“I’m not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else.”
All tagged childhood
Am I one of those “older people” who thinks they grew up in the height of some cultural era? Thinking back on my musical history, though, I am sure I lived in the golden age of Michael Jackson videos (Thriller, Remember the Time, anyone?), the Peter Gabriel stop-motion videos*, and, by middle school, the gem that was VH1’s Pop Up Video. The videos I remember the best, though, are the parody videos of the late 80s and early 90s.
The benefit (well, a benefit) of having an almost-decade-older sibling is that there weren’t a lot of pop-cultural limitations growing up*. This isn’t to say we were sitting down as a family to catch that new movie on Cinemax or anything; we were down with Cliff and Claire. Still, I don’t remember being told “you can’t watch that**,” "you can't read that," or “you can’t listen to that.”
Picture it. Nashville. 1985ish. Satin jackets. Badminton rackets. Power pop. That was the world of The Jackers; a sibling duo who brought the house down at every show. Well, not literally. That would've resulted in a really long Time Out.
Consider yourselves VIPs on this trip down memory lane which, coincidentally, is made up of highways and interstates that'll take us from Nashville, TN, to Prattville, AL, to Austin, TX. I'll be updating the blog with posts between now and October 2 (the "go" date of the tour part of the tour) and then the hope is to have posts, video and other multi-media from the road. You can follow updates on Twitter through @_TheJackers.
I think I’ve talked about this before, but my brother and I had a “band” in the 80s (didn’t everyone) called The Jackers. Our hook? We wore jackets. Also, we played plastic badminton rackets as guitars and sang into a Fisher Price radio-tunable microphone. We played our gigs on the staircase landing in our house in Bellevue off Sawyer Brown Road. It was, in a word, awesome.
I loved this idea from Erin's recent blog, and wanted to piggy-blog off of what she'd done - share memories formed around music.
I’d say that most songs that are more than five years old remind me of a specific time and place, so it’s difficult to just pick a few. I could go on and on and on…but here are some that really stick out:
