1994 Time Machine: Green Day

Been a while since we cranked up the ol’ Time Machine, and with the semester nearly over, I think I can safely say this hasn’t sucked at a high level, like I feared, but that a case of bad timing has made it a less regular feature than I would have preferred.

It’s always easy in August to foresee a day a week when there’s not much going on and I can fool around a little with some non-traditional programming (see, with that sentence, I’m auditioning for a job as a television executive), but November turned out to be a crazy month for Hofstra sports news and there was never a natural time to change gears.

Which doesn’t upset me at all: I’d much rather be digesting games against Kansas and UConn than the alternative, and pondering the future of Flying Dutchmen football is a great meat-and-potatoes topic. In fact, I’ve produced more stories this month than during any other in DD history (pat pat on my own back), and November isn’t even over yet!

But it’s the end of Thanksgiving weekend and the schedule opens up a little more for the next few weeks, so what the hell, let’s revisit the idea and see if we can’t find a day a week every week between now and Christmas to go all Entertainment Weekly on you.

First is Green Day’s “When I Come Around,” which was a ubiquitous presence on MTV back when MTV actually, you know, showed music videos—and, it seemed, especially inescapable on Thursday mornings, when I tried out my latest foolproof plan not to sleep the day away. Spending Wednesday nights laying out The Chronicle during my first year on campus led to many Thursdays in which I went to bed with the sun out and woke up with it long gone. Not the best recipe for a GPA, trust me.

So in addition to scheduling my Tuesday/Thursday classes at a reasonable hour in the fall of ’94, I decided, upon returning to my room after layout to nap with the TV on in hopes of not falling into a day-long deep R.E.M. sleep. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it worked well enough so that I made more classes that I missed—and continue, even today, to rely on the doze-with-the-TV-on approach whenever I need to get somewhere on little sleep. Hooray me!

Anyway, it seemed I’d either wake up to “When I Come Around” or “hear” it multiple times during my non-deep sleep in the fall of ‘94. It’s a damn good song (albeit not as catchy or irresistible as its predecessor, “Basket Case”), and the meandering and unfocused vibe of the video seemed to summarize what everyone else wanted to think of Generation X (my favorite image is lead singer Billy Joe Armstrong randomly pulling a pay phone off the hook)—at least until we began wasting the prime years of our lives being instructed to do more with less.

But at no point 15 years ago did I think I was hearing anything more than a one- or two-album wonder. Green Day was a band of 20-something punk rockers whose first single off Dookie, “Longview,” was about smoking dope and masturbating. Such opening salvos don’t usually lend themselves to a long, fruitful career, and indeed, when their follow-up album, Insomniac, was released in October 1995 and sold a mere two million copies—a notable figure, to be sure, but also seven million copies fewer than Dookie—it seemed as if Green Day was destined to follow Hootie and the Blowfish into gradual obscurity.

Except, somehow, Green Day hung around the mainstream long enough to emerge as America’s Most Important Rock Band with 2004’s concept album, American Idiot, which sold five million copies, earned the band armfuls of awards and inspired it to deliver another concept album, 21st Century Breakdown, earlier this year. According to Wikipedia—which is never wrong—Armstrong calls the new album a “…snapshot of the era in which we live as we question and try to make sense of the selfish manipulation going on around us whether it be the government, religion, media or frankly any form of authority.”

All well and good, but I do enough of that during the day. Quite frankly, I’d be just as happy to forget the real world for a few minutes by walking around and pulling pay phones—if they all haven’t gone the way of videos on MTV, of course—off the hook.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

The 1994 Time Machine: Pulp Fiction

It’s a lot easier to explain to the young ‘uns the appeal of Pulp Fiction than it is to explain, oh, I don’t know, Hootie and the Blowfish. There’s a reason Pulp Fiction is continually among the top 10 favorite movies at imdb.com, and it ain’t because dudes in their mid-30s are stuffing the virtual ballot box.

