SST & More

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1. My scene is the 80's, today. Not sure if you and I had the same 80's though, musically speaking.

2. The first punk (post-punk) show I ever went to. They opened with this song and played the prelude for what seemed like 10 minutes at the old Lost Horizon in Syracuse. The crowd was screaming insanely when Jello finally started singing...

3. The Minutmen really did jam econo. Even their success was pretty small - their talent was pretty outsized though.

4. Love and Rockets struck me as super talented. Their musical style changed a lot with each album and it was pretty good every time.

5. I liked Husker Du. They were pretty good background music - never loved 'em, never minded 'em. If the 80's had a soundtrack for me, Husker Du would hold down the unremarkable sixth slot on the album. Listening to this I think maybe I missed out a little by not paying attention to them.

6. This is a great song, a crossover hit for Los Lobos. The politics implicit in the video are almost innocent compared to today's spittle flecked rhetoric.

7. This is the song that turned me on to music. My buddy Mark got the first Stevie Ray album and put it on the turntable and we listened to this first track together and just say there staring at each other going "holy shit!" and a bunch of other expletives. We played the first track about 10 times. I was about 15. The guitar playing just hooked me and after this I started exploring blues and jazz, and punk. Sorta missed a lot of the new wave stuff unless it was punky or had some interesting musical twist to it. I sort of followed the trail from him to Hendrix to Velvet Underground and so on, started following musicians around and seeing who played with whom, and basically exploring music the way I sometimes do here on Fridays. But Stevie Ray Vaughn is the guy to thank for it. If I'd never head this song and the album it was on, it's likely I never would have paid attention to or cared about music.



Just damn. The day his helicopter went down I was on field exercises in the Army. I found out about it around 2 in the afternoon and had to excuse myself from the Tactical Operations Center and go have a lie down in the dirt for a half hour to recompose.