Bush- Machine Head

What do I think of when I hear Bush's Machine Head? Hockey, Bowling Green hockey to be specific. Most of my college winters were spent at the Bowling Green Ice Arena watching the mighty Falcons. Of course, this was the start of the Falcon down falls for a few years and still to this day the hockey team is not what it was. So why does Bush Machine head remind me of BGSU hockey? They use to skate onto the ice to it. I still remember waiting outside the arena for an hour just to get close to the ice. The routine and chants we'd toss towards the visiting teams. It was a great time in my life and as I can still smell the ice. Oh Ice Arena, many an hour did I spend at you.

Third Eye Blind- Semi Charmed Life

This song has one of my favorite lyrics, "Those little red panties they pass the test." I don't know why I like that part but it makes me smile. Third Eye Blind was one of those groups in college that started out in heavy rotation at the college radio station I worked at then was yanked a few months later because it was "too mainstream." That describes a lot of my college music experience. I would like a band till they hit the mainstream and then turned my back because the sorority girls now liked it. Stupid, yes, but that was the way things went.

Third Eye Blind was a little bit of an exception, my friend Collins loved Steven Jenkins and would listen to a rotation of U2, Peter Gabriel, Barenaked Ladies and Third Eye Blind. She kind of kept me grounded a bit musically, then for some reason Third Eye Blind, Sugar Ray and Smashmouth were playing together at Ohio Northern, a small college in the middle of nowhere. The Collins/Hartman apartment went crazy and I was able to join them. It was strange to see these bands who were charting at a small college. The place was packed and there were more people outside trying to get in. Overall the concert was pretty good and it was strange to see the reactions of the women to Steven Jenkins. On one song he climbed a mountain of speakers and started dry humping them and the women went insane. I even think the stuffed polar bear in the gym made a noise.

Toad The Wet Sprocket- Fall Down

Toad the Wet Sprocket is the band nobody remembers but everyone knows. You say the name and people usually chuckle and say they have never heard of them. Mention All I Want or Walk on the Ocean and they usually respond "I love that song." I've had a 5 year span where Toad was weaved within my life.

I First heard Fall Down in high school and loved the song, but never bought the album or anything like that. I'd hope MTV or the local radio would play something by Toad but it very rarely happened. I get to college and I some how get involved in a secret society. It's nothing like the Skull and Cross Bones at Yale, but the organization is over 60 years old and has less than 200 members. We were the secret spirit crew of Bowling Green called SICSIC I know members hate this comparison but we were like mascots on crack. We wore coveralls and mask our mission was to spread spirit through out Bowling Green. BGSU was a pretty apathetic university when the group started and still is today. It's tough when you are in the middle of corn fields and are so close to Ohio State and Michigan. It was tough but we did and they still do their best and I think BG would be a worse place without SICSIC.

Why did I give you all that background? My first year the male senior Brian was the big DJ at the campus radio station and he loved Toad. This helped bring them back into my life. They just released a collection of songs from other albums or were released on soundtracks. They had a song called All in All and it became the anthem for SICSIC. Why, I am not for sure but we'd play this song all the time.

Toad will always be the band I could never figure out why they never "hit it big." They had a sound everyone could like, but they just didn't want the exposure.

Snow- Informer

This is a guilty pleasure, how can it not be. It's a white Canadian guy that is trying to rap like he's from Jamaica. The big twist with this song in my life is shortly after it's release my home town was hit by a giant snow storm in March. I remember spending spring break shoveling snow while listening to Snow in my walkman. I even kept saying to friends that I blame Snow for this little blizzard we had.

Yet like most guilty pleasures this song keeps getting played and for some reason people like myself keep listening to it. If youd did not know this, next year this freaking song will be 20 years old. How can a song this bad, yet so catchy still be around? We need to stop this song, yet I can not take it off my iPod. DAMN YOU SNOW!

Prodigy- Breathe

The 90s were a strange time musically, think about it we started out with hair metal, went to grunge, rap hit it big, swing music, and the raise of boy bands. Prodigy was in the middle of it all, it was electronic, but it was hard like metal and most males 18-25 bought this album.

I have no idea what this song is about, but if you are in a bad mood it's a great song. Shorty and I would rock out this song in the "Tremobile" a 1988 Cutlass Cruiser Stationwagon with a tape deck, you know it! On Friday or Saturday nights we leave the apartment throw in a mix tape and head over to the "Collins/Hartman" apartment. Oh the hours spent over there and usually ended with us walking back the next day to retrieve the Tremobile.