But as much as Pulp Fiction is a multi-generational hit, trust me when I tell you this: Seeing the movie on its opening day Oct. 14, 1994—and countless times thereafter as it became a cultural sensation—is an experience you cannot match and cannot hope to replicate.

Like any wanna-be hipster in 1994, I was into Quentin Tarantino. He’d written the latest Greatest Movie I’d Ever Seen, True Romance, and even though I’d only seen his breakthrough film Reservoir Dogs once at the time, I loved it and nodded along with everyone in the office who was spouting lines from the movie and joined in the mimicking of Mr. Blonde whenever someone cued up “Stuck In The Middle With You.”

Pulp Fiction arrived with plenty of buzz (built the old-fashioned way, via newspapers and word of mouth) and we were anticipating the movie for weeks, so much so that we couldn’t even wait until Friday night to see it. We piled into a friend’s car shortly before 2 pm—I’ll never forget darting out of an English class and the driver motioning for me to hurry it up—and went to a theatre in downtown Hempstead, which, you know, was not an area that Hofstra encouraged its students to frequent.

But we would have gone to Siberia if it meant seeing Pulp Fiction, and it would have been worth the effort. We went in expecting awesomeness, and what we got was indescribably better than that.

All I remember is watching it with giant, ear-to-ear grin plastered across my face. It was brilliant, it was boisterous, it was savage, it was hilarious, it was exhilarating, it was random, it shattered all the conventions of modern film-making and, in the end, it was even a little noble.

The film, almost overnight, turned Tarantino into Hollywood royalty. Pulp Fiction became the first independent film to gross $100 million, earned seven Oscar nominations (and won for best screenplay), revived the career of John Travolta and turned Samuel L. Jackson into an A-lister. But my favorite performance in the film remains the one brilliantly turned in by Bruce Willis who, as the alternately scheming and sympathetic boxer Butch, utters pages and pages worth of dialogue without ever opening his mouth—or, in his first scene, by barely even batting an eyelash.

The non-linear script rewarded those who stuck with it and left the writers and pseudo film critics in the audience with plenty to digest, particularly in the days before we knew everything about a movie long before it hit the theatres. To know that the unforgettable third act featured Vincent, who was blown to pieces in the second act, would have ruined some of the mouth agape fun. And bursts of shocking violence that followed moments of tranquility and inconsequence would not have been nearly as jarring if we already had an idea of what was going to happen.

The symbolism was alternately obvious and sneaky: Jules sucks a soda dry in front of the doomed Brad and—in one of my favorite scenes—the board games Operation and Life are stacked atop one another as Vincent and Lance frantically try to figure out how to save the overdosing Mia.

The pop culture references from Tarantino (who reportedly played the “Welcome Back Kotter” board game with Travolta in wooing the actor) were both winking and obscure. There was the almost poignant scene of Mia and Vincent dancing, which served as a reminder of what Travolta once was 17 years earlier in Saturday Night Fever, as well as a discussion of what a television pilot is right before Jules and Vincent complete an early morning killing.

And even today, we still marvel at the layers to the story. Why does Marcellus have a band-aid on his neck and what’s in that briefcase, the one that is opened with the combination 6-6-6?

There are the acts of shocking gallantry and vulnerability displayed by Butch and Jules. Butch, less than 24 hours removed from swindling Marcellus Wallace and showing no remorse for killing a man with his bare hands, runs back into the hillbilly dungeon to rescue Marcellus from a gang rape.

Jules reconsiders his ways after he and Vincent survive point-blank attempts on their life immediately after executing Brad and preaches the gospel to Pumpkin, while Vincent condescendingly dismisses Jules’ affirmations and ends up paying dearly for his lack of faith, first by accidentally shooting Marvin in the face and then getting murdered by Butch days later.

