Well I guess I couldn’t have been more wrong about the Super Bowl. I’m disappointed, but at least it was a good game. Props to the Saints who played well, and props also to Peyton Manning who was total class in defeat. Yeah, you know that’s Archie’s boy.
I made myself finish the other book I was in the middle of before getting into When You Reach Me, Craig Ferguson’s American on Purpose. Excellent bio, I have to say. It is a really good telling of his story, mostly staying away from details about The Drew Carey Show and The Late Late Show because I get the feeling he’s saving that for another book, but he hits enough of it all to really make you see what you already know if you watch his show regularly: this guy loves America. I was moved to tears more than once.
I’m midway through When You Reach Me and it’s everything it promised, so far. Can’t wait to get some time to get into it again.
Something you might not have heard of if you haven’t been in a high-school English class for more than a decade is a word wall. Lots of language teachers create them, and they get created lots of different ways. I haven’t done word walls for a few reasons, but the main one is that I suck at teaching vocab. The vocab workshop I attended at the beginning of last summer gave me tons of good ideas, though, and it had me thinking of ways to approach a word wall in my English class. One other obstacle was that my walls are covered with posters and signs and cool stuff like that, so a word wall is tough to find space for.
Then one day some of my silly juniors were goofing off with the round magnets I keep on my whiteboard. My room’s ceiling is acoustic tile, that dry, crumbly stuff that comes in panels of about two feet by three feet and rests upon thin metal brackets, and above which all the wiring and fire-alarm stuff is strung. The silly juniors took the magnets from my whiteboard and stuck them on the metal braces. They thought I was going to be mad or at least miffed, but I looked up there and saw a hundred cool, fun ideas, including a possible place to put my word wall.
The configuration of my teaching space has left one whiteboard pretty much useless except for doodling space for my students (I love to let them play around with the whiteboard) and my weekly to-do list. I’m thinking of printing the vocab words on cardstock, then cutting each word out and sticking adhesive magnet strips on the back of each. Then the whiteboard becomes my word wall, and if I decide I can find a way for them to do it safely, I’ll have the kiddies use the ceiling space for some of our vocab activities.
Yeah, baby. That could be so neato. I went to Walmart this evening to buy the adhesive magnet tape. Something that specific can be tough to locate in a place like that, and it was, but I had a really good feeling it would be there, and it was. I’m kind of amped about that.
McD’s has a new dipping sauce for the McNuggets. Sweet chili sauce. It’s pretty good. Why doesn’t McD’s do that more often? You’d think it’d be easy to introduce, say, a new sauce each month, and rotate them in and out periodically. What about a hoisin sauce, or a Chinese plum sauce? Or a katsu sauce?
Women sometimes ask what the deal is with guys and spectator sports. They say they get the whole participatory sports thing, but what’s so great about watching sports on television? And why is there such fanaticism tied to certain teams?
It’s not an easy question to answer, and it’s different things to different guys. One part of it, though, is the fact that at the professional level, guys are watching other guys do stuff they have only fantasized about. The ability to play a game at that level is kind of a mind-blowing thing. After my trip to Cooperstown with JB, I spent a couple of days at JB’s place and we went to a Richmond Braves game. That’s AAA baseball, one step below the Major Leagues. What impressed me most (besides what I thought was a lovely stadium for a minor-league team) was how excellent the level of play was. These guys were darn-good baseball players, yet they weren’t good enough to be playing in the Majors. It reminds you how good those guys at the highest level really are.
When you’ve watched professional sports for a long time, you get used to being amazed. Records are broken every year. Every season, someone is doing something that hasn’t been done in decades. I imagine that from the point of view of someone who’s not a fan, it must seem kind of boring the way fans are always using superlatives in talking about some achievement, because next year there are going to be a whole new set of achievements unheard of.
A funny thing happens to sports fans when they’ve turned from boys to men. They stop idolizing the players they see on the field. Men can still be passionate about the games they watch, but they are seeing younger men playing a game, now, where they used to see heroes. There’s quite a difference. My love of and appreciation for baseball and football is deeper now than it’s ever been, but it becomes more and more difficult to really, really impress me.
That’s why Peyton Manning is so amazing to me. It’s rare enough to see a player play the game as well as you think your boyhood heroes played the game. To see a guy like Manning, who actually plays it that way but better, is a thing of beauty. I’m old enough to remember when quarterbacks called their own plays, something that’s hasn’t been commonplace for decades now. No matter how good guys like Favre and Brady are, there’s a part of me that thinks in some ways they were never as good as Stabler, Griese, Tarkenton, and the original Manning, guys who knew enough about the game to call their plays. Smart guys who knew football, not just robots who went out there and did what they were told.
