This thing has been going around Facebook, for the list of 15 or 25 recordings that changed your life,  I wanted to do this list but I wanted to do mine a little different and tell you why.

1. Tie: Nick Lowe ure Pop for Now People(Jesus of Cool) David Bowie the Lodger

This unlikely combination is exceedingly important to me  as they were the first records I ever bought that my parents didn’t approve of before hand.  My mother had always been very  prominent in my musical choices  it was very rare  that I got to spend money unsupervised.  That’s how I wound up with lots of Big Band jazz records and Billy Joel, not that there is anything wrong with those  types of music . In fact I can argue that Glass Houses is the first major label big name Punk Rock record.  In January of 1979  at a Zayer’s Shopper City  my Grampa offered to to let me buy any 2 8-tracks in a dime bin.  I passed over the collective work of Boz Scaggs, numerous disco records and , and picked these two, solely on the  basis of the covers, and the fact that my one young uncle had also mentioned that David Bowie was cool.

Little did I know that I had picked  up sacred texts: Pure Pop is a masterpiece of pop perfection, power pop that helped to pave the way for the punk steamroller that would soon come its way. Songs about Castro, and dead silent screen stars eaten by their dogs  took up the space in my head  that previously only cared about Star Wars, Superman and Buck Rogers.  Bowie’s lodger on the other hand was something else polymorphic weirdness, androgyny and a taboo smile   lurking behind every corner;  Not the typical fair for a 10 year old from Fridley.My mind was sufficiently blown to start the next decent.

3.  Adam Ant: Friend or Foe

MTV started right about the same time we got cable TV, the very first video that came on was “Goody Two Shoes”. I was instantly hooked the music was hypnotic, strange, but witty, and the DRESSED LIKE PIRATES!!! whats not to love. That day I tried to wear my long feathered hair like Adam Ant, I perhaps was the biggest sissy in the 8th grade at that particular moment.  it took another few months before i could get a haircut that didn’t look like something that Prince Valiant wouldn’t have sported.  goody Two Shoes didn’t just make me get a decent haircut it is really what strted the  major change from boy to man,IE; I let my mother stop dressing me funny.

I had always been a well behaved kid, in fact I was only a kid in size. I was always around adults, half the time raised by my Great Grandfather  who was in his late 70’s.  Not one for a lot of playing along with the kid.  i was an 8 year old that listend to Paul Harvey, relgiously.  Seriously I was beyond nerdy; I carried a briefcase to school every day. A briefcase that I had wired an AM transistor radio, I used it to listen to WCCO,  a radio staiaon aimed at the over 50 demographic. Its no wonder other kids thought I was a narc and beat the crap out of me.

My parents had also learned a cool trick when I was in kindergarten thaat they followed all through elementry school: bribing  the principal to keep me on the bus longer , most grade schools  get out before highschools  and they use the same buses- hence I would hget picked up after school they would drop all my classmates off at the their homes to play and watch TV, then head to the high school pick up those students-drop them off at their home to smoke pot and watch TV,  then about 2 hours after school I got to go home and watch TV.  On the plus side cute high school girls would talk to me, on the downside I was 7.

This sort of gives you th ebuilt in alienation you need to want to satart dressing like a pirate, which is what i did. At first I looked less new wave then I did an extra from a bad holiday pantiomime. Eventually I get better at, but I am pretty sure i was the only New Romantic in Fridley

4. Killing Joke: Whats This For

After a while I slide into this Punk Rock New Wave  Proto goth thing with regular trips to musicland at Northtown, i started  getting into other MTV fave raves like the Police and Oingo Boingo. However something was missing, i knew it was time to break the mall ahbbit and go to  a real Punk rock record store.

The problem with my new found punk rockness is that i was entirely in a vaccum, no one elese I knew was into it, and they pretty much thought me a freak for  liking  it.  That first record store trip was the first time that I was around people who indentifed themselves as “punk”.  I was scarred like  a chubby kid at the top of the talles waterslide at the water park.

