Dinosaur Jr and miracles

 

 

I have many good memories of travelling across London to the Brixton Academy to see a band but none so more that the time I went to see Dinosaur Jr with my buddy Jason.

I met Jason and his mate Jack at his house in Wimbledon and then caught the bus from Colliers Wood down to Brixton. Before getting on the bus we bought a quarter bottle of whiskey , a quarter bottle of vodka and 3 cans of Coke. The idea was that you drank half a can of Coke then topped it up with booze, then drank half a can and then topped it up again and so on. After 4 cycles the Coke was so diluted that you wouldn’t know there was any in the can! This was one way of getting drunk very quickly and by the time we got to Brixton we were all over the place!

Thinking back, we must have got the tube at some part of the journey as I remembers quite vividly the train breaking sharply and Jack rolling almost head over heels down the whole length of the carriage! Not one person reacted! It was like they saw this kind of thing every day!.

When we got to the Brixton Academy we headed to the bar, and this is where the miracle happened! Jason, or as we called him for the rest of the night, Jesus, bought 2 pints of cider and one pint of lager and then asked for a spare glass. At this point Jesus started mixing the drinks, tipping them from one glass to another, a bit of lager, a bit of cider, mixing up Snakebite. Once Jason had finished I was amazed to see, 4 full pints of booze! 4 from 3??? That is Bible stuff in my eyes!!!

The gig itself was brilliant, extremely loud and ear splitting. The tour was to promote the ‘Where You Been’ album

The ‘big’ hit to come from this album was Start Choppin’ which Dinosaur performed live on The Word. I remember the floor manager frantically waving at the band to wind up the song so that they could go to the next link but Dinosaur just kept playing! Eventually they plugged the plug on them. Brilliant!

Start Choppin’ – The Word

Out There – The Jenny Jones Show

A new direction

So much for my top 50 albums of all time! Not an easy task as it turned out. The problems with compiling such a list is that you only really write about the flavours of the day. Albums I want to hear today, right now. Of course there will always be albums that will be up there, Hunky Dory, Ill Communication, Zilch, but true top albums are like best friends, you can only honestly count them on one hand…. Oh go on then, two hands!!

You see they problem with compiling such a list is that you tend to forget the truly wondrous albums that you have listened to too many times and are sick to death of and therefore not included. This list shouldn’t be about now, it should be about ‘all time’.

So would I have reached 50 albums, ‘yes’ probably, would they have reflected my top 50 albums, no, probably not.

The good thing to come out of this, and you will see this as you work from bottom to top, is that I shifted from writing about why i liked an album to writing about the band, the gigs, the laughs and the mosh pits!! How I discovered a band, who was with me and what direction this band took me in.

So this is the new direction. No more top albums, I’m going to concentrate on the experiences, memories, good time and friends.

Hope you enjoy it!!!!

Goff