Moby- South Side

2001 was a strange time I was working in Toledo and had been there for two years. I was starting to get the itch and wanted out and little did I know I still had a full year to go. The Detroit/Canadian rock station was playing this song in heavy rotation and I would pop around the Toledo market singing South Side. I bought the single on a trip to Bowling Green, I was working with a reporter by the name of Dewayne Walker and created a method of reporter that had the story finished in under an hour. That left us about three hours in the wind and the station couldn't touch us "we were working on our story." We ended up at Finders listening to music. I found the single for South Side.

As we were wrapping up our purchases we finally get a call, there is "flooding" and we needed to find it. I had the only car in our fleet with a CD player and we listened to new music as we kept looking for this flooding. Oddly enough the flooding was on the South Side.

The Black Keys- 10AM Automatic

I'm not big on the blues front, at best I can listen to Robert Johnson and I can not stand Stevie Ray Vaugh. Then you have Akron Ohio's own The Black Keys. A friend and former coworker who shall be called DJL is very musically open and has a knack of finding good music that no one has ever heard. CD101, Columbus' alternative station, was having a special $5 dollar show and The Black Keys where headlining. For $5 I'll go see about anyone and I'm glad I did. My new favorite band Ash performed as well as The Bravery and a few other good acts. So already the show is worth $5.

The Black Keys came on and it's only two guys. I know The White Strips are the starting point for most people when it comes to this kind of line up, The Black Keys are different. First of all the drummer, Patrick Carney, can actually play. As they progress through the set Dan Auerbach goes insane. I am not comparing him to Jimi Hendrick but for me it was probably the closest I will ever get to hearing and seeing Hendrix. He just made the guitar make sounds I have never heard and it was jaw dropping awesome. Once the song ended DJL leaned over and said "That alone was worth the $5." All I could do was nod.

Sarah McLachlan- Possession

I'm probably the only person in the world that was introduced to Sarah McLachlan through Taco Bell. Yes, go back and read that again... Taco Bell. You see back when I was in high school the most progressive radio station was WKEE FM and it played pop music. The other option was MTV but this was the time music videos were starting to be pushed a side.

While at the Taco Bell in Ironton they were selling a CD entitled Do Something, I have no clue what it was for now but it was a charity and I think Andrew Shue was involved. It was a pretty good CD and I still have the disc today. My favorite song on Taco Bell CD was Possession. I had never heard anything that sounded like that and I am a sucker for a female singer, still am today. Have a decent rock sound with a female lead and I am in as a fan for life. As I continue on I met a cool chick while working at a Ponderosa Steakhouse and Buffet in Russell, Ky.

Tiffany hung out and we both loved Sarah McLachlan. I even went to Lillith Faire, don't you judge me! I got to see Sarah McLachlan, Jewel and another band I loved called Luscious Jackson. Even beyond Tiffany my college friend Sara (I know, same name but different spelling... follow along) traveled to Toledo to see her perform. McLachlan has had a rep of being a "chick" musician and it sucks for guys like me. I have to deal with guys judging me even though I went to concerts filled with women. Sarah McLachlan is very talented and stop judging guys you enjoy her sound.

Skee Lo- I Wish

How recent do I have a recollection of this song? I was in Chicago a week ago at the Hard Rock Hotel. What do I hear in the lobby, I Wish. I immediately said, "Is that Skee-lo?" Of course all the suits at the Bio Conference waiting for the elevator had no clue what I was talking about.

1994 you had gangsta rap every where but every once in a while something different and a little od. Skee Lo's I Wish fit that to a tee. This is one of the few rap that I know most of the words and will use the lyrics in my Facebook status just to see who know the song.

Once I was in college I let this song fall to the way side but nostalgia would catch up to me and as I worked in Columbus, Oh in the early 2000s I Wish would re-enter my life. Even as I moved to Raleigh I would find others that enjoy the lyric mastery of I Wish like "Ah yes, ain't this fresh, everybody wanna get down with that." Oh Skee-Lo I shall never forget your skills and fresh rhythms ever again.

