In my last entry, I mentioned the ill-fated Ned’s Atomic Dustbin show. Here then, is the story of that night, and then events that transpired.

Spring 1992.

Michael got wind of a rock show happening in the Great Northern Metropolis of Charlotte, North Carolina. After a fair bit of ticket wrangling and cajoling, he convinced Amy, Pam and me to travel and see the mighty Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Mind you, this is God Fodder era Ned’s. . . pre-”Not Sleeping Around” and well before the trainwreck that was their cover of the Bay City Rollers’ Saturday Night on the So I Married An Axe Murderer soundtrack.

The SIMAAM soundtrack(!) which includes two versions of “There She Goes“; one by The La’s — which made them very famous — and the other by The Boo Radleys, which should have made them very famous.

Anyway, we traveled on a rainy Friday to the legendary 1313 Club. Legendary. . . every club in Charlotte was lengendary at that point, because they were all owned by Bill Flowers, a fifty year old burn-out who couldn’t hold a decent conversation, but was an idiot savant when it came to booking a venue. Bill also owned The “Legendary” Milestone club, a rat-infested hole-in-the-ground which was the place to play in Charlotte between 1988 and 1997. Speaking of “legend”, legend has it that J Mascis carved “Dino Jr.” into the bathroom wall the first time that Dinosaur, Jr. played the Milestone, then Lou Barlow scribbled “J Mascis sucks” on top of it during Sebadoh’s first engagement there. I’ve seen both, but who knows how the scrawl got there.

Where was I? Oh yes. . . we four traveled to the 1313, and on the way Michael kept bugging Amy to pop in the new Gin Blosssoms album, but Amy stood steadfast in her resolve to play only the compilation that Mark had given her, featuring Polvo’s Channel Changer and Pegboy’s Through My Fingers, and also Jawbreaker’s Bivouac.

In any case, we went to see Ned’s and Hot House Flowers (this is the part of the story where I introduce the central conflict) only to discover that it’s an 18 and over show.

DRAT! For Amy was 17 and I was a mere lad of 16, so we were not allowed into the show. We made heartfelt promises and pleaded and begged, but the doorman stood firm. Michael and Pam went into the club, while Amy and I scalped our tickets, hopped into the Saturn, and set off with a little pocket money and four hours to kill in Charlotte, NC.

Let me take a moment here to kill the suspense and answer the question that each of you is asking in your heart-of-hearts. . . no, I didn’t kiss the girl. In retrospect — and when I say retrospect I mean two weeks later when she dumped her boyfriend — I realized that I should have kissed her, because she was the sort of girl who looked like she wanted to be kissed, and I thought I was the sort of guy who could do the job properly. But, I didn’t.

Gentle reader, I’m not sure how much you know about Charlotte, but in aside from being the financial center of the Southeast is a sleepy little burg, where the street lamps shut off at 10:30 and the sidewalks roll up around midnight. It was well past 10pm and all the movies had already started, it was league night at the bowling alley, both Milestone Records and Repo Records were closed — Repo Records, Charlotte’s only punk rock record store/adult bookstore, owned by Jeff Clayton of Anti-Seen.

So, what are a boy and girl to do? That’s right, we rode around the beltway listening to Bivouac, and stopped at every Taco Bell we could find. There are alot of Taco Bell’s in Charlotte and I think we visited every single one that night, finally returning to the 1313 with time to kill. We sat in the parking lot of the club, laid the seats back and blasted. . you guessed it, Bivouac, until Michael and Pam arrived.

To this day, I’ve never seen Ned’s live, and I don’t know how that show was. Amy and I wouldn’t let Michael and Pam talk about it, so if you have any Ned’s bootlegs circa 1992, pass them my way. I’d appreciate it.

The moral of the story is two-fold. . that means there are two morals, a pair of lessons you should learn from this tale:

The first is that listening to Jawbreaker, while perhaps not actually solving any problems, causes any problems in the foreground to dissolve into the background. It helps to have a cool spring night and a pretty girl around, but these are not strictly necessary.

Which brings me to the second moral, the important one. If the opportunity presents itself, Kiss the Girl. It will probably go poorly, and you may wish you hadn’t, but in the balance it’s much better to wish you hadn’t that to wish you had. And sure, it might make things bad and it might make you miserable, but you’re probably going to be miserable anyway, so you might as well be miserable for a reason. Think of it as Pascal’s Wager, but with lips.

Postscript: Three years later, in the summer of 1995, I kissed Amy. Once. It was like kissing my sister. But at least now, I know.

Yeah, it’s been awhile. I wish I could say that I’ve been horribly busy or whatever, but in all honesty I’ve just been a shade negligent. Once you combine that with the fact that I’ve had nothing to say of any value on any subject whatsoever, then perhaps you can begin to understand, come to grips with, or even grok the yawning silence that has been Simplemath.org as of late.

