cassette

Tags

alice in chains, blast tyrant, cassette, clutch, memoir, music, passive restraints, poems, poetry, rock, we die young

cassette

neither of us was emotionally stable
when she made me a mix tape
in the mid nineties

we listened to it on the highway
without a reason to be there
except for driving at unreasonable volume

two songs on that cassette stayed with me
we die young by alice in chains
and passive restraints by clutch

as just another grunge member of generation x
i should have heard alice in chains before 1997
but i ignored commercial radio all my adult life

we die young retains their hair metal sensibility
while foreshadowing the heavy suicidal brilliance
of subsequent albums

but the clutch tune eclipsed it
combining a description of cars
with sexual power and surrender

expressing things i felt for her
but she felt for someone else
and i should have known that

early clutch riffs are not difficult
beginners can play them
but their ferocity and massive sound remain unmatched

when we saw clutch in pontiac they were just okay
though other times ive seen them
are among my favorite concerts

in hindsight it says a lot about my twenties
not really formed yet as a person
i was in the process of becoming someone else

it didn’t surprise me when layne staley died
he sang about heroin addiction and death
so it felt more predictable than the weather

what really surprised me
was how clutch recorded album after album
blowing away even that first impetus ep

and if i had to pick one perfect rock album
to listen to for the rest of my life
it would be blast tyrant

maybe everyone has an album like that
one that never grows old
no matter how many years go by

ive become more cynical and set in my ways
but every time i hear those songs
i miss her

 

 

 

Secret Holiday Origin of Mars Will Send No More!

Tags

christmas, comic books, garage, gramma, holiday, memoir, origin, vacation

Every geek has their own secret origin, a time when the world of comic books magically came to life for them. I’ve never changed into a costume in a phone booth, but I did transform into a mutant in a garage many times during my childhood vacations.

My family lived in rural Missouri for many years. My parents’ families mostly lived in small-town Ohio back then. In most of my pre-adolescent years, Mom, Dad, Sister, and I packed our bags every December to drive north and spend Christmas with the families.

Mom’s parents had a detached garage off their modest but cozy three-bedroom house. It held the typical backyard stuff: trees, a bench swing, a small garden, a clothesline. To get to the garage, I walked along square, concrete tiles with black pebbles in the spaces between. A waist-high chain link fence separated the small path from the driveway. A door opened into the darkness of the garage, which at that time of year was always cold. When the moon was up or the back porch light was on, I could see my breath in the darkness.

The garage possessed a unique scent. Grampa smoke his cigarettes in there and framed pictures at his work bench. Dust, sawdust, stale cigarette smoke, and mold. Dampness, but frozen. It’s not the bouquet you might associate with happiness, 25 years later – unless you were also there with me to turn on the dim light, squeeze between the cars, and approach the ramshackle shelves on the far wall. Those shelves held every comic book my grandparents had purchased for their four children from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, and some that Gramma still liked to follow in the 1980s. She always called them “funny books.”

Every year I dug out a new section of the stacks – hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Some years, I excavated completely unknown buried treasures. Some years, I found an issue I’d read before: a copy of World’s Finest #147 featuring Superman and Batman, or Tales of Suspense featuring Thor, Iron Man, or the Human Torch. With a year between visits to Ohio, it was like meeting an old friend. Early issues of the X-men and Spider-man sat under so much dust and time and disuse that I sometimes got sick. I had pretty bad allergies to dust and mold at that age but zero qualms about risking my health to read those books. I would take an armful back inside the warm house, find a comfy spot to curl up, and be absorbed for hours. If the adults wanted to stay up late and play Rook at the kitchen table, I might even make two or three trips to the garage!

To read some of those magical old books now might be a disappointment. Stories that appeal to you as a boy often seem childish after a time. But, I do regret not going there and getting, oh, just a few hundred of them before the collection was sold some time in the 1990s. They didn’t sell for much, considering how many decades they had been exposed to the elements. But the connection to those feelings and those fantastic adventures my mind took as a child… There is no dollar figure you can put on fuel for your imagination. And if the nostalgia becomes too acute, I can find most of them at My Comic Shop in better shape than when I first read them!