FINALLY SOMETHING TO REPLACE BOWLING

Discovered this 30 second, mind-numbing treasure on a video tape this afternoon. A bunch of 90’s teens go on the Vicki! show to be made over by way cool Brian Austin Green and then Vicki! humiliates herself Tyra-style, rapping with ‘tude.

[YouTube Video]

I was pretty sure Viennetta was off the market for good. As a kid, it was the filet of grocery store ice cream novelties that you only heard about during the holidays. Something so elegant, I could never convince my parents to get one. Maybe they were too expensive or perhaps I kept my Viennetta desire secret and never actually asked for one out loud. Regardless, I was never able to have the “dessert experience” that is Viennetta.

[YouTube Video]

As a fat, little boy, I wanted one. Bad. Not bad enough to get on my bike and go to the store and get one, but pretty bad. It has been a long time since I’ve heard anything about Viennetta. It’s memory has been collecting dust in the back of mind along with other frozen novelties like Jell-o Pudding Pops, Zoomers, and Push-Ups. All but forgotten, until I recently noticed an ad for it on the front of my grocer’s shopping cart. Since then, me and my girlfriend have been hunting the Viennetta down with absolutely no luck. I was beginning to believe it was all in my mind, I never actually saw those new ads and the Viennetta was gone the way of the McDLT.

[YouTube Video]

That was all true, until today. After loading my groceries into the trunk, I saw the same ellusive ad on the front of the cart. Walking through the frozen section mere minutes earlier, I was unable to find one. (Yes, despite officially giving up, I was still looking). I came home from work agititated that I may never indulge in deliciously rich ice cream and irresistible, crisp, dark layers. My girlfriend could tell I was going to be a giant baby if I didn’t track down a Viennetta. I was at the breaking point. She suggested I give Publix a call, and after a few minutes of “I’ve already looked there” complaining, I gave in. A girl answered. “Do you sell Viennetta?” She perked up and answered immediately without pause, as if she’s asked this all day long. “YES! We have them on clearance.” I stuttered a little bit. Yes, they actually have them, but they are on clearance. “Are they being discontinued???” I asked.  She wasn’t sure, but she let me know supplies were limited. Ten minutes later, three Viennetta boxes were living in my freezer.

So, that’s it. Not as sophisticated as you remember, either? I’m pretty sure the Viennetta budget has been decreasing since Regan left office. It definitely appears to have shrunk in size and I’m not sure if the ingredients have changed, but it did not make the trademark crispy sound when we cut in to it. That’s probably the one thing that always made the Viennetta appealing to me. Guess I was just a victim of marketing.

So, what I can tell you about living in a post-Viennetta world? They ARE good and worth tracking down, but you could probably get a similar experience with soft serve custard covered in Magic Shell. I’m going out on a limb and assume they taste much better when eaten out of a crystal goblet in your tuxedo.

EDIT: Tried the Vanilla variety this afternoon (the one pictured above is Double Chocolate). It much closer resembles the Viennetta of yester-year, and it even cracked a little bit when I sliced it.

My main thing right now, besides quietly supporting the balloon and coordinating gift industry, is digitizing every last analog item I own. Some, like my vinyl and cassette collection, are worthwhile endeavors that I will enjoy for many years to come. Others, like the one posted below, will be for the historians to decide. I basically hold on to anything I come into contact with that amuses or bewilders me in any way. I feel the time is right for me to start sharing what I’ve been saving.

Let’s all go back to 1996, a dark time when disco had to live in the shadows:

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I’m not sure where to start. This was taped during my high school speech class 13 years ago. Our teacher had the foresight to have us bring in a video tape and film our speeches, with the idea that watching ourselves squirm would make us all better public speakers. I doubt this worked, but it did accomplish capturing the mind-blowing moment when this disco speech was delivered. Instead of only haunting the dreams of the 30 or so kids in the class that afternoon, it now has the capability to reach everyone with a decent internet connection. Perhaps disco can get back into the picture, afterall.

And why do I have this?? I promise this isn’t me giving a speech about love and brickhouses. Mine was about advertising and was much drier and propless. Since I was responsible, I brought a VHS tape to class. Many did not. In addition to my own speech, I was able to get three others. I was also able to snag a little memorabilia. Thank you, Chris.

OK, obviously, our ambition to make this blog thing worthwhile fizzled out even faster than anyone expected. I apologize. For us to continue, I suppose some tweaks will need to be made, perhaps we’ll add photos of celebrities without makeup.

