Led Zeppelin "Fool In The Rain"

Ugh, it was painful.  He was heartbroken.

We've all had those friends, right?  Who go through a breakup and are just f-n miserable?  You've been there?

You do your best to strike a balance between letting them have their grief, and keeping them from falling into an abyss of self-pity.

Most importantly, you make sure you are gentle, sensitive and accepting.  You make sure you are not an ass.

He was my roommate and he'd been blind-sided.

For over a year, they'd been inseparable.  Happy.  Then she suddenly just turned it off.

She broke up with him.  Didn't want to talk to him.  Didn't want to hear from him.  Lost all semblance of affection for him.  Or even for their relationship's previous existence.  It was like it never happened, to her.

To him, it was painfully, painfully real.  And this being his first big breakup, he took it hard.

He went into my record collection and pulled out "In Through The Out Door."

It was a strange choice for him.  We had this running back and forth thing.  I was a Zeppelin guy.  He was a Who guy.  You would think he'd take refuge in his favorite band, instead of mine.

He played "Fool In The Rain."

He played it again.

Then again.

I must point out to the kids reading today, that my version of "In Through The Out Door" was actually on cassette.  So after listening to the six minute song, he had to hit rewind on the boom box, and let the tape spool back for 90 seconds or so before banging the Play button and sending the music into forward motion again, usually catching the last little bit of the previous song "Southbound Suarez," before "Fool In The Rain" started again.

And again.

And again.

The next day, I walked into the room, and he was at the boom box.  Again.  "Fool In The Rain" again.

Over and over.  "Fool In The Rain."

This went on.  It went on to the point where it crossed that bridge from me letting him have his grief, to pulling him out of the abyss of self-pity.

And, truth be told, I really couldn't figure out why he was playing that Zeppelin track.

It wasn't "their song."  He didn't love Zeppelin.  She certainly didn't love Zeppelin.

Why that song, I finally asked?

"Because I'm 'just a fool waiting on the wrong blond.'"

Huh?

Oh wait.  I get it.  She's blond.  He's a fool waiting on the wrong blond.

Except . . .

That's not the lyric.  The final line of the song is "just a fool waiting on the wrong block."

"I should just let it go," I thought to myself for about a nanosecond.

Unfortunately, two things got the better of me.

One, was that I truly believed that if could release him from the idea that the song was about a fool waiting on the wrong blond, he'd somehow free himself from the repeated misery of playing a song that depressed him, over and over.

Two, I sometimes (especially then, but still even today) can't help myself from being an ass.

I told him that I was pretty sure the lyric was "on the wrong block."

But he was pretty sure it was "on the wrong blond."

We rewound the tape, to just the last verse, thinking that would help.  Because if we knew the previous line, we would know if Zeppelin was trying to rhyme "block" or "blond."

That line is "When I'm breathless I run 'til I drop."

"Drop"?!?  That doesn't rhyme with either word!!!

Well, we had a little (very little) laugh about that and the mood lightened for just a moment as we agreed that the line was whatever either of us wanted it to be.

And thankfully kids, song lyrics were not available on the internet (we didn't even know what the internet was) at the time this story took place.

Because otherwise, I would have had to search around online and further be an ass, and prove that I was right.


Hear the song on Youtube.

The Tubes "What Do You Want From Life?"

We were like twins, born 8 years apart.

My college girlfriend had an older sister who was married.  And her husband and I had this weirdly parallel existence.

Which was cool for me, because I got to see what life would be like for me in a few years.

He was in TV production, and I was just graduating college ready to start making videos.  He took me to a studio where he worked, and showed me what was cutting edge technology, never before seen by me---computer animation.  I got career advice and encouragement, with a healthy dose of reality (finding work is hard), doled out by someone who'd moved through life with a temperament and style similar to mine.

I also got to see what life was like, in the past.  Sort of.

Because he was 8 years older than me, he grew up with music that had come and gone before my musical awakening.  Sure, I hadn't missed out on The Beatles and The Stones---I could go back to bands like that---but what about the nooks and crannies of 70s weirdness that had already slipped into obscurity by the mid-1980s?

He was a prolific cassette-tape-maker, and though I'd made mix tapes before, I really upped my game, after seeing the care that he put into both the track listing, and the package design.

Mix tapes are a hazy memory in this (digital age) day and age, as is that girlfriend.  But I heard this Tubes track the other day, and knew that if I had taken a different (dating) path, "What Do You Want From Life" (which I first heard on one of his awesome mix tapes) probably wouldn't have registered in my mind at all. 

But instead, it invokes the warm analog nostalgia of cassette-tapes and video production and college girlfriends' families and musical friendships made and faded.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Tift Merritt “Mixtape”

You can find lots of nostalgic love for vinyl. Audiophiles love to go on and on about the superior quality of sounds found on records. And Album-ophiles lament the loss of LPs, claiming the art of the cover and the weight of the wax are as essential to the experience, as the music itself.

But you don’t find the same kind of romance for cassettes, do you?

Certainly, the same nostalgic reasoning doesn’t hold up. The audio quality on a cassette is poor, and degrades quickly. And cassettes are actually blamed for the death/dearth of the album cover as an art form.

But Tift Merritt and I are of like minds.

On “Mixtape” she brings back the romance to cassettes. For all the limitations of these little reel to reels, they have one true, head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest advantage:

Mix tapes with homemade covers.

You can’t make your own vinyl compilation. It’s just not technically feasible for the average person.

And sure, you can make an iTunes playlist, but you can’t lovingly craft an iTunes playlist and then physically present it to someone. It’s not a thing---it’s just files. And playlists, even burned CDs, are made to be randomized, to have tracks skipped over, to be embellished or deleted.

A mixed cassette is a collage that can tell a story, based on the songs and the song order. A track listing matters.

Then there's the sides. A Side and B Side. You can’t have sides on an iTunes playlist, for crying out loud.

And yes, some vinyl enthusiasts sniff at the idea of cassette album art. But when you make a mixtape with a homemade cover, you tap into a charm that’s not a part of vinyl or disc or MP3 or 8-Track.

I have dozens of cassettes, made by me or given to me as gifts, in the basement. I’ve probably made hundreds in my day. But since the world went digital, the practice has fallen by the wayside of my life.

Thanks for the reminder, Tift: Time to press rewind, rewind.