Driving around in the car the other day listening to KXT (like I typically do) I heard a string of tracks I hadn’t heard in years. What struck me first was the fact that I’ve been listening to some pretty damn good music for a very long time (insert self-indulgent pat on the back here) and that my brain is packed chock full of old lyrics.

I know I’m not anymore special than other hardcore music fans, but it was quite striking that I could still sing along with a song I hadn’t heard in a least a decade.

What is it about our brains that allow a person to forget where they put their keys minutes after placing them “someplace safe,” driving away from the house to be stuck with the fear that they didn’t close the garage door, or to even forget a birthday or anniversary; but to remember all the words to a random song?

It’s almost uncanny.

A goodly chunk of us has also experienced the spontaneity of sitting in a bar when an overly familiar song comes on the jukebox just to look around and see other patrons mouthing the words over their beverage. It’s almost a horrible cliche. I am a firm believer that given the right amount of social lubrication, any given dive could burst into a Glee-esque karaoke bar with the right set of tracks. Maybe that’s just a secret wish of mine.

Moreover, what is it about some songs that bring back specific memories? Whenever I hear certain Echo & the Bunnymen or Love and Rockets songs, I am immediately taken back to one particular summer in my youth where I spent my days reading Tom Swift books and eating State Fair Brand Corn Dogs.

In that same regard, I seem to learn the words to songs I hear on the radio or live pretty damn fast. I wonder all the time what “important” information is being pushed out of my head as I learn the words to the newest Iron & Wine or Dawes song I hear on the radio. I know for a fact that records from Catherine Wheel and NOFX are responsible for me losing most of my German grammar and vocabulary. One would think that committing the last couple of KMFDM records to memory would have jogged some of that back into the ol’ gourd, but I think all those oat sodas and brown liquor helped keep that fine learning at bay.

The one terrible thing, though, is that I have a terrible time with song titles and, in some cases, artist.

Recently I was on a cross-country flight where I whiled my time away catching up with season three of Being Human (the UK version, not that wretched version they have tried to put out on SyFy, but that is a topic for another post). In episode six a song was playing that I knew all the words to, but had no idea what the song was or who might have originally done it. I racked my brain for several hours, singing the words to myself over and over, trying to figure out how the hell I knew the song. Almost a day later, in the middle of a meeting when my mind was wandering far and wide, it struck me that what I had heard was an odd cover of Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” That’s the kind of crap that occupies my brain when I’m staring off into space and/or sitting in meetings.

It didn’t hit me until a couple of days ago that we are, once again, in the season of the Irish. St. Paddy’s is right around the corner and green stuff is showing up in stores like crazy. On top of that, the squeezle and I are seeing Flogging Molly tonight and the Dropkick Murphys in a little over two weeks.

Where’s the month full of German “culture.” When do I get to put on my lederhosen, slam down boots of beer and jam to Kraftwerk and Rammstein. Octoberfest doesn’t get that kind of attention here in the states. You want to know why that is? Germans don’t put on drunken parades. I swear that post-Valentines/pre-Spring should just be called “Boston season.” If it weren’t so damn miserable and cold up there I’d probably spend that month wandering around Cambridge, drinking Harpoon and throwing the munch at the Barking Crab. Back in college I used to go to Boston every February and it was horrible and awesome at the same time.

Now, in my “advanced” years, I sit at home, drink my Irish whiskey and wait for the Boston to come to me. If the Red Sox were smart they’d do a national tour during “Boston season” just to kick their revenue bucks up a couple million or so.

Instead, I get the Texas version of “popular” Irish. Tonight I’ll get to deal with hipster highschoolers while they dance around to music that can only best be appreciated with a couple of pints of something in you and sing about “Drunken Lullabies” when, at the most, they’ve taken a swig from stepdad’s Coors Light or managed to pay a guy to pick them up a bottle of Boones Farm.

It’s enough to get a guy drinkin’.

One of the first things that popped in my gourd when I thought about looking back on the decade was food (I’m hungry). After a quick granola bar, what was left was music. Specifically, live music. I attend a lot of live music events and looking back on the long list of shows I attended in the past ten years definitely gets the grey cells firing.

If I can remember anything that happened more than a week ago, it must be incredibly memorable.