As many of you know, asaurus.org started out as the home of Asaurus Records (still is, actually: asaurus.org/records). The label would have turned 8 years old this past December. To celebrate our third anniversary in 2004, we released a special 3-disc boxed set entitled You Already Have Way Too Many CDRs. It included a sampler disc featuring a new song from everyone on our roster at the time, as well as a disc of outtakes and a disc of our bands doing covers of songs they considered “guilty pleasures”. In true Asaurus fashion, it wasn’t released until February of 2005.

When we started up this new website, one of things we wanted to do was celebrate, archive, and share the history and music of the label. Our first offering is the complete boxed set. This may or may not crash our servers:

Click here to download the boxset, including a PDF of the booklet.

You’ll find lots to love about this collection, please let us know your favorites in the comments. Hopefully it won’t take one of us another month to post again.

I’ve probably been asked countless times, knowing full well that I’m a totally obsessed music junkie,  “Matthew, what is your favorite song ever?”  I normally start stuttering while my brain goes into overload, scrolling through an infinite mental list of songs, trying to pick one that I could definitively claim to be my all time fave. After a few seconds, my typical response is always, “That’s just too hard to answer” and move on.

The problem with picking a favorite song of all-time is that it must transcend musical trends and fads and your own flip-floppy personal taste. While I may have loved that Spacehog song back in 1995, I find it lacks something today and probably always will, as I fall deeper into middle-aged-ness. A favorite song should remain relevant throughout your life, always sound exciting, no matter how many times you’ve listened to it, every time you listen to it. A favorite song should help bring up memories scattered across your lifetime. It is because of these reasons and more, I’ve always stayed mute on the subject.

But recently I realized I totally know without a doubt what my favorite song ever is and always has been. I can’t recall the very first time I heard it, but I can remember loving it even as a small boy. When I was 6, my dad made me a mixtape (Matt’s Tape II) and I requested this song to be included. That moment is still vivid, and that mixtape is still treasured and listened to.

The Doors’ “Light My Fire” is my favorite song ever.

I know, it’s both an odd choice considering all the possibilities and an obvious choice considering how universally it is beloved. But this song has always been with me and driven me completely crazy. With every listen, I feel like there is a hidden message somewhere in the lyrics or that damn, hypnotic organ, that I will never ever decipher. Deep down, I know “Light My Fire” is just a pop song, but it’s strange instrumentation files it into an entirely different category in my brain. My mind does not include it in the genre of pop music or classic rock. There is something so mysterious about the chords, the tones, the sound of the air between the amps and microphones. Trying to put my finger on what makes it so unusual is maddening.

[YouTube Video]

When I was young, the inherent mysteriousness of this song was even more apparent. The lyrics made NO sense to me whatsoever and clocking in at over 7 minutes, I felt the song lasted an entire day, or at least the entire car ride to grandma’s. The song is filled with eastern/calypso-y/??? sounds uncommon to American pop music. As a kid, they creeped me out beyond belief, kind of like the first time I heard Enigma’s “Sadeness Part 1″, which is probably what kept drawing me to the song.

I’m pretty sure on a well-rested day, I could hum for you the entire extended organ and guitar solos verbatim. Definitely not something I’ve been practicing for an upcoming talent show, but yes, I’m pretty confident I could do it.  Now, I imagine all of this boils down to you assuming I’m one of those possessed Doors fans who believes Morrison was some kind of poet prophet savior. No. Like most middle schoolers, I really got into the Doors after going through my dad’s record collection. Jim Morrison has always been my least favorite part of the Doors. As a kid, he made me uncomforable with his adult situations and psudeo-cryptic drunken b.s., and now, I just find him tragically overappreciated.

I recently rewatched Oliver Stone’s Doors biopic, and while most of it comes off as Morrison myth-building, the scene early on that recreates the band writing “Light My Fire” is truly magical,  while being most likely completely inaccurate. But it more or less solidified my choice for favorite song ever, freeing me up to think critically about my second favorite song ever, Disco Duck.

[YouTube Video]

So what’s your favorite song ever? I already called “Light My Fire”.

An afterword: This is my first real post, and honestly, it took me several weeks, on and off again, to finish it.  Reading it several times, I continually came to the conclusion that I wrote a lot without saying much. No, it wasn’t just you. I am really rusty at this writing thing. I promise to get better over time, and now that the first few posts are up, more and more will come sooner rather than later.  Thanks for reading!

Recently, I got to talking with my son’s “friend who is a girl but not his girl friend’s” father.  Our kids are both six and my son is a little touchy on the girlfriend/boyfriend terminology.  Her father happened to mention how the people on the island and in the Seattle area were in general overly competitive.  “Even during the whole nineties grunge thing” he told me, “people were all like I’m more grunge than you are.”   I tended to agree with him and found his insight on the Seattle scene interesting.  Seattle in the 90’s seems like a different place than the city I know today.  It’s still talked about in terms of “before the condos” and “when such and such used to be here.”  I wondered if some of it was done in an attempt to exclude the non natives.  In the navy we called them plus ones.  We all know too many people like this, the scene is full of them after all “It’s not the bands I hate it’s their fans” right?

