OMG WTF, I’m Old

As I’ve mentioned before, since I have now been without cable a few years, instead of watching TV I usually watch original comedy stuff on YouTube – guys like this one and this one and this one, gals like this one, this piece of citrusy goodness, and, of course – these guys, as they’re the home team.

A month or so ago, I was voting in a Survivor-type contest among YouTubers, and I kept seeing this one three-letter acronym used over and over again in comments on people’s videos. It was confusing me terribly as to why people were repeatedly writing this acronym in regards to YouTubers they apparently liked.

Because when I was in college and thereabouts in the Eighties – and into the Nineties, for that matter – all those bad boys with their Black Flag and Minor Threat and Bad Brains records (i.e., the ones I always wound up with – go figure) used to stencil this three-letter acronym on guitar cases and skateboards and stuff. Or my ex’s slightly nerdy, acid-dropping, D&D-playing friends would fake tattoo it on themselves. It was spray painted on the walls (always either in black or red) of at least three apartments I remember in Murfreesboro and two in Nashville, and on the outside of one garage.

You’d have been hard pressed to walk into Cantrell’s, the Exit/In, or Elliston Square in the Eighties and not seen this acronym scrawled on a t-shirt, an Army jacket, or a pair of torn jeans in black magic marker. After all, it was all, everybody’s an anarchist, yada yada and all that… way back then in the ol’ Dark Ages. After all. (I just wanted to fit “all” into this paragraph somehow, just one more time.)

And it – said three-letter acronym – it wasn’t very, well… nice. (And understandably so, since everybody was an anarchist and all that.)

So a month or so ago, I was really having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around why in the world people kept leaving in comments things like:

“(insert YouTube comedian’s name here)… FTW!”

I guess it’s one of the disadvantages to not having kids/teenagers to set me straight – and next time, maybe I’ll have enough sense to just go straight to Urban Dictionary instead of straining my brain over something like “For The Win!” for days. Or a week and a half exactly.

But I guess at least not having teenagers meant I got to spare myself the inevitable ridicule when Mom asked why all these people on YouTube were telling all these other people to f*ck the world, right?

My City Was Gone, But Not For Long

I got in the car to run some errands and go to the bank a couple of weeks ago, and – knowing I might be waiting in line a little while – I’d taken my MP3 player with me, which I don’t usually do if I’m just running the usual errands. My MP3 player pretty much stays on shuffle.

I plugged it in and started the car, and The Inmates’ 1981 version of The Standells’ “Dirty Water” started up. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I’d go to check the weather online and type in my zip code and the next thing I’d see, on the pages with the weather forecast – ads for water damage restoration experts.

My auto insurance company has finally stopped sending me e-mails asking me if I need to get my car checked out since there has been severe flood damage in my area. No, thank you. I’m just fine.

I know there are people right here in Shelby County, and nearby, and up yonder a little ways, in just as desperate straits as people in Nashville and Middle Tennessee – and in some cases, maybe more. But still, overall – as a whole – we got off easy, here in Memphis, this time. The tornado warnings here that same weekend were pretty scary, but the last time we had a really bad storm like that, I saw debris on the street and trees pushed over dotting the landscape on my little route from here to Kroger. This time, the following Monday, I think I counted only one house that had some limbs on the curb. The north part of the county got slammed, and there were spots of bad flooding even here in the central city – but still, overall and as a whole, the majority of us, we were fine.

But you know, as far as the cities go – in a lot of ways, I’ll always be more connected to Nashville and Murfreesboro and Middle Tennessee than I ever have been to Memphis, even though I was born here and have a long history here and strong connections here, including having had strong family connections here. And probably more than I ever will be to Knoxville. Don’t really have any to Chattanooga, other than a family member living there for a while who no longer does.

But I spent some pretty crucial years in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, as well as a pretty significant number of days throughout childhood and my teen years.  My phone number started with 615 (back in ancient times before there were more than two area codes) for a good portion of the Eighties. It’s almost as much home to me as Northwest Tennessee is.

What a month it’s been. The week after the flood, I was kinda just feeling shellshocked, although I hadn’t actually DONE anything but sit here at the computer catching up on all the news in between periods of working. I kind of drifted off to Facebook for an evening on the following Monday, I think, and got into digging thru old high school photos various friends had posted, after having spent about 15 hours straight reading flood-related updates on Twitter and the Web. Feeling guilty the whole time, because I could get away from it all for a little bit while so many people I know couldn’t. Because they were right there in the middle of it.

Then I was committed to something work-wise from that Tuesday onward, and it was really the end of the week before I really had a chance at all to truly even attempt to catch up on what all had transpired since Monday and the big day of the flood. Couple being completely and totally swamped (no pun intended) with work with the fact that the fourth of the Christian-Newsom trials started that same Monday in Knoxville, which I would have liked to have been able to keep up with throughout the week but there just wasn’t enough time in the days to do so; checking on updates of online acquaintances who have been been dealing with a nightmarish tragedy of the non-flood type; and scrambling to put Band-Aid fixes on what I guess is just going to keep being an ongoing calamity of sorts here on the home front – even if I’d had four or five clones of myself, I’m not sure there would have been enough for me to go around.

So, the flood…

For the benefit of what few of you here reading don’t already read everyone else’s oft-more-updated and finer blogs in Nashville and in Tennessee, the Nashville flood finally got some national attention, though I’m not sure it really would have much if not for all the Tweeting and blogging there was about it. MSNBC was one of the first to give it decent air time, here and with another mention from Keith Olbermann that I think, in particular, was much appreciated by the community at large.

My buddy Travis Harmon – certainly the most successful of the bunch from that wide circle of friends from old ‘Boro and college days – and his comedy partner put out probably the best edition of Red State Update ever, and made me laugh (and laugh and laugh and laugh) and cry at the same time. Many of my personal friends and acquaintances up there have been volunteering their asses off all month, and continue to. I’m so proud to know all of them.