The only thing worse than listening to a guy butcher movie lines is reading a guy butcher movie lines—especially on a blog that strives to be PG-13 most of the time—so I’ll spare you most of that, except to say that the unforgettably quotable cameos by Christopher Walken and Harvey Keitel provided the best of the hilarious one-liners that served as a collective bonding experience.

I truly can’t count how many times we saw Pulp Fiction during its theatrical run (I swear it ran as the $1 movie on campus for the entire spring 1995 semester). It remains a hair behind Heathers as my favorite movie ever (if you think this is gushing, be glad Heathers wasn't released in 1994) and and one of those movies that, whenever it shows up on one of the pay cable channels, demands I drop whatever it is I’m doing and watch it. I watched it on DVD as I wrote this, except I did little writing, because even 15 years later it’s impossible to turn away from the screen.

Pulp Fiction was the perfect movie for the semester in which the reality was even better than my sky-high expectations. It was, by far, the best time I’ve ever had in a movie theatre, and I’m sure it’ll never be surpassed now that I’m old and grumbling about how expensive tickets are and how those damn kids won’t keep it down during the film.

“That was [expletive] trippy,” Jody says after Mia is revived. It sure was, in ways that could only be truly experienced and appreciated if you were sitting in a movie theatre for the very beginning of a pop culture revolution.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

1994 Time Machine: Hootie and the Blowfish

Fame is fleeting for just about every chart-topping musical act, but even as they were taking America by storm in 1995, it felt as if Hootie and the Blowfish were on a running clock, the superstars who were also relics from another era.

Built on irresistible harmonies and the tightness of a band that had been honing its craft in dive bars for years, Cracked Rear View was neither a fluke nor an undeserving blockbuster. It sold more than 15 million copies, a remarkable figure made even more so by the slow build the album enjoyed beginning with the fall 1994 release of the single “Hold My Hand.”

The next single, “Let Her Cry,” boosted the band into the stratosophere, and Cracked Rear View finally hit no. 1 in May 1995. The album would generate two more hits, “Only Wanna Be With You” and “Time,” and in perhaps the  best symbol of its inescapability, Cracked Rear View returned to the top spot on the album chart four more times in 1995.

I take an extra bit of—wait for it!!—pride in the success of the album because I gave it a rave review for The Chronicle early in the fall semester 15 years ago and declared the band the future of Southern rock. That review made me look alternately prescient and foolish, because the more successful they became, the less likely it appeared that Hootie and the Blowfish would have a lasting impact on the musical landscape (and the less a writer wanted to brag about his ability to peg the band for superstardom, but I digress).

Cracked Rear View had its share of substance and depth: “Let Her Cry” is a pretty dark ballad and “Drowning” tackled racism in America in general and the band’s home state, South Carolina, in particular. But in the mid-‘90s, Hootie and the Blowfish were the audio equivalent of comfort food in an era in which artists were aiming to make their listeners squirm.

Music was getting angrier and more dangerous. Green Day was recording hit songs about masturbation and drug use. Hootie’s one vice was beer. Lead singer Darius Rucker was earnestly singing “I wanna love you, the best that I can” while Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was crooning “I wanna f**k you like an animal.”

The band was inescapable on MTV and VH-1, yet it was about as telegenic as those watching the videos (present company excluded, of course). Marketing geniuses didn’t have to waste any time spinning Hootie and the Blowfish as a bunch of normal guys, because they were actually four completely unremarkable looking dudes (in 2009, though, to look at guitarist Mark Bryan is to think Dirk Nowitzki has a twin brother).

Hootie and the Blowfish were too nice to stay atop the charts and too authentic to undergo any sort of transformation, so through no fault of their own, they were destined for the where-are-they-now files even as they owned America’s tape decks and CD players. The band, too, seemed to get this, and even at the peak of their success, they appeared to be preparing for the inevitable slide back to anonymity, as they discussed in this excellent Rolling Stone cover article from 1995.