Peyton Manning calls his own plays, and he does it better than any of those guys. Manning is playing the game at a level far above and far deeper than anyone I’ve ever seen. As smart as those guys from the 70s were, they didn’t watch film until 10:00 at night. Ken Stabler is my favorite football player of all time, and I know that he couldn’t wait to break out of practice so he could get drunk and/or get laid. Stabler was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a grinder.
I heard this story on the radio today that I almost couldn’t believe. According to Tony Dungy, Manning’s coach for his whole career until this season, when the Colts drafted Anthony Gonzalez out of Ohio State in 2007, Gonzalez (an Academic All-American) was still in school until early June. A lot of drafted players get to go to rookie camp in May, but Gonzalez wasn’t done with his semester, so twice a week in May, Peyton Manning drove from Indianapolis to Columbus to have one-hour, one-on-one workouts with Gonzalez. Just a few months after winning the Super Bowl with receivers like Reggie Wayne and Marvin Harrison, Manning was driving three hours each way to throw footballs to a rookie wide receiver.
All by itself, that’s merely impressive. When you realize it’s just one example of the kind of leadership and work ethic Manning possesses, what you see on Sundays during games is just not a surprise. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s a thing unlike anything I’ve seen in thirty years of fandom. Manning is playing the game differently, not only more excellently than those who’ve played before him, but a different way, at what seems to be a completely different level.
All of this doesn’t mean he’s unbeatable. You’d think a guy with all his talent and brains and football acumen would have won more Super Bowls than Trent Dilfer, but at least for a few more hours, this is not the case. He’s fallible. He’s beatable. It’s possible that his own skill at his position hampers his team (the Colts have never had a great running game, and at least one of my friends say it’s because Manning is such a good thrower). Still, what he does on the field blows my mind, and when you add to that the exemplary way he conducts himself off the field, you’ve got the ingredients for a full-blown mancrush. I love Peyton Manning.
Prediction: Colts 31, Saints 23. I actually think it’s going to be 31-20, but something won’t let me predict an eleven-point differential, so call it Colts by 8.
I finally got my hands on these, and I’m kinda stoked that When You Reach Me doesn’t yet have the gold medallion on it.
If you haven’t heard of the title on the left, all you have to know is that the main character tries to solve a puzzle and she carries a copy of A Wrinkle in Time with her everywhere. The premise itself is Newbery-worthy, if you ask me. I just can’t wait to immerse myself in this; I’m so excited I feel kind of tingly.
I’m post-nasal-dripping like a madman today. Turned in early and am writing this during one of my mid-night trips to the bathroom. It’s only 11:40 and this is the first. That’s not a good sign.
The broken photocopier was an eyesore. It had been taking up physical and visual space for as long as any of us in the Baptist Student Union could remember. Someone in the dorm had the key to the BSU director’s office and because of the recent turnover in directors and fill-in directors, none of the current administration knew that copy of the key existed.
Not a big deal, really. It’s not like it was the key to a pantry or a cashbox or anything you could really cause mischief with. So some people in the dorm (I’m not saying who!) just used that key to pull silly pranks on Liz, the newest BSU director. One night, mountains of ancient, never-used-anymore books from the so-called BSU library found their way past the locked office door, to be hauled back to the useless library shelves the next morning by Mark, the year-long semester missionary from Oklahoma. Another night, one of those orange hazard blinky light things you see on the roads at night when lanes need to be closed sent out its beacon of warning from within the walls of that office.
Mark wasn’t given the task of undoing that one. Instead, Liz asked me (directly, as if she assumed I had some kind of inside knowledge!) to tell the perpetrators of this fun prank to please return the thing to wherever it came from before the next morning. I assured her that I would relay the message, and of course the next morning it was gone. The pranks were never malicious or meant to cause serious problems, you see, so once the mischief was done it wasn’t a big deal for the pranksters to undo it if they were asked nicely, which I always made sure to pass along.
One morning, Liz found the old, unworking photocopier sitting atop her desk. No blinking lights coming from this thing; it was dead dead dead, and clearly the message from the perpetrator(s) was that this thing had been in the way for long enough. Rather than return it to its spot atop an old cabinet in the fellowship area, Mark and Jamie (Liz’s husband, a music teacher at HBA) moved it into the hall so it could be taken care of.
You see? It wasn’t just about mischief for these college-aged pranksters. There was often some kind of message involved, like why the heck do we have a BSU library that nobody ever borrows books from (when the library was finally gotten rid of, I rescued a book called the BSU Handbook or something like that, which was so old it contained a section on membership cards for BSUers, and another book, a four-hundred page tome called A Brief History of the Southern Baptists. Brief?) or happy birthday to our wonderful BSU director! Here’s a whole carton of ice cream left overnight on your desk!
A couple of weeks later (I could be wrong about the length of time), the copier was still there. Then one night while we were watching a UHM baseball or volleyball game in the dorm lounge, K___, one of our dorm managers, stuck his head into the lounge and asked if one of us would help him carry the copier up to his pickup truck, from where he would be taking it to the dump the next day.
It was kind of a good lesson for us. Of course K___ was being asked to do such a chore while a great game was on television, and of course he was asking us to help him at such an inconvenient time. I’m not pointing fingers, but K___ was a married man, and it seemed to us that the timing was probably not his.
But we all loved K___ and J___, our (married) dorm managers so we did what they asked whenever they asked it. Still, there was a game on, so I told K___ that JB and I would be happy to move it to his truck later. K___ had one of those weird jobs in agriculture (he was a soil agronomist) that meant he sort of kept farmers’ hours. He was almost always in bed by nine because he was almost always on the road well before five. We told him he could turn in and we’d make sure the copier was in the truck before he left early the next morning.
Some time after the game ended, we moved that ridiculously heavy thing, and as we walked from the parking lot to the dorm, I said, “We should take that thing apart.” It was kind of a funny thought, and far too fun-sounding not to try. We grabbed screwdrivers and returned to the parking lot, climbing into the bed of the pickup truck to do the deed. In the middle of our work, we discovered that the copier had its own built-in carrying handles that slid out on each end. That’s the kind of thing that might have made our original task (not to mention the task of whoever had left it in the director’s office) a heck of a lot easier. Too late, though.
It took really long. A photocopier’s got a ridiculous number of screws. But we did unscrew them all, leaving a wonderfully satisfying mess where once had been a horribly ugly eyesore. One of us dug up a business card from somewhere, scratching out the text on the face and writing new calling info on the back.
One of our dorm-mates, G____, had been having trouble getting his moped back together. It had been working just fine, but he’d taken it apart one day on the front porch and it had been a ridiculous eyesore for weeks. We razzed him about it incessantly, much to his annoyance, but it had been weeks and the stupid thing was still taking up all that porch space. So we wrote on the business card, G___ A_____ Copier and Moped Repair, adding the address and phone number (and G_____’s room number!). We tucked the card under K___’s windshield wiper and went to bed, a lot tireder than we’d expected.
JB’s room’s windows opened right out on the parking lot, right where K___’s truck was always parked. JB said that early early the next morning (only a couple of hours after we’d finished the job) he was awakened by the great sound of K___’s laughter.
I’m laughing now just remembering it, ‘though now that I think about it, I find this part difficult to believe. JB sometimes didn’t wake up when his freakishly loud alarm clock went off and wakened everyone else in the building; I don’t see how he could have been awakened by K___’s laughter out in the parking lot.
Later that evening, JB and I found in our mailboxes typed letters from K___.
Dear G___ A_____ Copier Repair:
Thank you so much for the excellent job you did on our photocopier. Never have I seen such thorough work: Whatever the problem was, you certainly took care of it! I’ll be sure to recommend your work to all of my friends!
Waking up early was a good plan. I didn’t wake up SUPER early, but early enough to toss out a cabinet full of canned good that had to go. They had to go quite a long time ago, actually: It was my Y2K survival cabinet. Yes, the cans had bloated and one of them had even popped (something I had been unaware of), leaving a sticky black mess. Luckily, that cabinet was lined with shelf paper so I just tore out the shelf paper and it all looks pretty good now. Also tossed out a large carton of rolled oats (I only make steel-cut oats now, and I have a feeling this carton had been infested with crawlies) and a few other things that were past their time. Of course, since that stuff was all in a cabinet, you can’t tell by looking that I’ve done anything. However, I know what I’ve done.
I think this will be my plan for a while: wake up early to do some housecleaning. It seems to work for me.
In which our hero is too tired to get any housecleaning done…
Ugh. So super super super tired. I’m going to turn in a little bit early and try to get in a good 90 minutes of throwing out trash. I’ve got the house divided into those zones (so there’s at least that) and tomorrow is a trash pick-up day, so it’s a good day to get some junk out of my kitchen cabinets and out of my fridge.
Lessons went mostly well today, but Mondays are just crazy. They’re like a series of frantic fifty-yard dashes with no real break. Tuesdays can be as bad, but since there are no academic classes on Wednesdays, there’s less stress to get ready for the next day.
There will probably be no FAWMing for me this year. I’m not ruling it out, but I’m focusing on getting the house clean this month, and I’m making that a first priority. The madness of January (professionally and personally) has passed, and February is normally something of a let-down anyway (it and October are my least-favorite months).
I still haven’t decided how I want to go about this. I could make it a time commitment: A certain number of hours of hardcore cleaning for the month, say seventy-five or so? I know that’s how NaNoEdMo does it. A time thing seems kind of lame to me, though. It’s not as fun as, say, a wordcount, a song count, or something like that. I could make it a square-footage thing. This would allow me to mark off already-clean square feet on days when I’m not up to the task (trust me: there aren’t that many already-clean square feet in my house for that to be a problem). I kinda like that idea. I could say every square foot (and all the space above it, up to the ceiling) must be cleaned. This would make certain areas, like the living room and hallway, pretty easy to manage, and other areas, like the closets and kitchen, much more of a challenge.
It would also work better with my cleaning style, which is to start at one end of a room and work across it. Stuff can be picked up and put ahead, to a section of the room that hasn’t yet been dealt with, but it cannot be put back, into a space that’s already been cleaned. This system has worked well for me for most of my adult life, but for some reason this job seems much too big to approach this way. I’m not sure why.
Another way I could mark my goal is to identify zones. I will totally clean each zone and not mess up previously cleaned zones in order to clean the currently-being-cleaned zones. This might work, especially if I allow myself one zone to be left uncleaned at the end of the month, like the walk-in closet or the cabinets in the laundry room. Something to consider.
I’ll decide in the morning. I can’t reasonably get started now anyway, even though I’m just six minutes away from February House-Cleaning Month, ’cause I still have to be up and alert for my job in the morning! You know what I need? I need about two and a half months when I don’t have to work and they still put a paycheck in my bank account every two weeks. Where can I get a job that allows me that?
Feeling better, mostly. My brain is kind of mellow, which is a nice change. Nothing keeping me up, nothing causing me too much stress. I’m a little bit sad that football season’s just about over and it’ll be a couple of months until baseball season. Sorta can’t believe how quickly the school year is going. I have one more day to reconsider making February National House Cleaning Month or whatever I’m going to call it.
I haven’t been in my classroom since late Tuesday night. That’s kind of a long time for me during a school year; it might be a record for the year. Trying not to stress out about that, but we’re about to hit crunch time for the yearbook. Ack. Divert thoughts! Divert thoughts!
A classmate of mine is up for a judicial appointment. It’s her second time up for such a position. She’s married and has twin girls. It’s a logical place for someone smart and competent in her field to go at this point in her career. She may not get this one, but I get the feeling that once your name’s on the list, it pretty much stays there until you’re finally let in, so I figure it’s not long before my friend, someone I’ve known since before we were teenagers, is a judge in this state.
I mention this because I try to picture myself in such a position. It’s weird, you know? I can pretty much hold things together professionally (I said pretty much) but the rest of my life is kind of a joke, not too different from what it was like in college. I don’t understand why my development has been so arrested. I know I’m selfish, self-absorbed, and immature, but that’s what I’m talking about. Why am I those things? Do people become mature because their circumstances demand it? I can be selfish, self-absorbed, and immature in my non-working life because nothing’s forcing me not to. I’ve held off on certain things (like dating, recently) because I’m thinking I need to get my act together first, but maybe dating forces a person to get his act together. I have a couple of friends who have other friends over once in a while because it forces them to keep their houses clean. I sorta do the same thing with my car: offer rides to people when I can give them because it forces me to keep at least the passenger-seat portion of my car tidy.
I’ve heard others in my field say that becoming the department chair forced them to grow up, professionally. Then there are the friends I have who found themselves married and with kids, not exactly by design, and they obviously became responsible whether or not they were responsible before. Heck, if you have kids who are depending on you, you have to be responsible. There’s no choice.
I wonder if I’m doing things in a backward manner. But I also wonder if I’ve got it in me to do it any other way.