My mom – back in one of the few sectors of West Tennessee that mostly escaped both wind and flood damage almost completely last week – usually gets her faculty a little gift for Nurses Week every year. This year, she made donations in their names to one of the community relief organizations that WKRN had listed on their website instead of gifts. She said it just seemed like the right thing to do this year. I’m very proud of her too.

So many of my friends wrote great truly stuff that week. This was one of the very best, as was this post that led me to it. This was another one that particularly touched me. This angry one from one of our own forced to watch it all unfold from thousands of miles away clear across the country, expressing all the frustration pretty much all of us who still had power and Internet access were feeling that day. And pretty much everything over here all week long, but especially this one. I wish I could list more, and there are more I probably haven’t gotten around to seeing yet as I’m still (always) catching up. But they all outdid themselves on the writing thing that week, especially those many that were smack dab in the middle of it all.

Most everyone I know was okay and while many had flooded basements and such, overall everyone I know made it through and, most importantly, alive and uninjured. I’m thankful for that. I know everyone up there, though, has continued to be almost all exhausted beyond belief, though, mentally and physically.

I still have a little bit of a nagging worry – because I have known SO many people throughout my life from all over and have been fortunate to have made many friends throughout – that news has yet to turn up that won’t be as good. I think I’ve now accounted for most everyone I “need to know about” – if not directly, I’ve seen them Tweet or someone else mention them on Facebook or Twitter or on the phone – and have racked my brain all month long trying to figure out who hasn’t crossed my mind that should have by now.

One friend who didn’t get too lucky was an old college friend and ex-boyfriend who arrived home after a week in Chicago to find thousands of dollars’ worth of musical instruments, studio equipment and gear swimming in his basement. He was prepared for it, as his neighbor had been able to reach him by phone and warn him, and luckily the water damage was limited to the basement only – by about a half inch below the upstairs door. It was a too-close call for the rest of the house, but things could have certainly turned out much worse.

Unfortunately he got hit by a double whammy, though, as he still owns and rents out his mom’s old house in Bellevue, and it was nearly completely submerged. Last we spoke, which has been a while now, he still didn’t know where his renters had fled to, but presumably by now they’re probably some of the folks out there having to sift through and throw away most of the entire contents of the house. I know he sure wasn’t looking forward to the expected hassle forthcoming with his insurance company and was already preparing himself to be SOL.

Lots of teary moments that week, often over the oddest of photos, of all the many horrific ones that were hitting the Internet out of Nashville and Middle Tennessee. Lots of times just sitting there gaping, open-mouthed.

Highway 96 from Murfreesboro to Dickson was my usual route back and forth between college and home for me. Naturally, if I had five bucks for every time I was back and forth on I-24 between Murfreesboro and Nashville, whether going out downtown or going to work, I could have probably retired on that. I worked at Southern Hills, so you Middle Tennesseans know what my usual route to work was. To see that intersection in Franklin on 96, and those stretches of I-24, with cars and trucks nearly completely submerged – just surreal.

The (current) Opry House, which wasn’t very old when I attended a rock concert there in the garishly neon, New Wave, how-many-items-of-Esprit-clothing-do-you-have-in-your-closet days of 1983. My friends and I thought it would be a kick to get matching outfits made for the event, and – though they were each made of different colored material and design – we all showed up in matching camouflage miniskirts (with equally matching skinny ties) and just about every color of chunky neon jewelry you can imagine. I think we probably all looked like Catholic schoolgirls, except in camouflage instead of plaid – which I guess was unintentionally ironic, since we were from a small town in West Tennessee where dates on the weekend during duck and deer season ended at 8 pm, because your date had to go home and go to bed so they could get up at four in the morning and go shoot stuff.

So I was looking at the flood picture of the Opry stage that first week, and in my head seeing clearly what the stage looked like from the floor, standing in the third or fourth row in from the stage that night in 1983. Remembering that I was looking, basically, up – since I’m short anyway, but still, it was relatively high off the floor.

Realizing that that water I was looking at in the picture was quite a bit – a lot - higher than I am tall.

I wrote in a post that’s yet to be published that the Opryland Hotel’s what really did me in, sifting through pic after pic as I was early in the week. I know it’s silly, and I know they’ll repair it and build it back. It’s just seeing a place like that where you have a really strong, clear and special memory so devastated – that’s when it really hits home, when you’re having to watch like this from afar.

And speaking of home over here in West Tennessee… although I had heard and read about and seen some of the horrible devastation in Dyersburg, pictures that were forwarded to me of the flooding in Jackson struck it home even more.

Though things have progressed a great deal in many of the smaller towns, when you’re from Northwest Tennessee, Jackson’s a big hub – that’s where you go shopping for Christmas or your prom dress, that’s where you go to the orthodontist once a month, where people end up in the hospital when they have things more severe than the smaller ones can handle, where folks go to the doctor regularly – all those things. Many friends and old classmates live there. I lived there once briefly too, matter of fact.

The pictures from Jackson were as awful as the ones I’d been seeing out of Nashville and Middle Tennessee all week. A main stretch of road with vehicles as submerged as all those pics from I-24. A Sonic Drive-In with water up to the lighted menus, menus that are generally quite a bit higher than the bottom of your average car door’s window.

Virtually almost all of West Tennessee, as well as so much of Middle Tennessee, has now been declared a disaster area by the Federal government. Of my two little hometowns here in the West, one is in one of only maybe two or three counties in West Tennessee that were not. My other home county is.

I know a lot of people who were watching from other places on Twitter and Facebook and the like, and folks from other places reading Nashville and Tennessee bloggers’ blogs – and probably especially people who live in cities and areas that do experience such devastating flooding fairly often – maybe thought we’d all gone mad, overboard with it all.

But it just doesn’t happen here. Not like that.

Not but in a few pockets of the state (like up around Reelfoot Lake and off the Mississippi to the north), and certainly not like this. And absolutely not in this state’s largest cities.

