March 09, 2012

Saturday Night Tunage XIII : Friday Night Fish Fry!

Saturday Night Tunage, starring DJ Wonderduck, has returned!  "But DJ Wonderduck," I hear you saying, "it's not Saturday.  How can it be time for Saturday Night Tunage?"  Well, there's an interesting story behind that... originally, this series was to be on Friday, and be called "The Friday Night Fish Fry, with DJ Wonderduck."  Kinda like the title of this post, actually.

Okay, it wasn't that interesting of a story.  But it was a story, no way you can deny that!  Anyway!  You don't come to Saturday Night Tunage The Friday Night Fish Fry to hear stories, you come for the music... so let's get right to it!  And we've got a theme, to boot... Wonderduck goes to Minnesota!  And I swear that it's all true to the best of my memories.  The coincidences are firmly entrenched in my brain.


The Cure - Fascination Street (Extended Mix)


The year was 1991.  A young Wonderduck, recently graduated from Duck U., has just been informed that he's been accepted to graduate school.  After some initial celebration, Our Hero realizes that he doesn't know anybody in the city he's going to be moving to... and he has no way to peruse apartment listings.  Now, I'm sure there's some callow yoots out there, asking why I didn't just look 'em up on the Intarwebs.  The answer to that is easy: it was 1991!  The Intertoobs as we know it today didn't exist.  Here, this'll make it all perfectly clear: I had a Prodigy account.  It came with 30 e-mails a month... FREE!  Beyond that, they were $.25 each.  On one warm May day, I sat down at my computer, a DOS-based Compaq 286 if I remember correctly, logged into the service, and began to write to everybody Prodigy had listed as living in the city I'd be moving to.  The gist of the e-mail was: "My name is Wonderduck.  I'll be attending college up there in a few months.  Will you be my friend?"  Yes, it was a simpler time back then.  22 e-mails went out over a two hour span.  As I typed, the newest cassette by The Cure, entitled Mixed Up, played in the background.  Consisting almost entirely of remixes of their songs (with one or two new tunes), I was duly impressed by the music of a band I wasn't particularly fond of.  Too dark for my tastes, on the whole... but "Fascination Street" showed me that this band of whiny goths could actually rock once in a while.  That's a bassline any rhythm section would kill for, right there.  That particular cassette was the soundtrack to the next few months of my life, until I was given a CD player for Christmas... and then that particular CD became part of my collection.

And in case you're wondering, I received three replies from those 22 e-mails.  One person replied "no."  A second said that he didn't actually live in the town anymore, but if I stopped into a particular bar on the Friday night I was there, the bartender would give me a free dinner and a beer... which actually happened!  See, he owned the place, and he called to let them know I was coming.  He made his money back on me once I moved up there, by the way.  The third reply came from a girl named Suzanne, who accused me of e-mailing her only because she was a girl, and "...that's so slick."  She also agreed to be my friend and show me around town.  I pulled into town around noon, visited an apartment that a graduating theatre major was vacating, signed up for it, then late in the day checked into my hotel.

Candy Dulfer & Dave Stewart - Lily Was Here

I had a night to kill, so after visiting the bar mentioned above, I returned back to the hotel room to read a Heinlein novel that was new to me (Door Into Summer, in case you're curious).  One of those late-night talkshows, maybe Arsenio Hall's, was on the tube, and the musical guest was Candy Dulfer, a rather cute Dutch saxophonist that I had never heard of.  Turns out she rocks fairly hard, having played with Minnesota local Prince Rogers Nelson, and some band named Pink Floyd on a few of their concerts.  I remember being quite surprised at how great this song was, and after dreaming of her playing it that night, wound up buying the cassette for the drive home.  The next day, I met Suzanne for the first time.  We went out for lunch and showed me around town... not that that took much time.  The city wasn't exactly big.  There was one moment that gave me pause, however.  As we drove around, I noticed that every fire hydrant had a very tall orange fiberglass pole attached to it.  I could not think of any good reason for it, so I asked Suzanne.  She just looked at me oddly and said "so they can find them in the winter."  I pointed out that they were at least ten feet tall, and she riposted with "yes, they put on the other half in October."  At the time, I thought she was kidding.  She wasn't.  Suzanne became a great friend while I was in Minnesota, and the only one I had that wasn't in the theatre department, a rare and valuable thing.  She also gave me one of my grad school nicknames: "Slick," born from that original e-mail conversation we had.  We never dated, but she did introduce me to a lass I wound up going out with for a while.  A lass named Angela.

