Sugar "If I Can't Change Your Mind"

"What the hell happened to you?!" the kid behind the counter at Subway had apparently asked, with just a little bit of trepidation.

Looking at my roommate, it's not hard to understand why the kid would have thought a crazy, perhaps dangerous man had just been in the sandwich shop.

It had been a loooonng day, and it started early.

This was when I was living in Southwest Virginia, in the a big farmhouse called 7 Maples. Living out the post-college dream of being on the radio, drinking beer, staying up late, being with friends, watching a lot of sports and listening to a lot of music.

My roommate was both a huge Bob Mould fan, and (because he was an alumnus) a Virginia Tech football fan. And on a hot, hot fall Saturday, there was both a game, and a Sugar show to go to.

So we were up early, with his Dad. I didn't have tickets to the game, but I took the road trip two hours up I-81, to sit in a bar within earshot of the stadium to watch the game on TV, while they went to the game.

I knew it was going to be a long, long journey into the night so I sipped my beer slowly, as the frat kids around me got sloppier and sloppier.

The sight of my roommate after the game, made me laugh.

"You sat on the sunny side of the stadium, huh?"

Lane Stadium could be a cold, unforgiving place in November and December. But on this day, half the crowd was on a concrete cookie sheet baking in the sun.

And my roommate was quick to turn lobster red in those conditions.

We split with his Dad, who returned to Abingdon, and we traveled on to Chapel Hill for Sugar, who were touring behind "File Under Easy Listening."

The Cat's Cradle that night was like a convection oven---mostly airless, but except of gusts of hotter heat that swirled around the raucous activity of the crowd.

Sugar was just a singular kind of band. They had this focused, precise, tight type of anger---a really amazing mix of ferocity and control. And the audience acted accordingly, moving and swaying and sweating en mass, both exhausted and still frenzied.

With our ears still ringing, we started our long drive home.

We were both broke, having spent what we had on gas and beer, but we scraped together a couple of bucks as we pulled into a local Subway. My roommate offered to go in himself, while I kept the car running.

I wish I could have seen the look on the kid's face when this large, tired-looking, wrung-out red man, fully drenched in sweat, walked into Subway and said, "Can I have two Gatorades and a small bag of pretzels?"

But my roommate came out laughing, having been previously unaware at just how horrible and weird he must look to the rest of the normal world, a world that hadn't spent the day watching football, drinking beer, driving a few hundred miles, jumping around at a rock show and steeling himself for another few hundred miles of highway home.

Hear the song on Youtube.