Mid-February

This week's selections, while few, are a hilarious sampling of what I was into about 10 years ago. I promise, I was not a pothead. My musical taste was, though.

22. Rusted Root - When I Woke

Here is my Rusted Root story:

"You wanna go with me to Memphis in May and see Rusted Root tonight?" "Heck yeah!" - this is a conversation I had about 12 or 13 years ago. I wish I still had convos like that now, and the fun that usually comes soon after.

I think it was just before summer break in 1999, the end of my first year at Mississippi College (not exactly a party school, but we still found ways to have fun - usually involving getting as far away from campus as possible). I had become pretty good friends with this cool girl named Sally. She was very free-spirited and a lot of fun. She had an extra ticket to Memphis in May*. Seeing as school was out and my birthday was just around the corner, I needed a fun trip to celebrate.

The plan was to drive up, meet up with some friends of hers at the show, and drive back that same night. Memphis is "only" 3 hours away, so it was doable. We got there in the early afternoon and stopped off at the home of a friend of Sally's before heading downtown. After visiting with them for a while, we drove down near Beale and somehow found a place to park. I remember we managed to get something to eat at Blues City cafe, and then made our way down to Tom Lee park. This was my first visit to the festival and it was an awesome people-watching spectacle. LOADS of hippies, baby hipsters and frat boys all around. There were lots of vendors set up selling jewelry, "water pipes," you name it. I guess we eventually found her friends and settled in for some Rusted Root. We probably saw some other acts before they came on, but I don't remember now. I had not been super familiar with RR's music before this show, but it was still fun.

We headed back to Jackson pretty late, probably around 11:00 or midnight. Sally drove a blue Pontiac 6000, which, coincidentally, was exactly the same kind of car I had in high school. It was 1999, so I am not sure I even had a cell phone, and if I did, it wasn't with me. Sally had a bag phone, I think. The Pontiac 6000, while it was a nice car for a young student to drive, was lacking in one particular feature: it had no warning light for the gas gauge.

Sally and I are talking and laughing, listening to Edie Brickell and trying not to fall asleep, and we're getting closer to Clinton. Suddenly, the 6000 starts sputtering, and slowing down. We are now wide awake. She looks down at the dashboard and realizes that we have run out of gas. No big deal, it's only 2:00 in the morning and we're on I-220 near the Medgar Evers exit. Just two 21-year old gals! Totally safe.

We think for a minute about walking to the gas station that's just off the exit ramp on Medgar Evers, but knowing the area and the time of night, we decide against it. She pulls out the bag phone and we try to think about who to call. Remember, this is the end of the school year. School was out, actually. Sally was from the coast, and the only reason she was still in town was because she was an RA, and they had to stay an extra day or two for some reason. I don't know why I was still around. Probably just for this trip. Anyway, the point is, there was nobody left in the dorms to call. Except for our friend Carol, who also happened to be the Resident Director of our dorm. Carol was and is a very sweet person; so sweet in fact that we really hated to call and wake her up like that. But this was a pretty desperate situation, so we called her. About 20 minutes later, she and another friend and her boyfriend come to help us. I'm sure they all thought we had lost our minds, but they were nice enough not to make us feel worse about it. We got some gas, made it back to the dorm, and crashed out for probably 12 hours or so.

Was it worth it? Totally. Would I do that again? Probably not.

Rusted Root put on a good show if I remember correctly, but I never became a superfan. Maybe if I had been a pothead? Their music is just a little too earthy/bongo-y for me now. But I always smile when I think about that trip.

*Later, when I lived in Memphis, I learned that it is actually called "Beale Street Music Festival," but nobody down here really calls it that. (Memphis in May actually encompasses the entire month of May, because there are different festivals going on every weekend, but I'm showing my snobbery as a former Memphian and digressing. Sorry!)


23. Mix CD from 2001 or Thereabouts

So there will be several of these throughout this project. Like a lot of music nerds, I used to make tons of mixtapes. When tapes finally went out, and I got a CD burner**, it became mix CDs. Most of them I only made for myself to listen to in the car, but of course some of them I made for friends or cute boys. I always made copies of the ones I made for cute boys.

I am pretty sure this is a copy of one I made for a guy I was seeing off and on in Memphis. It was a very silly relationship that I wasted a lot of time on. But of course at the time I just knew we were meant to be, and this mixtape was going to propel us forward into the throes of mutual "like."

The disc begins with Phish's "Theme from the Bottom," a deliciously pathetic tune. I don't think I could've been more obvious. There's some obscure Dave Matthews, some Ben Harper, Ani DiFranco, Jeff Buckley, and even (cringe) some Jack Johnson. In my defense, he was just becoming popular at the time. I had no idea all his songs would wind up sounding exactly the same.

I don't know what I was thinking giving this guy a CD like this. Overall it has a very dark and dreary feel. I guess I wanted him to think I was deep? But really, I think I just looked extremely desperate/borderline psycho. Jeff Buckley singing "I know we could be so happy baby/if we wanted to be"? Poor Jeff, who had just died a few years earlier in Memphis, had to have been rolling in his grave, telling me to stop.

I will say that one line from Ben Harper's "Show Me a Little Shame" still sticks out and sums up the way my relationship was with this guy to a T. "You change your mind so many times/I wonder if you have a mind at all/And I'd rather be by myself/than to have your lonesome company come to call." I do think I put that one on there on purpose.

**I still recall going to Best Buy to purchase a CD burner and installing it myself in my tower hard drive. Still proud that I could do something like that, but WTF, really? I bet I paid nearly $100 for that thing.

When I think about my college/grad school years in the late '90s/early '00s, it often seems like it was really just a year or two ago. But then... bag phones? Pontiacs with no gas warning lights? installing a CD burner into a desktop computer that takes up half your living room? 3-day passes to Memphis in May were $36 in 1999. They are $65 today. Pontiacs don't exist anymore. My work computer doesn't even have a CD drive in it at all. So... ok, I'll concede. It's been a long time! But how fun it is to look back and see how far we have come.