fIREHOSE – Riddle of the Eighties

This evening I got an email from my mother because she’d seen an article in the daily paper about the 30th anniversary of the record store where I was the first full-time employee. Talk about feeling old. I realize I now have a child who is 18 and technically an adult, and those record store days definitely feel like another lifetime, but 30 years is a long time.

I can’t remember what album I must have bought there when they opened but I remember talking with my younger sister before we headed down there on the opening day and deciding that I had to buy something just to encourage them to stay open. And to hopefully put myself in their good graces so I could improve my chances of a landing a job there.

I scanned through the Slicing Up Eyeballs list of the Top 100 Albums of 1989 to jog my memory. I don’t think the fIREHOSE album fROMOHIO was the one I bought that day but I am sure I bought it there in 1989. There are some records on that list which I would have thought were even older than they are. Probably it has to do with whether I associate the album with college and the first half of that year, or just general life, which would be anything mid-June and after. Also MTV still played videos and I had no way of watching them when I was away at college but once I graduated and was back at home, I would stay up and watch 120 Minutes pretty religiously.

The chorus of this song has Ed singing “what the eighties mean to me.” I’m not sure what they mean to me, or if I could even summarize it, but we’re closing in on the end of this anniversary year for many things. I’ll have to give this some thought.