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.

Jale "Despite"

Following up on yesterday's post . . .

The opening band that night was a Canadian 4-piece on the same label as the Scud Mountain Boys.

Jale had had a lot of success in their native land, and they were receiving great reviews here in the States for their jangly, tuneful indie-pop.

I was early to the show, hanging around the bar with a lot of time to kill, so I made sure brought along my copy of their CD "So Wound," and a sharpie.

I'd never been an autograph seeker, but it seemed like a neat thing to do, to get the 4 members to sign my disc and then bring it back to play on my radio show.

I approached Jennifer first.  She had a serious air about her, but brightened visibly when I started talking about the album artwork and photography, which I gathered she had a hand in.

Then she got serious again.

"Did you buy this CD today?"

I was a little embarrassed.  I stammered out that no, I didn't buy it.  I was in radio and I got it for free.

Eve, one of the guitar players was pleasant and answered some lyric questions I'd tossed out, but she was on her way to do backstage.

Laura was friendly enough to sit down in a booth with me and chat for a minute while she signed my disc.  But after a few questions, she asked the same thing that Jennifer asked, looking over my shoulder toward the merch table, which wasn't even set up yet.

"Did you just buy this?"

I felt weirdly guilty.  No, I didn't buy it.  I was totally riding free.  I was a leech-y, industry-type who'd got himself guest-listed and now had a free CD I was looking to get signed.

But my "no" was enough for her.  She smiled and excused herself with the very awesome line, "Well, nice talking to you, but I gotta go get glamorous."

Mike, the drummer was the last one to nab.  He'd recently joined the band and seemed kind of eager to chat about it.

I had lots of questions about Sub Pop and life on tour and he was pretty open.

The band was pretty disappointed with the support they were getting from the label.  And looking around the bar, it was hard to argue with that.  Up-and-coming Sub Pop band, with critical steam behind them, visits a major college/music town, and there's only 30 people there?

He talked about how the band was doing very well in Canada, coming from a vibrant Halifax scene, where they were selling out larger venues to enthusiastic audiences.  By contrast, this American tour had been a slog, almost feeling like a back-step, to thinner crowds and a fair amount of indifference.

He was doing his best to be the band's cheerleader, to keep his bandmates' spirits up, despite the demoralizing aspects of being an unknown band making its way across the USA.

And that's when it struck me.  They weren't asking about my CD because they noticed the notch on the bar code that pegged it as a freebie.

They were simply surprised to meet someone who had been listening to their record and came to the show with a knowledge of who they were.

This theory bore out later in the night as Jale played.

Each of the three women in the band wrote and sang and did quite a bit of harmonizing.  But Mike's voice did appear on one of the album's tracks, late in the record, called "Despite."

It's a "conversation" song that Jennifer sang, with Mike coming in after the first verse as the male response to the female narrator.

Because the show was sparsely attended, I was standing pretty close to the stage.  And when Jennifer started singing "Despite" I realized she was directly between me and Mike.  So when his first line came up, I leaned to the right, to look around her.

But he wasn't singing.  In fact, he wasn't even miked.

I looked back at Jennifer, who was singing Mike's lines, lowering her voice for the male parts.

Because I was right in front of her, she had noticed that I was looking for Mike to sing, and she cracked a smile, breaking, for a second, from the downbeat emotion of the song.

It was a sweet little moment.



Hear the song on Youtube.

The single from "So Wound" is one of my favorite pop songs of the 90s.

Hear the song on Youtube.