Northern Lights on E Block in downtown mpls was the pinnacle of cool, small fdirty in an area of downtown that my mother forbid me to go to, so it was perfection. E block was the area of downtown that had peep shows, dive bars, and news stands. A little slice of gritty in an otherwise placid downtown.  The shop was a craamped crowded  box  with racks and racks of vinyl. I wandered around the store, i Looked at every piece of vinyl that they had, twice. trying o eavesdrop and just glom on to every nuainsce that i could.  I knew i was going to buy something, the question was what.  It dawned on me if I bought a record that I bought like something by the Dead Kennedeys or Black Flag  (things that were noticably missing from the racks of Northtown) that I might “flag” myslef as being incredibley uncool, like I should have owned it allready.

This set pure panic in my despereate for acceptance adolscent brain. I decided that I would by something  that I had never heard of,  and that they also didn’t have a lot of copies of , because obscure wouldmmean I was cool…riight…LIKE ME PLEASE OH GOD LIKE ME…oops sorry I was channeling me in the 9th grade.  From that I then decided that in this instance I could judge a book by its cover, so the album had to  have cool artwork, but should be diffrent then anything I had seen prior.   Enter Whats This For, the cover of which had a suburban looking heavy set woman looking at a bleak forboding street.

Upon getting the record home I was in shock this wasn’t hardcore punk (at this point I had no understaanding of the all the subtle nuainces of the various genres) it was dark droney and ..dancey. Loud droney guitairs, hard tribal drumming and hypnotic chanting vocals. I was intoxicated. I wanted some  crap hardcore record, instead I got a record that busted a busted up genre. To this day this record stands out as my most profound musical influence.

To be continued…

Editor’s note: this is the closing piece of episode 3 of Unconvention.tv a and the last of the reprints here

I love America; Hell I even love Americans, I am proud to be an American, albeit not in a Lee greenwood kind of way.  I wouldn’t wear a flag pin, because I don’t do broaches.  I think that patriotism means more then “saying you’re patriotic” and putting a “support our troops” magnet from super America on your car.

I love what the US has achieved solely based on the concept of “intestinal fortitude “literally they had the guts to do it.  I don’t just love our country though, I love South America too, Europe, Asia, Africa, all of your continents, even Antarctica. I am just a big fan of the world and its people in general.

What I am not a fan of is people shooting each other, Lead bullets, rubber bullets, pepper spray what have you, I believe the world to be a better place when we aren’t firing projectiles at each other period.

Of course sometimes we have to, revolution is part of evolution, Thomas Jefferson said “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” The manure part of the quote that often gets left out, he also might have wanted to mention that it is important not to over water his particular Liberty garden, or you’ll wind up killing everything.

Its funny, politicians love to evoke the revolutionary war, and make grand claims about the founding fathers, but the reality is not all the citizens of the colonies were behind them, most of the public was just as happy under England’s Rule, the founding fathers did what they believed in. at the end of the day it s all about a triumph of the wills, who want it more.

Of course if they did win, the question is “what do they want”, the protestors all seem to be saying they want a chance to “discuss” their views with the delegates, do they really think the delegates are unaware of the junior grade riots going on outside the convention center?

Do the protestors really think that if they got to yell “No more Bush” to a room full of his loyalists that its going to accomplish anything besides being a mild irritant?   Do they realize that while a number of the delegates are elected officials, the vast majority are just citizens like themselves? That if they really wanted to have an influence on them, they could easily join the part, and then have a much easier time of having their voice heard.

on the run

Sometimes we yell to be heard, sometimes we yell to hear ourselves

What I wonder is if this isn’t some sort of cultural tourism on both sides of the aisle; protestors getting to relive the 68 convention, which is a bit like doing a historical reenactment of the Alamo – their side didn’t win.

The cops also having their own ’68 flashback where they have to hold their ground. I’d hazard a guess that the twin cities police have unholstered more weapons in the last week then they have in the past six months.

I wouldn’t trade jobs with them for anything, think about it: somebody throws a rock at you; you’re going to get mad. Throw a rock at them or worse, the police have ability, to defend themselves they have the access to weapons and they have the restraint not to use them. How long would you get hit with rocks, in a crowd that outnumbers you 10 to 1?

All this noise to be part of a waning news cycle, each side gets bragging rights, but what really gets accomplished save that the rift between the two sides grows wider.  When do we build bigger bridges, instead of widening the river? Of course this is Minnesota and we do have this problem with bridges…