Listening to one of Matthew’s mixed CDs, which were things we used to make before they were called playlists.  Did you see that?  That was my subtle attempt at +1-ing you, suggesting that I was somehow better than you by passing the presumption that you don’t know what mixed CDs are.  Maybe suggesting that even if you did, I knew about them first or had been doing them longer than you.  It’s a pretty universal concept not entirely based around any particular music scene.  311’s “Do You Right” from their first major release Music came up at the end of one of these mixes.  I can’t think of a more quintessential band that embodies the feeling of over competitiveness and +1-ism growing up, than this band.  I first heard the group on an old radio station in Detroit that no longer exists.  My freshman year the song “Don’t Stay Home” appeared on the station’s Christmas compilation along with Goo Goo Doll’s “Name.”  I saw them in concert several times after that and it became apparent that we all really liked 311.  By we of course I mean the alternative kids in the high school marching band.  I feel that I should mentioned I never understood the negative connotation and stereotypes surrounding band nerds until I moved to my second high school.  The band kids at my first high school embodied the persona of the counter culture, what I had always assumed were the cutting edge of cool.  My second high school band though was filled with socialites bordering on autism.  

With 311’s recent success it wasn’t enough to like them, or even to wear a concert shirt to school.  Someone deemed that the band was getting too popular and only true fans liked them before they were popular.  Only the true fans had a copy of Music and their second album Grass Roots.  But the segregation bled into other aspects of our MTV lives.  On a trip to Disney World I picked up a Cat in the Hat, hat.  At the time it seemed ironic or different and cool.  Looking back, nothing screams white trash more than bringing home a novelty clothing article from any theme park.  I wore the hat to a party one night and was accosted by the self appointed muscleman of cool.  “Hey.”  He told me with his high school facial hair beyond his years, “I had that hat first.  You don’t wear that shit.”  He then pulled the hat off my head and walked out.  I remember seeing him wear it on the bus to a band competition once, but surely I could make him understand that I had gotten before that.  His reign didn’t stop there.  There was a girl I liked from a nearby catholic school, her friend wore this cool black flag shirt and in the rules of high school I figured I was safe to wear the same shirt to my school since I hadn’t seen any one else wearing it.  The third or fourth time through the wash I was sitting at lunch when Mr. Cool came up to me demanding that I tell him whether it was the band I liked or just the bug spray.  I was in the early stages of my punk music phase and insisted that I liked the band.  “What do they sound like then?”  he demanded leaning aggressively close to me.  “They’re harder music.  Like 311 but more raw.”  I told him.  I must have passed the test because he nodded in agreement and said.  “Ok.”  The next time I was at the record store in Dearborn I bought Black Flag’s TV Party 7” to validate my apparel.

Hum was the first band that I felt really had the ability to rip my soul from my chest. I bought the album the winter of 8th or 9th grade after hearing their single Stars play on Detroit radio’s 89X. You’d Prefer An Astronaut became one of the most quintessential albums of my youth. It seemed that all of my friends simultaneously picked them up too. There was a guy that ran in our circle of friends who cyclically turned from drugs to Jesus all the while wooing the girls with his guitar, bringing tears to their eyes as he sang “I thought you’d be there holding daisies you’d always wait for me.”

Instantly I knew I had to play guitar. Though I didn’t get my first electric guitar until after graduation, I took advantage of plugging the floor models at the local music shops (that I dedicated entirely too many hours of my youth in) into a Boss Distortion and MXR Phase 90 pedal, disseminating drop D guitar riffs. I consistently listened to this album every day for four years. My own lyrics poorly imitated Matt’s, with dreamy references to radar, circuitry, blue lights, and radio frequencies.

Even now as I look at the album cover, there is something comforting about the two shades of green and that zebra staring back at me. My first Graphic Arts project in senior year, I replicated the very cover for a sketch pad. My instructors tried to talk me out of it, suggesting I wait until I develop the skills to reproduce the zebra on the light board. Far from a printer’s perfect, I went ahead with the task and I got an A.

I eventually learned to play every song on the album, my favorite being I Hate It Too. I used to sit on my suburban porch during the summer, strumming out the rhythm on my Ovation guitar, pounding the base of my palm below the sound hole to simulate the heavy drums. I played it so much that one day, when I was pissed at something or someone, I strummed at nearly twice the speed, and when my dad came out to smoke a cigarette, he commented about half way through, “That’s not how fast that goes.”
“Huh?” I said, sort of snapping out if it, “No, I guess not.”
I started over, this time playing a bit slower. When it came to the part when the distortion was to kick in, I broke my low E string as I strummed too hard trying to buzz the strings.

