Tuesday, June 29, 2021


Tuesday Tuneage
Coverdale-Page - “Pride and Joy”
1993


I was working my first post-college temp job at the Richfield Lunds grocery store in the summer of 1987. My task was to sit at a table with another temp and some senior volunteers and help people sign up to obtain at-home colon cancer screening tests. It was a campaign promoted by channel 5’s Dr. Michael Breen, who once stopped by to say hi and thank us for helping out. (Imagine my disappointment decades later while watching the NBA Finals and finding out ABC’s Mike Breen is a completely different guy, coulda done the Jeff Spicoli “ah, I know that dude” bit.) Later in the summer the reachout effort tamped down and the table was down to one-person shifts and there weren’t many interested patrons. (Though I was referred to as “sir” for the first time ever by a high school kid looking for the deli section ... I was twenty-one, sigh.) The manager of the store took a liking to me and said it would be fine if I flipped through magazines at my station during the slow stretches. So it was in a magazine there — I forget which — that I read Whitesnake’s name described as “seemingly both racist *and* sexist.” That line sounds like a Spinal Tap outtake, bravo.

Tawny Kitaen (RIP) aside, I never cared for Whitesnake. Glossy corporate metal that became increasingly laughable once Guns n’ Roses appeared and dumb without enough fun to make up for it. (No, I didn’t care about the hire-Steve-Vai move.) While I could go back to David Coverdale’s solo album White Snake (two words, not one, a complicated fellow this Dave) and try to find a song, instead I’m using a Coverdale-Page song here because Jimmy Page’s efforts in the nineties to resuscitate Led Zeppelin were pretty damn funny.