When we made tapes from records and played 'em in the dorm...

I left my toadie level position in the music industry earlier this year, and I’ve been amazed at how quickly the names and titles and stories that were part of my working life for the last ten years and my waking life for the past thirty, have started leeching out of my brain. I actually blanked out on the very existence of an Indigo Girls album. I distinctly remembered the sunny Scranton Tuesday when I walked down to the Electric Mindshaft on Lackawanna Avenue and bought it, but I could not for the life of me remember anything about it. I knew something fit in the slot for that year, but no song, no album artwork came to mind. I was a little ashamed that I would have let something that essential drain from the memory bank.

So, trolling the net for discographies tonight, I found a fan site that hosted some Indigo Girls bootlegs from 1981, and I spewed milk out of nose. Nine out of twelve of the songs are songs that I spent a lot on the early 80’s dropping the needle on repeatedly to figure out chords changes- the Fogelberg stuff in particular. My copy of “Home Free” is gray from overuse on a couple of tracks.

I emailed the mp3 of “House at Pooh Corner” to an acquaintance from college… a woman I’d looked up to my freshman year. She was the first other girl I knew that played the guitar or wrote songs. She hung out with her room mate and sang and played these same songs at the weekly’ coffeehouse’ open stage event at our small parochial school.

Having spent the last ten years or so doing ‘serious’ gigging, I’ve grown into the habit of being mildly embarrassed by that period in my life. I was starstruck by the cooler, older girls, starstruck by the cooler older girls playing guitar, and weirdly exhilarated by a sense of a deeper kinship- yep, it turned out that they liked girls too. It was too much for me. I’d spent most of the 80’s in my bedroom in my parent’s basement writing songs patterned after the 70’s folk rock records that my big sister left behind when she moved out. Too much, I say, too much, and I mooned over the entire package, and I generally acted like a lovesick puppy. So I cringe over that, and I cringe over some of the songs – “Brown Eyed Girl”, “Father & Son”, “House at Pooh Corners.” Even at 17, I knew they were songs you’d never put on a set list, and I was more of a rocker. I thought they were pretty lame, I’d been going to the church of Zep, but suburban as they were, I played them anyways, because those girls were playing them, and I’d never had girls to play with before. To be fair, in the wake of new wave, in the mid to late 80’s, there wasn’t a whole lot being added to the Acoustic Rock canon. Sure, by ’88 we had the Tracy Chapman debut, and 10,000 Maniacs In My Tribe, but the beginning of that year, they were too new (in the days before the internet and OLGA) for anyone to have really copped the chords, and those first few weeks of school were total AM Solid Gold.

It’s not just the track listing from this little bootleg that gave my heart a pang, it was the recording itself. It sounded like any one of the tapes that those girls made in the dorm bathroom with a boom box. The voices too, so so young, not yet strong, still very adolescent sounding, and still sounding a little bit like they were asking permission to sing. If you didn’t know it was the Indigo Girls, you would never know it was the Indigo Girls, it could have been Chris and Alice or Me and Kathy or any of a million girls with guitars just waiting for someone to say, "You, yeah, you, you're good enough."