. But I knew that a rock record was moving me in ways in which very few did after the 500th or so purchase.

"I'll take the Seafood Primavera."

"And another glass of wine...Merlot. Thanks."

The Hold Steady- Boys And Girls In America

Enough with this bar band shit. Seriously. This band sounds nothing like the type of band you’re likely to encounter if you hit just about any bar in any city. If bar bands sounded like this Top 40 radio would be a beautiful thing, American Idol wouldn’t exist, and we may have even spared ourselves from W (sorry I can’t even type his name anymore without feeling sick).

Can you imagine what it would look like? Every small town would be a ripe scene waiting to explode. It’d be like having a 1959 Liverpool, 1967 San Francisco, 1977 London and 1989 Seattle everyday in every small town. “Good to see you’re back in a bar band, baby.” Yeah, maybe at the type of joint you’d find in Minneapolis in 1984.

The Replacements, Husker Du, and the Minneapolis scene of the early 1980’s feature prominently in the Hold Steady’s approach. Like Westerberg, Craig Finn wouldn’t be in a band if he had nothing to say. Fortunately for us, he’s got plenty to say, but he’s abandoned the unfocused jazz approach the got him so many comparisons to early pre-Born To Run Springsteen albums.

Boys And Girls In America is all about economy. Lead Singer/Lecturer Craig Finn sounds like he’s part of the band instead of competing with them. Gone are the long narratives found on 2004’s Almost Killed Me and especially last years concept heavy Separation Sunday, and in their place are concise rock songs. Most feature pronounced piano and restrained guitar. Some of which Craig Finn even manages to sing on.

The album kicks off with “Stuck Between Stations” and tells an interesting story about the poet John Berryman, Minneapolis and drinking. “He was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected/He loved the golden gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters”. Alcohol gets the best of him (“he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration”) before he leaps to his death and drowns in the Mississippi river. Hard lesson. You have to wonder if there isn’t a little band commentary in there.

The album’s other highlights include “Chips Ahoy”, “Massive Nights” and the very Cheap Trickish “Southtown Girls”. Boys And Girls In America’s greatest strengths come with its biggest detours. “Citrus” is a lovely ode to romance and inebriation, and oftentimes the romance of inebriation. Religion creeps its way in as well “I feel Jesus in the tenderness of honest nervous lovers/I feel Judas in the pistols and the pagers that come with all the powders.”

The real highlight is “First Night”. The song is where Craig Finn’s storytelling comes full circle as he resurrects Holly from Separation Sunday. Piano driven with layers of strings and guitars underneath, this song is The Hold Steady as probably nobody could have imagined them just a few years earlier. Indeed, if bar bands sounded like this, it would only be a matter of time before this song would penetrate a prom or two somewhere along the way.

Boys And Girls In America does have a few missteps, most notably “Same Kooks”. Guitarist Tad Kubler is wonderfully restrained on most of the album, but when he lets loose here the song can’t really support it. Elsewhere “You Can Make Him Like You” seems a little pedestrian, and “Chillout Tent” suffers a bit from the guest appearances even if the subject matter and song itself are pretty strong.

But none of that really matters. What really counts here is how brilliant the storytelling and lyrics are on the bulk of the record. Nobody comes close to Craig Finn at his most focused. And there’s plenty of focus here, lyrically and musically. Oh, and it rocks. If only all bar bands were this way.

1997- OK COMPUTER

You look so tired, unhappy

I was dating a flight attendant. Or, a flight attendant wanna-be, anyway. She certainly looked the part. Tall, blonde, well endowed. She was a friend of my roommate’s friend, and we hit it off when the two of them came to visit.

She was living in Chicago while she was in training, and we’d get together at Red Lobsters and TGI Fridays out in the suburbs when I’d come to visit. Our visits were brief, and I’d have to have her back by 1:00 on Sunday afternoons. There would be hell to pay if she was late.

I’d heard the Flight Attendant School horror stories. Makeup that wasn’t put on right, an imperfect walk down the aisle, leaning too close to the “passengers” on the mock jet while serving them drinks, a.k.a. being too fat. These were all reasons for disqualification. And if you were too fat and you showed up late, well, then forget about it.

She wasn’t fat, but she was miserable. She thought she would love taking off and landing all day long and serving drinks, but the pressure was enormous and she was beginning to have her doubts. With almost nothing in common, it was probably the job dissatisfaction that kept us together.

A job that slowly kills you

I worked in the technical service department of a medical products company. Whenever my phone rang I had to diagnose what was wrong with the blood glucose meters that nurses in hospitals across the country were using. There wasn’t a lot of detective work involved. It would come as a complete shock if the call was anything other than the meter showing an “error 1” or an “error 4”. The answer was always the same. We’d send a new meter out, and include a postage label for them to send the old one back.

So I was on autopilot most of the time. For a while the internet saved my brain from turning to mush. Then they blocked it. Which was kind of cool for a while. It gave me a far more engaging challenge. I’d have to find ways to get outside their “intranet”. Once I got to yahoo, I was usually home free. Eventually they caught on and tightened things up further.

Before going to work I started to do a quick surf of my favorite sights, copying and pasting articles I thought might interest me later in the day and then sending them to my work email address. Usually by mid-morning I had exhausted these resources and needed more. Joe came to the rescue.

I’d send him emails with subject lines like “a job that slowly kills you” and describe the torturous environment I spent 8 hours of my day at in which to pay the rent. Whether it was getting too much information about the sex life of my overweight bearing coworker or getting crap from the scientists who worked there for not being scientific like them and earning a better paycheck, Joe was a sympathetic ear.

Bruises that won’t heal

To every “a job that slowly kills you” email I’d send, Joe had a “bruises that won’t heal” response. He had taken a job through a temp service, but the owner of the company sat down with Joe on day one to chat. That had a brief talk where Joe told him that we was “pretty into vinyl” and the guy got excited thinking that Joe knew a thing or two about vinyl siding. Telling Bossman that he had a vintage copy of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music was not the way to ingratiate himself.

Still, Bossman told Joe he didn’t like working with temp services, and that he wanted Joe to be his employee. But Bossman made it clear that he had to pay off the temp service to free Joe of the contract, and he threw the dollar amount in Joe’s face every time he didn’t like what he did, claiming that Joe would owe him that money if he quit or got let go. He told Joe he was grooming him to be a professional and maybe “run the company some day”. He used this excuse to remind Joe to tuck in his shirt like a real man. Or in one case, zip up his zipper.

When Bossman would leave to attend to his other businesses, Joe would do the only thing he could think of to preserve his sanity. He surfed the internet, and often times he’d cut and paste articles he thought might interest me and send them. Music reviews, interviews, political stories, News Of The Weird. Anything was better than my “error 1, error 4” existence.

Phew, for a minute there I lost myself

Joe had a habit of putting the word “the” in front of bands. Wilco became “The Wilco”. Radiohead, “The Radiohead”. It was probably the “The-ing” of Radiohead that kept me from going to see them play at the State Theater with Joe soon after Ok Computer came out. Going to see The Radiohead just didn’t sound all that appealing. That, and the CD had yet to penetrate my every thought and become my soundtrack for a year or two.

My infatuation with Ok Computer began on a Sunday afternoon after the flight attendant girlfriend left to go back to Chicago. Joe was out of town. I sat in my music room where I’d recently demoed some songs and listened to my dubbed copy of Ok Computer over and over again with the afternoon sun shining in on me and a nice breeze blowing through the room. Joe had bought Ok Computer, but I’d made sure to make a copy before he left. With a little alone time to really listen to it, everything clicked. It would be one of the my most played albums. It spoke to me in every sense of the cliche.

Still, I regret not going to that show. I’ve been able to catch some of my favorite bands within a few weeks of getting into them, but this would not be the case with Radiohead. I’d have to wait until the summer of 2001. But when I finally did see them in Chicago’s Grant Park after pretty much giving up on large outdoor shows, it was incredible. Probably the best show on that kind of scale that I’d seen in my life.

1996- BEING THERE

Joe was usually up first. He'd put on a cup of coffee and start playing video games. It was always pretty quiet too. The stereo speakers were routed back to my room where you could switch the sound to play in my bedroom, the living room, or both. So he usually waited until I was up to put any music on.

One time I scared the hell out of him and his cat by turning up my stereo and playing "Hey" by The Pixies. Not the whole song, but just the part where Black Francis shouts "HEY" with no music accompanying him. Joe was like "what the hell". I waited a little while, laughing my ass off, and did it again before he noticed it was me. I felt bad later when he mentioned the scratch marks from his cat.