So, without further ado, here is a smattering of the top gigs I attended over the past ten years. These aren’t in any particular order, I’m just scribbling them down as they float out of the murky ether that is my memory.

October 21, 2007 – Golgol Bordello @ Granada Theater
This show was utter insanity. I attended this one with my buddy Jason and his girlfriend who was on her first excursion to Texas. With as big a stage presence that Golgol Bordello has, we plopped ourselves up at the very top of the Granada Theater (easy “secret” bar access!) and pretty much danced ourselves sick.

November 23, 2001 – Vandals @ Deep Ellum Live
This was one of the first shows where I realized that I was getting older. The average age around me at the front of the stage was a good ten years younger than me. Regardless, everyone had a great time and I think that was actually the last time the Vandals came to Dallas outside of the Warped Tour.

October 17, 2002 – Catch 22/Madcap @ Galaxy Club
Catch 22 always puts on a pretty amazing show, and Madcap is always good for an offstage laugh since, at that time, they pretty much sold all of their merch out of their travel cases. What stands out at this show was that squeezle nearly had to beat the living shit out of some punk kid. It was glorious. This little bastard wouldn’t stop rubbing up on her, so, after several terse verbal warnings, she took a swing at him. That’s one of the reasons I love her so.

October 19, 2004 – Pixies @ Nokia Live
I had already seen the reunited Pixies at ACL fest, but seeing them up close was glorious. My brother actually came up from Austin to go to the show with me, so that made it all the better.

December 3, 2005 – Pleasant Grove/I Love Math/Happy Bullets (Art Conspiracy 1) @ Texas Theater
What stood out most about this show was the drunken haze. This show was a art auction and live music escapade in the place where Lee Harvey Oswald got nipped for shooting that guy from up North. Now for the important part: it was BYOB. I had me a liter jug of red wine and I made quick work of it. Several drunken catch phrases were created that night that are still a part of the Forkers/Brewsers vernacular.

February 22, 2006 – The Sisters of Mercy @ The Gypsy Tea Room
While a great musician, Andrew Eldritch is more of a diva than Mariah Carey. I had resigned myself to not being able to see the Sisters unless I wanted to travel to some goth convention in Pittsburgh (even though Andrew says the Sisters aren’t goth), but, through some stroke of luck, they came on down to Dallas and played their tunes. Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed the hell out of it, but what really stands out about this one is that I paid $30 for a freakin’ t-shirt. How stupid am I?

June 18, 2004 – Lars Frederiksen And The Bastards/Horrorpops/The Briefs @ Trees
I came to this show to see Lars and the Horrorpops play, but was pleasantly surprised by the discovery of The Briefs. It was June and it was Trees, so it was hotter than hell. Squeezle and I managed to escape upstairs to have a good vantage point since the crowd was pretty insane. The Horrorpops didn’t get to play because there was something wrong with the drummer and his hands had swollen up to something like three times their size, so The Briefs and Lars each got to play extra long sets. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget the swirling and whirling of the circle pit as seen from above.

March 21, 2003 – Jello Biafra @ Ridglea Theater
This one is sort of a cheat. Jello did one of his standard vitriolic/political spoken word pieces. At this particular time, he was wrapped up in a harsh legal battle with the remainder of the Dead Kennedys (then fronted by Brandon Cruz of The Courtship of Eddie’s Fatherfame) and he had a lot to say about that. At one point during his talk Jello said that the legal costs were skyrocketing, but it was a good fight. Without prompt, people started walking up to the stage and tossing money on it. Jello was actually moved by it. Of particular not for this show is that squeezle and I were sitting right next to the Flametrick Subs just knowing that Mike, err Buster, was stocking up on stuff for his next tirade-laden show.

OK, that’s all I’m willing to dig through my addled brain for right now. I might regale you with more live show insanity later, but now I need a nap.

Thinking is hard.

From 1993 until some time in 1997, my roommate and I had a Sunday ritual. I’d usually spend the afternoon putting away a box of Peter Vella’s burgundy and, come evening, we’d watch and record 120 Minutes on MTV.

At this point in time, MTV also had Alternative Nation (hosted by the ever-annoying Kennedy) going just about every night, but we preferred trivia-tourettes spewing Matt Pinfield on 120 because they always seemed to play those videos that got a single airing and then had the tape chucked on the degausser.

