Dear Friends,
It’s weird to say, “Going home day” when it feels like home up here in Maine, too, but Phoenix is home for eleven months of the year. Majority rule, I guess. It’s also where we own a home, so that makes sense, and it is where the vast majority (there’s that word again) of the people I love live, as well.
Travel days are their own beast. I’ve written about them before. There is the feeling of weirdness waking up one place and going to sleep in another. There is the strange way that time passes and all the thoughts that go along with flying through the air at great speed. There is the saying of goodbyes, too. They are not my favorite.
It has been an eye-opening month, though, and it is time to start a new year. My years typically revolve around getting back here to Maine, so when I go back to Phoenix, it is more like New Year’s Eve than December 31 anymore. The clock starts again.
*****
Yesterday I took my last looks at different parts of Rangeley. Bailey and I went for a short walk in the woods, too. The weather wasn’t great and the dog was spooked by something, so we didn’t go very far, but it was still nice to get out and see it.
Rhondi and I went to dinner to celebrate our anniversary and that was super nice, as well. It felt like a good way to end the trip and I am very lucky to be able to say that my marriage has reached the age of adulthood. That didn’t occur to me yesterday when I was writing about the length of our time together.
Of course, I will be enjoying “meet the teacher” night instead of having a true anniversary dinner with my wife, but that’s okay. That will be exciting, too. Shit. I just realized that long pants are on now officially on my calendar.
Damn it and fuck.
*****
We will head down to Portland for a visit with Sylvia today for lunch. I am bummed this will be our only visit with her this year, but life is such that it is. It will be great to see her, though, and I hope that next year we will have more time together. Perhaps we can visit again in October when I come back for the dog and the car.
We are bussing from Dover instead of Portland, so that will give us a shorter ride to Boston. I have taken this bus before, too, when I worked for eCoast Marketing about 11 years ago. I don’t think it exists anymore, which is sad, but they were based in Rochester, which is right down the road from Dover. When Gramma died, I had to take a bus to the airport because my co-worker was going to keep the rental car I was using.
It will be nice to have a little bit of time in New Hampshire again. We got some last week and one day I will visit a few of the people I knew at eCoast. I enjoyed that part of my life a lot. Hell, if they had asked, I would have moved there.
*****
After dancing to Ministry at the teen clubs in the mid-80s, hearing an album like A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste at the end of the 80s was revelation. I remember thinking, “Wait. This is the same Ministry as ‘Every day is Halloween.’” How could that be possible.
Learning about Ministry actually taught me a lot about reinventing yourself. Al Jourgensen did a yeoman’s job of changing his image around, as well as his music. It’s easy to forget that this was some of the most aggressive, kick ass, yet kind of mainstream music there was in those days that wasn’t by Metallica. They were firing on all cylinders when A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste came out and if you listen, you can see why.
The guitar sound was huge. There were no real leads on a lot of the songs, but damn if they weren’t both compelling and heavy. “Burning Inside” is just so damn huge. When you play this record and crank it up on a decent stereo, it would just take a party a notch higher. I used to love to listen to this record when I was driving.
“Thieves” starts it off with a bang before going into “Burning Inside.” Both of these songs are among my all-time favorite songs when it comes to needing a song to get you going. Many of the other songs on A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste kind of pale in comparison to them, but that’s okay. Had they kept up the assault for nine or ten songs like the record starts, people would have probably had conniptions.
“Never Believe” fits what I feel like became a formula for Ministry in the 1990s and beyond. It is driving with sparse, angry lyrics, and Bill Rieflin’s drums just keep it going full-forward the whole time. Rieflin was a hero, in my opinion, for the work he did with the band.
Chris Connelly does a pretty tasty John Lydon impression on “Cannibal Song.” It’s actually a pretty PIL-sounding song. I’m kind of surprised that I never really made that connection before. I listened to this record a lot in a time period where I was listening to a lot of PIL, too. Maybe I was too close to it at that point.
I could have easily been swayed, I guess, by how much I liked “Breathe.” It might be my favorite Ministry song other than “Jesus Built My Hot Rod.” It just has something that I have always loved. There is a real easy beat in there to just bob your head to as you listen.
It could also be that the duplex I lived in when I lived in Berkeley had a sign over the door that said “Breathe.” My old roommate, KJ, or her previous roommate, Sarah, had put it there and it was a huge help to me in navigating some pretty severe homesickness at that time. As much as I loved living in Berkeley, I missed my friends and family terribly and felt like a total fish out of water.
“Breathe you fucker.”
“So What” is another one that I really like. Something about the guitar harmonics in the beginning of the song really jives with me. When it kicks in, I can feel it in my bones. Maybe it is that laugh. Sofa king good, as I like to write.
It really is another spot where Rieflin shines and Paul Barker’s bass line is also quite bad ass. I probably owe more than the proverbial nod to Barker. He never overplayed a bass line, that’s for sure. When I listen bands like Viagra Boys, for example, I hear the heavy influence of Barker as that dude (forgive me for not knowing his name) comes directly from the Barker school of repetitive yet pulverizing bass lines that you love to love.
“Now I’m ready to fight.”
During the days of Son of Crackpipe, we had a song that we called “What Now?” and it was a direct descendent of “So What.” We liked that song a lot and it seemed fitting to make our version of it, in a way. You can probably find it on YouTube somewhere.
“Test” brought in a guest vocalist and the band laid down another template for how they would sound for years to come. There was definitely a formula for Ministry. It’s a good formula, and kind of like the Ramones, you can forgive them having a lot of similar sounding songs because it’s a good song.
To be honest, “Faith Collapsing” and “Dream Song” are kind of both fillers, but there is enough goodness on the record that I can overlook the somewhat weak ending. Both songs are, at very least, different enough to be interesting to a point. While A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste doesn’t quite fit into the “all killer, no filler” mode, it is close enough. I loved this record in the early 90s and I love it still. It’s still great driving music.
*****
See you tomorrow from the surface of the sun.
AI's concept of Phoenix is frightening.
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