Round 8.xx - 20 Year-Old Album
Well, it should be something that was social more so than an independent musical journey, because we lived in a five-person suite with two bedrooms and a common area. Most likely, if you were there in the spring (I was twenty) you heard me and my roommates playing this
Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
I was supposed to transfer to play hockey after my sophomore year and decided not to do so thanks to the strength of friendships made on campus. This album and our scene had a lot to do with that. Of course, those were halcyon days and things never work out the way a nineteen/twenty year old plans, but I'll never forget those spring and summer nights, sitting in our hall, generally jamming down. "Please, please, please do not go," was the refrain, and it was heeded. We'd spend the summer in Boston and at that time, we couldn't do anything wrong. I was more into punk as the spring and summer wore on as my true stripes showed. The Rip Offs, The Queers, The Muffs, Screeching Weasel -- they all were primary, but this was the album that most defined the twenty year-old I was, social as I'd ever be, reveling in the adulation of a bunch of other nineteen or twenty year-old contrarians, twenty of us deep, marching to the future all together, undivided.
To borrow from Grease!, Oh! Those Summer Nights...