A New Year's Eve Story from Long Long Ago
I like Reggae. I really do, and I have one Bob Marley CD to prove it. I have a UB40 LP too - you remember vinyl, right? - and some English Beat on cassette if that counts. But, I am getting ahead of myself.
I've been noticing that New Year's Eve is coming up. Xmas too, but that's another issue. In my youth, I would stay home on New Year's Eve while my parents went out and drank somewhere with friends. Later, I suspected that some serious wife-swapping was going on, but I had no proof. At home, my brother and I (and sometimes my sister) would stay up late drinking pop and eating chips. Well, that was until my sister was old enough to go out with boyfriends in their cars and my brother hooked up with his ex-hooker girlfriend.
On occasion, a friend might come over and we would watch Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Evidently, the man is still alive. Until Dick had his stroke, I assumed that he was some sort of robot, never aging and always boring. But, that is not what this post is about. This post is about Reggae music: Bob Marley, Eddie Grant, Mighty Diamonds, Musical Youth.
Maybe it was the fact that I was in Waterloo at the time. I went to University there for two years once, but before that, I knew very little of the place. One New Years' Eve, we ended up at a strange and small party filled with the socially-desperate. It's difficult to say why that happened. Wait, it was because of the woman I was with. She attracted the social misfits, not that they were necessarily bad. Some were fascinating, but not this bunch. They were ostracized for good reason.
So, some dude showed up with a boom box and some CDs. He put on a Reggae disc and we chilled. Somebody broke out the Dubonet on ice (I can't think of that without reflecting on Berlin), but I stuck with beer as this was back in the days when I could drink beer. I drank; I chatted - as best as I could with the socially-challenged, or maybe they were socially-desperate.
A full two hours after the dude put on the first CD, some sharp cookie (and it wasn't me) realized that no CD could really be that long. Here's the punch line, in case you are scanning for it: he had hit repeat. But, we didn't listen to the same CD twice or maybe three times. We had two hours of the same Reggae tune. It took two hours for someone to notice! Not even the dude who brought the CDs noticed.
Ok, so this story is not as funny as I thought it was.
Technorati Tags: New Year's Eve, Reggae
5 comments:
Au contraire... the story is quite funny. We had a similar thing happen at my dad's place once. And incase you are wondering, NO, we're not social misfits or socially incapable.
We were listening to the Run Lola Run soundtrack and somehow, someone had hit the repeat button. The thing is, the song we were listening to was decent enough background music that we didn't realize until about 40 minutes later. It was pretty funny.
Perhaps it's the water?
So, in other words, listening to the same track from Run Lola Run over and over again is sort of like watching Run Lola run?
Bedouin Soundclash is pretty awesome as well.
There are certain tunes I can listen to over and over and over again, one after another. One of them is Lake Charles by Lucinda Williams. Another one is a polka called Zosia, recorded by Scrubby and the Dynatones, out of Buffalo NY. I don't know what it is about those songs in particular....
Yes, it is funny. It's funny because one might think that you didn't notice the music was the same song over and over due to the very interesting conversation--but you ruled that out with your description of these party-goers. So it's funny.
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