Pittsburgh Salad Days

High school was a monumentally transformative coming-of-age experience for me.  In both good ways and bad.

Bad took in the form of dramatic friendships and relationships breaking up, going from regular kid to "freak, loser misfit" overnight, unrequited loves, and having one fight that ended in my punching a bully in his braces-laced mouth, causing blood to spurt down his jacket.

In terms of good there were new friendships forged (that sadly though unsurprisingly didn't stand the test of time when I moved away) idyllic summers, poignant relationships, the new-day-upon-us that was senior year, making close to six hundred dollars in one day shoveling Pittsburghers out of the largest blizzard we'd seen in my lifetime. And music.

I knew people who used to listen to "whatever is on the radio," and couldn't understand them any more than I could understand the kids who listened to nothing but Bob Marley and The Dead and The Doors. I absorbed music through osmosis, taking everything in except for what was popular, with few notable exceptions.

What I find missing today (definitely today but also in the years before today) is just how little local music means. Sure college kids still support their local bands, but the music scenes have shrunk. There's no reason for a local scene when you can get every song from every part of the globe just by turning on your computer. You don't even have to pay for it.

And that's a shame. Growing up, I was able to see Rusted Root play a dozen times before they became mainstream. I saw Grand Buffet drop rhymes before anyone cared. Don Caballero ushered in math rock before that was a term, and before they became Storm and Stress and Battles. I saw The Cynics and to this day I don't know why they weren't bigger except perhaps because they arrived too early, before The White Stripes and Black Keyes and similar bands were tapping into that vein. There was also drum and bass and no wave acts and folk artists and even jazz singers like Phat Man Dee.  Many of these bands have long since been lost to time.

Often there'd be three or four acts on a bill and I might have only been there for one, but got there early to see everyone else because you just never knew. That was the thrilling part. They might suck or they might be amazing. Or somewhere in between. But the point was I was there to take it all in.

In A-Sides and B-Sides I wrote about seeing a female punk band on tour at a local called Graffiti where just the night before I'd seen another local band The Frampton Brothers (none of whom were brothers or named Frampton) playing. The Framptons were Pittsburgh's version of the Young Fresh Fellows with a similar vibe. Their singer and guitarist Ed Masley has had a fruitful career  as a music journalist both in Pittsburgh and Arizona.

I can't remember if he worked at Eide's record store which is somehow still standing in Pittsburgh or if I just saw them play there a few times. But along with Eide's and Graffiti, I feel like I saw them at Metropol too on their Big Stoopid World Tour. But maybe it was another club.

What the hell am I doing? I hate nostalgia. Shake it off.

You should hear the silly, excellent, and heartfelt album "I am Curious (George)" on their Bandcamp. It's a free download, too.