Mind Your Own God Damn Business

(In celebration of my impending 10 year high school reunion, I have decided to start putting up videos of music that I listened to as a senior in high school and attempt to justify my love of them. Some of it is still pretty ok, some of it is terrible. Either way, here it is.)

My original plan was to start with Limp Bizkit, but here’s the problem: I planned on mentioning that the first time I heard Limp Bizkit was at a Sugar Ray concert. I feel like with both bands, I have to immediately follow up the statement “I liked them in high school” with “WAIT, WAIT! LET ME EXPLAIN!” I thought about waiting a week before explaining why I had paid money to see Sugar Ray, but my manhood was too threatened to let that sit.

So, anyway:

On my last day of Jr. High school, one of the tech lab teachers let me take home a Commodore 64 computer, which was badly dated even in 1995 when he gave it to me. My entire summer before starting high school was spent in the basement, dicking around with BASIC on my sweet ass C64, trying to trick a girl I knew into letting me do it on her face, and listening to KTCL. I can still almost smell the cool breeze that blew in my window at night after everyone had gone to bed and I was still plinking away at my Commodore and watching Conan O’Brian.

Let old Grandpa Johnny wax nostalgic about KTCL for a moment, if I may: KTCL used to be an independent station that played a lot of music that you couldn’t hear otherwise, and if you were willing to sit through a lot of strange things, they would usually play some pretty cool stuff that other stations didn’t play.

In a strange coincidence or maybe just a celebration of my high school graduation, KTCL changed their format to “A 45 minute repeating playlist of alternative hits from the early 90′s” the year I graduated. Needless to say, I would rather fuck a dog than listen to KTCL anymore.

…ok, that’s probably not true. I mean, unless I had to listen to it for a really long time. Like, 10 years, nonstop. Then…well, I’m still not sure. Look, you know what I mean.

Anyway, that summer, listening to KTCL, I heard Sugar Ray for the first time. They played “Mean Machine” and was a fan.

Here’s the video for their first song:

This video really only kind of does the song justice, mostly because during the last guitar part, he screams “DON’T FUCK WITH IT!” in the unedited version. Who am I kidding, though. You didn’t know that there was a guitar part at the end, because you didn’t watch the fucking video, did you? I could tell you that at 2:54 in the song the drummer takes a dump on George Burns’ grave, and you would never know if I was telling the truth or not.

Whatever.

Here are a few more videos from their first CDs:


Sure, it’s not as hard as Pig Destroyer or anything, but they rocked pretty hard.

(I have to pause for another story for a moment – During a New Year’s eve party that one of my old girlfriends and her friends threw, I hijacked the stereo and put on Mean Machine and started blasting it when midnight hit. I’ll never forget how much fun Kevin and I had rocking out to it, or the disgusted, angry looks on all of her friend’s faces when I did it. There was one girl in particular that was especially irritated by everything that I did. I still have a very vivid mental image of her face, with that sour look on it like she just took a bite of a turd sandwich, because I saw that face pretty much every day for nine months. I could discuss the fact that the suffering of others seems to heighten my enjoyment of music, but we’ll save that for another day.)

Anyway, After two albums of rocking pretty hard, Sugar Ray realized that the music that they were playing wasn’t making them a lot of money or getting them laid, so they decided that it was time to start sucking.

All the way to the bank.

In a boat that was floating there on a river of 100 dollar bills and my tears.

Those motherfuckers.

Nonetheless, I will always have fond memories of rocking out to their music during my senior year of high school.