There will be a new Throwing Muses album out March 4, and everyone will make an appearance -- even Tanya Donnelly. Woo hoo!
I played The Real Ramona pretty much every day the last part of my freshman year of college, when I was living in Hallett with one Greg Mayer. He was pledging Chi Psi. I barely drank. We got along OK, but we were from different worlds. Meanwhile, I got accused of keying of one girl's car -- I didn't even know she HAD a car on campus -- and had a massive falling out with this clique that was sorta nice to me in the beginning but turned spiteful in the end. I ran into Brian Grantham in the library years later in college, but I didn't want to have anything to do with him. Ditto Margot Liggett. They're all probably enjoying making immense amounts of money and having their affairs with their lovers in the city.
Thing is, I probably remember more about those last two months of my freshman year than I do of the other 4.5 years of college, and I'm not exactly sure why. I think I met a lot of people that were interesting and unusual. This was also the time when I learned I have the social skills of a wad of steel wool. You grow up a social outcast in the Midwest, a nerd to end all nerds, then you get to university and you discover that the one skill you should have learned in high school was how to effectively communicate with other people. Thirteen years of constant, endless bullying left me cold, aloof, defensive, and completely unable to understand personal space. Oh, I forgot judgmental. Very judgmental. Everything was a personal affront. Thing is, there were a LOT of good people I was around back then, Ruthie, Caroline Linder, Rebecca Stroup, Jill Jefferies (I think she's Jill Bell now), Amanda Henry aka Elvis. They were all women, though. I just couldn't figure out how to communicate with guys, except Greg, but what helped was he was laid back and generally never there.
What held me together was my growing music collection, some 40 CDs and a box filled of tapes. (Sounds so small compared to the close to 700 CDs I have in the living room right now. Heck, I think I have more disks stacked up next to this computer than I did freshman year.) Being an Okie, my musical exposure was mostly to butt rock and really bad country. In Boulder, I came into contact with "the college scene," with the Boston groups like the Pixies and Lemonheads and the Throwing Muses. I also discovered the little Boulder scene we had, with Big Head Todd and the Samples. With all the crap going on around me, with all the struggles to fit in, music was all I had, just as it was when I was in high school, just as it is now. As Jeff Tweedy wrote, "Music is my savior, and I was maimed by rock and roll."
I spent the first two years of college (on top of all of high school) pretty well depressed, but Kristin Hersh was a fellow traveller in these strange times I was living in. I can't remember a single line from any of the songs, but my right-brain memory connects it The Real Ramona with the pain and longing to belong I felt back then. Now, I still feel that same sense of disconnection, thanks to never really figuring out how to socially interact with people in any way that neither offends people nor makes me want to vomit uncontrollably. However, most of my despair is channeled through old-time country as much as through those "CDs of nostalgia." Where I was humming "Counting Backwards" while Brian Grantham was accusing me of keying Tanja Marion's car -- and not only did I not know she had a car on campus, I didn't even know what keying was -- in 1991, I'm going through my hard times at work with Uncle Tupelo's "Looking For A Way Out" running through my head.
I'm not sure I'll ever be able to fit in or carry on a conversation that doesn't result in me sticking my foot in my mouth. But the "soundtrack of my life" gives me a vocabulary to put it all into a context, gives me the ability to think that someone else has the same problem as me and has done a far better job of putting it into words. As for the new Throwing Muses CD, I'll just watch to see when it drops below $10 on half.com....