You know, a lot of people use the term one-hit wonder kind of mockingly, but I was thinking about this the other night, and I think it’s more of a wonder that musicians come up with more than one hit in a lifetime. When you consider how many people there are out there trying to make hit songs, and how hard it is to create something good (I know; I’ve tried), how does anyone succeed more than once? And the worst thing about it is that you know the corporate machine that pushes its product out through the mainstream media makes it impossible for what must be THOUSANDS of really good songs ever to be heard. Think about some of your friends who write songs: surely some of the good ones are better than a lot of the stuff that gets a shot at airplay.
Then you get musicians like Billy Joel, The Eagles, Pink Floyd, and Bob Dylan who seem to have gone decades at a time without recording a bad song, and it’s kind of mind-blowing. Even a guy like Steve Miller, who wrote a lot of bad songs surrounding each good song, still put out a greatest hits collection that’s impossible not to love.
Then I think about most of what I listen to on a daily basis, and I am reminded of the fact that most of those musicians have never put out anything that could be called a “hit.” These musicians somehow found success in their niche markets, but that doesn’t make any of them hits.
So it is with respect and not derision that I present this list of my top 5 one-hit wonders, because one hit seems like such a difficult, difficult thing to make! Please pardon my obvious eighties bias.
Whatever you think about rap, you have to admit that the sampling of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and The Who’s “Eminence Front” (I think!) in 3rd Bass’s “Pop Goes the Weasel” (1991) is brilliantly executed. It feels like such a natural part of this song that you sometimes forget this is even a sample. 3rd Bass was a smart group of lyricists and I really dug their style, even though I thought the video for this song was wholly inappropriate for MTV. It’s one thing to make a serious charge (racism in the music industry) but it’s another entirely to encourage violence on specific, recognizable figures. Still, a great, great song. This compression of the mp3 in the widget here is kind of bad: you lose a lot of the cooler sampling in the verses, so I encourage you to seek a better recording.
It might be unfair to call Paul Hardcastle a one-hit wonder, because he has had several hits in his native UK, but mention his name to almost anyone my age and you immediately hear, “19″ (1985). And that’s it. I always considered it kind of weird that this was a dance song; I mean, I love the juxtaposition of the grim narrative over the cool chimey beat, but would you really want to dance to it? And was that the point? Because if it was, I think a lot of people missed it. I suspect lots and lots of people got their groove on while this song was playing in clubs. Kinda sad. Still a great song, though.
If I haven’t already made it clear, I love Humphrey Bogart. I don’t mean I really enjoy his movies; I mean I love him. Bertie Higgins, with “Key Largo” (1982), tapped into that love, something I and apparently millions of others could relate to. It was somewhat exploitative, granted, but it also seemed sincere. I really think the persona of this song is someone who digs old movies on cold nights. When this song first hit, I just liked it as a nice song. I used to sing it in the hallways with one of my friends in seventh grade. Then in ninth grade I got into old movies and discovered Bogey for myself and the song took on a whole new dimension for me. I hear there’s a follow-up with some other Bogart film’s title, but I’ve never heard it and I’m not really that interested, to be honest.
It’s tough to explain why I think so highly of Ali Thomson’s “Take a Little Rhythm” (1980). I remember that when I first heard it, my family was driving to Kuilima on Oahu’s distant north shore for a weekend retreat with my mom’s coworkers. I had just completed my first week at my new private school; my sister, still in elementary, was still enjoying her summer vacation. I was feeling strange about my new life. The song came on the radio and I liked it immediately. We heard it twice more before we finally got out of the car seemingly hours later, by then familiar enough with it to sing the choruses. That song seemed to take off like a rocket, ubiquitous without warning, and then it seemed to flame out just as quickly, absent from the airwaves two weeks later as if it never existed. You know, I might check out Thomson’s other stuff because if it’s stylistically similar to this, it might be worth a spin.
I always got the Red Rockers mixed up with Red Rider, another band who could qualify for this list, I think. My classmate Kristy was into Red Rider, which is probably the source of my confusion. “Lunatic Fringe” is a good song, but it’s not nearly as good as the Red Rockers’ “China” (1983). Again, I don’t know why I like this song so much, but there’s a weird urgent longing (mixed with maybe some wistfulness?) in the chorus that doesn’t let go of me! Adding to the current appeal is the fact that Red Rocker John Thomas Griffith is now a member of Cowboy Mouth (whose awesomeness I have trumpeted in this space before) who covered “China” on its Easy album. If you were at the Cowboy Mouth concert at the Pipeline Cafe several years ago, that was me yelling for the group to play “China.” It didn’t.
