New Orleans, Louisiana (1992)

From left to right: Jim Wilde, Paul Catanzarite, Jamie, Lenny.

Everyone but Jim was Major Bill 5th Floor.

Jim was a DU at VT and a great guy.

For years we’d talked about going to Mardi Gras. Sophomore year, Pope (who was spending a year away from school at the request of his Engineering Dean) was supposed to drive up from Suffolk in his parent’s Plymouth Cougar and drive us there. But around Charlottesville he crested a hill and right in front of him was a broken down 18 wheeler. He went under the truck’s trailer and totaled the car.

Finally, in 1992 we all drove down there. I can’t remember whose car we went in, but we couldn’t afford a hotel so we CAMPED at some crummy campground in the middle of the city.

I did so many embarrassing things that trip I don’t even want to think about it.

Sanctum Sanctorum

This is one of the first things I bought for our new home down here. I can’t believe my wife let me hang it up.

I was inspired by Marvel’s Doctor Strange:

“The mansion of Doctor Stephen Strange is located at 177A Bleecker Street, New York City, NY 10012-1406, on the corner of Bleecker Street and Fenno Place in the heart of Greenwich Village. Also known as the Sanctum Sanctorum, the townhouse has served as the personal residence of Doctor Strange and formerly as the headquarters of the Defenders and the New Avengers. It is also the greatest concentration of occult esoterica and mystical phenomena in existence.”

I had it made by someone on Etsy. As you can clearly see, it hangs above my bathroom.

It still makes me laugh.

1981 Dodge Charger II

Here’s a view of the front the day we drove it home from the dealership.

1981 Dodge Charger

This was my first car. I can’t believe my Dad bought it for me.

He tried to teach me how to drive using his maroon and black Plymouth Turismo, which is a very similar looking car, but that was a manual shift transmission and I had not yet mastered that art.

If you look on the back you can see several stickers including:

– One VT parking permit
– One VT sticker
– One University of Toronto sticker below it. (The week after I graduated high school, me and two high school chums drove to Canada because we heard you could drink beer legally at 18.)
– Two Godwin H.S. parking permits
– Vanity license plate that read “J-BE-GD” for Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” one of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar and the song Marty McFly plays at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance in “Back To The Future.”
– A black and white WYSP bumper sticker. (This was a “classic rock” radio station in Philadelphia that I used to listen when I lived there. Even then I was trying to show off my indie cred.)
– A red and white Godwin H.S. bumper sticker. Mortifying now that I think of showing so much school pride.

The car served me O.K. from about 1986 to 1989. I crashed into a truck on an icy night coming back from Anne’s house near Byrd Middle School and banged up the front right side, then my parents announced they were going to California for a trip and the house would be unoccupied.

I’d never been able to have a house party in high school because they were always around, and I thought this was finally my chance.

So, I left Blacksburg and made the three hour drive going 80+ and the car shimmying the entire time. I met up with some friends and we started partying and I passed out on a couch in their apartment.

The next morning I woke up and my car was gone.

In the days before cellular telephones, it took me a while to figure out what happened.

After I’d parked the car in the apartment parking lot, the engine caught fire and totaled the car. Completely.

The fire department came out and put out the fire, ran the plates, and had it towed to my parent’s house where my younger brother was staying. He saw the burnt out hulk of my car and assumed the worst, so he called my parents in California and told them he thought I was dead. Meanwhile, I was passed out drunk on a friend’s couch.

This was the same weekend where I decked Brother #1 waiting for a ride to take me back to Blacksburg.

Fort Bragg, North Carolina (1996)

Fort Bragg, North Carolina (1995)

America’s Guard Of Honor

This promotional video was done in 1988, so about six years before I got there.

It’s much closer to what I experienced and participated than the video I previously posted.

I’ll put both down below.

LINK

“Joey”

Listening to this song for the first time in years. The female POV and amazing vocals about a troubled relationship has always clearly been the main reason fans, particularly, women love this song. But I’m gaining a new appreciation for he band as a whole and particularly the guitarist, James Mankey.

He is criminally underrated and I think I need to go back and reevaluate the entire band.

What a shame they’re all pretty much retired. Such talents.

“One Saturday afternoon in 1986 I turned on MTV and caught the last half of the video for “Still in Hollywood,” the first single off Concrete Blonde’s self-titled debut album. I was hooked. I bought the cassette ASAP and it was actually the album to which I (finally) learned how to play guitar by ear. However, I only learned to play the basic chord progressions by ear, because there was NO WAY I, or most other guitarists, could imitate what guitarist Jim Mankey was actually doing. For one thing, he played with his fingers instead of a pick, which was extremely odd for a guitarist in a pretty heavy alternative rock band. For another he rarely played barre chords or any of the standard rock tropes you would expect to go with the relatively simple 3- or 4-chord songs on the album. He was just out there doing his own thing, creating an atmospheric, swirling sound that perfectly complemented Johnette Napolitano’s aching, powerful voice and twilit songs about Los Angeles and its denizens. I was having an absolute hell of a time deciding which song to use for Jim, so I decided to just sell out and use the one Concrete Blonde song non-Blonde fans have probably heard: “Joey,” off their third album ‘Bloodletting.’ While it’s not his weirdest or most technically impressive solo, the song as whole shows off his repetoire well. There are the slinky, reverbed-out flourishes during the verse, the ringing melody line going into the chorus and best of all (at 2:49) the fluid, sinuous solo, just 15 seconds long, achingly pretty and all the more perfect for its brevity.”

LINK

“Need You Tonight”

The cool guys from my High School, including Tyler (the guy who organized VB Beach Week) all were big INXS fans.

I thought “Kick” was amazing, but didn’t really get into them until later. I was too busy with my Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.

Now, I’ve sung me some karaoke in my day and I have a variety of songs that I can do reasonably well, or at least get a laugh.

But a couple of years ago, I tried out “Need You Tonight” because it’s almost all spoken word.

It went over extremely well.

Now, when I have an opportunity to get up on stage and make a fool of myself, this is what I usually lead off with.

LINK

“The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Like many a sensitive young man in the 1990s, I fell madly in love with Sinead O’Connor after a single viewing of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” That tear rolling down her cheek was like a dagger in my heart.

Over.

End of story.

So, of course, I bought the CD.

I remember being home in Richmond that summer and trying to go to sleep on my dirty floor mattress with the lights off and this song playing.

The final fadeout takes forever. It’s gotta be at least three minutes of nothing but twirling and swirling drums, keyboards, and guitar.

I literally went off to Neverland waiting for the goddamn song to finish.

“Through their own words
They will be exposed…”

LINK