Sometimes I Wish to God I Didn't Know Now...

I won't pretend that I ever loved Poison, and I won't pretend that I hated them.

They may have been a cartoon band, but they also had a knack for writing songs that stick to your memory like flies on a windshield. (Forget what a songwriter's song "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" is....try and get "Unskinny Bop" outta your head now that I've put it back in there.. I respect that kind of talent.)

I also won't pretend that Brett Michaels didn't totally annoy me as he made his transition into reality TV star. But he created a brand for himself long after the likes of Stephen Pearcy are still trying to cling to relevance, so God bless him.

Anyway, to get to the point, the news of Brett Michaels' brain hemorrhage has got me pretty sad. Not because I particularly liked Brett or Poison, but because its been two years since I lost someone from the same episode.

I hate even thinking back to that time, but I'm forced to now.

I didn't know her well.....she was the sister of a friend, and we'd only met a few times. She was always friendly, and a little bit shy. I was happy to learn that she was just about to move into the building I lived in, and I was looking forward to seeing her around and getting to know her better.

Then one day as she was getting ready for her big move, she was hospitalized. A few days later she was dead.

Just like that.

The memories of the following week were the saddest I can ever remember.

I remember running into her brother as I was on my way to work on the morning that she died -- the two of us hugging on the sidewalk, time stopping as we tried our best to keep it together and commuters hustled their way past us and down into the Metro.

I remember helping the family move her belongings into a condo in which she would never live.

I remember the horrible, horrible sound of her parents wailing as they put her coffin in the hearse after the funeral.

That entire week was heartbreaking in every single way, and I walked around in a complete daze for about three weeks afterwords, emotionally raw from the experience.

So, I guess you'll have to excuse me for having a pessimistic view of Brett Michaels' chances for a full recovery. I want him to beat the odds, because I would hate for his children to suffer the way that my friend and his family and the rest of us did.

But I guess I lost a little faith two years ago.

So, give me something to believe in.

R.I.P. Peter Steele: 1962 - 2010

Timing is a bitch.

I've done so frigging many posts about Type O Negative concerts lately, that to tell you the truth I was dreading the fact that I still had one more ticket stub for them, which would require yet another entry that would at once apologize for loving them so much back in the day, while trying to justify it all.

But then I got home after being out of the country for two weeks and learned that Pete Steele had passed away.

So let's try and do this right....

You can read my former posts about Type O Negative here, here, here and here. If you follow this blog at all ( I know there aren't many of you), you know that at a certain point in the mid-to-late 90's, I really loved that band. In fact, I was probably a little too vocal back then about how fond I was for them, but whatever; it spoke to me at the time, and I still go back to them once in a while.

To be sure, Type O did some goofy shit, and they didn't exactly pull off the second half of their career on a note befitting of their potential (Steele's last several years, in particular, were often hard to watch). But they also did some truly groundbreaking things in metal that deserve to be recognized.

I sure hope that my fan-boy adulation for them back then didn't dissuade too many folks from seeking them out and giving them a listen. At his best, Peter Steele really was one hell of a songwriter, a vocalist and a performer.

Here's a quick clip of one of my favorite performances of Steele's. I hope you enjoy:

type o negative nation

type o negative nation
Originally uploaded by tonbabydc


I can't imagine that anyone wants to read another entry about Type O Negative less than I want to write one. But you're here and I've got the stub, so what are we going to do?

Try to be patient....

My friends were accustomed to my stupid obsession with those four dicks from Brooklyn by this time.

In fact, when the band came through D.C. on the "World Coming Down" tour (the second time), my bass player, Mark, was kind enough to dial into WHFS and win a pair of tickets for us. Awfully nice thing for him to do, especially since my guitar player, Greg, and I spent a lot of our downtime hazing, mocking and otherwise abusing Mark as the odd man out in the band.

(He brought a lot of it on himself, but that's a different story altogether).

Despite Mark's kind gesture, I'd predictably bought myself a ticket as soon as the show was announced.