Tornadoes – we know tornadoes, yep. We are all too familiar with tornadoes. Maybe not quite on the scale of, say, Kansas – but we know tornadoes.

Floods like the one earlier this month – they just don’t happen here. Not at all in Nashville since the 1970s – and bad though it was, that was really nothing compared to this one.

So yeah. Most of this state, except for those in the mountains in East Tennessee – we’re a little loopy right now, still. We’re better than we were, but things are still pretty bad for a lot of people down here. We’ll be okay, eventually.

But so much help is still needed, and will continue to be. It was heartbreaking a couple  of weeks or so ago to see one of my friends who’d gone out to volunteer and help Tweeting for more help, because apparently a lot of elderly people showed up at the location and she was only one of a few (if not the only) volunteer that showed up. I know a lot of major relief efforts went on all the following weekend after the flood, and I’m sure the larger ones have been more successful than that one was. I hope not too many of the smaller ones had problems like that one did.

It’ll be a long ongoing process for a long time, and daunting. In Nashville, the potential economic repercussions alone are a little bit terrifying. Not only are many of Nashville’s biggest landmarks and tourist attractions, and other large industries, going to be under repair for some time – some of the largest are out of commission for possibly the rest of the year at the very least, and literally thousands of people are about to be (or already are) without jobs.

And the same goes for other places in Tennessee, with varying degrees of what and how much those counties are going to be hit economically. In a state that has already been struggling with disastrous state budgetary issues, widespread unemployment, and general economic downturn statewide for some time now – it’s no wonder if everyone’s holding their breath to see where we go from here.

Some resources for those who want to help (many of these are also aggregating efforts for other Middle TN counties as well):

• The United Way of Metropolitan Nashville – you can also text RESTORE to UNITED (864833) to give $10 to help victims of the Nashville flood.
• Hands On Nashville – also in the process of major relief efforts for Nashville
• DonateNashville.org - a Craigslist-type resource recently put together by The United Way of Metro Nashville and Cool People Care to more efficiently organize directly what people need and what people have
• The Red Cross – you can also donate $10 to the Red Cross to help the flood victims by texting REDCROSS to 90999
• Cool People Care also has some great “We Are Nashville” t-shirts for sale with proceeds going to help flood victims

Speak to Power has put together some listings of resources for help, donations and more in several of the worst hit counties in West Tennessee also:

• Dyersburg – Dyer County Relief & Donation Resources
• Tipton County Relief & Donation Resources
• Shelby County – Millington Relief & Donation Resources
  

My hat’s truly off to Christy and Morgan (and anyone else helping behind the scenes that week) at The Nashvillest, who did an outstanding job of collecting, organizing and getting information out on the Web through this whole ordeal that week and just really became the central point of Internet communication regarding the Nashville flood and continue to be. I should point out, too, that the website is not their job – they have full-time jobs elsewhere – yet they still managed to kinda outshine the local print and television news media when it came to the WWW. The local media still did a good job and continues to, but in this situation, they kinda got pwned as far as getting critical information out on the Internet goes.

(Sadly The Tennesseean‘s website, though better than it was in the past, is kind of a great big cluttered mess and I really don’t know how anyone finds anything on there. Messy, messy, messy. I’m not a big fan of the Scripps template that The Commercial Appeal and the Knoxville News-Sentinel are using these days, but it’s 110% better than the garbled cluttered up mess I see every time I go to The Tennesseean looking for something. And while I know newspaper and television news sites pretty much MUST have ads on them these days, and that’s fine – it’d be nice if someone would come up with a solution for nearly all of the media sites nationwide where advertisements wouldn’t cause the page loading issues they do. There’s nothing more annoying than going to your local TV news station’s site when the tornado siren’s going off outdoors… only to see the page hanging FOREVER when it’s trying to load via some ad supplier’s domain.)

Anyway, so there. I would say that’s all, but yesterday the floods came back and a little too close to home for me – way too close to home for many of my friends.

Summer hasn’t even really begun in Tennessee and, this year, I don’t think winter can come too soon.

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On a final note – I’m going to make a valiant attempt to start posting again at least a few times a week, if not more. Even if it’s stupid. I’ve been so busy for so many months now and it really has been almost impossible to get here and post most of the time. But I feel better when I do, so I’m going to make an effort again and guess we’ll just see what happens. I’ve decided it wasn’t just because the week of the flood was so grim and critical – it just felt better, being on Twitter more, being here more. So there you go. It might get really dumb around here, but I guess that’s okay too.

If Tennessee Floated Away, Would The Other 49 States Notice? (Bizarro World Weather, Nashville Waterworld, and the Tennessee Complex)

We interrupt this (really mostly unplanned) posting moratorium ‘cos I just wanna say, WTF?

Having survived Hurricane Elvis, the Great Ice Storm of 1994, and – even more up close and personal than I like to think about very often – the 2003 tornado that tried to eradicate Jackson from the planet, there’s not much about natural disasters that comes as a surprise anymore. I’ve seen lots of crazy whacked out weather down here.

But this weekend was like Bizarro World Weather down here. In almost 22 years of living in the same house (and a hop, skip and jump from the same tornado siren at the fairgrounds), I am pretty certain I have never heard that thing go off five (at least five, it might have been six) times in a 24-hour period. And I’m absolutely certain I’ve never heard it blare for TWO HOURS (could have been three, definitely two). Having really only fairly recently gotten to where I’m not practically hyperventilating and paralyzed anymore when the thing goes off, it was better than it would have been a year or so ago, but still – decidedly on edge for a very long period of time.

At the time of that two or more hour siren, they were also evacuating the thousands of folks down at the Beale Street Music Festival (i.e., MudFest) on Saturday night. And then last night, people in the crowd were acting like jerks and booing when headliner Three Doors Down had to be canceled and couldn’t make it down here because they were having trouble getting from Nashville to Memphis, because of the flooded mess this state is right now. Nashvillians John Hiatt and Alison Krauss’ BSMF sets were also canceled due to the flood situation, as was a Dierks Bentley show in Knoxville on Sunday night, seeing as how Bentley was in his flooded basement with a bucket just like most everyone else in Nashville. (Why the Beale Street Music Festival hasn’t yet been moved to a different weekend in May after all these years is beyond me, since it almost always rains and storms that weekend, and either doesn’t rain at all or hardly rains the rest of the weekends in May. Seriously.)