The band made a winking acknowledgment of its limited shelf life with the title of its second album, Fairweather Johnson, which debuted at no. 1 in May 1996. The albums that preceded and succeeded it atop the charts—Rage Against The Machine’s Evil Empire and The Fugees’ Score—served as another reminder of how unhip Hootie had already become. By 2001, Hootie had bottomed out (or peaked?) as a punch line on an episode of The Simpsons in which Chief Wiggum uses an old Hootie and the Blowfish tape to secretly record a conversation between mobsters.

The band is getting the last laugh though. It continues to tour and record at its leisure, and Rucker recorded a country album and saw his first single go all the way to no. 1 last year. Turns out being true and authentic to oneself, even in cynical times unkind to those without jagged edges, can in fact lead to sustained success.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch. 

The 1994 Time Machine: Interstate Love Song

Quick apology here for not having the Fifteen Years Ago: New Hampshire post up on Thursday. I went to Boston for a day trip Wednesday, which just reminded me how awesome it would be to write a Hofstra blog while living in Boston, and got back to the Island much later than planned Thursday.

Also a quick note here to mention that I’ll be at the Hofstra-James Madison game Saturday afternoon and will try live Twittering. Yes. It turns out there is a level below rock bottom. Seriously, it may—like the series today’s post is part of—suck at an epic level, but I figure it’s worth a shot and could be fun. I’m not a fan of live blogs/live Twitters that are just play-by-play, so hopefully I can give you more than that. Follow me at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch and find out!

No idea, honestly, on what to expect from the game, but Shuart Stadium’s reputation as a ghost town is beginning to gain legs, if the tease in this Daily News-Record article is any indication. Apparently, you have to pay to read the whole thing. What a concept. Had newspapers tried this 13 years ago, maybe most of them wouldn’t be in the crapper.

Where was I? Oh yes. The Dutchmen at least provided themselves something to build upon in last week’s 24-10 loss to Western Michigan, a marked change from the unmitigated disaster of the 47-0 loss to Richmond. Any shred of playoff hopes rest on not getting embarrassed today. Hunger and motivation for the Dutchmen shouldn’t be a problem, not after last year’s 56-0 rout at the hands of the Dukes.

So let’s see what happens…on Twitter as well as the gridiron!

As for the time machine: Like last week’s selection, the exuberant tone of “Interstate Love Song” symbolized the unlimited promise of the semester in particular and of being a 21-year-old in general. Underneath the exuberance, though, was a bit of a wistful tone, one that seemed to hint that none of this could last forever. Pretty soon we’d all have to worry about graduation and getting real jobs and paying our bills. In the meantime, though, life was grand and perfect and the song is an absolutely perfect summation of that time.

Turns out that’s not at all what troubled Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland was writing about at all. Apparently, he wrote the song about his dishonest relationships with his girlfriend and heroin. Yeah, I’ll continue to associate the song with late-night trips to Dunkin’ Donuts, thanks.

“Interstate Love Song” also sounded like the road, and like most 21-year-old writers, the idea of hitting the road, becoming one with it and absorbing all that America has to offer sounded awesome. Alas, the reality is that I’m a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad traveler, as I found out during a cross-country car trip the following March with Loyal Readers Sully Ray and Rob as well as fellow Chronicle staffer Adam. I like my routines and my rituals and, in unfamiliar situations at least, I don’t handle hiccups well…at all. How my three friends didn’t drop me off in the Gulf of Mexico remains one of the great mysteries of life.

Fun facts: “Interstate Love Song” was the second song off the chart-topping Purple album. It reached number one on the mainstream rock charts (otherwise known as the album rock chart) Sept. 17 and spent a record 15 weeks there. It replaced Purple’s first single, “Vasoline,” atop the chart.  This, by the way, was back when album rock stations played new music, and not the same six Led Zeppelin songs all the damn time. Oh boy! "Stairway to Heaven" again!

