... But My Friends Are Fucking Awesome, And We'll Keep On Doing Our Best Even Though Our Lives Are A Mess

It’s an awesome thing when you re-discover a band that you used to just absolutely love.

I know I’ve written about this before, but I used to be absolutely head over heels in love with Big D And The Kids Table. They changed a bunch since then are aren’t even a shadow of what they used to be (already wrote about it, so I’ll refrain from ranting), but their older stuff is still extremely important to me.

In high school I was not exactly the cool guy. I went to an all-boy, Catholic private school that was comprised of a 50/50 mix of the Jersey Shore b-team and OHL super jocks. Being the scrawny kid in a Suicide Machines shirt that I was, it was safe to say that I didn’t fit in. My way of dealing with that many douches on regular basis was listening to my walkman every day on my hour long subway ride to and from school. One CD that especially helped was “How It Goes” by Big D as well as “The Gypsy Hill LP” also by them.

But in particular “How It Goes” was just my go to CD on the way to school (didn’t have an iPod at this point). Especially the song “LAX”. The song is about them not exactly having it all in their lives but just doing what you can and depending on your friends to get by. There’s a lot of dicks who get all the breaks and take it for granted, but we don’t. We earn everything we get. This really hit home for me in high school, as many of the students came from pretty affluent families. I’m not saying my family was super poor, obviously my parents could afford to send me to the school, but we were in no ways loaded and they had to stretch a little to send me there. But obviously one can see why a song about those types of kids would hit home for me.

I realized the other day that I hadn’t listened to either of those albums in quite a while and decided to throw them on. Now “The Sounds of Allston Village” is a great opening track, but as soon as I heard the guitar riff to “LAX” it just hit me right in the chest and I remembered how much the album does rule. Realistically, there are just way too many songs I could put up here. The album is just covered back to front in awesome “us vs. them” lyrics that I just ate up when I was in high school. 20 tracks and I would say no filler. In the liner notes it says “we had a choice – we could sell out like everyone else and maybe make a buck, or record an album that we liked and continue to be poor. Well, we’re still poor...” I love how before “LAX” they have the clip saying “We’ve got something real exciting to tell you. It looks like we’re finally gonna have a hit record” then follow it up with a song that clearly states the opposite in its lyrics. Then after the song it says in the same voice as the clip “Foooooled ya!” this was one of those instances where you just completely understand what someone is going for and completely agree with it.

The band used to just be the best live as well. Just the best. Whenever they played things would just get crazy; people front flipping off the stage, the singer diving into the drum set, the trombone player borderline smashing his instrument. And every set you knew they were going to end with “LAX”. Everyone would go crazy, but save that last little bit for the ending song because it meant so much to every kid there. The crowd would be screaming the lyrics so loud that it would almost drown out the band. There was one point in playing it live where the band would just stop and everybody in the venue would keep it going screaming “and maybe your glamour’s not in Boston, but my friends are fucking awesome, and we’ll keep on doing our best, even though our lives are a mess”. It was just such a special connection. I even wrote to the singer on MySpace saying how much the song helped me and he wrote back saying “Thanks for the kind words, it means a lot to all of us”.

I got turned off the band for a while because of how they sound now, but it’s just impossible to ignore how much they’ve helped me in my life.