Vitamin Z - Angela

She had brown hair, enormous brown eyes, and a ridiculously cute button nose.  We met for the first time in a rather unconventional manner.  See, I was to meet Suzanne and a couple of her friends at the bar down the street from my apartment at 9pm.  Around 8pm, I put a cassette into my stereo system, turned the volume up loud, and took a shower.  After the shower was over, I dried off, wrapped the towel around my waist, and stepped across the hallway into my bedroom... to discover Suzanne and her two friends standing in my bedroom, looking at my music collection.  Time actually froze as I stood in my doorway, my mind flash-analyzing the situation: it was bad enough that Suzanne was in my room, because she was cute and had a rather dry wit that would never let me live this down, but there were two ridiculously attractive strangers with her.  One, a statuesque blonde whose name escapes me nowadays, was one of the best dart players I've ever met, oh and a regional-level clothing model too.  The other was Angela, who I had not yet been introduced to.  There wasn't much chance that I wasn't going to be the butt of many jokes on the night, clearly, so I had to perform damage control before everything went south.  My brain settled on "When you're done looking at my cassettes, could you hand me my pants?"  Slick indeed... maybe Suzanne hit on something with that nickname.  Of course, I had no shame back then, either.  I was in Theatre after all, we were supposed to be a little "out there."  Being willing to go a little bit farther than normal... gets you a little bit farther than normal.  I got Angela's phone number that night, and we went to dinner and a movie the next weekend.  The movie?  Cool World.

Thompson Twins - Play With Me (Full-On Mix)

...and what a mistake that was.  Fortunately, she was the one who suggested it, not that I minded the choice in the least, as I wanted to see it.  Unfortunately, Cool World is on the short list of the worst movies I've ever seen (non-MST3K division).  Indeed, it may be the reason that I hate Brad Pitt to this day.  We walked out of the film about three-quarters of the way through and never looked back.  Soundtrack rocked, though, and this tune was on it.  Came as something of a surprise to me, as my memory of the Thompson Twins was that a early-to-mid-'80s low-cal geeky synth-pop band with clever lyrics, a huge difference from this.  Maybe unsurprisingly, the Twins broke up not long after the movie came out.  Depressingly, a few months later Angela and I broke up as well.  Or, more correctly, I dumped her.

LA Style - James Brown Is Dead

One evening, I got out of rehearsal some hours earlier than normal.  Instead of going straight home, I decided to walk across campus to the pizza joint first.  On my way, I noticed Angela's car parked in front of the dance bar across the street from campus, so I altered course.  Inside, I remember quite clearly that LA Style's James Brown Is Dead was playing to a mostly empty dancefloor (it was Tuesday, after all)... and there, on the far side of the oval-shaped bar, was Angela, deeply invested in attempting to find some guy's tonsils with her tongue... and apparently intent on succeeding, no matter how long it took.  I walked to the bar, ordered a beer just loud enough that she (and everybody else in the place) could hear me... and waited.  It only took a second or so, but the sound of my voice filtered into her brain.  Her reaction was surprise, shock, maybe some fear... and she refused to meet my eyes.  I chugged the beer, paid the bartender, and left.  Some time later, I bumped into her at the local mall.  She tried to apologize.  I told her, quite politely, to go grope some random guy in a bar and walked away.  I haven't seen her since.  Afterwards, my roommate Paul, who was there at the mall with me, asked what the story was... I explained, and he was shocked: "You let THAT get away?"  Yeah, don't rub it in or anything, Paul.  When we got back to our apartment, he dug around in his music collection until he found a particular cassette.  The first song?  Angela by Vitamin Z.  Yeah, don't rub it in or anything AGAIN, Paul.

Donald Fagen - Snowbound

He'd make it up to me, though... as I loaded the U-Haul after I got kicked out of grad school, he handed me a copy of Kamakiriad by Donald Fagen.  It was a nice gesture.  And considering that I was in Minnesota, the title of this song is appropriate.  27.5" of snow on Halloween?  Four inches of snow on Memorial Day?  A high of 40° on July 4th?  Welcome to Minnesota.  I no longer fear driving in snow, unlike most other people here in Duckford.  I also have a healthy respect for the Minnesota state bird, the mosquito.  Still hate the Vikings, though.  Two years of 20-hour days and hard work, shot to hell... but I was back in Duckford, embittered but (allegedly) wiser.

Well, that's a little trip down Memory Lane with DJ Wonderduck.  From Duckford and Back Again.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 1857 words, total size 13 kb.

1 Interesting.

I've heard a different band cover <i>Fascination Street</i>, but I hadn't heard the original.

(And I attended grad school at a place on the shoreline of Lake Superior in Michigan. That place could get similar levels of snowfall...)

Posted by: karrde at March 10, 2012 06:48 PM (sDEaK)

2 This is all true about the weird in and of Minneapolis, Minnesota but I'll say this has been the mildest winter here in the last 20 years.

Posted by: vonKrag at March 10, 2012 10:43 PM (XIY2m)

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