And while things are fine right here where I am in the center of the city, they definitely are NOT around the whole region in general. It was kinda bad enough in Memphis and Arkansas and North Mississippi, with all the flooding (in places I’ve never seen flood before) and storm damages and, sadly, several deaths. The tornadoes that did come through (mostly hitting the more rural areas) were terrible with horrific damage – but the rain itself just gutted the entire Mid-South. It just kept on coming down, and coming back again and again, and it wouldn’t go away.

And Nashville, poor Nashville, is practically totally under water and now the Cumberland, which was 19 feet on Friday, has a flood stage of 40 feet, and was currently 55 feet last I looked at the news – the river’s on the verge of completely swallowing up downtown Nashville. I spent most of Sunday reading friends mentioning that co-workers had had to abandon their homes, neighbors had totally lost their homes, just about everyone I know up there has water in their basement (and rising in many places), and many of my friends discovered on Sunday that they now own lakefront property all of a sudden.

I saw a photo snapped not far from where an ex-BF used to live used to be (officially I never lived there but technically I did), and at first I thought well, we’d have been all right probably because the living space was actually on the second floor. Then I remembered how small the building was and how low those ceilings were. If this had happened 23 years ago, we’d have been like those other people clinging to their roofs or the top of their vehicles waiting to be rescued. (Consequently, that same ex moved back to Nashville a few years ago and texted me last night, lamenting the thousands of dollars in musical instruments, equipment and other gear currently swimming around his basement – according to his neighbor, that is. He was in Chicago this weekend, so he hasn’t yet seen it for himself.)

And it’s not just Nashville. One of my two little hometowns an hour to the west is being besieged by an overflowing Big Sandy River (and though I haven’t seen photos, I’m sure the Tennessee River is flooding the other end of county at the beach and beyond), and judging from the conditions in this photo that was sent to me in e-mail last night:

… if I was still in high school, I would have had to had a boat to get there on Monday morning. That building in the photo is NOT “out in the sticks” out in the county – it’s very much inside the city limits – and really isn’t all THAT close to the river in question, so presumably nearly every business on that side of town was fighting the same watery madness.

Most things south of Nashville in Middle Tennessee are apparently a wreck as well, including this house. She was supposed to leave for NYC in three weeks, they have no renter’s insurance, and they’ve lost everything.

Levees are leaking and breaking all over, sinkholes are developing everywhere (including still in West Tennessee as well as Middle Tennessee), people and animals are stranded, drowning. So many roads closed and it’s bad all over, but Nashville itself has kinda turned into one gigantic lake with thousands of little islands around.

I am old enough that I vaguely remember the major flood Nashville had in the 1970s, but that was nothing compared to this. There are places up there that have never been under water in my lifetime – or probably for hundreds of years, or ever. It’s just stunning.

All of this coupled with the fact that three members of my family were in Nashville on Saturday – and had already planned to stay in a hotel overnight (good thing) – but trying to get them out of there Sunday was a bit daunting, especially when – after hearing road after road after road was closed or closing, and downtown was closed in all kinds of places and flooding, and most especially when authorities up there were practically begging people not to drive, all of which I was texting with every new closure or warning I read about – after encouraging them to stay put, they left anyway. They couldn’t go what would be the usual route back on I-40 West (we already knew the main highway off the interstate was marked as flooded by the Highway Patrol, and knew most of the other alternatives were probably little better.)

It took them a while to get through downtown, but once they made it to I-65 North, things were okay to Clarksville and beyond. But I pretty much held my breath until I knew they’d gotten out of Nashville, and still until I knew they’d made it home.

And Nashville, poor Nashville – later Sunday morning, friends and others were Tweeting that the waters in their basement were starting to recede. And then around noonish – just like the weather and news folks had said it would – the rain and sirens and everything else started up again.

People are going to need serious help to put Nashville and Middle Tennessee back together again. It’s such a mess, but you probably heard that already.

Or maybe you didn’t – because apparently much of the national news has mostly ignored what’s happening in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, as well as the rest of the damage in West Tennessee and our neighboring states. Little blips here and there, but you know, it’s not like when some other cities have gotten decimated by Mother Nature and you can’t get away from it on the news and in your newspaper, no matter where you are.

And it’s kinda doubly puzzling because some of those cities I can think of that have had their disasters plastered on TV and other media for days at a time – the hurricanes and floods and such that have happened in those places, they happen fairly often. What’s happening in Nashville right now has never happened in my lifetime (and I’m getting kinda old, you know) – we have some rural flood zones with relatively small area dotting the state, but a national emergency-type flood of this proportion is just unheard of.

It’s kinda like the (cough) “straight line wind” storm dubbed Hurricane Elvis that paralyzed Memphis for weeks in 2003 – I recall one of our city officials commenting at the time that a hurricane that wound up not even materializing and hitting one coastal city got more national coverage than Hurricane Elvis did. People died, the city was in pieces (including parts of the city that had never or rarely seen such kinds of damage), the whole city was mostly without power in 90+ degree weather for weeks – yet unless you lived fairly close by, you probably had no idea what was going on down here.

What, do we (Tennessee in general) need to switch deodorants or something? At this point – and after this many crises that have gone mostly ignored – it’s enough to give an entire state a complex.

Aunt B. writes about the current situation and similarly puzzling lack of interest here and here, and the fine folks at The Nashvillest have done a stand-up job gathering and providing information during this awful time up there. Honestly, The Nashvillest and Twitter, as well as the Internet in general, have become invaluable resources for sure time and time again, and kept a lot of folks in the loop and informed that would have otherwise not been.

