Tuesday Tuneage
The Blasters - “Go, Go, Go”
1982

Anybody remember the original Gaviidae Common? A high-end fancy pancy shopping complex on Nicollet Mall? Bound to be as successful as The Conservatory? I worked as an accountant for a general contractor when Gaviidae was constructed, the division I was in built out some of the tenant spaces there. One shop our company built was owned by a British couple and its concept must have been born from the hubris of the United Kingdom defeating mighty Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982: It was a freakin’ tea room. You could go there and sip your tea and eat your crumpets. On little round wooden tables with doilies. A jolly good time. Oh boy.

Then the utterly predictable happened. The place had loyal customers numbering in the single digits and hence didn’t do great business. The Brits didn’t pay the bills owed to my company and our subcontractors didn’t get paid. Inquiring phone calls went up and down the owner-contractor-subcontractor chain over when funds would be made available to the companies that built out the space and things went to hell.

There was a process directed by people above me involving sending notice that our company would file a lien on the space. One day my bosses were conveniently all in the same meeting so I took a call from one of the clients, a lady with a shrill British accent who railed at me, saying my company was acting inappropriately and offered up the usual deadbeat client excuses for why they weren’t paying their bills. After a few minutes of taking this bat’s haranguing, I calmly told her it was out of my hands and that I would ask one of my bosses to call her later. She yelled some more at me in that annoying voice before hanging up. I placed my receiver down and yelled: “THIS ISN’T THE GODDAMNED LEND-LEASE ACT!”

So on the Fourth of July, I will raise a toast to Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, et. al. Imagine if all the gals in the Upper Midwest had an annoying accent and sounded like some version of that lady. I’ll be also be queuing up The Blasters’ Over There EP, a live recording from 1982 where they absolutely smoke in London. Its back cover notes by Claude Kickman Bessy state “forgive me … for once doubting the American supremacy in the bopping field” and its label has an approved use of the Gadsden Flag. 

Tuesday Tuneage

Corrosion of Conformity - "Goodbye Windows"
1996

Ozzy’s Boneyard — the classic hard rock and heavy metal station on SiriusXM — is my go-to listen when it comes to crunch time on the elliptical, for blasting out distractions while writing, or while descending into a living room happy hour on a lazy afternoon. You get a run of Deep Purple, Scorpions, Led Zeppelin, Black Label Society, and Blue Oyster Cult going on a Friday afternoon with a glass of Larceny bourbon and your troubles are behind you. Lately they have Corrosion of Conformity in regular rotation, which is cause for celebration.

COC became a late nineties/early aughts favorite upon stumbling across a copy of Wiseblood in the used CD racks and circa 2000 I saw them on the America’s Volume Dealer tour at First Avenue. This was the show where I was standing on the main floor and two huge linebacker-size metalheads standing behind me (kindly? gently? it seemed that they had more humor in their intentions than bullying) pushed me into the mosh circle. I made moves like Barry Sanders and bid a retreat out of the pit and found a place further back behind two even bigger guys. But there was another reason for this show being written here in my history, my memoirs, my back pages — and it’s that at some point before the show some skinny little metalhead inadvertently bumped me and spilled part of my beer. He stopped and looked and me, shocked and sheepish, and said: “Oh dude! I’m sorry! I’m sorry.” Then he gestured at my beer and stammered: “Can I buy ya? … Can I buy ya?” I assured him that not much had been spilled and eventually he made his way on. I told this story to a couple of my friends a few days later and soon after “Can I buy ya?” became our shorthand for getting together for a beer. … “Can I buy ya?”