20% Amnesia
This year marks my 15th anniversary of moving to the Bay Area. It was 1994 and I was 23, which seemed very old to me at the time. It had been the 90s before, slightly, but 1994 was the onset of the mega-super 90s. The internet was just catching on. A program called Mosaic enabled computer users in one part of the world to view "pages" from other parts of the world, all of which had grey backgrounds and blue lettering. Grunge had gone mainstream, dragging along with it all manner of un-listenable music that should not have been played on the radio outside of hipster college towns, but was. There was a lot of good music too, which could only be discovered by means that seem downright antiquated today. We 1994-ians had buildings called "record stores"* with "listening stations" that required you to physically leave your house and put headphones on your head that had probably been worn by hundreds of filthy flannel-clad heroin addicts. Then, get this, if you found music you liked you had to buy an entire piece of plastic (with an extra paper and plastic covering), take it to a cashier who would put it in a redundant plastic bag, and you couldn't even listen to it until you got home unless you were very wealthy and had a machine in your vehicle that could play the plastic discs without them skipping.
I was not one of those types. I arrived with around $1500 in my bank account (after being laid off at the Grand Rapids Label Factory), enough to cover 3 months in a studio apartment at the time, barely enough for 1 month in half of an apartment now. (You do the math.) To survive the first summer I worked odd jobs and scavenged whatever I could. Through a temp agency I was lucky enough to land a position as an apartment inspector. It only paid about $200 a week but it involved cleaning out people's apartments after they moved; a scavenging bonanza. In the early Clinton years in Silicon Valley a lot of people assumed that prosperity was endless and when they moved to a bigger place they wouldn't bother to clean out their old refrigerators and cupboards, they'd just get new food later. I ate second-hand food for several months. I also scavenged clothes and household items including towels, kitchen appliances, tables and chairs, a stereo, a tv and vcr and even a bike. The citizens of 1994 threw out perfectly usable items left and right with nary a care.
I acquired a second night job at Shoreline Amphitheater, directing traffic in their vast parking lots. It didn't pay much either but I got to go to the concerts for free. I saw Elvis Costello's reunion tour with the Attractions, Depeche Mode, Lollapalooza, The Beastie Boys, The Eagles and many more. There was good scavenging at Shoreline too; I managed to find free dinner at every show I worked. You can learn a lot about humanity and how it relates to musical taste by working in a parking lot. Lollapalooza concert-goers were the nicest people in the world. They treated the parking lot attendants like real people and even invited us to hang out with them. At the other end of the spectrum, a lot of country music fans were drunken jerks who thought it was hilarious to try to run over us with their trucks.
I lived in an attic above a garage, next door to a convenience store and a car repair place. It was walking distance to the library, the train station, several coffee houses and the best Vietnamese restaurant in the world (sadly no longer existent), so life was good. I biked 12 miles to work and back every day and spent much of my work day walking from building to building. I got into such good shape that I would wake up every morning at 7 with no alarm and be ready to go conquer the world. On my days off I'd take the train up to San Francisco, wander around The Haight or Chinatown and just watch the 90s unfold, or I'd bike out to the bay and look at birds - all at minimal cost. I was there for the discovery of Black Skimmers in the San Francisco Bay. If you look at bird books from pre-1994, you won't see them listed as living here.
*In the Mountain View / Palo Alto area alone we had Tower, Blockbuster Music, CD Land and Record Heaven. All 4 are now out of business. The old ways of music distribution were inefficient and clunky so from a business and ecological standpoint the demise of record stores is good and right. Still, I miss the atmosphere of late night CD browsing and in a way I miss the caste system of the old business model. In the 90s if you could record a CD and get a store to sell it you really were somebody. Now anyone with a guitar and a USB converter can make an album and sell it on iTunes. I suppose this makes this makes the business more democratic, but no one really believes in democracy unless their side is winning.
I was not one of those types. I arrived with around $1500 in my bank account (after being laid off at the Grand Rapids Label Factory), enough to cover 3 months in a studio apartment at the time, barely enough for 1 month in half of an apartment now. (You do the math.) To survive the first summer I worked odd jobs and scavenged whatever I could. Through a temp agency I was lucky enough to land a position as an apartment inspector. It only paid about $200 a week but it involved cleaning out people's apartments after they moved; a scavenging bonanza. In the early Clinton years in Silicon Valley a lot of people assumed that prosperity was endless and when they moved to a bigger place they wouldn't bother to clean out their old refrigerators and cupboards, they'd just get new food later. I ate second-hand food for several months. I also scavenged clothes and household items including towels, kitchen appliances, tables and chairs, a stereo, a tv and vcr and even a bike. The citizens of 1994 threw out perfectly usable items left and right with nary a care.
I acquired a second night job at Shoreline Amphitheater, directing traffic in their vast parking lots. It didn't pay much either but I got to go to the concerts for free. I saw Elvis Costello's reunion tour with the Attractions, Depeche Mode, Lollapalooza, The Beastie Boys, The Eagles and many more. There was good scavenging at Shoreline too; I managed to find free dinner at every show I worked. You can learn a lot about humanity and how it relates to musical taste by working in a parking lot. Lollapalooza concert-goers were the nicest people in the world. They treated the parking lot attendants like real people and even invited us to hang out with them. At the other end of the spectrum, a lot of country music fans were drunken jerks who thought it was hilarious to try to run over us with their trucks.
I lived in an attic above a garage, next door to a convenience store and a car repair place. It was walking distance to the library, the train station, several coffee houses and the best Vietnamese restaurant in the world (sadly no longer existent), so life was good. I biked 12 miles to work and back every day and spent much of my work day walking from building to building. I got into such good shape that I would wake up every morning at 7 with no alarm and be ready to go conquer the world. On my days off I'd take the train up to San Francisco, wander around The Haight or Chinatown and just watch the 90s unfold, or I'd bike out to the bay and look at birds - all at minimal cost. I was there for the discovery of Black Skimmers in the San Francisco Bay. If you look at bird books from pre-1994, you won't see them listed as living here.
*In the Mountain View / Palo Alto area alone we had Tower, Blockbuster Music, CD Land and Record Heaven. All 4 are now out of business. The old ways of music distribution were inefficient and clunky so from a business and ecological standpoint the demise of record stores is good and right. Still, I miss the atmosphere of late night CD browsing and in a way I miss the caste system of the old business model. In the 90s if you could record a CD and get a store to sell it you really were somebody. Now anyone with a guitar and a USB converter can make an album and sell it on iTunes. I suppose this makes this makes the business more democratic, but no one really believes in democracy unless their side is winning.