There's No Other Way
At Dana's behest, our man Turner (the ex-Clark dj de la maison) has put together a Clark Standards songlist, and I'm listening to it right now. It's wonderful. Cheers, cheers, CHEERS to Clark Hall Pub, circa 1991 - 1996 (my tenure at the place - I'm sure it's still awesome, but I can only personally vouch for the years when I was a regular).
"Jesus Built My Hotrod" by Ministry. At the time, I didn't understand why this song was, or why it appealled to me. All I knew was that it was 1994, my parents had broken up, and I'd spent one HELL of a summer dealing with the aftermath. I came back to Kingston in the fall and called Sean Monkman and said, "I want a mix of all the angry Clark music. And I want that Jesus motorcycle song". And he made it for me, bless him, even though Sean believes that you should know the whole album if you're going to yoink a single for a mix. But this was the first song on that mercy tape. It's a love affair, mainly Jesus and my hotrod (yeah, fuck it).
"Head Like A Hole", by Nine Inch Nails. I can't help it, it reminds me of you, Harry Cho. We were the only people on campus with eyebrow rings in 1993, and for whatever reason, we decided that made us friends. You and me and many others danced and bowed to this one numerous times over the years. Much later, in grad school, I was on some half-baked river watershed study and this song came on the radio. In a glee I told my study partner, "Oh, this song reminds me of this friend from undergrad!" ... Bow down before the one you serve... you're going to get what you deserve... he looked at me and was like, uh... great.
"Debaser" by the Pixies... oh youse. I knew ALL ABOUT the Pixies before I even got to Queen's in 1991. I SO have my cousin Alanna Thain, and high school friends Melissa Darou, Margaret Drummond, and Elliot Long to thank for my prescient arrival in their fabled realms. By the time my university contemporaries had arrived at the Pixies' promised land, I could recite lyrical circles around them sevenfold. So when Clark played this one, it was a quaint reminder of driving home early on Friday afternoons in grade twelve, making the van "dance" with the brakes, at the time never suspecting I wouldn't see these rearview mirror friends again for years and years to come after first year university...
"Cannonball" by the Breeders. Oh, and I was so ahead of the curve on this one. I arrived in Kingston a few weeks earlier than everyone else before fall term started in 1992, and Kim Deal and the Breeders were still holding high ground before the Pixies' Trompe Le Monde release that fall. "I'll be your... whatever-you-want..." C'mon, as if we all haven't been there. SO GREAT. This song fed the Clark Hall spinning-dancers' fancy for years to come.
"Elephant Stone" by the Stone Roses. My 1992 beau John Johnston had this shoe box where he kept his music tapes (yes, tapes, 1992 was that long ago). And it seemed impossible to me, but whenever I'd come into his residence room and say, "Hey John, you know that song, ....nuh nuh nuh nuh...?" he would go to the shoe box and pull out exactly that album, and flip it into his tape deck, and fast forward it to exactly the song I'd been nuh-nuh-nuh'ing. I resolved to never look directly into The Tape Box (and I never did), because obviously it was magical and could produce whatever music I wished to hear.
"There's No Other Way", by Blur. Yet another set of props has to go out to Father Ted. The bad-seed young priest asks Dougall, "Which do you like better: Blur or Oasis?" Dougall, clearly having never heard of either band, stabs blindly: "Uh, Blur?" And the bad-seed priest spits in horror. "...Uh, Oasis! I mean Oasis!" counters Dougall, and the bad-seed priest is mollified. ...But I should note of course that this was a Clark favourite. I have a great many memories of standing in line, listening to the strains of this one coming through the doors at the top of the stairs, and pleading with the staff to hurry the fuck up in letting us in: we gotta drink! we gotta dance!!
Now it's "Loser" by Beck. To this song, it's April 1994, and I'm going down Laurier in the back seat of a sedan, driven by I-dunno-who... Jenn Bascom and I are in Ottawa for a rave. We're headed to the liquor store to stock our crew for the warm-up before the night's party, and it's unseasonably warm, and the windows are down, and we're singing this to all the pedestrians en route. Cousin Jana and I arrived at her then-boyfriend's house earlier that afternoon with the help of Jenn's signs posted throughout the neighbourhood, "ASHLEY: TURN LEFT HERE" etc. and finally, "ASHLEY: YOU MADE IT!!! YOU ARE A GODDESS!!" I still have that final sign, laminated, in my collected "archives". Get crazy with the cheez whiz!