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And finally – yes, there was supposed to be an Alex Chilton post in March and no, you weren’t imagining things. As I kinda said the day I posted the last one (about Doug Fieger), the Alex post was nagging at me so much it was going to make me sick if I didn’t post it that day – and then I never posted it. Because I haven’t finished it. Because for some reason, I can’t. There’s a personal piece to that post that I’m struggling with – maybe it’s because I’ve told the story many times before, but this will probably be the last time I ever tell it. Maybe I’ll finish it and post it soon. Stay tuned.

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EDITED TO ADD: What a beautiful and horrific photo at the same time @brittneyg‘s place:

Nashville Submerged

A Long Overdue Thank You

I am here today because there’s a post I need to write that’s going to make me sick if I don’t get it out of my head today, it’s been nagging at me so much since yesterday afternoon. If you happen to have arrived here before the next post is posted, then I’ve probably already spoiled it because you probably already have an idea what it’s about. Sorry for that. They probably both belong on the music blog instead, but I really need to post them here instead (don’t ask me why, like a lot of things it really makes no sense, but there ya go).

First, though, before I get to that post, I would probably be really remiss if I didn’t go back to about a month ago and admit to you all that the day the news came out that Doug Fieger, leader of The Knack, had passed away, I cried my fool head off that entire day and night.

This really didn’t make any sense on the surface. As a 13-year-old, I bought Get the Knack in 1979 just like most everyone else did and played it to death, “My Sharona” was a great tune, it was cool. All peachy.

But The Knack were never, like, one of my VERY favorites, you know. That’s a record that’s somewhat surprisingly stood the test of time, but it would have been far, far down the list of my stranded-on-a-desert-island picks. And goodness knows the music world has lost a bunch of my big heroes in the last several years – Joe Strummer, three of the four original Ramones, many many more. All of which made me sad, of course, but none of which left me incapacitated in tears and unable to do anything but drown my sorrows in YouTube for an entire day.

It finally dawned on me at some point during the course of all that misery why it was affecting me so. The more and more frequent occurrence of the heroes and idols of my youth passing away over the last several years had indeed been more and more disturbing and upsetting, and each one another reminder of how much older I myself was getting and that – since most of my musical heroes were far older than me when I was a preteen, teenager, college kid – I knew these depressing moments were going to happen more and more as time went on and as we all got older, sure.

This one hit HARD, though. Almost like losing a family member, because of the sheer importance of it all.

Importance? The Knack????

Scoff if you will. The Knack changed EVERYTHING – for some of us, anyway.

Oh sure, there was great, and greater, music around. The Ramones had been around for years by that time, The Clash, and dozens of other legendary bands springing up in New York City, on the West Coast, in the UK, lots of places, yes.

There was great music around somewhere. But you’ve likely no idea how hard it was to GET to that music in 1979, if you lived in small towns in West Tennessee. Probably would have been a little different had I grown up in Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis – but it still took a long time for a lot of that stuff to filter down to even those places. I’ve written numerous times over the years about how hard I had to scratch and scramble to get my hands on anything I read or found out about that wasn’t “mainstream”, and how I’d have been oblivious to most of it were it not for the fact that I was (A) a night owl and (B) rarely missed an airing of things like Saturday Night Live, Fridays, and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.

And you must remember as well – people still listened to radio back then. In the car, at home – wherever – radio was still pretty much king of the hill when it came to getting music to the masses. Yeah, I had a lot of records as a kid – but there were lots of times the choice was either radio, or no music at all.

Were it not for the fact that I was a major Cheap Trick fan from nearly the start, and a KISS fan, and the fact that The Cars put out their first two albums (which still didn’t get played on the radio down here all that much back in the day), I’d have been mostly 100% S.O.L. throughout the late 1970s because there was just so very much horrible crap on the radio. For years up to 1979, the radio airwaves were dominated by disco and so much easy-listening-type junk that even though I listened to it anyway – and even though I bought a lot of it at the time – it was really like a vast musical wasteland out there filled with stuff that might have been better than no music at all, but was thoroughly unexciting and barely tolerable.

There was one FM station in the area that wasn’t on around the clock and did play mostly progressive rock – a lot of which I didn’t like and still don’t, but some of which I did – but it was better than what was on the rest of the stations on the dial, so I’d listen to it when I could. But then we moved too far away in the beginning of the summer of 1979 for me to get the signal anymore, so there went that.

And to make matters even worse, bands I did like whose music made it to mainstream radio were releasing stuff I couldn’t stand, to fit in with the times. God knows I love The Rolling Stones and always have, but with the exception of “Shattered”, you can keep the Some Girls album. Then KISS goes all disco and releases the “I Was Made For Loving You” single and adds even more insult to injury. It just kept getting worse and worse.

That summer of 1979, The Knack saved mainstream radio. For those of us stuck out in the sticks (or almost), those of us who didn’t have easy access to all the cool stuff out of the norm that they didn’t play on our local radio stations and had to scramble to get anything like that – The Knack were a godsend. When “My Sharona” hit the top of the charts and stayed there and stayed there – ultimately becoming the top selling rock single of the entire decade of the Seventies – Doug Fieger and The Knack changed everything, for those of us who didn’t live in the cool cities like NYC and L.A., or even Memphis and Nashville and Knoxville.

The Knack opened the door for all those other bands that came after to get played on Small Town USA radio – some great or good, some not so good, some just plain bad – but they weren’t disco, and they weren’t all that soft rock-easy listening stuff that kind of put the entire nation to sleep, I think, for most of 1974 or 1975 to 1979. Finally there was something new and fresh and different to listen to on the radio – ‘cos listen, if you weren’t old enough to drive yet, you were still pretty dependent on whatever was on the radio for the most part back then.

And all those bands The Knack’s big hit opened up the door for made their way to MTV, when it began – but most of us outside of the cities didn’t have MTV, not for years. You’re reading the blog of someone who, for years, one of the big highlights and treats of going to visit friends and family in Memphis was getting to watch MTV while there, after all.

