story time!

As in, personal story time.

Here's the setup. Way back in the mists of time (gather round children while grandpa chews his gums and reminisces), I remember all of the family getting my great-grandparents a VCR, the very first one they had.

So far, so good, and many of you reading this will have a similar story. Here's what I remember best about it, and it's something that pretty well nails down my music and niche, if you recognize the setup.

Ok, so we all get Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw a VCR for Christmas, and the first thing my aunts and uncles do is ask, what movie can we rent for them to watch. Someone says, hey, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas just made a movie, the two old farts came out of semi-retirement and had an absolute blast doing it. Comedy, Hollywood legends, we're golden.

And we were right. The movie "Tough Guys", if you seek it out, is a smiler, the kind of fun ride that old pros put together, hits its marks and bows out.

Now we get to the really fun part. I had to look up the dates, but I was about fourteen or so, and I had my own radio world. Needless to say, it overlapped with precisely nobody I knew, except for the one or two other kids at school that I traded cassette tapes and bootleg concert vcr tapes with.

This was the first rumblings of what would later become a roar. REM, Metallica, a vicious little snarl from L.A. that would turn into Guns N' Roses, the Seattle sound was hinted at, Queensryche was the forerunner here, Concrete Blonde, basically there was a group of us, holding tenuous hands around the country through tape exchange and bbs postings and so on, and we were so far outside of what people considered normal that Michael Stipe and REM making the radio was a shock beyond words.

What does this have to do with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas enjoying their golden years in a Hollywood comedy about the last two train robbers?

Well, the bit is that Kirk Douglas is trying to be cool and hip and date a much younger lady, one who's into the L.A. punk scene of circa 1985.

She took him to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. When, and trust me on this, absolutely no one (except for the handful of kids I'm part of, the ones who somehow connected across country and continents and were slowly morphing into something that other people would eventually accept under the odd label of Alternative, we didn't care because none of the bands and artists and writers we were part of cared if the straights *ever heard or saw anything we did*. Why care what the straights get up to?) had ever heard of this merry band of misfits.

Except for whoever had the mindflash to put them in "Tough Guys" and have Kirk Douglas try and dance to them => here's the YouTube Link.

And now we get to my part in the proceedings.

And that's the part where, a day after Christmas when we've rented "Tough Guys" for my great-grandparents to watch, and we get into this scene in the movie, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers come on the screen...

And everyone in my family turns to me at once, automatically, without thought at all, and simultaneously asks "What the hell is that?"

I'm just glad the Peppers had their clothes on. Because trust me, they're tame here...

p.s. I guess that means someday I'm going to have to tell the story of the little punk bar where I met Dave Grohl, when he was touring with his first band a couple years before he joined Nirvana...