We’d tape the two hours of videos because we never knew when there would be an incredible gem and the interwebs just weren’t very robust for that kind of crap pre-Y2K.

One of my favorite songs (and videos) that only ever seemed to get airtime on 120 was Jawbox’s “Savory.”  I was lucky enough to see Jawbox in September of 1994 at Emo’s, but not on their “farewell” tour at the end of 1996. 1997 rolled around and Jawbox called it quits.

Roll ahead to 2009 and a moron named Jimmy Fallon. For some unknown reason (aside from a re-release of Your Own Special Sweetheart), Fallon was able to get Jawbox back together after 12 years to play, among other things, “Savory” on his show. What? Could a reunion tour be in the works? The answer from front man J. Robbins is: hell no.

So, enjoy Jawbox on Jimmy Fallon, it may be the only new sounds we hear from them until the next ultra-annoying talk show host comes along.  Balls.

Throughout my college years I was fortunate enough to be situated in absolutely the right place in Texas to watch amazing things happen to me: Waco. Sure there was all that Branch Davidian stuff when I was a freshman at Baylor University, but there was a lot of other really incredible stuff as well: 100 miles North, Dallas; 100 miles South, Austin.

I’ve always been a big fan of live music.  Growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to live music outside of the bands that blossomed out of my high school and New Mexico State University.  Turns out, a couple of pretty awesome people/acts grew out of both, but that’s a tale for another time. Whenever possible, I turned my young self out for some great shows at the wee tiny amphitheater-like pit outside of the studios of KRUX on the NMSU campus and watched local kids wail their little brains out for just the chance of being heard.

Go forward in time a couple of years and I was fortunate enough to be involved in the day-to-day operations of KWBU on the Baylor University campus. While we did have our fair share of the Christian music and Jazz stuff, we were able to play some pretty fantastic music and talk to some pretty fantastic talent.

One of the greatest things about working with a radio station like KWBU was the almost constant barrage of invitations to concerts. Like any music-loving college student in a similar situation, there was just really no way I could say no. With a constant supply of “plus ones” and friends with cars, getting to either Dallas or Austin (or both on a couple of days) was a piece of cake.

If you follow a band that doesn’t play massive arenas from city to city, you notice something about the sound, energy and routine of a show: the venue plays a gigantic role. I hadn’t really noticed this prior to seeing band after band play over a given set of weeks on the same set of stages.  While the crowds in Austin differ greatly from the crowds in Dallas (naturally), the biggest factor was where a band was playing. I saw bands totally tear things up at Emo’s down in Austin and then put on a half-assed show the next night at Deep Ellum Live in Dallas.

After about six months of just passively going to shows, I started interviewing bands before and after shows.  Of special interest to me was the rituals involved with playing town-to-town and what expectations from the performers was depending on where they were.

As expected, the answers were all over the board, but some commonality started to peek through when it came to venues. Artists, like fans, have their favorite places to play. Austin has a shitload of these places and some even survived the culling that seemed to happen in the late 90′s and early 2000′s.

Hands down, my favorite place to see a show was Liberty Lunch in Austin. Over the few years I got to see shows there I saw everything from metal to punk to folk to Britpop. Nothing sounded bad in this joint. I knew where to perch during the opening bands where I could get to the bar easily and peruse the merch tables on the riser in the back of the venue easily enough, yet be positioned to dart down to the front for the bands I wanted to get up close to. I knew the nooks out front and around the side that blocked the wind while I was waiting for doors to open for a February show, and I loved the horribly shitty “green room” that acted as backstage. I talked to a lot of performers on the crappy old couches back there and drank a lot of bad beer (and even some good) at the giant bar up front.

Liberty Lunch “fell” around the same time a lot of venues in Austin got repurposed. It still hurts to look over 2nd avenue from Congress and see a massive concrete structure where the oddly small Liberty Lunch building once stood.  Austin Music Hall is nearby, but never had the intimate feel that LL did.

It’s almost too fortunate that I moved up to Dallas right after the venues in Austin started to fall. Sure, Dallas had it’s share of ups and downs in the venue department, but the majority of those didn’t happen until well into the 2000′s. I was able to remember the grimy holes I saw shows at in Austin with a fondness that only comes with being removed from a given environment.

If I had been living in Austin during those years, I’d probably be much more bitter than I usually am.