January 28, 2016

The Most Eagerly Anticipated

The year is 1994.  Our Hero, horribly damaged by his failed expedition to grad school, has found himself a job where his (at the time) nigh-on encyclopedic knowledge of music actually has a use: he's a shift nabob in the music department at BigBlueBoxStore.  For once I'm going to brag about myself here: we were easily the best music store in town, and I was arguably the main reason why.  Between my radio experience, my personal collection, and a willingness to listen to anything except Country (and even some of that, too!), I could help just about any customer find something they'd like.  The other members of the music department would always come to me if their customer had managed to stump them on a song title... "Hey, Wonderduck, the song goes 'Juliet, the dice were loaded from the start...', who is that?"... and chances were pretty darn high I'd get it right. 

Remember, kids, this was before Google.

Or the internet, really.

I had been hearing rumors from various radio and music trade pubs (Billboard used to be the cat's meow, lemme tell ya!) that there was a movie coming out based on a comic book which sounded promising, but it was the soundtrack that had those of us in the music department drooling.  There was no way the purported lineup could be real.  Stone Temple Pilots, Pantera, Rage Against The Machine, MLWTTKK, Henry Rollins, the Violent Femmes, and The Cure?  And there's no way Nine Inch Nails could really be part of it.

Right?

After a really really lousy day at work today, I got myself some fast food (first cheeseburgers in two months!) and settled in front of the TV to watch... something.  I practically didn't care what, just as long as it didn't have anything to do with claims processing.  After scanning through my list of recorded shows (who would have thought that Red Vs Blue would be on television?), I settled on a movie I hadn't seen in years: The Crow.

Suddenly, all those memories of BigBlueBox came rushing back.  Nobody believed me when I first talked about the soundtrack's artist lineup.  Eventually the movie was announced as coming out in May, but for whatever reason the Powers That Be decided to release the CD / cassette in March.

Know what?  I have no idea where I was trying to go with this, other than "holy crap, Nine Inch Nails first song in two years" and "wow, sold 100 copies of the CD in one day."  Screw it.  Here's the NIN song:

...which is actually a cover of a Joy Division song. 

This could have been an epic post, I think, if it hadn't've happened nearly half a lifetime ago and my memories weren't hazy.  But it did, and they are.  Still love the soundtrack, though.

Never mind.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:41 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 477 words, total size 3 kb.

1 The 90s were a weird kind of golden age for soundtracks. The Until The End Of The World movie was a mess, but its soundtrack is chock full of awesome. See also, any number of action movies.

Posted by: GreyDuck at January 29, 2016 08:20 AM (rKFiU)

2 > The 90s were a weird kind of golden age for soundtracks.
> The Until The End Of The World movie was a mess, but its
> soundtrack is chock full of awesome.

Hadn't heard that one, but am probably going to pick it up. Looks eclectic to say the least.    (My own favorite part of the record bins has often been Various Artists, though it does help to be unashamed to use  "skip"  as well as "repeat.") 

A random 90s favorite:  The Horse Whisperer (the "music from and inspired by" disc, not the Thomas Newman score), which actually got me into a couple of artists to whom I'd paid insufficient attention.

And then at the end of the decade came the "Songcatcher" soundtrack.  Not a very good movie -- I was glad I blundered across it in a hotel room  rather than paying money in a theater and thus feeling obliged to sit through to the end -- but the album is well worth it, if only as an open invitation to fly down the Interstate with all four windows down and Maria McKee wailin' away with the knob turned to 11... 

Posted by: Ad absurdum per aspera at January 29, 2016 03:46 PM (Xqqhu)

3 Maria McKee?  If she still sounds anything like she did when she was with Lone Justice or her first solo album, this is something I need to hear, toot sweet!

As an aside, looking for the original video for "Ways To Be Wicked" coughs up this beauty, including original MTV bumper.  It also leads to Tom Petty's version of the song, which I totally didn't know he wrote.  Doublebedammed.

Posted by: Wonderduck at January 29, 2016 06:27 PM (KiM/Y)

4 Oh, Maria McKee.  I still listen to her first solo album regularly (in fact I started when her name came up).  I haven't listened to everything she's done in the 2000's, but some of the songs I've sampled led me to believe that she lost a step or two sometime in the 2000's.  She can still sing, and even sing well, but she lost that natural combination of twanging, growling, and wailing while nailing sonorous highs and dissolving into steady, resonant lows.

Posted by: Ben at January 29, 2016 07:58 PM (S4UJw)

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