GET BENT!

Column: Sofa King Bent

Get ready for early-naughts nostalgia, as GET BENT columnist Tiffany Minton takes us back to her first day of high school and the conversation—and the song—that changed her life. Plus a little hint for what’s to come in the next edition of Sofa King Bent!

By Tiffany Minton

August 1999: the month I started high school, downloaded my first .mp3, and turned fourteen, which at the time seemed so much more significant an age than it does now. My freshman year of high school is also when I had my first taste of rebellion. My mother would most likely still defend that overall I was a “good kid,” but the trifecta of what’s most rebellious about me in my familial context (rock and roll, women and freethinking) can traced back to August of 1999.

My childhood best friend, Michelle, was about as buxom and precociously beautiful as a fourteen year old could be when we entered high school. This of course prepared her quite nicely for popularity. And as the balance of the universe goes, I was a baggy-jeaned skate betty, failing miserably at femininity. However I anticipated the pressures to come so I didn’t fight her suggestion that I wear a white skirt and terribly uncomfortable foam-stacked thong sandals on the first day of school. I don’t remember much from that first day of high school, outside of the mild anxiety from having to remind myself constantly that 1) I wasn’t wearing pants so I must 2) cross my legs every time I sat down and 3) remember Michelle’s advice to “not drag my feet in heels.”

What I do remember prominently is a conversation with some other freshman I didn’t know about a “new cool thing on the Internet called Napster.” It’s difficult to completely summarize how this changed my life, but I’ll say that if it weren’t for the technology of music pirating I never would have been able to break the indoctrinating stronghold that Top 40 Pop/Rock/Rap/Country music had on the minds of most of my peers, myself included. It was a cultural KoolAid we all consumed because of our inability to access anything out of the mainstream in the bubble of our small town. There was also very little challenge made to that precedence by the adults in our lives, besides a few worldly types such as your friend’s ex-hippy parents or the art teacher who listened to NPR in class.

I won’t pretend I didn’t own …Baby One More Time and just about every other (mostly female centric) pop album of that year and those that followed. I’m proud to say that even within the emulsified sweetness of early millennial pop music I found a way to build on the foundations of my budding feminism.

Growing up, there was always music around. Not musicians per se, although my brother did play bass in a cool psych-grunge band called “Steel Token.” But there were always radios blaring, records spinning and tapes in the deck. My mother has great taste in popular music, having the discerning palate to separate the wheat (Prince) from the chaff (John Mellencamp), and she raised me up to appreciate both the eclectic and esoteric sides of the genre. By middle school I was generally familiar with the major musical developments of the four decades that preceded me, particularly the rich musical history of Detroit, as I found myself drawn to her Motown records collection. But by fourteen I was ready to develop my own distinctive musical tastes. Thanks to being raised on the music of almost every major girl group of the 50’s and 60’s, I naturally evolved into a young super fan of bands like The Donnas and Bratmobile.

As a result of that first day’s conversation, I pretty much fell into a downloading k-hole over the course of my freshman year. Napster fueled my emerging obsession for music and was the reason I was able to access the obscurities of rock and roll, particularly punk. With the Internet at my fingertips, albeit painfully slow dial-up, I had the technology to acquire almost anything I could dream of but couldn’t acquire from the one record store in my small town. Not to mention, downloading was almost instantaneous, although humorously I now think back on having to leave my queue filled with only a dozen or so .mp3’s to download overnight. This annoyed the hell out of my mother because “it tied up the phone line and what if someone had tried to call us during the night?”

Building on my repertoire of female rock and roll iconography, I used to spend hours browsing the Internet with key words and phrases like “girl band,” “girl punk,” “girl power rock n roll”, feverishly searching for the sounds and images I fantasized about in my head. Naturally all of the names that my searching recovered would fill my download queue night after night. I’d then weed out the stuff I didn’t like, narrowing my tastes into Winamp playlists and eventually burning them as mix cds. One morning before school I found a folder titled “girl band mix” sitting in the previous night’s download queue. Excited, I opened the folder in my Windows Me desktop and browsed the files for songs I hadn’t heard. As I recall there were songs by Bikini Kill, Shonen Knife and Hole, all of which I recognized from my older siblings’ music collections.

One file in particular I couldn’t distinguish with any familiarity. It was mysteriously and poorly labeled as something to the effect of “001_babycome0n_overt0_myside.” Although my recollection of it’s titling now, skewed by the years, still seems more forgiving than what I perceive in retrospect. The bit rate was so poorly compromised by the countless compression artifacts added onto it through the chain of uploads and downloads, that it rendered the original vinyl recording barely listenable. Basically, the overtones sounded like a cat hissing under water, which helped influence my distaste for audiophile. I would obsessively burn this song (always making it track one) onto just about every rock and roll themed mix during those four years of high school. Lyric search engines were far between and certainly not populated with obscure garage rock songs until the late 2000’s, so I was never able to figure out who the artist of “001_babycome0n_overt0_myside” was until almost five years later.

In 2003 I graduated high school and moved to college, but by this time the original file of this mysterious song had been lost to a series of Windows operating system crashes and the terrible conditions I subjected all of those burned mix cds to in my first car. Somehow my vast collection of obscure and live recordings of The Donnas did make it through and they’re still tucked away somewhere in my downsized collection of cds to this day. Fast forward to December 2004 and I’m working at Tower Records (R.I.P. #153). My co-worker gives me a Christmas gift. It’s a mix cd titled “Chick Fight.” It has laser jet printed cover art of two brunette pin-ups, one pinning the other in a sleeper hold.

After work, I pop it into my car stereo without checking the track listing. Track one blared through my car speakers like some kind transcendental déjà voodoo. It was “001_babycome0n_overt0_myside”, but it was clear. It was audible. It was “What a Way to Die” by the Pleasure Seekers and it was like I was hearing it for the first time. I felt butterflies, I felt feral, immoral… WILD! I wanted to scour my couch cushions for change and head to the Circle K for a $1.79 Colt 45. I wanted to swill all 40 oz. while the song repeated. Then, I wanted to play it again while shaking my ass in a stranger’s basement until 4am. I wanted to party, ya’ll!

I am forever grateful to the original file sharer for the 2 minute 14 second gift, no matter their ineptitude for labeling, because this song has changed my life. It was my gateway drug to garage rock music, both a template and teacher. Everything I listened to that followed was measured against the perfect blueprint created by the Quatro sisters: the boogie-woogie piano, the shrieking vocals, the 16th note shuffle on the ride cymbal, the thumping bass as the backbeat and the tinny reverberant guitar sitting all the way in front of the mix.

Since re-discovering “What A Way to Die” in 2004, it has become an axis around which many of my most precious memories of bonding with lovers and friends revolve. It’s impossible to fathom how many times this song has played over the P.A. speakers of a house party I’ve attended, been included on mixes I’ve used to woo a cute girl, or been sung at the top of my lungs while driving to and from Nashville, TN and Boone, NC, my hometown. Some favorite memories include: catching a former roommate baking cheesecake in her dirty socks and underwear while dancing and singing to it in our kitchen; drunkenly twisting around the living room with my first girlfriend in the apartment we once shared, and blowing out all of the speakers in the Heavy Cream van on more than one occasion while on tour. There are few things that make me happier than hearing this song and when I hear it to this day, I WANT TO FUCKING PARTY. So turn up your speakers and let’s blitz!