Radio became tolerable again – kind of funny NOW to think of being THAT dependent on what was being played on the radio – but you just didn’t have that much of a choice back then and, again, a lot of the time, it was radio or no music at all. And I started out growing up in one small town, but spent my teenage years in ones even smaller. My little hometown’s FM radio station would have probably still been playing disco and all-Eagles-all-the-time (nothing against the Eagles, but you get what I mean) by the time I was in high school. Instead, thanks to what happened the summer of 1979 and The Knack, that little radio station was the first place I heard things like Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio”, Billy Idol’s “White Wedding”, and any number of other tunes that might have never have had a shot on mainstream radio had they come out a few years before that.

John Cougar-before-he-was-Mellencamp, Bryan Adams, Loverboy, .38 Special – all those probably would have made it out there anyway, but I have doubts that things like Donnie Iris’ “Ah! Leah!” (still to this day one of my fave all time tunes) would have ever made it to Small Town USA airwaves without the overwhelming initial success of The Knack. Maybe so, who knows – but The Knack still started it all, and at the best possible time when it was desperately needed by those of us far from places like NYC and L.A.

So when I found out that Doug had passed away, I mourned, probably for many reasons. Here was another senseless cancer death, for someone who was really far too young to leave the world this early (he was 57). And the fact that, though The Knack were never a “top favorite” of mine, they were a band that was so instrumental and so important in such a very big change in the world of easily available music that was my youth. And then there was having to face the fact that it’d been now over 30 years since “My Sharona” was released, so that was kind of like the final nail in the coffin of my gloriously misspent youth (not that I don’ t know my youth has been gone a LONG time, but something like that just makes it oh-so-final and irreversible).

It’s hard to believe that was so long ago. If I close my eyes, I can remember a certain day that song was playing and see the radio it was playing on, the dresser the radio was sitting on, see the mountain view outside the window the dresser was next to, and almost – almost – hear the voices of the several people that were lounging around the room that day, most of whom were tapping a foot or fingers or bobbing their head along with the music. It’s that clear. It’s just one of those songs that can immediately whip me right back there to that very spot in time… if only for four minutes and 54 seconds.

Anyway, it was that long ago indeed. And it was just all so depressing and I felt so blah that I just cried my fool head off all day because it was really the only thing I felt like doing.

Which, again, was kind of odd, as Doug was someone I hadn’t really even thought about in a long time. I remember way back during the Kevorkian trials, noticing that the doctor’s attorney’s name was Geoffrey Fieger and thinking he sure did look an awful lot like the only other person named Fieger I’d ever heard of (and of course he does, he’s Doug’s older brother, as it turned out). That was probably the last time Doug Fieger’s name had crossed my mind, really, consciously anyway.

And in the course of that day of mourning, I also discovered that he was once married to actress Marin Kanter, who starred in one of my favorite music films of all time that nobody ever saw called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains with Diane Lane, Laura Dern and Ray Winstone (along with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, Paul Simonon of The Clash, and Fee Waybill of The Tubes) – a film that finally won a DVD release in 2008 after years of clamoring for it by its cult following of fans, most of whom had only seen it back in the early 1980s when it ran on The Movie Channel and the like. Anyway, that was kind of a neat Easter egg to come across, something I didn’t know.

In any case, The Knack just changed everything for kids like me that were stuck out far away from the cities back in 1979, it was really as simple as that. If not for them, some other band might have come along and done it, sure  – but as it were, it was Doug Fieger and The Knack that saved radio for us. I’ll be ever grateful for that.

This was a neat video from 2008 I found that day on YouTube where Doug and a friend gave an impromptu performance of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” at a party (yet another one of those cool things I find from time to time that make me wish I’d had a video camera in the ’80s to capture some similar moments around Nashville back in the day).

On a final note, here’s a hint – the Get The Knack album is still really, really good. It’s a little dated, but it’s stood the test of time pretty well – you’ve got to get past “My Sharona” and listen to the whole thing to really get it (no pun intended), but I think it’s held up a lot better over time than many of the other big albums from that early New Wave era of rock & roll.

I kinda knew this a long time ago back in the mid-’80s when Greg and Joey and I started messing around musically and (in that honeymoon-like period when you are first getting to know people you’re playing music with really well and everything you discover you have in common is such a treat) we frequently found that the songs we all liked best and had spent time learning were usually the songs on various albums that were the “filler” tunes and ones other people often didn’t know or care about (and because of that, we’d often have to correct people who’d think it was one of Greg’s or Joey’s originals, but that’s another story).

Of the probably thousands of albums we pulled out (whether actually by hand or just talking about them) that summer of 1986, one of the tunes Greg started picking out softly on his guitar in my stupid little apartment north of the MTSU campus was this thing I immediately recognized and started singing the first line before he even opened his mouth, and it eventually became a staple and something people often thought Greg wrote, especially since we kinda indie’d and punked it up a little like we did most everything. This happened all the time – name an album, and whatever obscure “filler” track on that album one of us liked best almost always turned out to be the one the others liked best too. This one, too, was just another one of those “back of the album” tunes we all liked best on the album that most people never heard – along with other ones that weren’t “My Sharona” or “Good Girls Don’t”. It was The Knack’s “Your Number or Your Name”, and we just made it our own for a little while.

“My Sharona” was deservedly the hit for The Knack though – and that guitar solo is actually pretty awesome, and lord knows it sold bazillions of copies – but really when you listen to the album, the other single to me was really always the standout, brilliant one and the gem among it all. It was a favorite of KC’s, and when we were about 14 & 16 he once told me that all I really ever needed to know about teenage boys was in this song  (that was, of course, before The Replacements and before Paul W. wrote “Sixteen Blue”) – but this was always (no surprise) his favorite Knack song and really it was pretty brilliant in its straightforwardness and its simplicity. I was going to post the original video and then I found this semi- (or all?) live version of “Good Girls Don’t” from some appearance on VH-1 in the early ’80s. KC’d be happy with this one and he’d say this is the correct version (because it’s the dirty version, which obviously didn’t make the original video). ;)

In any case – even though I’m a month overdue in posting this – RIP Doug. Thanks for the music, the memories, and thanks especially for saving radio and making it tolerable again for us kids stuck out in the sticks and almost-sticks in the summer of 1979. For that, I will be always grateful.

