Mountain Goats…

Back in the days when I was an elementary schooler, before I had an iPod and before I was cooler, you could find the abstract listening to Z104 and asking his father to record a song he didn’t know the name of off the radio on to his dictaphone. My dad carried around a dictaphone to record notes on his patients, but on one particular afternoon, we recorded a 30 second snippet off of an ephemeral hit single by an unknown group. We went in to the music store, played the crackling audio for the store clerk, and identified them as European house music heroes “Black Box“. I bought the cassette single for 99 cents that afternoon. Things were so much easier before iTunes.
I grew up. Went to college. Discovered Napster. Discovered college radio. While driving to a friend’s house my Senior year, I heard the following lyrics fuzz through the faint WXDU FM signal.

“sophomore year, you rushed for an average of eight and a third yards per carry/all eyes were on you/junior year, you blew your knee out at an out of town game/nowhere to go to but down down down/nothing but the ground left for you to fall to/”

I called the station to find out their name. I wrote it down on a scrap piece of paper on my steering wheel. I finally got a chance to see them tonight.
The Mountain Goats (click to listen to the song: the fall of the star high school running back…)
Listening to them is like putting on an old pair of OshKosh B’gosh overalls and discovering a Bazooka Joe fortune that has ironic relevance to your post-adolescent life. Or, discovering in the pocket an audiotape of you and your father from elementary school talking about Little League baseball, life, death, and obscure European house music.