Never Knew What You'd Get

Album: Galaxie 500, Today, 1991

Best Track: "Parking Lot"

Lasting Memory: Growing up, my friend Chris Gersh's dad owned a Galaxy 500. I have wanted that car ever since I first saw it in, oh, 1976. The men of Reverend Horton Heat, who tell an ex-wife that she can have everything but the car, seem to share my passion.

But my unrequited auto love was not the reason I picked up Galaxie 500's Today. Rather, I bought this album thinking that it would contain one of the great overlooked alterna-pop nuggets of the late 1980s.

Turns out, though, that "Love Crushing" was performed by Fetchin' Bones, a band that could not have been more different from Galaxie 500.

I don't consider myself burned, though. Today is plenty entertaining in its own right. Galaxie 500 never rocks here, but they do create and commit to a solid vibe that is equal parts melancholy and hopeful. "Tugboat" illustrates this seeming contradiction nicely, with its central lyrical message of, to paraphrase, "I don't want you to think of me as friend, I need you to think of me as someone you need."

Okay. I guess the vibe is more "ineffectual stalker," but it's still harmless and active rather than mopey. I'll take that over Joy Division or Elliott Smith any day.

Galaxie 500 didn't make the kind of music I was listening to and buying in the early 1990s, or at any other time, really. That's makes my kind of embarrassing mixup of them with Fetchin' Bones a happy mistake. If I'd been smarter or better informed, I never would have heard "Parking Lot." And that would've been a shame.

One of the things that I worry about with the remorseless rise of the Internet and the lingering-but-assured death of the full-length album and the mall record store is that people will have fewer and fewer opportunities to make happy mistakes. There is so much information just a mouse click away, that it has become almost impossible not to find what you're looking for. Also, since everyone will only buy singles anymore, there will be no reason for bands and singers to put together collections of related songs.

Last, the irony of the Internet is that it tends to narrow users' intellectual and aesthetic worlds rather than expand them. Hell, I just autoprogrammed my own "Uncle Tupelo" radion station on a Web site called Pandora. I could make a convincing case that no one loves Uncle Tupelo more than I do, but does anyone need to get "Punch Drunk" every day? Should one? Probably bad for the liver,. And, absolutely, such minimicro genre splicing concusses the artistic sensibilities.

Up Next: Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience, 1992