And this posed something of a problem, because my gigantic boner for this band had basically turned every single person I knew off from them; I knew we'd have trouble finding someone to go with us. Mark - who didn't even like metal - was along for the ride, but he sure didn't know anyone who wanted to go.

Inspiration would strike one evening as I left work.

I was working at an ad agency located in a beautiful converted granary in "old town" Gaithersburg, MD. (How can a city that's only like 75 years old have an "old town"?)

In addition to our offices, the granary conversion had yielded an auto mechanic's shop, a bar, an army recruiting station, and a hair stylist. Often, when walking to my car, I'd wave to the cute young girl who worked at the front desk of the hair salon. Every day, she'd get a great big smile on her face and wave back to me. This was often the best part of my day.

For weeks and months we never spoke....we just smiled and waved at one another. I remember one evening in particular when I was so excited to walk past her that I forgot to bring my car keys...which meant I'd have to walk past her again as I backtracked, then a third time on the way back to my car. Fighting off the mortification, I simply pulled the keys out of my pocket, pointed at them and shrugged as I walked past.

She broke into a full laugh, and I saw out of the corner of my eye that her head had turned to watch me as I continued my walk across the parking lot. This sort of thing did not happen to me very often.

She was adorable, and I was absolutely smitten... yet, I didn't even know her name.

I probably never would have, either, if she hadn't taken the initiative of scheduling her smoke breaks for the time at which I tended to leave the office. One evening as I was headed home with a stack of CD's a friend had lent me, she decided to break the ice.

"What you got there?" she asked as I was still fumbling to come up with a greeting.

It was the first time I'd heard her voice. It was playful, and vaguely impish. She reached out and grabbed Jeff Buckley's "Grace" out of my hands.

We stood in the parking lot for a few minutes, getting to know one another. Her name was Morgan, and up close she seemed much more beautiful than I'd ever noticed: She was tall, with long legs and an absolutely phenomenal smile. Together with her gigantic brown eyes, her ever so slight lisp and her upbeat manner, she was sort of like a beautiful little puppy.

Conversation naturally gravitated towards music, and lo-and-behold she told me about the metal bands she'd seen - Powerman 5000, Pantera; you know: kid's stuff.

It was settled: I'd ask her to the show the next time I saw her.

And wouldn't you know it? A few days later I had her number and we had a date: That Sunday night, after we'd wrapped up band practice, Mark and I would pick her up at her home in Germantown, and we'd all go see Type O Negative together.

"That was easy," I thought to myself. "I should do this asking-girls-out thing more often."

++++++++

I wanted to call her immediately, but I waited patiently all weekend, not calling until Sunday afternoon, right before practice started. I wanted to get directions to her place, and confirm the times with her.

There was no answer. 

With my bandmates looking at me expectantly, I shrugged it off and we started one of our marathon four hour practices; I had all afternoon to reach her. (This is how it was done before cell phones and text messages, kids).

We took a break from rehearsal, and I tried again. The woman who answered the phone sounded decidedly older than I'd expected. That's about the time I realized she was living with her fucking mom.

"Of course," I grumbled to myself. "Why did I assume she'd have her own place? In fucking Germantown?"

I left a message, and her mom sounded skeptical of who I was and what my intentions were.

Practice ended. I still had not heard from her.

I called again. Her mom answered again. I left a message. 

Again.

Mark and I looked at one another. Time was getting tight, and this had become embarrassing.

Twenty minutes passed, and I made one final attempt to call her. Her mom told me point blank that Morgan wasn't home, and that she wasn't going to be home. Her tone was firm, and I felt very foolish.

Even Mark - who was ordinarily merciless about my bad luck with women - took pity on me. It was getting late enough that we were in danger of missing the show, so the decision was made: It was time to hit the road and make the best of the evening.

++++++++

The car ride was very quiet. I was trying to be a big boy, but this one stung; it wasn't like I wasn't used to being turned down (or worse, stood up). But it was totally foreign to me to have a girl agree so enthusiastically to a date, only to bail like this.

Mark and I parked somewhere down in South East, near where Nationals Stadium currently stands. The box office was just about closed by the time we arrived, so we had to do some coaxing to find someone to get Mark his ticket.

