Songbook #10: Red Sweater!
Oh well, whatever
You and me
And that red sweater
The Aquabats
Red Sweater!
The first semester of my sophomore year of college was pretty lousy. After scraping through the entry level classes of my freshman year with acceptable grades, the weed out classes of sophomore year kicked my ass; I ultimately lost my scholarship at the end of this year, which made the difference between my having (admittedly small) loans when I graduated and having money in the bank. Most of the problem was that I simply wasn't smart enough, or didn't care enough about the esoteric subject matter, or most likely some combination of the two. It didn't help that nearly every leisure minute I had in that fall semester was devoted to one of the two positions that I held in the fraternity (risk manager and house manager). Throw all of that together with the only semester I ever worked help desk support (aka, hell) and extreme cynicism and bitterness from my mostly not having gotten over the girl in the passenger seat, and you get a level of stress that I've never really come close to matching since.
When I returned from the winter holiday I had a very brief relationship with a girl who decided that I was absolutely the right guy for her. For reasons still unknown she flipped out after two weeks and disappeared. As you might imagine this did not help my mental state particularly. It was very clear that for the sake of my own sanity I had to find some kind of activity to do that wasn't related to the fraternity. I really had no idea what that activity was going to be, but I had two fraternity brothers who were involved with WRUW so I signed up for the training program in the spring of 1998. I figured that at two hours a week the time commitment was both reasonable and easily scheduled, and if I didn't like it I could drop out.
I was assigned to train on Screw the Buzzard, a punk and ska show that my fraternity brother Glick (air name: T.P.) had been hosting for the last several years. Glick had graduated at the end of my freshman year and had a co-host, Brian (The Spectator) who had trained with him the previous year. We were on Tuesday nights from 5pm to 7pm, and despite the fact that I knew almost nothing about ska, I was stuck in charge of that hour of the show almost immediately because T.P. had some work issues that popped up after the semester started.
To help correct the holes in my musical knowledge, T.P. lent me two large CD books full of ska CDs. I spent an inordinate amount of time in my room at the fraternity house (the back of The Studio, for those scoring at home) listening to music by bands I'd never heard of. Although the third wave of ska peaked in 1996, I had never heard of it until now, and I took to it like a junkie to heroin. Looking back on it now, this was an incredibly generous loan, especially when you consider that MP3s had only hit the scene in mid-1997, and iPods were still fever dreams in the minds of a few isolated techies.
One of the best of those CDs was the second album from a band called The Aquabats, and the consensus best song on that album is "Red Sweater". Even now it is my favorite ska song of all time, a distinction that survived the rather lackluster performance that occurred the sole time I saw the band. It must be admitted that by the time gieves and I saw them in 2004 at the Agora Ballroom we were far out of their target age group; we could practically smell the hormones coming off the horde of teenagers in the pit dancing to the ska sounds of a band dressed like superheroes. Oh well, the song is still awesome.
In any event, by the end of the semester I had a strong working knowledge of the genre, and I was hooked on the idea of college radio. The path was set for a leisure time activity that continues to this very day. Almost as importantly, I had a new nickname. "The Cynic" came from a comment I made on the fraternity email list that T.P. ran with. It seemed to fit, and I've been using it on air ever since. As secret origins go, that's pretty prosaic, but there you have it.
Tracklist
#1 - Welcome to the Jungle
#2 - Runnin' Blue
#3 - Cryin'
#4 - Mr. Jones
#5 - Blinded by the Light
#6 - Piano Man
#7 - Romeo & Juliet
#8 - Ecstasy
#9 - Seasons of Love
#10 - Red Sweater!
You and me
And that red sweater
The Aquabats
Red Sweater!
The first semester of my sophomore year of college was pretty lousy. After scraping through the entry level classes of my freshman year with acceptable grades, the weed out classes of sophomore year kicked my ass; I ultimately lost my scholarship at the end of this year, which made the difference between my having (admittedly small) loans when I graduated and having money in the bank. Most of the problem was that I simply wasn't smart enough, or didn't care enough about the esoteric subject matter, or most likely some combination of the two. It didn't help that nearly every leisure minute I had in that fall semester was devoted to one of the two positions that I held in the fraternity (risk manager and house manager). Throw all of that together with the only semester I ever worked help desk support (aka, hell) and extreme cynicism and bitterness from my mostly not having gotten over the girl in the passenger seat, and you get a level of stress that I've never really come close to matching since.
When I returned from the winter holiday I had a very brief relationship with a girl who decided that I was absolutely the right guy for her. For reasons still unknown she flipped out after two weeks and disappeared. As you might imagine this did not help my mental state particularly. It was very clear that for the sake of my own sanity I had to find some kind of activity to do that wasn't related to the fraternity. I really had no idea what that activity was going to be, but I had two fraternity brothers who were involved with WRUW so I signed up for the training program in the spring of 1998. I figured that at two hours a week the time commitment was both reasonable and easily scheduled, and if I didn't like it I could drop out.
I was assigned to train on Screw the Buzzard, a punk and ska show that my fraternity brother Glick (air name: T.P.) had been hosting for the last several years. Glick had graduated at the end of my freshman year and had a co-host, Brian (The Spectator) who had trained with him the previous year. We were on Tuesday nights from 5pm to 7pm, and despite the fact that I knew almost nothing about ska, I was stuck in charge of that hour of the show almost immediately because T.P. had some work issues that popped up after the semester started.
To help correct the holes in my musical knowledge, T.P. lent me two large CD books full of ska CDs. I spent an inordinate amount of time in my room at the fraternity house (the back of The Studio, for those scoring at home) listening to music by bands I'd never heard of. Although the third wave of ska peaked in 1996, I had never heard of it until now, and I took to it like a junkie to heroin. Looking back on it now, this was an incredibly generous loan, especially when you consider that MP3s had only hit the scene in mid-1997, and iPods were still fever dreams in the minds of a few isolated techies.
One of the best of those CDs was the second album from a band called The Aquabats, and the consensus best song on that album is "Red Sweater". Even now it is my favorite ska song of all time, a distinction that survived the rather lackluster performance that occurred the sole time I saw the band. It must be admitted that by the time gieves and I saw them in 2004 at the Agora Ballroom we were far out of their target age group; we could practically smell the hormones coming off the horde of teenagers in the pit dancing to the ska sounds of a band dressed like superheroes. Oh well, the song is still awesome.
In any event, by the end of the semester I had a strong working knowledge of the genre, and I was hooked on the idea of college radio. The path was set for a leisure time activity that continues to this very day. Almost as importantly, I had a new nickname. "The Cynic" came from a comment I made on the fraternity email list that T.P. ran with. It seemed to fit, and I've been using it on air ever since. As secret origins go, that's pretty prosaic, but there you have it.
Tracklist
#1 - Welcome to the Jungle
#2 - Runnin' Blue
#3 - Cryin'
#4 - Mr. Jones
#5 - Blinded by the Light
#6 - Piano Man
#7 - Romeo & Juliet
#8 - Ecstasy
#9 - Seasons of Love
#10 - Red Sweater!