"I Once Drove Sixteen Hours For A Cup Of Coffee"

On nights like this one – the temperature dropping into the single digits – I rethink global warming being such a bad idea. Sure, there might be mosquitos the size of biplanes, global warfare over sunscreen, and Vanuatu might sink, but our teeth wouldn’t be chattering.

It’s raw outside. “It’s the kinda night that’s so cold that your spit freezes before it hits the ground.”

And that line from Cowboy Junkies’ ‘Cause Cheap Is How I Feel makes me think of a college friend who often quoted it on frigid nights when we’d head out to our favorite pub for a pint or two.

He was used to intemperate temperatures. He was from Brainerd, Minnesota, a small town, just south of the Arctic Circle where, if you had too lengthy a lunch, you risked missing the forty-five minutes of summer each year.

After we graduated, he returned to the Great White North and I headed in the other direction. There have been winter days when we’ve spoken on the phone and he has been positively giddy at the prospect of the temperature hitting thirty-five degrees.

This near Canadian was one of my best friends in college even though I was a slightly more coherent Jeff Lebowski and he was a far less villainous Gordon Gecko. Even if on paper our friendship shouldn’t have necessarily worked, it did.

He called me on some random Tuesday night in January. There was snow on the ground and I was sprawled on the couch watching hoops or a Barney Miller rerun.

“Want to go to Cleveland tomorrow?”

He had read about a coffee shop in Cleveland, Arabica Coffee House, and how spectacularly profitable it was and he wanted to do reconnaissance.

I was only taking a couple classes to finish my degree and, since I rarely went to them, I quickly jumped at the chance for an eight-hour ride in a drafty jeep.

So, the next day, he picked me up, we drove to Cleveland, hung at the coffee shop, met with the owner for a couple hours, and drove back to school.

This friend used to joke about wanting a jet and his mind was often working on a scheme as he had an entrepreneurial streak. His vision of green in a pile of coffee beans was especially prescient as, at the time of our java junket, Starbuck’s had fewer than 100 locations.

Had we followed through with the knowledge gained from that road trip, we might have been coffee moguls. This friend would remark that, when his biography was written, he wanted a chapter titled I Once Drove Sixteen Hours For A Cup Of Coffee.

For now, he’ll have to settle for this.

Of course, on our sixteen-hour trip, there was sixteen hours of music. I don’t recall exactly what we listened to – maybe some radio but mostly cassettes – but I could make some good guesses…

Cowboy Junkies – ‘Cause Cheap Is How I Feel
from 200 More Miles: Live Performances 1985–1994

Cowboy Junkies caused a commotion with The Trinity Sessions, but their sparse, unadorned sound was not quite where my head was at the time. Over the next decade, I’d snag several of their albums as promos, and I’ve never really given them more than a cursory listen. Margo Timmons does have a lovely voice, though, so perhaps I need to revisit them.

The Lightning Seeds – Pure
from Cloudcuckooland

Ian Broudie made some fine music, but with Pure he managed to concoct a perfectly infectious single.

World Party – Way Down Now
from Goodbye Jumbo

I had the chance to meet Karl Wallinger, ex-Waterboy and the creative force behind World Party. It was a small, private show and he struck me as a fascinating character – a tiny, slightly impish, rock and roll leprechaun.

As for Way Down Now, the song makes paranoia sound positively engaging.

Concrete Blonde – Caroline
from Bloodletting

Concrete Blonde was one of my favorite discoveries while in college and I quickly snagged each and every album the trio released, though most of their records were uneven.

Bloodletting was their momentary breakthrough with Joey becoming a hit and the title track getting some airplay on modern rock stations, too. But, for me, the wistful Caroline was one the band’s finest songs and featured some riveting, serpentine guitar courtesy of James Mankey.

A Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

(reposted from Saturday, March 21 sans music)

There are no two better days in the sports year – at least here in the States – than the first two days of the NCAA college basketball tournament. There are usually at least a half dozen jaw-dropping moments in the first forty-eight hours.

Most of those moments prove to be quite fleeting and often the key players are soon relegated to fuzzy details – who was that kid that hit that shot when so-and-so upset so-and-so?

As much as the calendar, it is a harbinger of spring.

The tournament has become a bit bittersweet the last several years. It might be a longing for once having the luxury to skip classes and leave the couch only for snacks, glued zombie-eyed to the television for five or six games straight.

It rained a lot during the first two days of the tournament in ’90. It was a cold rain which provided a meteorological argument for not trekking to classes.

I don’t even think I had a shift at the record store.

My school, three years removed from winning the tournament, went out in the first round.

So, I lived vicariously through my brother’s school, Ball State, which was one of that year’s Cinderella teams – a #12 seed which upset two lower-seeded teams and came within minutes of beating a loaded UNLV team to reach the Elite Eight.