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

The Debut of the 1994 Time Machine

The original plan this fall at Defiantly Dutch was to celebrate all things 1994-95, not just that year’s Flying Dutchmen football team. So of course here I am debuting that feature a full six days before October dawns! Hooray chronic attention deficit disorder!

Anyway, I arrived on campus in late August 1994 determined to make up for some lost time. Going away to college a year earlier was a particularly big deal for someone who attended community college for two years and, at almost 20 years old, still hadn’t spent a whole lot of time outside of a hometown in Connecticut that was about as far removed from the hustle and bustle of Long Island as humanly possible.

I was just beginning to overcome my natural shyness (I know, I know, nobody else believes it either) and was in the process of really getting comfortable at Hofstra in the fall of ’93 when my sister was involved in a serious car accident in October. She was OK, thankfully, but even after she got out of the hospital and went back to school (where she made the honor roll while I had to drop a math class to maintain a 2.5), I found the pull of home harder and harder to resist. I went home almost every weekend the rest of the fall semester and every other weekend or so in the spring.

But by the summer of 1994 I knew I was ready to dive in. I was comfortable at the newspaper, had established a familiarity with the campus as well as the sports I was covering and was prepared to immerse myself in Hofstra. I had great friends and I figured this might be the year I finally met Her.

Those were high expectations to meet, but the 1994-95 school year—and the fall of 1994 in particular—was everything I thought it’d be and a whole lot more. The success of the athletic department and the football team in particular provided plenty of inspiration and fuel for an aspiring sportswriter. I came to understand that the friends I’d made at Hofstra were as loyal and ever-lasting as the ones I had at home.

Popular culture seemed to understand the magnitude of the moment, as well, and provided incredible sights and sounds that served as an unforgettable soundtrack. I am a firm believer that college provides that Time for everyone, that perfect era in which everything is intertwined and related. But as good as your Time might be, you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you the fall of 1994 was the best time ever to be a music fan, a moviegoer and a fan of “The Simpsons.”

Don’t believe me? Within a three-day span 15 years ago this week, R.E.M. released Monster and the movie The Shawshank Redemption hit theatres. And it only got better from there.

Who knows what kind of tricks my memory is playing on me, but I’d swear on a stack of 1994 media guides that the video for R.E.M.’s “What’s The Frequency Kenneth” had its world premiere the day classes began. I remember watching the video in my dorm room and thinking that the soaring opening licks and the odd yet inescapable buoyancy of the song summed up the immediacy of the moment and the grand potential of the year to come. Or maybe it was the perpetually dour R.E.M.—fresh off one of the most depressing records ever, Automatic for the People—rocking out that proved anything was possible, I don’t know.

(I know, I know: The last thing R.E.M. ever wanted to do was inspire some hair metal-listening kid from an idyllic home in the suburbs, but that’s what Michael Stipe & Co. did there.)

The song would also become a defining one for our group of friends. One late night at The Chronicle, as we cranked the song, the news editor blurted out “Leavitt”—the last name of his top writer—instead of “Kenneth.” It made syllabic sense and, at 3 am, the type of hilarious sense that is unexplainable outside of a newsroom.

Leavitt was also the last name of the girl on whom I was beginning to develop a mad crush. A couple weeks later, we had our first date, and a couple weeks after that, I made her a mix tape (look it up, you damn iPod-listening kids) that I dubbed “What’s The Frequency Leavitt?” You may have guessed by now she is in fact Her.

The farther back 1994-95 is in the rear-view mirror, the more fond the memories become, because adulthood is a constant reminder of how often seemingly perfect moments and opportunities turn out to be something far less than that. Hopefully, these occasional forays into the pop culture world of 15 years ago will remind you of your Time as well, even if it wasn’t the fall of 1994.

And you also get my humble apologies if this bores you to tears, but I can assure you, even if this sucks in a really large way, it’s still better than 1994 eyesore Natural Born Killers.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.