It all worked out though, and we got into the show just as the band was getting ready to take the stage.

I don't remember the details of this one too well, but I remember that they opened with an abbreviated vamp on Pink Floyd's "On with the Show."  After a song or two, Peter Steele welcomed the crowd by announcing in near monotone, "We are Type O Negative from Brooklyn, New York. We were here a few monts ago at da Nine-Toity Club. Dat show sucked. Dis show will rule."

He was more or less correct on both counts.

(God, Nation was a great venue).

++++++++

I was so disappointed about the whole incident with Morgan that I'm pretty sure I either worked late or left out of the office's back door for a few days so that I wouldn't have to face her. I was angry and embarrassed, and, frankly, I didn't want an explanation. I just wanted to be done with her, because that was so much easier than admitting how outrageously happy it had made me that she agreed to go out with me in the first place.

Halfway into that week, I stepped out of the office for lunch with my coworker Sean - a chubby African-American guy who was convinced that he was the second coming of Billy Dee Williams.

As we stood at the front door to the office, chatting and waiting for a third coworker to join us, Sean's tone suddenly changed.

"Well, well, weeeeellllll," Sean cooed. It was his trademark phrase for when he saw a girl he liked.

I looked up to see Morgan standing halfway out of the front door of the salon, maybe twenty yards away. Her mouth was partially open, as though she had started to say something then suddenly decided against it.

She had been waiting for me.

"I'm not talking to you," I shouted to her.

I smiled to let her know that I didn't mean it, but I'm not sure she understood. In a tiny voice, just loud enough for us to hear at a distance, she said, "You have to."

Her voice cracked as she said it...She was pleading with me.

While Sean looked on, puzzled, I trotted over to her.

She explained to me that her friend had a serious illness, and had been taken to the hospital over the weekend. She told me that if I'd given her my number she would have called, but instead she was back and forth from the hospital all weekend.

I stood there, trying to determine if I should believe her, and feeling so ugly for being petty about this whole situation.

We talked for a second or two, and I told her not to worry about it. I guess I wasn't mad so much as I felt small. Her little voice made me want to try and protect her, and that urge made me uncomfortable in ways that I didn't understand.

On the spot, I chalked it up to yet another missed connection.

++++++++

For the next few weeks, Morgan and I repeated our ritual of smiling and waving, but it wasn't the same. We chatted every once in a while, but never made plans again.

At some point later that year she ran outside and stopped me to let me know that she was moving to Cleveland. Her sister would be going to college out there, and she thought it would be good to tag along and have a change in scenery.

I took a second to process that, and I guess she saw the confused look on my face.

"I'm only 19, you know."

Her voice dropped a little when she said it, her tone confessional. I should have picked up on it earlier, but her guilty voice indicated that she'd made some effort to disguise this fact from me. All of the awkwardness of the past few weeks started to make a little more sense, even if it was no less embarrassing.

Jesus, I was 26. I didn't want any part of a teenager.

I wished her well and we said our goodbyes. No hugs, no kisses, and no exchange of contact information. I guess if it had all happened ten years later, we'd still be Facebook friends, but that's not how it worked back then.

I never saw her again, and to be honest, I'm not sure when the last time I'd thought of her was, prior to coming across this ticket stub.

I do wonder what would have happened if we'd gone out on that date. I'm certain that I would have plied us both with plenty of alcohol, and from there its kind of a crap shoot. I was in a weird spot those days, slowly waking up to the fact that the nice guy routine had been an abject failure in advancing my pursuits with the fairer sex. As a result, I was on the verge of entering into a kind of reckless, mercenary point in my life, and I'm not sure either of us would have made any good decisions.

As long as she did ok for herself in Ohio, it's safe to say that she was better off without my influence.

Which is kind of a cop-out. Sure, I was making a lot of bad decisions back then, but it was fueled by the anger and frustration that comes with chronic loneliness. Truthfully, I was ready for a good girl in my life, and an awful lot of potential matches were fumbled right before my eyes. It was painful.

++++++++

What does that have to do with Type O Negative?

Everything.

I look back and I tend to remember all of the great times from my 20's. But I also easily forget that most of those moments were tied together by long bouts of loneliness and feelings of rejection and a sense of utter failure that followed me around through every single doomed romance... no matter how many ways I insisted to people that I was neither angry nor lonely.

I beat myself up a lot for being so obsessed with Type O Negative back then. But those emotions were exactly what Type O's best music was all about....feeling worthless and channeling those frustrations in stupid, macho, self-destructive ways. Songs like "Burnt Flowers Fallen" "Can't Lose You" and "...Bacchus" were, in fact, forcefully simple and romantic and honest in confronting that dreadful feeling that you may, in fact, be a failure as a man.

So, yeah, maybe I got a little silly over this band.

But its even sillier to deny that it spoke to me....especially at a time when I was truly struggling under the weight of my failures.

Or should I say....Frozen?

Ten Bands I Just Don't Get

(sorry for the double post - didn't post chronologically due to a blogger formatting issue)

It isn't a personal attack. Try not to pee yourselves, nerds.

Black Flag - Yes, I read "Our Band Could Be Your Life". No, I still don't get it. Sorry.

The Clash - I guess if I were ten years older and had been an existential pussy during the 80's, the Clash would give me as big of a boner as it does for everyone in their 40's.

But I just can't get excited for this band. "White Riot" has always struck me as a really awesome punk song, and "White Man in Hammersmith Palis" is as close to reggae as I can come without punching a hippie or a frat boy. So, I'll give them that.

But "London Calling"? Just shut up before you launch an entire generation of annoying politically-minded bands.

Anything Involving Richard Hell - Yeah, yeah, you lived in NYC in the 70's when it actually meant something. You're a part of the blank generation. Now take your "New Pleasure"-singin' ass and get the fuck outta here.

Spoon - My God, could the music critics at NPR be any more in love with these guys? Enough already.

AC/DC - Metalheads hold this band sacred, but all I have ever heard in AC/DC is a salute to being white trash. I will give you "Hells Bells" and "Ride On". I'll even throw in "Highway to Hell" if you're gonna make a fuss about it. But I gotta draw the line somewhere, and "Dirty Deeds" is the last song I'll even consider letting in.

I can't stand these fucking guys or their dumb fans.

((...Great, now I can't ever go back to Baltimore)).

Fugazi - Speaking of fans I can't stand, go ahead and lynch me. But before you do, you ought to know that I get it: Fugazi is an immensely important band for all the things they stood for and all the things they did for independent music. Not only do I get that, but I appreciate it. All of it.

But that doesn't mean I have to like their music. Because Ian MacKaye has no fucking concept of pitch and I'm tired of him getting a free pass on it!

Fuck - even Lemmy shouts halfway in key. (Sort of).

The emperor has no clothes. Get it together, MacKaye.

Nice rhythm section, though....

Radiohead - I keep waiting and waiting for the hooks, but they never come.

I mean, they NEVER fucking show up. Where are the goddamned hooks with this band?????

(And don't you tell me to be patient. I've been patiently listening to this sickly little fourth grader snivel and moan since "Creep").

Siouxsie and the Banshees - I dated two different girls who thought this chick wrote "The Passenger".

Depeche Mode - Not only do I not get what people love about Depeche Mode, but I outright resent them.

It all goes back to one moment of epiphany I experienced my senior year of high school. I was standing on the side of the stage during down time for rehearsals for "Guys and Dolls" (yes, fuck you very much, I was in the stupid drama club), listening to two fellow students discuss Depeche Mode.

One was a new girl who had transferred in only a few weeks ago. Her name was Amy. She was pretty and friendly, and the five or six straight boys in the drama club were all scoping her out pretty hard.

The other was a kid a year behind me, named Bill.....a tall, gangly, goofy, immensely intelligent and funny kid (who went on to have a fairly amazing adulthood as a writer).

They were engrossed in a conversation about Depeche Mode. I was standing perhaps five feet away, and I knew I had absolutely nothing to contribute to the conversation. I also knew that this young lady would not turn around and ask me about the Rolling Stones or WASP.

