AJust sharing a single song with you today.

If you have read this blog at all, you know the true emotional connection I had and still have with a specific time in my life where left of center culture ruled.  A time where “punk rock” and “new wave” were more than trite labels affixed to mere pretenders, or worse, some clichéd nostalgia night at some dive bar (feh!)

If you haven’t and need to catch up,  look at this post.

I always look forward to opportunities to reconnect with the folks I went to these events with and have been so lucky to have been able to connect with a bunch of folks I should have been closer to back in the day.  I was thinking about some of these folks, and I am realizing that as we as an age group are all getting older, just how damn NICE everyone turned out.

It was a great time in my life(as is this time, thank you very much) and I am not one for too much nostalgia, but that era was special to me.

Imagine my surprise this week when I heard Toronto based singer Oh Susanna’s great song “Tickets on the Weekend”  from her upcoming album “A Girl in Teen City” (produced by the HIGHLY under appreciated Jim Bryson)

This song hits every memory button for me  about  times where I would go off to some punk rock show or another  as a young lad; shows at the local music club The Lost Horizon, or all ages shows at ECHO or the Ukrainian Home.    Hanging around.  Hustling to get booze from someplace, anyplace and maybe even getting busted with it.  These things happen.

Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it’s just me, but when a song comes around where every word that’s in it gets it’s claws into the memory part of your brain, you can’t help but fall in love with it because it finds its way into a warm place that you thought nobody else understood.

It may not seem to be a romantic time, but it was …..I was so much older then……

Ya had to be there, and I was.  So was Susanna and you can tell she remembers it fondly too.

I offer this for everyone of us who was there.  Be it to see DOA, or The Ramones, or each other.

Down at the oddfellows hall with the big and the small

We’ll be slamming away

Baby spike up your hair

Raise your fist in the air nothing stands in our way

Hobnob there with the poor

Sneaking in the back door

Sister she never pays

Baby punks at the scene

We’re pretending we’re mean its just a part that we play.

Gabba Gabba Hey

Just like actors in a play

Addendum:  Susanna was nice enough to say nice things about this essay: