Saturday, August 26, 2006

Ten Years Ago

On watching some 50 freshmen move into my dorm last Saturday, I was taken back to my last days leading up to college life. Wide eyes and uncertain handshakes. Overly concerned mothers followed by armies of homeschoolers. Then I became keenly aware that those days were now a decade ago, and I felt very old. I still feel old, seeing as I yawn heavily around 11 p.m. and have to hold back laughs when people ask me to go to Wal-Mart or watch a movie with them when it's technically the wee hours of the next day (which is going on in my living room right now).

But back to being ten years removed from high school. It was the summer of 1996, arguably the best days of my life (at least that's the thought that was in my head at the time. Now I scoff at my own melodrama). Me and five or six of my best friends were moving off in different directions, yet we clung to the last days of the summer like...well...like kids clinging to the last days of summer. Soon enough, we'd all started attending different schools, and two of the friends that had been dating broke up. A few months later down the road the other couple called it quits, then my girlfriend started seeing someone else... and then broke up with me two weeks later, and all the while I struggled with the oddity known as community college, where still pimply-faced 18 year-olds and 50 year-old mothers of three go to school together. I also misread "the freshman 15" memo and took it as "the freshman 50" instead. Well maybe not exactly, but you get the point. It was sort of like a second puberty. Yikes.

The good memories I have of that summer were related to music. Back in those days, I'd go to at least one concert every two weeks it seemed, and then there was the five-day stretch where Atlantafest, the biggest Christian music festival in the Southeast, made its way to Six Flags over Georgia. I saw Michael W. do his headtoss-legkick thing, Steven Curtis do silly "dance moves" and the Newsboys guy wear his silver suit. So, for a 10-year tribute, here's my top five albums that I was listening to in the summer of 1996.

1. Jars of Clay, Jars of Clay-The bad thing about this album is that everyone knew there was no way they could top it. I've always admired the group for not trying to duplicate what was on this album, but it's just too bad they haven't made another album up to par.

2. DCtalk, Jesus Freak- Hmmmmm, the freak show. This album made me realize that Christian can make music that's cool and glorifying. Again, too bad the group never came out with another great cd.

3. 4HIM, The Message- Bring on the harmony. These guys were so squeaky clean that I stopped taking showers in the summer of 96. Okay, so that's a lie.

4. The WorldWide Message Tribe, We Don't Get What We Deserve- I don't think I ever heard anything about these guys ever again. They were a weird British techno, dance band that easily won me over with their high-energy shows. They had two black ladies that wailed away on the mic, a spazzy white dancer boy that flew around the stage like a three-year old on Kool-aid and another bald white guy named "The Heavyfoot" who would growl out raps that were really hard to understand. I saw them in concert early one day at Atlantafest. They played in the evening set later that day and then played again at the late-night stage in the wee hours of the night. It's really weird stuff.

5. PFR, Them- This was a sad cd, because it came out just around the end of summer and was marketed as PFR's last album. Five years later, the band reunited for another album, which proved that sometimes people should stick with their retirements. Them had a way harder sound than anything I'd ever listening to before, so I flipper back and forth between a feeling of guilt and exhilaration. I shrugged the guilt eventually. The first track, "Pour Me Out," still has one of the greatest tempo changes that I've heard in a song.

Other notables include MWS I'll Lead You Home (I still get pleasure of singing "I'll leave you home..."), Geoff Moore and the Distance's Homerun (the epitome of cheese), and the Newsboys Take Me to Your Leader (probably the band's last top-notch album, though the disco disc still gets my groove going).

Ironically, two of my high school friends recently contacted me about the possibilty of a 10-year reunion in October. Honestly, I have to say that the thought was slightly disturbing to me, not so much because I don't want to see old classmates (at least not all of them), but because I can now be classified as one of those people that has a 10-year reunion that they could choose to avoid. On the bright side of things, I graduated in 1996 instead of 1986, which means I don't have to worry about people bringing up my mullet, tight designer blue jeans or super sexy Magnum P.I. mustache.