Back in the wild and crazy mid-nineties, I lived in
Mt. Pleasant, MI. The running joke about
Mt. Pleasant is that there are no mountains, and it's not very pleasant. Basically it's a college town dropped in the middle of a cornfield. Strange days indeed.
Anyway, when I think back to those days I feel like I actually was living in the UK. I was totally immersed in
Britpop and
Britpop culture. I guarantee that I was the only kid in Mt. Pleasant with
Ian Brown and
Pulp posters, waiting for a new
Suede B-side, or literally having trouble sleeping the night before the
Echo & the Bunnymen comeback single was released. There were a couple of great record stores there (remember, this was pre-internet, so it was really tough to get your hands on English music) including the phenomenal
New Moon Records.
I was in there all the time. They had a great used section, tons of vinyl, intelligent employees, and an awesome listening station. Mike, the owner, was into lots of late-sixties psych stuff - he got me into all manner of glorious weirdness like
the Stooges and the
MC5 and exposed me to
Captain Beefheart and
Frank Zappa.
My friend Rod worked there too, and looking back, he was a huge influence on me. I met Rod on a bus going to
Chicago, and I remember him and I hanging out at
the Blackstone Hotel (where they filmed
The Untouchables) the night that
Allen Ginsberg died. We were both heavy into
the Beats, and we were both pretty upset. Later Rod taught me my first chords on guitar - I'll never forget the summer night we both sat up playing
"Down By The River" by
Neil Young. He showed me those three chords - C D G - and I hammered away on them while he soloed for seriously, about 5 hours. He gave me the first four
Echo & the Bunnymen records,
The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead,
New Order's Substance, and
Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. Essentially I was an
Anglophile of the first degree, obsessed with
Britpop stuff like
Oasis and
Verve and
Suede, and he also was an
Anglophile, but from the previous generation, thus he was into
The Smiths and
Joy Division and
The Stone Roses.
So long story short, those were good days. And the other record store in town used to order both
NME and
Melody Maker for me. They were always a week late, but they were a lifeline to a world I could only dream of. Every week there was some new band that I'd never heard of and couldn't wait to check to check out -
Blur,
Manic Street Preachers,
Boo Radleys, etc. I got a hold of a ton of great deleted British stuff from the cut out bin (do you remember the cut out bin?) like the magnificent first album from
Geneva, and a bunch of out of print
Echo & the Bunnymen singles.
Here is a large collection of mid-nineties
NME and
Melody Maker scans. Just seeing them takes me back. Enjoy them
here.