Yep, That About Sums Up the ’80s

SHack: well you were at night court more than me
Lynnster: What? Only because before I met you I used to go there to watch and laugh at people!
SHack: and you never bailed me out
Lynnster: What! I was there every single time!
SHack: but jay always bailed me out
Lynnster: Because I never had money because nobody would have ever eaten if not for me!
SHack: you’d have left me there to rot
Lynnster: I probably should have.
SHack: then you dumped me
Lynnster: Because I was tired of narcissistic sociopath musicians.
SHack: that’s most of your ex-boyfriends
Lynnster: No, you were the only sociopath.
SHack: i played better than all of them though
Lynnster: When you were sober maybe.
SHack: that one night at cantrells
Lynnster: You were banned from Cantrell’s!
SHack: elliston then
Lynnster: You got banned from there too!
SHack: i never got banned from the exit in
Lynnster: Probably only because they forgot to.
SHack: i was never banned in murfreesboro
Lynnster: Well, there’s no accounting for taste.

Big ’80s Hair & Camouflage Miniskirts

Somehow unintentionally I moved into a very ’80s portion of Radio Lynnster since I last posted, probably thanks to Jeffraham (who wants me to be the chick drummer for the Bangles) and Josie (who really is a chick drummer), who is following along at home and requested Adam Ant, though what I am currently playing is Adam & the Ants instead.

A while back, Newscoma mentioned something about having seen Adam Ant in Nashville and I think I failed to comment at the time. If it was Adam Ant with The Romantics opening at the new Opry in 1984, my friends and I were standing on the front row for most of the show, the girls all dressed in camouflage miniskirts with matching skinny ties that, for some unknown reason, we all had had made just for that occasion because we thought it would look cool. Dorks.

It was cold but clear when we walked into the show. When we walked out, snow and ice were everywhere and it took us four or five hours to get home because we had to drive so slow all the way back to West Tennessee.

OK, too much New Wave and neon flashback there – back to cooler stuff again.

Hey Hey, We’re The… (More Liveblogging Radio Lynnster)

Oh, come on. It’s not like none of y’all (well, some of y’all) didn’t know it was coming.

Go listen to your bad ’80s hair metal (Slaughter who? Winger wha…?) and quit e-mailing me, Steve. : P

And buy me the DVD box sets for my birthday while you’re at it.

Can’t Do Much More Damage After Having Just Played The Osmonds

My retarded friend Stevie Kane, who is monitoring my Last.fm playlist live by RSS feed tonight (GEEK!!!) and making sure to e-mail smartass commentary after every track, can kiss my butt here, and I don’t care what anybody says. Bread’s “Everything I Own” is still one of the best lost love songs EVER.

Again, as Newscoma would say – shut up.

An Unwilling & Involuntary MySpace Monitor, Ugh

As I have mentioned before, I am pretty active in the music aspect of MySpace nowadays. That said, something MySpace related has come up that I wasn’t quite counting on when I made my profile and started getting active over there in the music side of things.

A couple of weeks ago KathyT and I got in a brief and small discussion in my blog’s comments about MySpace, where she mentioned she had a profile there too, but mainly to keep an eye on what her kids are up to. I’ve had a similar online conversation in the past with one of the legends of L.A.’s punk rock scene in the ’70s, who is now stepmother to a couple of teenage girls; as well as more similar conversations both online and off with others in their thirties and forties and fifties who have MySpace profiles for basically the same reason. Granted, there’s quite a large (less than the younger set, but still quite large) population of the over-30 crowd who are childless or didn’t make profiles on MySpace for such reasons, yep. But probably the majority of those are – like me – there because of the music resources available on MySpace.

Most of my friends from high school and college days, and later, have kids that are teenagers or in college now. Naturally, most of them have MySpace profiles. So when I have spare time for goofing off, sometimes I’ll just click around looking to see what they’re up to. Since I don’t really get home very often and most of my college and later-life friends are spread out all over, some of these kids I haven’t seen since they were babies; some I’ve never seen in person at all. There’s a few I’ve seen at regular intervals over the years, but for the most part, most of them I haven’t seen much if at all. So it’s been really neat to be able to not only see what these kids look like as young adults and teenagers, but being able to get to see what kind of people they’ve become (and in some cases, I’m sure, learning stuff about them via their profiles that some of their parents likely haven’t a clue about, though in other cases I’m sure their parents are monitoring at least somewhat).

Since I have no children of my own, I’ve kind of gotten to enjoy that godmother/cool aunt kind of role with a lot of the kids I’ve seen most of their lives, including my younger relatives. Now, that part’s great, because especially with the teenage girls, no matter how much of a bitch their mom’s being and how much they hate her at the moment, I’m still cool. One of my oldest and dearest friends totally flipped me the bird behind her teenage daughter’s head one time because the child hadn’t spoken to her in full sentences in weeks; yet the second I walked in the door, the kid went from surly to happy motormouth in seconds.

(Of course, this is the same kid who has this oh-so-serious, Sylvia Plath-worshiping, emo MySpace profile, and declared mine and her mom’s MySpace profiles immature and obnoxious and rolled her eyes, but, well, what can I say? She’s right!!)

Anyway, the few I have been around most of their lives or have known mostly as they got older, the kids will sometimes talk to me about stuff that they wouldn’t necessarily be so open about with their parents. Or my significant other’s younger siblings in their twenties now, who have sometimes confided in me about something with the stipulation “DON’T tell (their brother)”. I reckon I’m pretty easy to talk to and most of them are pretty comfortable with me; and depending on what it’s about, you know, generally, I’m not going to rat ‘em out. If it’s some dire emergency that’s one thing, but it’s usually not. And info that comes my way that way, I just kind of weigh whatever as an individual case and go from there.