Pearl Jam- Jeremy

1992 I was a Sophomore in a very small southern Ohio town and I happened to be named Jeremy. Of course a song with the same name was awesome, well it could have been better. It's about a kid killing himself in front of his classmates. It could have had a happier ending like Jeremy became the awesomest person in the world, but I'll take what I can get. Grunge was in full swing and looked like everything out of Seattle was going to turn to gold.

At first I was not a fan of Pearl Jam, I heard Alive and didn't like it but the next single Even Flow was more pleasing to my ears and that Christmas I got Ten as one of my first CDs (along with Dr Feelgood by Motley Crew and Amy Grant's Heart In Motion... yes that's me in a nutshell). When Jeremy was release I thought it was great as I stated above a side effect of the song started. Everyone had to sing "Jeremy spoke in..." in a bad Eddie Veder impersonation. Still to this day I have not gone a year without someone singing that song to me.

As much as I like the song I get tired of hearing it sung to me. I even took it off my iPod because I know I will hear it from someone sooner or later and I'll want to punch them. So if you know a Jeremy I urge you NOT to sing this some to them, maybe I need to start a support group over this.

Rage Against The Machine- Killing In The Name Off

I was walking across the Ironton High School stage when I was stopped by friend named Matt. We had a friend attending Ohio University and gave him a CD I had to listen to. He made me put on the dead phones and 40 seconds in my face changes and I hear Zack De La Rockha scream killing in the name of and this wave of sound pummels me. I had never heard anything like this. Sure grunge was around and I was into Nirvana and Green Day but this was pure anger and aggression. Nothing I heard sounded like this, bands like Linkin Park were almost a decade away. This was anti everything and as teenagers my friends and I hate it up like it was pudding. I didn't know who Leonard Peltier was or what the Rage was so upset about, but railed against the man and I was for that. Just like millions of other teenagers I bought this album and more like it.

Of course I grew out of this phase, but every once in a while when I get a little frustrated a good Rage Against The Machine song will angry up the blood and feel like taking on the man.

Seven Nations- Up To Me

One of the music styles that I am no where near the main stream is Celtic rock. You may ask what the hell is Celtic rock? Well it's rock n' roll with a fiddle or bagpipes and in the case of Seven Nations it's both! The way it works, or at least the way I think it works, the fiddle acts as the rhythm guitar in the group and the bagpipes equals a keyboard or if you want to go all nerd rock, a keytar.

How in the world did I get into Seven Nations? I have to thank my friend Nancy whom I met working at the Bob Evan's in Ashland Kentucky. She had room mates that had brothers in the Celtic games and the room mate Steph E knew Seven Nations. They bought me a CD when I visited them in Lexington and from that time forward I have enjoyed the bagpipes in a rock band.

My memory flashbacks do not stop there, while working with a reporter in Raleigh, NC (who we shall call Serg). He enjoyed my slightly off main stream musical sense but never could figure out my Cletic rock infatuation. He didn't hate it but I loved playing it just to get a reaction out of him. Most days the iPod just would randomly play Seven Nations every time he was in the truck. Of course if it was near St Patrick's Day it was Seven Nations all the time. Serg preferred not to work with me on that day.

Spice Girls- Wanna Be

The Spice Girls are not in my musical wheel house. If you want to keep the baseball references going this is a wild pitch Rick Vaughn style. But I think the Spice Girl permeated everyone's lives, even if we didn't want them in it. Once example is a road in Ohio named Spiceland and every time I passed it I had to make a bad joke about the Spice Girls.

This is more than just about bad road puns, it's about Rodgers Hall at Bowling Green State University and my roommate Shorty. He's 6"10' get it, it's because he's tall, I digress. We were sitting in our dorm room watching a request show on MTV. The English host read the request and it was for some group called the Spice Girls. We watch the video and kind of laughed, we thought an obscure some from the 80s. The video quality appeared to be old and we thought we'd never hear the song again. A week later it was freaking everywhere. We finally realized that this was a new group and it was not played as a joke.

It felt like the Spice Girls did take over the world and there was nothing we could to to avoid it. Before we knew it there was a movie and one was in Playboy. It was a whirlwind that destroyed everything in it's path, I even think Shorty bought the album.

Sixpence On The Richer- Kiss Me

There are very few bands that I can say I heard them before everyone else and the one that I started listening to from the beginning was Sixpence None The Richer. To be honest, the above song Kiss Me is one of my least favorite songs by SNtR. Instead of doing a post on this one song I'm going to do it on how Sixpence and I followed a similar path for four years.

