track 28: ghost of a texas ladies man b/w someday?

Spring of 1992. I'm at Sound Warehouse (WHY do I want to type "Sound Wherehouse" every time?? Can I get some confirmation on this? It was on Kendall Drive and is now a Bed Bath & Beyond...) with my dad, browsing. The way that I do. At this point I am still in school, but unemployed. The previous fall, I had what I now know to be THE GREATEST JOB EVER. In fact, now that I think about it, I may have been back during that spring, I'm not sure. The job was simple, customer-free and I could listen to music the whole time. You know when you're in school and you have the whole fundraising thing where you get catalogs and try to sell stuff- usually Christmas or Easter time- tins with candy or stuffed animals, etcetera? My job was going through the order sheets, finding the merchandise in the warehouse and filling up bags and boxes properly. Another plus? There were like three employees and two of them were friends of my mom, which is how I got the job. It was fun at the time, but in retrospect, total bliss and a piece of cake. But sadly, a seasonal gig.



Anyway, if I wasn't picking up Easter shifts there, I was either saving my allowance or saving up my lunch money by eating snack machine food. At the music store, I see the CD single for a new Concrete Blonde song called "Ghost of a Texas ladies' man." And I think "meh" (only not because that word wasn't in usage yet) because if you read my entry about "Joey", you may recall that I wasn't so crazy about Bloodletting. However, it also has their cover of "Everybody knows" on it. I had the soundtrack to the film Pump Up the Volume on cassette and loved that song. I buy it. I find myself really liking "Ghost." I also like the remix of "Bloodletting (the vampire song)." And their cover of Nick Cave's "The ship song." In fact, I like it all. I give another listen to Bloodletting and find myself enjoying it more than before.





Cut to March 10, 1992. I'm out at Dadeland Mall with my mom, Dave & his friend Nick. We browse through another music store and right at the front, in the new releases and just out that day is Walking in London. I buy it and... I LOVE IT. From the single to "Someday?" and "Long time ago" the whole album just rocks. It becomes all I listen to. I go out and find the two earlier albums, Concrete Blonde and what would end up being my very favorite CB album, Free. There was just something about Johnette Napolitano's voice, the stories she told in her songs, that suddenly clicked with me.



After that, Concrete Blonde has always been one of my favorite bands. My very favorite bands, up there with Bic Runga, Travis, Indigo Girls and Aimee Mann/'til tuesday. Not just, "oh I love them." I LOVE them. I had to have anything I could find by them, every single, every rarity. T-shirts? Yes please! Baseball cap? Uh-huh. I even wanted to get a tattoo of the sun/moon art that graces the cover of Free and Walking in London. But I never got to see them play. The album after London would be their last (for a long while) as they went their separate ways. Which is why it always kills me that in high school, when Kristi and I were going to go see Sting, with Concrete Blonde opening, we changed our minds and saw Slaughter and Poison instead. WHY??!?!?!?? Since then, I've followed Johnette's career through the many projects she worked on in between Concrete Blonde and her eventual solo album, Scarred.

It's interesting to me that a band who I had shrugged off a year earlier, could suddenly become my biggest obsession. What's funny is that it would happen again. A couple of times, most recently with singer/songwriter Regina Spektor. But the next time it happened on a much bigger scale.