But enough about me.
Let’s talk about Johnny cash.

I’d heard an interview about the new Johnny Cash album on NPR and I think that I can best describe my anticipation of the release as overwhelming. Luckily, this particular adjective is also a fair assement of the actual album, so I won’t spend more time thinking of a different one. Johnny Cash has always had a reputation as an experimental country artist, and possesses a range and depth in his songwriting — song-craft is a much better descriptor — is undisputed, so I find it interesting that Johnny chose to release an album consisting mostly of covers. The album is too cohesive to dissect song by song, but highlights include Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Danny Boy … each of these receives the Cash treatment of spare guitars, sparse arrangement and subtle lyrics.

The theme among these songs is the contemplation of loss, and Cash has earned his stripes in that regard. He sings with a hard-won, unfeigned, unfettered world-weariness that contains no trace of angst, a sound that modern artists Staind, Creed, and the like can only imitate but never truly achieve.

What is amazing and yet altogether unsuprising about this album is how readily Cash makes each of these songs his own. Cash should have written Hurt, not Trent Reznor, and he manages to sing a stunning rendition of Personal Jesus while removing any trace of irony from the lyrics. The album is a true accomplishment, and I lack the vocabulary to do it justice. Just listen.

In other news, The Family (TM) was in town for the holidays, but I’ll most of that out. One aspect of the visit worth noting is how much CNN we watched. I’d been out of the news loop for awhile, in preparation for the Visit. So, here is a quick little run-down of November’s notable events.

I think first heard Interpol’s PDA on last year’s Precipiate EP, but I don’t really remember. It wasn’t exactly a red letter day. The buzz out of New York (that sweet nexus from which all buzz flows) is that they are the next NYC band in line to save rock and roll. Personally, I didn’t know rock and roll needed saving — and I tend to keep a fairly close eye on exactly which musical genres need saving and which do not. Country music, educated hip-hop, torch singing. . . these genres need a hero in an almost Bonnie Tylerian sense of the phrase. Rock and roll is doing just fine. . thank you very much. In any case, even if rock and roll did need saving, I would put my trust in a more steady hand, perhaps Elvis Costello, before I would ask Interpol to respond to the signal flare.

It’s not that they aren’t a good band, they just aren’t qualified to masquerade as the saviors of anything, much less an entire genre of music. The band’s boosters will say that Interpol doesn’t WANT to save rocknroll, but I beg to differ. Any band that wears a uniform (black mod suits with red shirts) and features a bassist with a Flock of Seagulls haircut is out to save something, and if it’s not their record contract then the next most-likely candidate is ’sweet lady rawk’.

Although they’ve nailed the NYC hipster-mod thing down to a sweet science, the band that Interpol is usually paired with is Joy Division, but I think that is only because the lead singer can sometimes mimic the baritone of Ian Curtis. A vocal register is hardly a sound basis for comparision, and judging from their newest album Turn On The Bright Lights, I’d offer up Bedhead, My Dad Is Dead, a shoegazing version of New Order, or even a less inventive Mercury Rev as candidates for the “we spawned Interpol” award. not that any of those bands would show up to accept it.

Be that as it may, ChrisFromNewYork was in town last weekend, his friends Calla were opening for Interpol at the (Club) 9:30 (Club), and ChrisFromNewYork made sure that we were on the guest list.

(I once saw a bumper sticker that said “A bad day at the golf course is better than a good day at the office”, and while I can’t fully endorse golf as a good way to spend a Friday night, what with the possibilty of imminent death by four-iron, I have a fair bit of experience in the ‘going to rock shows’ aspect of Friday night, and I can say without reservation that “A bad night at the rock show is better than a good day at the office”, especially a free rock show.)*|

It was in that spirit that we four (Chris, John, Ivan and I) braved the wintery mix and trundled on down to “the rock”. I’m always ready for a good show, and I even enjoy a large crowd, but I was ill-prepared for the mass of clove-smoking psuedo-hipsters who had chosen to pack the 9:30 that night. The lot of them were dressed in the standard suburban goth/retro-mod uniforms — these kids came to see and be seen, and they wore their dis-affected aloof attitude and dismissive stares while cooling rating other audience members and summarily rejecting the uncool with a grim efficiently that can only be rivaled by white robots from the future.

Did I mention that they were smoking cloves? No self-respecting person over the age of 18 should ever smoke clove cigarettes. That’s the sort of thing you experiment with when you are in high school and then dismiss almost immediately — like paint huffing or joining the Republican party.

Even ChrisFromNewYork was not hip enough to stand firm against that onslaught, and he’s in a band in New York for pete’s sake, so we ditched the indier-than-thou crowd and made our way backstage to the Calla dressing room. The remainder of what transpired is standard backstage stuff — lots of people walking around trying to get stuff signed or whatever — so I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say it was simultaneously as tedious and exhilarating as you are imagining, but if you want the gory details, just email me.