Nostalgia…

I’ve got the skin of a shark / And I’m gonna make a muscle…

Weird; in the span of just a couple of days, I’ve had a series of “remember when?”-type happenings that’ve made me think back to the Good Old Days of H-town rock (in this case, primarily defined as the period in the mid-late ’90s when I was fresh out of college and playing in a band).

Nostalgic Moment #1: First I ran across this excellent post from back in ’05 on The Skyline Network, extolling the virtues of Mark Caperton’s It Came From Nowhere… 7″ comp, which included songs by Blueprint, Gomez, Celindine, and The Linoleum Experiment. It was the inaugural release, as I recall, on Mark’s then-fledgling Ojet Records, which would later go on to release stuff by Schrasj, Sad Like Crazy, Lucky Motors, The White Papers, etc. In its day, the comp was something else — four cool bands I’d only barely heard of, almost all of which (Gomez excepted, sorry; just never got into ’em) I ended up loving dearly for years to come.

I remember being blown away by how cool it looked, even, compared to all the crappy 7″s floating around the SoundEx bins. Mark poured a ton of money into making that label a professional operation, and the records & CDs he put out still sit nicely on my CD shelves next to all the other non-Houston-indie-label releases.

Just thinking about this makes me want to drag that box of 7″s out from the trunk my daughter’s computer is currently sitting on and slap ’em onto the turntable…

Nostalgic Moment #2: Then I hit a relatively-new local blog called The Westbury Squares (dead for the past few years; singer/guitarist Davey apparently moved on up to Portland) and The Jinkies (dead since ’99 or so). Weirdest of all, the Jinkies MySpace page uses a little bio blurb written by, um, me, using quite possibly inaccurate info — very odd… Oh, and Jim’s also got links for The Allisons, who were before my time, and Toby Blunt, once of Fab Motion and later of Mary Jane’s (aka Fat Cat’s, aka The Shimmy Shack, etc., etc.), as well as some cool local bands. Heard some, like The Ragged Hearts & Bright Men of Learning, but others, like Les Thargic & Penny For The Guy, are new to me.

Nostalgic Moment #3: I got an e-mail out of the blue the other day from an old friend I hadn’t heard from in a very long time, Hector Lanza, formerly the leather pants-wearing guitarist for long-gone local pals Big Top (with whom my little band did our first — and only — 7″). Hector’s been gone from H-town for quite a while sadly; he moved up to Austin a long, long while back and has played in at least one band up there, a cool little group called Blued.

Damn, this all brings back the memories. I think I’m going to have to figure out how to hook up my tape deck & turntable to my wife’s computer and transfer all that old stuff over to MP3, just so I can listen to it again.