My senior year in high school I was at an event called Summer In The Son at a small Christian college in Grayson, Ky. You have to realize something, Christian music at that time was pretty bad. When Amy Grant's El Shaddai is big then you have an issue, but there was a hope and some better music was starting to come out. While at Summer in the Son I saw a magazine that was devoted to music but unlike most Christian print they actually reviewed "secular" music as well. I bought the magazine and saw an ad for a band named Sixpence None The Richer. It mentioned that billboard called them one of the best new bands of 1993.

A month or so later I was the the "big mall" in Huntington, WVa when I was bored and walked into the christian book store. There I see Sixpence None The Richer's Fatherless and the Widow. I was still skeptical and instead of spending the christian book store CD price of $21 (never could figure out why they always charged more for CDs) I bought the $11 cassette. What I heard was a surprising sound, it was actually interesting. Very light, up beat guitar with a ethereal voiced singer. The difference between the rest of the christian music I heard was the actual lyrics. They were darker and sounded like my problems in life. I didn't want to hear all is good in the world, I was a teenager and feeling that typical mid 90s teen angst. I had that cassette for years and I played it so much that it began to warp from usage. Yet, they had that one song that did not fit, on Fatherless and the Widow it was Trust. It was that christian formula that was pounded out since the 70s. Almost every album I bought of theirs had that one song that did not fit.

A few years later they release a more edgy album full of harder guitar riffs and a full band sound, but the voice and the hurt was still withing each song. This album followed my personal path again, I was in college and listening to more college radio rock. I still felt the same way inside and the band continued to keep my spirits up with a true to life message. Then there was a long break in music, Sixpence started fighting with record labels and went quite for a while. I continued playing both CDs till in 1997 they finally released a self titled album.

Sixpence started experimenting with instruments and sound but still the message was still there. The band was growing up and so was I, my time in college was drawing closer to the end. But something on the album was a little off and that something was Kiss Me. It didn't fit anywhere on the album. Looking back I can see they wanted this to be their start into the big time. They promoted Kiss Me for over a year and released multiple music videos for it. Finally She's All That picked Kiss Me up as the lead song and Kiss Me was everywhere. I continued to support the band but this is where our paths started to part.

It appeared Sixpence did not know what to do next. They fought their record label and wanted to re-release the record with a cover song and release that as a new single. The Internet was young and email lists were the best way to keep in touch with other people who had the same interest. The Sixpence fans wanted a song called I can't Catch to be released next. It was my favorite song on the album along with many other fans on these emails. But record label people did not like it released the new album and the song did not do so well.

Sixpence released another covered Don't Dream It's Over and that went nowhere. Multiple people left the band and after another label change released a new album. By this time we had parted paths. I no longer was interested. They tried to go full main stream but they lost their heart. I don't mind bands crossing over boundaries set in sand but when you change what you are to do it that's the issue. Sixpence changed themselves away from what brought them to the table.

With the last year in a half of my life in chaos, I turned back to the old albums and they helped me through this time of economic strife and unemployment. I can always say when Kiss Me comes on the radio t I heard them before anyone else and remember the music that I enjoyed.

Snap- The Power

Let me take you back to a simple time, that time was 1990. Grunge was not in the main stream and we are still a few years away from gansta rap. We were hearing the death throws of hair metal as bands like Warrant and Slaughter start popping up. Yet there was also this strange dance music brought around by bands like C & C Music company. Then there was The Power by Snap.

I don't know what it is about this song but it always puts me in a better mood. Is it the strong electronic Bow dow dow dow dow Bada bow dow dow dow, the random Martha Wash "I got the power," or is it the guys flailing their arms while wearing red shoes. Even in small town southeastern Ohio where progressive music never seen, this song was everywhere. I remember band trips rapping "It's getting, it's getting, it's getting kind of hectic."

It was a song that probably should have faded over time, yet I remember hearing it in college and everyone liking it. The alternative music crowd, the average Ambercrombie and Fitch frat boys to the spirit group I was in. It even followed me through out my career.

Iron Mike is a producer I worked with and I could always make his day a little better by singing that Martha Wash line and proceed to do the flailing arm dance. He would follow up with the electronic music and laugh. Even during a time of unemployment I can listen to this song and remember that "I'm the lyrical Jessie James."