So far I’ve never had to rat out any of those who’ve trusted me with something like that. In fact, quite the opposite – I got ratted on one time instead by one of them, who’d come to me with a strict “you can’t tell my mom or my brother”, but then that one proceeded to spill all himself to both, including the fact that I knew about whatever it was. In the end, we all just laughed and decided keeping secrets was just impossible in the family, but for about five minutes I wanted to wring that one’s neck, heh.

But back to the MySpace thing. As I said, the majority of my friends’ kids who are on MySpace, I haven’t seen since they were babies, if at all. And, to be fair, the majority of them seem like really good kids who aren’t up to anything worrisome at all. Some of them, maybe up to a little more teenage shenanigans than others, yes; but so far I haven’t run across anything to be concerned about, or at least nothing any worse than their parent/parents and I did at their age.

Except for one, and her MySpace profile is a little worrisome and concerning. And somewhat unfortunately, not only does she happen to be the teenage daughter of one of my very best and most longtime friends… but her mom and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms at present.

That’s a whole other story I’m not going to go into, other than to say we’ve both kinda got valid reasons to be pissed at each other; nothing emergently terrible happened, we just both got our feelings hurt over a couple of things and haven’t quite gotten around to making amends yet. Which is, on both our parts, probably not really on purpose. We’ve been the closest of friends since we were teenagers ourselves; but as adults, even when things were fine and there were no issues between us, we’ve always had a habit of playing extended rounds of telephone tag with each other, sometimes for months on end.

And this is a kid I’ve seen regularly over the years, but not in a very long time.

This also is a kid who I laughed for years when she was a small child, joking to her mom that she wasn’t gonna know what hit her when that one became a teenager, and her mother pooh-poohed that notion over and over. After all, her mom was like the QUEEN of sneaking out of the house, circumventing being grounded, and all manner of other kinds of teenage trouble in her day. She was just SURE that when her own daughter got to be that age, she wasn’t going to be able to get away with anything because Mom would already have her number on stuff before daughter even thought about it.

Then she called me one night when her daughter was about 13 or 14 and admitted I’d been right all along, now at her wit’s end. I laughed and tried not say “I told you so,” but I did anyway, and we had a good laugh about it while she began outlining all her woes of being the mother of a teenage girl.

Anyway, well, now thanks to the “magic” of MySpace, I’m kinda now in this awkward position. What I’ve witnessed of this child’s activities is not really “dire emergency” stuff, but it’s stuff that is a bit concerning and worrisome. On the one hand, I have to look at it all and then remember some of mine and her mother’s “finer” moments back in the day, and then I think to myself, “OK, this kind of bothers me but is it really any worse than anything we ever did?”

And having to remember that times have kind of changed since back then too. One friend’s 13-year-old daughter and my longtime co-worker’s now-college-age daughter have kind of schooled me on a lot of that stuff, which is probably a lot of the problem I’m wrestling with right now. I know TOO MUCH “modern kidspeak”. I can read some of that stuff and break the code, as it were, and figure out exactly what they’re up to in a lot of cases.

But here’s the other thing about this whole thing – I’m also not sure that the kid in question is not just making a lot of the stuff she puts out there up, that it’s not just some bullshit she’s adopted on MySpace for the sake of coolness among her peers. And another thing? She’s almost 18 anyway.

Obviously I’m not going to outline the specifics here, but that’s a big reason right there why I haven’t already picked up the phone to her mother yet (who I know without a doubt probably doesn’t even touch the computer, much less check out stuff on MySpace). There’s enough doubt and enough evidence that it’s mostly BS that I’m hesitant to blow what may well be just a cover there. Sure I’m struggling with not wanting to rat the kid out unless absolutely necessary. And sure, the other side of the coin is better safe than sorry…? But it’s going to be a real embarrassment for the girl if she’s just been all talk and all BS and no action, really it is, not to mention she’ll hate me for getting her mom pissed at her. It’s not some dire, major emergency, and nobody’s going to likely wind up hurt or dead. It’s just stupid teenage stuff, and stuff she shouldn’t be into… but there’s a real good chance she’s just pretending and it’s all an act anyway.

So for now, I’m still wrestling with this issue. And don’t worry, I’m not just sticking with my own judgment – I’ve even consulted my OWN mother on it to see what she thinks I should or shouldn’t do, and she pretty much agreed with me that it may be just pretending and pretentious and not worth stirring up.

So there ya go. I hate being in this position, no doubt. And nothing like getting stuck in a position like this to make one finally maybe feel like a real grown-up. And yuck, you know what? I don’t like it. Ugh.

Interior Decorating Continueth…

OK, I feel a little more moved in here now to the new blog now that I have my Last.fm music charts/stats back up (and on their own page, no less). I know most people/readers don’t care, but I do, and my old friend Stevie Kane has been about to die not being able to see what I’m listening to at any hour of the day. He is weird like that, pay him no mind.

I have a couple of things to add and modify, probably over the weekend, that I just didn’t have time for before Christmas, and then I’ll be mostly fine with things here. Just a little additional straightening up. WordPress is so easy to manage that it has severely lessened my usual extreme anal retentiveness about such things that I normally would have spent a couple hundred hours on. Compared to past efforts, the new blog has taken practically no time. I’ve quickly become a big WordPress fan in the last few weeks.

I’ve learned from talking with a few people that a lot of folks don’t know WordPress is free, but it is indeed. You can pay for some upgrading (like having your own domain) but the free version has most of the basic bells and whistles – other than not being able to use Javascript, it’s missing nothing I had before and a lot of functions are a huge improvement from what I had before. I highly recommend it, I don’t think anyone using that thing that rhymes with Dogger (old or new) will be disappointed! If nothing else, try it out for free and play around with it and see what you think. It totally rocks for me.