Suicide Machine reminds me of the squealing tires I always heard in the distance behind the sound of automatic sprinklers on warm spring nights around midnight. My bedroom window faced Fort Street and I could smell the Detroit River less than a mile away. The airport beacon from the Gross Ile Municipal Airport in the distance alternated white and green on clear nights as I played the forty-five minutes this album had to offer, over and over again, laying on my floor, staring up into my ceiling fan.

Few albums have directly impacted my music preference like Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love. With the explosion and near peak of Napster at the turn of the century, I joined the army reserve just after getting my feet wet. Until recently, I kept all of the letters I received during those ten months away from home. During the last few weeks of basic training, I received a letter from a friend of mine who had found this amazing new band, along with the lyrics to a song that reminded him of me. A song he said that I would love.

You get the car I’ll get the night off You’ll get the chance to take the world apart and figure out how it works. Don’t let me know what you find out. I need a car you need a guide who needs a map? If I don’t die or worse I’m gonna need a nap. At best I’ll be asleep when you get back. I wanna see it when you find out what comets, stars, and moons are all about. I wanna see there faces turn to backs of heads and slowly get smaller. I wanna see it now. I wanna see it now. I want specifics on the general idea. I want to think what I should know. What should I do here, why’d you show? I wanna see movies of my dreams. I wanna see movies of my dreams. I wanna see movies of my dreams. I wanna see movies of my dreams.

For a while there, Twin Falls was my favorite song off the album. With lyrics like “beneath a parachute I saw her without shoes.” I fell in love with Doug Martsch’s writing style, later hearing that he never wrote his own lyrics and took submissions from his friends and people he knew. “Twin Falls isn’t even one of the good songs!” my best friend’s girlfriend protested one night as we drove the streets of Windsor Ontario. “And their other albums are all way better!” I didn’t care, I still loved the album’s nostalgic childhood references. “That Brontosaurus must have stood a thousand miles high.” For years, Built to Spill had been the foundation of electric guitar inspiration leading to most of the songs on my first album. Long after we left Michigan, Built to Spill poured from my car speakers, stemming from one album or the other, escorting us in Virginia and across Southern California. Prior to our departure, my friends, one in particular, used to criticizing me for my taste in this new indie music as they would so sarcastically say. “What’s with you and these seven inches and vinyl?” he asked one night amidst a night of drinking whiskey sours and inappropriate sexual innuendos. Perhaps I just grew up too fast for that group. “What are the guys in Built to Spill going to do once they’re old and no one wants to hear their music anymore?” I was asked once, as if I was trying to be talked out of it. “Dude, they’re like in their forties.” I replied. I really have no idea how old Doug Martsch is, but needless to say, I’ve met with or talked to those guys less than a handful of times over the years. Since then, my kids have come to love Built to Spill as much as I do, singing along with it every time.

Six months ago I promised something new at asaurus.org after the unfortunate closing of Asaurus Records. My plan was to get things up and running by August, but damn if I didn’t enjoy my new freedom a little too much. It was never my intention to close our beloved label only to start another “music blog”. These events are totally unrelated, and the only reason Finally Something to Replace Bowling is on asaurus.org is I think folks who enjoyed our music will also enjoy what we’re going to attempt to do here. And what is that, exactly?

Honestly, it is only halfway thought out so far, but the bulk of this new site, run by the founders of Asaurus Records, Matthew and Corey, will feature regularly posted music-centric essays about our lives and how music has shaped our experiences. We will not be tastemaking. We are not afraid to talk about bands that everyone already knows and loves. We’ll also dig deep and share the music that is wrongly underappreciated. What you won’t get is a few sentences a day and a link to an MP3. You’ll get thoughtful, possibly entertaining essays and articles about music and about being music lovers. We’ll be going back to the records we loved as children all the way to our most recent discoveries. This is where we are choosing to start.

Much like Asaurus Records, we are starting out with low expectations but a determination to keep doing things the way we want to do them and hope people find they like what we have to offer. Since we ran a label for 7 years and many of you coming here were fans of our releases, we’ll also be offering free downloads of unheard music from our archives, plus our hard-to-find releases. Our label website will remain online indefinitely, as it is the best resource for info on our bands and releases.

If you can forgive a shaky start, I think for the sake of getting this thing moving forward, we’ll just start posting and work the kinks out as we go. I hope you find asaurus.org a nice place to visit.