I was a 12-14 year old, but not in the early 80's. Partial credit?

Can we shove someone into a locker?

Sure, then we'll go sneak smokes behind the bike shed.

(also, I just got off the phone with my mom. apparently her and my Uncle Geno are going to Italy on Friday to check out the state of the family farm, taxwise and in other ways, since theres contention among the clan. I was recently speaking to afriend who also has an immigrant parent, who opined that no immigrant family is complete without some kind of property dispute in the Old Country)

I was a 3-6 year old in the early 80s, but I still dig the music.

I'm sure you do killdevil, but I dunno if it can have the same associations.

(also, my grandfather-who's 91-still seems to harbor ideas about returning to the old country to become a gentleman farmer. He has no peripheral vison, so at least his plowing would be straight, I guess)

Ok y'all are gonna laugh: I thought for a long time* that Just What I Needed was a Stones song off the Some Girls album.

* a month or two when it came out.

i was a 12-14 year old for songs like these (i just checked my itunes and don't have a single one)

Some Girls is the only Stones album i like---the disco album : >

Then you woulda been a high schooler for these tunes. Although, I imagine the appeal of the Van Halen cut was wasted on you. ;>

Some Girls is the only Stones album i like---the disco album

Really? Of all rock bands, I'd figure the Stones would have the most homoerotic appeal.

I was a high schooler for the Cars. So the Van Halen is lost on me but the Cars is still effective.

nah...especially not at that time. they were totally not big during the disco/new wave days.

this is closest to then that i have--enjoy!

the Cars were definitely a lesser new wave group tho--much less cool than Joe Jackson or Elvis Costello or Squeeze or any of thousands of British groups--even Blondie was a million times cooler than them.

nah...especially not at that time.

You need to listen to some late sixties Stones. You know Brad Pitt is every straight guys answer to "If you had to who would it be," these days? Jagger was the answer for that era, man. And he reveled in his bi-appeal more than anyone except maybe Bowie, and the Stones had better songs (no disrespect to Bowie, but Mick & the boys get the nod over him). For a taste of what I'm talking about:

Stray Cat Blues (live)

If there's nastier rock out there, I ain't heard it (and yes, the Stones are a joke today, but at his peak, Mick was the rock god to end all rock gods and he had Keith with him)


the Cars were definitely a lesser new wave group tho--much less cool than Joe Jackson or Elvis Costello or Squeeze or any of thousands of British groups--even Blondie was a million times cooler than them.

I'd agree, but 'Just What I Needed' is a fantastic single.

<hangs out behind the auto mechanics shop with the unpopular kids and smokes sweet bright green BC bud>

jon, I was double those ages for the early 80s (24-28), and I remember vividly that "Just What I Needed" came out in 1978, just a couple months after Van Halen's first album and my personal all-time favorite VanH track "Jamie's Cryin'" (Wa Waaa..). My favorite Cars song is 1984's "You Might Think", featuring one of the best music videos of the jurassic period of MTV. And I have neither song in my mp3 collection (Wa Waaa...)

All I can say is that all of you had it better than those of us who were in middle school in the early nineties. C + C Music Factory? Baby doll dresses? Yeah.

All I can say is that all of you had it better than those of us who were in middle school in the early nineties.

Yeah, but being in your early twenties in the early 90's was a mixed bag. We had great music (grunge, gangsta rap), and movies like Reservoir Dogs and Clerks were being made, and for a brief time I was fashion forward, but the economy sucked and everybody was stuck living at home working nametag jobs.

my personal all-time favorite VanH track "Jamie's Cryin'"

it's a good tume, but VH's best was a tie between "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love," and "Panama"(possibly the best video of all time).

Jon, the economy went to hell the year after I graduated from college. My twenties have hardly been a time of great wealth. That would be the group ahead of me.

It was shitty for most of us, too. The whole dot-com boom thing barely touched most of us. That was all a big media myth for the most part.

That has nothing to do with your previous point. We got crappy music *and* a bad economy. You just got the one.

Good point. You win.

I was a 15-17 year old in the early eighties and me and my buds were well-known as the Van Halen fanatics that we were. Ask postmodernmillie. "We" painted the VH logo on the town's water tower (and on a little tower thingie on the HS's property). We saw them in concert twice during our high school years, IIRC. At commencement, the girl in front of me was nervous so I sang "Ice Cream Man" quietly to amuse her. And, incidentally, her favorite band was the Cars.

Although I had been a fan of Hagar before anyone I knew had heard of him (my cousin in Palo Alto/Redwood City kept me up-to-date on stuff), I (and a bazillion other people) was not happy with Van Hagar and that was the end of my infatuation. Roth was a big, doofus maniac; but he was lots of fun and constituted about 95% of VH's feel-good hard-partying sensibilities. He was a lot of fun live, too.

Most underrated Roth-era album: Fair Warning.

Oh, the quoted "we" indicates that I was actually not present at either one of those two episodes.

"The whole dot-com boom thing barely touched most of us. That was all a big media myth for the most part."

You should have been in Austin. Me and my officemate—a skate punk who had previously worked at Apple—both had option grants worth over 2M. We talked about the cars we planned to get. He ended up getting a 911, I bought a BMW 840ci. (Actually, he saw that red BMW at an exotic sports car lot on the way to work a couple of hours before I did. I stopped and test-drove it and bought it on the spot, took the other car home and then went on to work. When I got in, my officemate said "Keith, I know exactly what car you should buy—there's this red BMW 840 at..." I replied, "Hey let's go to parking garage, I have something to show you." That was an interesting coincidence.

I didn't actually realize a million from those options; but a coworker in our dept. who was hired two weeks before me had what in retrospect was clearly perfect timing and she cleared a million when she exercised and sold her first vested 25%, and some other stock bought from our paychecks, just four months after I had done the same.

Still, you're right that it was mostly hype. I was very lucky to do the IPO soaring-stock thing with my company; even then it didn't usually work out that way. But salaries were high across the board in IT. Everyone I knew in Austin working IT could leave their present job and get a raise of at least 30K during that period. Salaries were grossly inflated, really. I have a friend who's still basically twiddling her thumbs at IBM making 110K.

I was in junior high in the mid-80s, but I still like those songs. : )