I remember speaking with my brother on the phone, not long after Ball State had won their first round game in Salt Lake City. It must have been closing in on midnight which meant we’d both been watching hoops for almost twelve hours.

And, of course, the most memorable run of that tournament was Loyola Marymount, the small school from Los Angeles which was a #11 seed. I’d read a lot about the Lions as they were the highest-scoring team in college basketball history. I don’t think that I’d seen them play.

The team had Bo Kimble who was the leading scorer in the country. His teammate, Hank Gathers, had done the same. The two had been teammates and friends in Philly who had headed west for college.

A week before the tournament, Gathers collapsed and died during a game (he’d had a heart condition).

In an event that has no shortage of sentimental pull, Loyola Marymount was the must-see team for most hoops fans that year. They were like watching a pinball machine and the mastermind behind it all was a coach who quoted Shakespeare to his team.

And in each of their games, basketball fans across the nation knew to expect the right-handed Kimble to shoot his first free throw of the game left-handed as a tribute to Gathers.

It came to an end one game short of the Final Four with Loyola Marymount going out against the eventual champions, UNLV.

And probably most of all, the reason that tournament was so memorable for me is that it was my last as a college student. I’d graduate in December.

I still hadn’t left town when the following season’s tournament was played. I likely watched as much or more of it in ’91, but things had changed.

Unlike twelve months earlier, my life was now on the clock.

Dire Straits, Pick Withers And The Winter Break Of My Discontent

Here, it is often said that if you don’t like the weather, wait twenty-four hours. Actually, I’ve been trying to inject new blood into that maxim by saying, if you don’t like the weather, move ten feet to the right.

It hasn’t caught on, yet.

The reason I’m even considering the weather is that after a couple days of warmth, tonight it’s cold again and I’m trying to remember the last place I lived that didn’t have a draft.

Psychologically, I wonder if I now associate a draft with the concept of “home.”

But having grown up in the lower Midwest, I was accustomed to cold from October through the end of March – none of this low 70s in January nonsense. There were no days off from the raw temperatures.

The shame that Paloma and I won’t have kids is that I could deliver that parental speech triangulating long distances, heavy snow, and walking to school backed by true experience. It would be an Oscar-worthy performance.

As I student at a large university, on an average day, between hiking to classes and work, I was probably trekking at least five miles (thank God for the Walkman).

One winter, I was stuck working through Christmas Eve. The campus was empty and I was crashing at a house owned by my girlfriend’s uncle.

The girlfriend’s brother lived there as did two of her cousins and a couple of other friends. No one remained, though, except for the roommate who managed a Pizza Hut (think Wooderson, Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dazed & Confused, except, you know, managing a Pizza Hut).

I watched a lot of late-night cable, slept on the couch under a mountain of blankets, and worked myself into a state of catatonia due to the relentless boredom.

I was also going through some kind of Dire Straits phase which lasted for a good six months. On one of those nights during that holiday break, I stayed up ‘til dawn taping every song by Dire Straits, A to Z, from their debut up through Brothers In Arms. I think I even threw guitarist Mark Knopfler’s soundtrack work into the mix.

(has anyone gotten a large government grant, yet, to study OCD in music fans?)

Poor Dire Straits. Has any band that was the biggest in the world – as Knopfler and company arguably were with the album Brothers In Arms – been so lightly regarded?

Of course, since that winter and following spring, I’ve rarely listened to Dire Straits even though I own everything save for their final studio album. Their songs pop up randomly on the iPod, though, and it’s a reminder that they did have some fantastic stuff.

And they also had a drummer named Pick Withers.

It’s a name that I just like to say from time to time

Dire Straits – Water Of Love
I always thought that Water Of Love was the underrated gem from Dire Straits’ debut.

Dire Straits – Skateaway
Other than Sultans Of Swing, this was the second song I think I ever knew by Dire Straits. I’m not sure where – as we didn’t have MTV in our town at the time – but I saw the video. Probably on Night Flights which we got a year or two before MTV.

Anyhow, it’s always been one of my favorites by them.

Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love
Is there a consensus on the best Dire Straits’ album? I’d have to go with Making Movies and Tunnel Of Love is that record’s stellar opener. Roy Bittan of the E-Street Band plays piano on it.

It has a way cool cover, too.

Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms
Musically and lyrically, Brothers In Arms is astonishingly evocative.

Mark Knopfler – The Long Road
The Long Road was from one of Knopfler’s soundtrack efforts for a movie called Cal. I seem to recall watching the film in college with a friend and it was so slow and depressing that we only made it halfway through (it’s a pretty grim flick about the IRA).

The song is pretty, though, and strangely hopeful sounding.

If you want an engaging, overlooked film with a Knopfler soundtrack, find a copy of Local Hero. Every time I think of it, I suggest to Paloma the idea of running a bed and breakfast in a small, seaside Scottish village.