I remember that dog’s “Totally
Crushed Out” because the album came at a transitional period in my tender
youth. I had seen the band open
for the Foo Fighters on March 30th, 1996 and was non-plussed. Granted, it was the first live show I’d
ever attended, but I think I was overly-anxious to see the guy who used to be
in Nirvana.
Two months later and I was
different. It was an awkward
time…I’d finished 8th grade and we were done with school a good two
weeks before the rest of school.
Hanging around at this time was a strange, unknown pleasure of nothing
to do during school-hour weekdays.
Ordering pizzas in the middle of the day, riding bikes down streets we’d
never been, perpetually throwing water balloons…me and this motley group of
rag-tag others lived as unchallenged kings in our own four square block
stomping ground.
Be we did other shit too. I’d dyed my hair forest green…only to
have it fade that same day in a gruesome shaving cream fight. The rest of the summer was spent with faint
pea green locks atop my head. We’d
gotten unusually obsessed with the Anarchist’s Cookbook, but all being under-18
were unable to purchase said text from the local head shop.
So we improvised. We had a general idea of what a Molotov
cocktail was made of, so the Snapple bottle was filled with lighter fluid with
a paper towel hanging out of the top.
We lit the paper towel and sat there, basking in the pyromania that most
twelve-year-old boys go through.
I’d say the flames got a little over my waist, so at that time, about
three feet tall. We never seemed
panicked or worried or scared…someone simply filled a kitchen pot with water
and doused our sorry excuse for overthrowing the government. The concrete on that spot had actually
been bleached a bright white from our actions and would remain so until we tore
up the backyard six years later.
But behind all this pre-pubescent
machismo, that same fucking day, I rode my bike to the Harmony House and spent
what felt like an eternity trying to decide between that dog and the Vaselines. The Vaselines album had the originals
of three songs that Nirvana had covered and was on Sub Pop to boot and was so
terribly hip and tempting. But I
kept coming back to that dog.
Something about the cover drawn to look like a teen romance novel or the
no short of brilliant use of all the song titles in a well-written, coherent
paragraph on the back cover was all too much. I was secretly scared that some suburban youth would come
and buy “Totally Crushed Out”, having witnessed the same mediocre opening
performance for the Foo Fighters I had, and I would never find the album
again. I bought that dog and came
back a few days later for the Vaselines.
The songs on “Totally Crushed Out”
are heartbreaking stories of lost love, missed chances, the “what could have
been?” which is totally what leaving eighth grade is all about. It made sense to me, but not too
quickly. As I grew, I kept finding
myself coming back to the record…it never aged and always seemed to equate to
that particular moment in my life that I happened to be living.
After meeting Anna Waronker, she
told me that she thought of that dog as an art band…the whole thing being a
kind of art project. And I thought
that a little queer. “Totally
Crushed Out”, a masterpiece that I revered as highly as any Beatles or Stones
effort, was almost shrugged off by its inceptor as a one-off art thingy. I prided myself on telling her that it
meant so much more to me and she was flattered.
So what I think of when I think of
“Totally Crushed Out” is the confusing time at the end of my pre-teens, my
stupid ugly green hair with the stink of lighter fluid still fresh on my hands
and the squeak of bicycle breaks humming in my head, partaking in some psuedo
rite of passage with a bunch of other hormone-addled freaks, and later, in
secret, hoping that no one would find me out, listening to this “pop” album and
feeling utter bliss and confusion and ecstasy and bewilderment. I liked the album so much that I was
scared. “Totally Crushed Out” made
a difference in this poor white boy’s life.
