ALTERNATIVE NATION

I still use a clock radio.

Sure, my phone has an alarm that works perfectly fine but for all intents and purposes, I have a soft spot for my clock radio (which I've had since I was 15, by the way). The thing I like most about it though, is that it's extremely loud. And I need that. Everyone that knows me knows how bad my hearing is. If you didn't know me very well, then let me tell you that I'm about 30% deaf—so if you ever say something and I ignore you, chances are pretty good that I just didn't hear you.

But anyway, back to my clock radio. It has a dial on it to find the right station. The clock is digital, but the radio is not. I tune it to one station and three days later, it's shifted to a different one, but since most radio sucks now anyway, it doesn't really matter. As long as the music starts playing at the right time every morning, I don't really care what it is.

The other morning the radio went off and the song I woke up to was stuck in my head the rest of the day. The song was "Shine" by Collective Soul. The entire day I was walking around humming that song to myself and it got me thinking.

Back when I was 15, I was in my first band. None of us were very good, so we were pretty limited in what we could do. We tried writing our own stuff, but failed miserably at it. So we stuck to cover songs. This being 1995, you can probably only imagine the set list we were able to come up with. Collective Soul was on there. Along with that, Better Than Ezra, Everclear, Live and a ton of others, too. These were all songs they played on X96 or Q99 on a fairly regular basis. Since I didn't have cable and the Internet wasn't around yet (for me anyway) I was taping the radio every night when they played the Top 10 most requested songs of the day, just hoping to hear that one song I liked.

I never knew exactly who it was, and when you're 15 and your only source of income comes from babysitting once every other week, $18 is a lot of money to spend on a CD of a band that might have only that one good song. So I taped the radio. Every night. And the next day, my friends and I would listen to the songs and decide which ones we wanted to try playing. Try is the operative word there. Most of the ones we wanted to play were too complicated for us. You know, what with the solos and transitions and bridges and what not.

I started thinking back to all the songs we covered and I started wondering if I could still remember any of them. I grabbed my guitar, thought of a track and started playing. It's amazing how many of them I can still remember. Most of which I learned from reading Guitar World magazine religiously because I wasn't good enough to figure them out on my own (I'm still not). All I wanted back then was to have my long hair, wear flannel shirts and be a rock star. I basically wanted to live the life portrayed in SINGLES. Never quite happens the way you plan it though, right?

Cut to fifteen years later, and there I was, sitting on my couch one Thursday night playing songs that no one has thought about since the mid-90s (did I mention I was singing, too?). I was having so much fun trying to remember the words and the choruses that when I finally got one down, I decided to record it to see how it sounded.

And obviously it's terrible.

I'm a slightly above average guitar player and well below average singer, but it was still fun.

But you know what I decided? That since I had so much fun, I might keep doing it. I also might keep recording them and every once in a while I'll throw one up on here (or Tumblr, or YouTube, or Facebook) and let everyone see me make a fool of myself covering Tripping Daisy songs.

Everyone wants to see that, right? I guess we'll find out.

But first I need to track down a CITIZEN DICK t-shirt.