I seem to recall that Bill and Amy may have had one of those three-week romances that are all the rage in high school. They seemed like an unlikely pairing to me, to say the least.

But deep in my little brain, something clicked: I realized that there was a small number of women who would give guys like me and Bill the time of day. And I also realized that they all seemed to like Depeche Mode. And as my college and post-college life developed, this fact became indisputably true.

And because I could not bring myself to get behind that stupid band, I lost a boatload of opportunities to have something in common with them.

Meanwhile, Bill is probably still pushing drama club girls and English majors off of him.

Man, fuck those guys....

The Dead Kennedys - Gah. I guess you had to be there.

Strange Highways

Just a quick shout out to Ronnie James Dio.

I think it's more or less common knowledge by this point, but Ronnie is pretty sick. His wife has been kind enough to share some relatively encouraging updates with music fans, but it's a small comfort to anyone who has ever been through a cancer scare or loved someone who did.

Which is far, far too many of us.

You know, it's funny: My formative metal years were just after Dio's best solo work, and yet I've never been a huge fan. Still, I am compelled to pull for him, not just in the interest of beating back cancer, but also because he is perhaps the one and only guy in metal - perhaps in the entire music industry - whose character has unanimous endorsement:

Music fans, journalists, filmmakers, other musicians.....all have openly admitted that Ronnie James Dio is simply the nicest musician around.

Which makes this news all the sadder and more unfair.

So, hang in there, Ronnie. We're rooting for you. Some of us might even be praying.

Ten Bands I Just Don't Get

It isn't a personal attack. Try not to pee yourselves, nerds.

Black Flag - Yes, I read "Our Band Could Be Your Life". No, I still don't get it. Sorry.

The Clash - I guess if I were ten years older and had been an existential pussy during the 80's, the Clash would give me as big of a boner as it does for everyone in their 40's.

But I just can't get excited for this band. "White Riot" has always struck me as a really awesome punk song, and "White Man in Hammersmith Palis" is as close to reggae as I can come without punching a hippie or a frat boy. So, I'll give them that.

But "London Calling"? Just shut up before you launch an entire generation of annoying politically-minded bands.

Anything Involving Richard Hell - Yeah, yeah, you lived in NYC in the 70's when it actually meant something. You're a part of the blank generation. Now take your "New Pleasure"-singin' ass and get the fuck outta here.

Spoon - My God, could the music critics at NPR be any more in love with these guys? Enough already.

AC/DC - Metalheads hold this band sacred, but all I have ever heard in AC/DC is a salute to being white trash. I will give you "Hells Bells" and "Ride On". I'll even throw in "Highway to Hell" if you're gonna make a fuss about it. But I gotta draw the line somewhere, and "Dirty Deeds" is the last song I'll even consider letting in.

I can't stand these fucking guys or their dumb fans.

((...Great, now I can't ever go back to Baltimore)).

Fugazi - Speaking of fans I can't stand, go ahead and lynch me. But before you do, you ought to know that I get it: Fugazi is an immensely important band for all the things they stood for and all the things they did for independent music. Not only do I get that, but I appreciate it. All of it.

But that doesn't mean I have to like their music. Because Ian MacKaye has no fucking concept of pitch and I'm tired of him getting a free pass on it!

Fuck - even Lemmy shouts halfway in key. (Sort of).

The emperor has no clothes. Get it together, MacKaye.

Nice rhythm section, though....

Radiohead - I keep waiting and waiting for the hooks, but they never come.

I mean, they NEVER fucking show up. Where are the goddamned hooks with this band?????

(And don't you tell me to be patient. I've been patiently listening to this sickly little fourth grader snivel and moan since "Creep").

Siouxsie and the Banshees - I dated two different girls who thought this chick wrote "The Passenger".

Depeche Mode - Not only do I not get what people love about Depeche Mode, but I outright resent them.

It all goes back to one moment of epiphany I experienced my senior year of high school. I was standing on the side of the stage during down time for rehearsals for "Guys and Dolls" (yes, fuck you very much, I was in the stupid drama club), listening to two fellow students discuss Depeche Mode.