Joe was pretty good at making coffee. He knew just how to ground the beans and add just the right amount of water to make a pretty mean cup. Cleaning up wasn't as easy for him. Powdered cheese and butter on the counter meant mac and cheese. Red stains on the counter and an open pasta box on the edge of the stove meant spaghetti night. I assisted in the coffee making process by putting the coffee beans and grinder away and wiping the coffee grinds off the counter when I got up an hour or so later.

Joe and I were both really into music, and those late morning weekend hours were crucial times to play records. Plenty of thought would go into what to play. Tom Waits was common. So was The Velvet Underground. We'd sit and drink coffee and chat about how bad our hangovers were or whether or not we were going to go record shopping that day, and if Joe hadn't already made some foul smelling corned beef and hash, we'd talk about getting breakfast.

I was friends with a girl who worked at The Electric Fetus, and she'd given me a promo double vinyl copy of the new Wilco record. I'd seen Wilco open for Pavement the previous year and didn't really notice anything that unique or exciting about them. Most of my time was spent behind the noise barrier at First Avenue talking with friends. Since then "Passenger Side" and "Box Full Of Letters" were getting quite a bit of radio play on REV 105 though, and I'd warmed up to them a little bit. But mostly I was just really intrigued by the Being There album cover.

Featuring a close up shot of someone fretting a chord on the neck of a guitar, it looked vaguely country, and it was a double album. I was always a sucker for the double album.

I think Joe suggested it. He'd probably picked up the record and had the same thoughts. One cold fall morning after Joe cooked up his corned beef and hash and I whipped up an omelet, we put it on.

It began with a slow rumble before quieting down to a strummed guitar. "When you're back in your old neighborhood, cigarettes taste so good, but you're so misunderstood. So misunderstood". I understood the sentiment perfectly. Later Jeff Tweedy mentions a party "we all ought to go to" if you still love rock and roll. If you STILL love rock and roll.

This wasn't a concept album, or worse yet, a "rock opera", but it did have a theme running through it. Unlike AM, which was largely written on the road, and came quickly following the breakup of Uncle Tupelo, Being There was the record where the band's breakup and the bigger questions about living a life on the road in pursuit of rock and roll came into focus. Married with a kid, and a broken up band, Being There is the search for answers to big questions: Does rock and roll mean anything after you get to a certain age? Is it a youthful pursuit? Do family obligations and growing up replace it?

With "Red Eyed And Blue" he's distracted. Drugs, alcohol, recording, missing his girl back home, fatigue. "When we came here today, we all felt something true, but now I'm red eyed and blue."

Later on "Sunken Treasure" he's "maimed by rock and roll", got his "name from rock and roll", and is ultimately "saved by rock and roll."

We sat paralyzed by the record. When we had to switch sides or move to the second disc, it was done swiftly with anticipation. At the end of every side, we wandered how they could maintain what we had just heard.

Somewhere around side three Joe announced that was ready to make the switch from coffee to beer. It was a weekend ritual for him that usually began around noon. Sitting in his rocking chair, stroking his cat and drinking an Old Milwaukee, he nodded his head as the last note of the last song rang out. "Wow." Then I joined him in a beer and we started to talk about it.

A month or so later, Wilco came to town. This time they weren't opening for Pavement though. And I doubt anybody was standing behind the noise barricade talking. It was a cold October night. Jeff Tweedy came out in his pajamas, and the band fed off each other as if their survival depended on it, which they were to eventually find out it did.

Maybe Wilco felt like they really had something to prove by playing multiple versions of "Passenger Side" or The Replacements' "Color Me Impressed". Jay Farrar was probably on his mind as well with the vicious way he sang "Somebody Else's Song". But it was a night where everything worked. A night when you felt like you were part of something bigger. Nobody forgets shows like that.

The band also formed a special bond with Minneapolis. Over the next few years they played First Avenue multiple times, and almost always in October or November. With colder weather came Wilco.

Being There taugh us that rock and roll could mean something. And it was something you didn't outgrow, and it could remain fresh no matter how many shows you'd seen. Which I guess is kind of the point of the album. With Being There, Jeff Tweedy and Wilco gave us a new band to follow, and made us believers again.