This is my real number 1, but I don’t know if it qualifies as a hit because almost nobody I know remembers it at ALL. Bourgeois Tagg’s “I Don’t Mind at All” is one of my favorite songs, and the only people I know who remember it are the ones I’ve played it for. Ugh. This is an injustice. It’s such a great song. I have one of Larry Tagg’s solo discs and two of Bourgeois’s albums. Neither are as good as Yoyo. This album is going to disappear forever into obscurity and that’s sad because it’s too good for that!
Whatever you think about rap, you have to admit that the sampling of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and The Who’s “Eminence Front” (I think!) in 3rd Bass’s “Pop Goes the Weasel” (1991) is brilliantly executed. It feels like such a natural part of this song that you sometimes forget this is even a sample. 3rd Bass was a smart group of lyricists and I really dug their style, even though I thought the video for this song was wholly inappropriate for MTV. It’s one thing to make a serious charge (racism in the music industry) but it’s another entirely to encourage violence on specific, recognizable figures. Still, a great, great song. This compression of the mp3 in the widget here is kind of bad: you lose a lot of the cooler sampling in the verses, so I encourage you to seek a better recording.
It might be unfair to call Paul Hardcastle a one-hit wonder, because he has had several hits in his native UK, but mention his name to almost anyone my age and you immediately hear, “19″ (1985). And that’s it. I always considered it kind of weird that this was a dance song; I mean, I love the juxtaposition of the grim narrative over the cool chimey beat, but would you really want to dance to it? And was that the point? Because if it was, I think a lot of people missed it. I suspect lots and lots of people got their groove on while this song was playing in clubs. Kinda sad. Still a great song, though.
If I haven’t already made it clear, I love Humphrey Bogart. I don’t mean I really enjoy his movies; I mean I love him. Bertie Higgins, with “Key Largo” (1982), tapped into that love, something I and apparently millions of others could relate to. It was somewhat exploitative, granted, but it also seemed sincere. I really think the persona of this song is someone who digs old movies on cold nights. When this song first hit, I just liked it as a nice song. I used to sing it in the hallways with one of my friends in seventh grade. Then in ninth grade I got into old movies and discovered Bogey for myself and the song took on a whole new dimension for me. I hear there’s a follow-up with some other Bogart film’s title, but I’ve never heard it and I’m not really that interested, to be honest.
It’s tough to explain why I think so highly of Ali Thomson’s “Take a Little Rhythm” (1980). I remember that when I first heard it, my family was driving to Kuilima on Oahu’s distant north shore for a weekend retreat with my mom’s coworkers. I had just completed my first week at my new private school; my sister, still in elementary, was still enjoying her summer vacation. I was feeling strange about my new life. The song came on the radio and I liked it immediately. We heard it twice more before we finally got out of the car seemingly hours later, by then familiar enough with it to sing the choruses. That song seemed to take off like a rocket, ubiquitous without warning, and then it seemed to flame out just as quickly, absent from the airwaves two weeks later as if it never existed. You know, I might check out Thomson’s other stuff because if it’s stylistically similar to this, it might be worth a spin.
I always got the Red Rockers mixed up with Red Rider, another band who could qualify for this list, I think. My classmate Kristy was into Red Rider, which is probably the source of my confusion. “Lunatic Fringe” is a good song, but it’s not nearly as good as the Red Rockers’ “China” (1983). Again, I don’t know why I like this song so much, but there’s a weird urgent longing (mixed with maybe some wistfulness?) in the chorus that doesn’t let go of me! Adding to the current appeal is the fact that Red Rocker John Thomas Griffith is now a member of Cowboy Mouth (whose awesomeness I have trumpeted in this space before) who covered “China” on its Easy album. If you were at the Cowboy Mouth concert at the Pipeline Cafe several years ago, that was me yelling for the group to play “China.” It didn’t.
This is my real number 1, but I don’t know if it qualifies as a hit because almost nobody I know remembers it at ALL. Bourgeois Tagg’s “I Don’t Mind at All” is one of my favorite songs, and the only people I know who remember it are the ones I’ve played it for. Ugh. This is an injustice. It’s such a great song. I have one of Larry Tagg’s solo discs and two of Bourgeois’s albums. Neither are as good as Yoyo. This album is going to disappear forever into obscurity and that’s sad because it’s too good for that!