One was a new girl who had transferred in only a few weeks ago. Her name was Amy. She was pretty and friendly, and the five or six straight boys in the drama club were all scoping her out pretty hard.

The other was a kid a year behind me, named Bill.....a tall, gangly, goofy, immensely intelligent and funny kid (who went on to have a fairly amazing adulthood as a writer).

They were engrossed in a conversation about Depeche Mode. I was standing perhaps five feet away, and I knew I had absolutely nothing to contribute to the conversation. I also knew that this young lady would not turn around and ask me about the Rolling Stones or WASP.

I seem to recall that Bill and Amy may have had one of those three-week romances that are all the rage in high school. They seemed like an unlikely pairing to me, to say the least.

But deep in my little brain, something clicked: I realized that there was a small number of women who would give guys like me and Bill the time of day. And I also realized that they all seemed to like Depeche Mode. And as my college and post-college life developed, this fact became indisputably true.

And because I could not bring myself to get behind that stupid band, I lost a boatload of opportunities to have something in common with them.

Meanwhile, Bill is probably still pushing drama club girls and English majors off of him.

Man, fuck those guys....

The Dead Kennedys - Gah. I guess you had to be there.

Type O Negative

ton 930


A few months ago I wrote about how, during my first year out of college - lost in the new world where all my friends weren't within walking distance and unrequited love lingered at a distance of 150 miles -- I'd placed enormous emotional meaning to the words and music of Brooklyn grind-core metal "goths", Type O Negative.

Unfortunately, my infatuation with the band didn't quite end there. In fact, only about a year after my broken-hearted purchase of Type O Negative's opus "Bloody Kisses", the band would follow up with a staggeringly lush production entitled "October Rust." And it proved to be just what my tender vagina needed to get me through the watershed period to be known as my early 20's.

While "Bloody Kisses" was rooted in themes of despair, loss and death, "October Rust" provided the ultimate foil - an album loosely focused on one central theme of rebirth. And while no TON album would be complete without motifs of great sadness, this record also charged forward with a shockingly vulnerable celebration of the loves, lusts and desires that are so often just outside the grasp of all male beings. In fact, for this one moment, songwriter Peter Steele put aside the self-hate and self-effacement in lieu of self-doubt.

The results were rather spectacular.

If the rejected little drama queen in me had bought into the often ridiculous funeral stylings of "Bloody Kisses", the repressed romantic of my 22 year old self fully wished to embrace the honesty of "October Rust".

Could this possibly be the same band that once wrote songs entitled, "Too Late: Frozen", "Kill You Tonight" and the unforgettable "I Know You're Fucking Someone Else"??

It was, in fact, the same band, and I took no small amount of inspiration in their effort towards reinvention. And there was probably a good reason why:

At the time this album came out, I'd been out of school for over a year and I was still living at home with my folks. I was stuck in the mud, I was underemployed, and a rebirth was exactly what I was in need of.

I gave the disc its first listen as I was lying in the dark in my twin bed, with absolutely no idea what to expect. I say with no exaggeration whatsoever that I was floored by how beautiful and haunting the opening track, "Love You to Death" was. By the time the song had reached the coda, I was literally sitting bolt upright in bed reaching for the lamp and staring in disbelief at the stereo as Steele repeatedly sang the gorgeous extended "am I good enough" outro.

To this day, I'm not sure that I have ever been so overwhelmed by a single piece of music, or by a lyric so incredibly simple. For a kid who had never stopped struggling with his notion of self worth - probably from the time I was in first grade or so - I was just completely knocked out to have the entire question of my lifetime summed up and sang back to me in a six-word lyric, repeated for two full minutes:

"Am I good enough for you", indeed...

This is usually where I write some snarky and defensive couple of sentences about how oversensitive I used to be, but to be honest, it's pretty tough to conjure the self-deprecation right now. Every music lover has those moments when a song somehow takes on an immensely important and deeply personal resonance with him or her. I guess its too bad that the Beatles or the Clash couldn't have been that force for me. But the fact is that once again it was metal that spoke to me and spoke for me.

And that's ok.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In the face of such a personal confession, I would be remiss not to share the other defining story associated with this song.

I was desperate for an awful lot of things in my early 20's. And one of the items near the top of the list was for people to think that I knew what I was talking about when it came to music.

And so I tried to sell just about everyone I knew on what a tour de force "October Rust" was.

As always, no one listened. Except my friend, Joey - known in previous posts as Pornmaster-T (PMT).

I've gone into detail about PMT before, so it seems unfair to dive into all his shortcomings again. But bear with me here, because its relevant.

PMT was having an open mind one night, and he agreed to borrow my copy of October Rust and give it a spin.

He proceeded to keep it for several months.

I should also mention that PMT had moved out to West Virginia. He was living with his dad, and having a little trouble forming a social circle. This is all understandable; starting over in a small town is hard.

One of the places that PMT looked for comfort was in the many low-brown gentleman's clubs that dot the Martinsburg, WV metro area. And I can't judge him too severely, because it was not uncommmon for myself and another friend to trek out to West Virginia and sample said strip joints with PMT.

Over time, however, PMT increasingly became a regular at these establishments, and he presumably attended them by himself. With all of us well within our early 20's, this struck me and my friends as both troubling and depressing.

PMT, in fact, became such a common patron of one establishment that they allowed him to bring in his own music for the DJ to play.

Just take a moment and imagine that.

((Oh, God, I'm just remembering the one time he brought us to this joint and made the JD play Faster Pussycat's "House of Pain". In the history of modern music, I'm not sure there's anything less appropriate for a young woman to gyrate nude before strangers to, than an ode to absent fathers.

Good job, PMT.)).

Of course, you all know where this is going by now. Perhaps six months after I lent him my goddamn favorite CD, PMT finally decided to return it, and - while I'm trapped in a moving car with him - he tells me in detail all about what he's been doing with it for the past several weeks.

"You know that strip joint we always go to?"

"Well, I mean we went to it two or three times, I think. I wouldn't say we *always* go there"

"We always go there when you visit me! Anyway, yeah yeah, we always have such a great time there. We gotta go back soon."

"Uh. Well."

"So, remember how they let me bring in my own music?"

"Oh, yes, I remember."

"Well, 'Love You to Death' is the BEST. LAP DANCE. SONG. EVER!"

*silence*

"Cuz, you know it's a long song, man. And I'm paying my $20 so the way I see it, I'm getting top value."

*silence*

"But here's the best part...."

*resigned silence*

"At the end, you know that part at the end? The part where he says over and over "Am I good enough for you?"

*glowering silence*

"You know what I'm talking about??"

"yes."

"The girl stood up - and she was so hot, man - she stood up and turned around and bent down right in my face and whispered "yeeesssssss."

*disgusted silence*

"And I was all like "UUUUGHHGHGHGHHOAAAAAH," PMT said, as he rolled his eyes back in his head and made his grotesque orgasm face.

A few awkward hours later, he gave me the CD back. I promptly threw it out and bought a new copy.

PMT and I are still friends, sort of.....but I always hated him a little after that. Seriously.

Still, I choose to remember this song for the powerful moment when it first reached me, and not for the equally powerful image of my morbidly obese friend having a 32 year old mother of two gyrate on his little dogcock as she counted the $1 bills that would hopefully someday finance her way through beautician school.

Because I can't live with that.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

As for the concert itself, who the hell knows? I'm too tired and I've written too much to do a review.

But in looking over the stub, it occurs to me that this wasn't even the tour behind "October Rust"; this was the tour behind the following album "World Coming Down" (which wasn't anywhere near as good of a record).

I lost the set list, but what I can tell you is that I went to this show immediately after my punk pop-noise band played the Metro Cafe on 14th Street (on a bill with no less than minor-punk-pop royalty, the Mr. T Experience....to a packed house, at that).

We finished our set, I broke down my kit, and I ran down U Street just in time.

The show was sort of disappointing, as I remember. But they did play "Love You to Death".


Originally uploaded by tonbabydc