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Wild Creature
nah, i'm just kidding. keep the dick one. it's a classic. but i need to think about the trade over the weekend, ok? i do love the wildflowers album, and I have two cctst's, but i didn't want you to give up your only cctst (which turns out you weren't). but i don't ever listen to wildflowers much anymore and i would like for you to have it - it is a wonderful, beautiful vinyl, both the music and the LP.
i'll tell you my wildflowers story. and you've got first refusal rights, so let me know on monday no prob.
i love the album wildflowers. but it didn't start out that way.
in college i was single, but i wanted to be double, or anything really. eugene oregon was just another world for me to only look like i could fit into. my roommate, whose sister i ended up marrying and still being married to, loved tom petty. and he would play his tom petty cd's on my radio, because my radio was big and in the front room. i would tell him to listen to his damn tom petty on his small cd player in his room, but then let him play it in the front room anyway. i started to like some of it. then we heard the new single on the radio, and there was something about it that i filed away.
i put myself through 2 years of college, working summers. i had money to blow, and every weekend at the record garden i'd blow hundreds of dollars on cd's. thousands probably. don't wanna think about it. they're all gone now, except for a handful. donated to the library. but i digress. tom petty was putting out a new album, and so i accompanied my roommate to the record garden. on a whim, i bought the new album as well, in the slightly more expensive brown paper covering version. my roommate the fan, on his parent's dime, just got the regular version. (this past year for his birthday, i gave him my worn copy from that day with the paper cover. i knew he'd always wanted that stupid paper cover for his cd.)
i listened to it. and by the third track, i knew. i had fallen in love with an album. the whole thing, majestic, sparse, rollicking and gentle, ridiculous and sincere. it was and it is, one of my all time favorite albums by anybody.
we went and saw him in 1995, at the gorge in washington state. the gorge is a mini grand canyon, and petty started playing as the sun was going down. he played wildflowers, some oldies for encores. we were 18 rows back, and it was the best concert i've ever seen. that night we drove to canada because you could drink under 21. i was under 21 then. i ordered one bourbon one scotch and one beer and the waitress rolled her eyes. we thought we'd stumbled into a bar where collective soul was playing, but we didn't know anything about collective soul except they sounded like some famous band name. in the end, it was just a no name house band.
slept in the car that night and my feet stank.
i wrote a paper about the trip, instead of a paper on what i was supposed to write about, for english. got an a minus and i laughed so hard at the teacher's wild comments on my piece of bullshit. it was small paragraphs on the road trip, and i wish i still had it...interspersed with the goings on, and the girl i was falling for. time to move on, time to get going. it was a neat time. i was falling in love with everything.
here are some great lines from "wildflowers"
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i gave her my best kiss, she gave it back again
i'm so tired of being tired
i'll be king when dogs get wings
i'm not afraid anymore/it's only a broken heart
what would i give/to start all over again/to clean up my mistakes
sometime later/getting the words wrong/wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme/nauseous adrenaline/like breaking up a dog fight/like a deer in the headlights/frozen in real time/i'm losing my mind
the days went by like paper in the wind/everything changed, then changed again/it's hard to find a friend/it's hard to find a friend
yeah you were so cool back in high school/what happened
now and again/i get the feelin/if i don't win/i'm a-gonna break even
i'll be the boy in the corduroy pants/you be the girl at the high school dance
don't clap between movements
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2011 04:03PM by mike5998.