This Day in the History of Learning You're Not All That Cool After All

Album: The Feelies, The Good Earth, 1986

Best Track: "Two Rooms"

Lasting Memory: Sometime during the late spring or early summer of 1999, I heard this album being played very loudly in my very own house. But I wasn't the person playing it.

My housemate Rob (I think that was/is his name; I try to block out most of that group house experience) was the spinner of this cassette on that day--the day my music cred died.

See, Rob (again, if that was his name) was not the kind of person who owned or listened to no-fi post punk albums by bands like The Feelies and Firehose and Guided By Voices. And, yet, even though he was a Chicago Bears-loving, Illinois-born second-generation Serbian mortgage broker who looked a lot like a heavyset Peter Lorre, he was also a Feelies fan. Go figure.

In a way, the shredding of my musical ego was liberating. I was at that very moment freed from what had always been a very poor-fitting hipster straightjacket and let to run wild plugging dollar after dollar into dive bar jukeboxes to hear Boz Scaggs' "Lido Shuffle" and Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman." (You know you want to click. Don't fight it. I'll wait.)

So that was all to the good.

The downside of learning that I was nowhere as cool or unique in my musical tastes as I would have liked to have been was that I no longer had much reason to work at stretching my musical horizons. I've acquired very little new music since 1999-2000, and I suspect that in a very small, very subconcious way, learning that (for-the-sake-of-this-post-at-least) Rob was as cool musically as I was is part of the reason for that.

Of late, I been listening to a lot more new music, thanks mostly to the digital musical channels on my cable TV package. Streams that I highly recommend are Music Choice Americana, Music Choice Bluegrass, Urge Radio Americana, Urge Radio Cover to Cover, Urge Radio Wide Open Country, and Urge Radio Acoustic Chill. The online Urge channel are subscription-only, dang it.

Yes. Rock is mostly too loud for me these days, and I am getting too old. 'Course this "La Grange" playing on my radio as I type is still okay by me.

The Feelies are also still all right by me. The band sounds cool, which I can appreciate even if I'm not a person in that category.

Like I typed above, though, The Good Earth is a strictly no-fi affair. All the songs have titles on the cassette isert, and they all also presumably have lyrics. Forced to reproduce those song titles and lyrics based only on my listening experience, I'd have to go with multiple variations and combinations of "aaaahnnAHNaaaa," "laaAAAAnnnn," and "ghghghghgh." Henry Higgins would have had a field with these guys.

He may have. Tomorrow's featured album treats listeners to a much more elocutious Feelies. The kids play their instruments better, too.

Up Next: The Feelies, Only Life, 1988