And, oh, "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys. To this one, I'm out in front of Grant Hall at Queen's University. It's the day before the start of Orientation in 1994. I'm the Speaker of the Orientation Roundtable, the ostensible overarching organizing body for the school's fall orientation of new incoming students, and am about to convene the first big chant-fest for the orientation leaders before Orientation itself begins the next day. This song is blasting and distorted through amps on the roofs of the vans belonging to the Engineering orientation leaders, the Frecs (led by their fabulous, devoted, worthy frontman, Mike Corcoran). The Frecs are slamming their jackets on the cement sidewalk in time to the beat, and the rest of us are standing around, basically wishing we were engineers.
Ah. Now it's "Jump Around", the House of Pain anthem. Everyone remembers this one, everyone jumped up and down in time to this one. Krishna knew all the words to this 'song', and if he'd had enough to drink you could convince him to perform it. C'mon, can you say you know all the words? ...I didn't think so. I'm the cream of the crop, I rise to the top...
"Hobo Humpin Slobo Babe" by Whale: I must've been drunk. This one just reminds me of being in Clark on Thursday nights late, beer in our mugs, laughing with Sean Monkman. In a specific effort to make sure we got some work done, we'd head to Clark at midnight on Thursdays - after dinner we'd work and work and work on readings and assignments until the penultimate moment. I'd leave the Brock Street house in the cold still of night, run up to Earl and collect Sean, and together we'd run over to Clark for last call. For some reason this song was a late-nite favourite and always played just as we were vaulting the stairs to order our three last-minute pints.
Hey hey. This one. Oh me, oh my. Dogs barking and I'm at Ritual. Ah, Jane's Addiction. There's not much to say about "Been Caught Stealing" other than: Awww yeah. ...The sun through the open windows, the smell of fallen leaves on the air, the smell of beer spilled on the floor. Gimme Clark any day.
"Big Time Sensuality" by Bjork - I know I heard this at Clark over the years, but for me, this was just a song of thrilling recognition: I love Bjork, and in her I found my musical doppelganger throughout university. So, I know I flung my face at the ceiling and threw my arms about and pranced around the dance floor to this one at Clark, but there were so many resonant times that held this song... so many times.
"Underwhelmed" by Sloan... even though I would eventually name my firstborn child Sloane, I never paid much attention to this Canadian band. When my dad arrived at the hospital the day after Sloane's birth, he asked if we'd named her after 'the band' and frankly I was floored that he'd ever heard of Sloan. His reply: "Well, you know... I searched the internet." (Cheers, Brucio.) This song reminds me of watching people play the old sit-down Ms. Pac-Man machine they had by the emergency exit at Clark - why, I dunno.
Oasis' "Supersonic": walking the street away from Clark, heading to get some food for the over-Ritualized tummy. Also very probably the source of most North Americans' first encounter with the phrase, "what I'm on about" in context.
Lordy! "Basketcase" by Green Day. 'I think I'm cracking up... Am I just paranoid, or am I just stoned?' - Even though me and drugs are basically strangers, I love that line. For this one it's standing in line for beer at Clark, lovely white-rugby-uniformed-staffers pulling pints, bumping past people on the way back to my friends, beer spilling over onto my hand and being shaken onto the floor and splatters onto my toes in sandals. Mmmmmm.
"Miss World" by Hole. I remember watching Hole on Saturday Night Live in early 1995. About thirty seconds into the first song, Krish turned and basically summed up the whole thing: "Uhhh... they lick." They did - Courtney Love was high or drunk or something, and it was horrible and embarrassing to watch. I ignored Hole for the rest of that year. Then Thaba and I moved to Guelph and one of us somehow acquired the 'Live Through This' cd, and it became the de facto soundtrack of that first semester of grad school, a sort of "holy shit, we miss Queen's" series of anthems. So really, this one reminds me of missing Clark more than actually being there.
"Homeboy" by Adorable. This was one of those songs were I'd go find the other people I knew in the bar and chat during the 'break'. I was always a dancer, at the bar to dance and laugh and drag people to the dancefloor (when I wasn't doing air violin to "Istanbul Not Constantinople", of course). This isn't much of a dancing song, unless you were of an interpretive bent. The chorus is okay, but the rest is too mellow. A go-an'-get-another-beer-sort of song. But really, this is Turner's mix, and yes, he was the actual dj there and me only a lowly Thursday-late-night-and-sometimes-Ritual regular, so I don't have much of a serious say in the songlist. But still, even for me it's a Clark sort of lovely-momentish song.
"Supernaut", 1000 Homo DJs... yeah, again, I must've been drunk. (My old housemates'll be nodding.) I have only vague associations for this one: late afternoon sunlight coming through the windows beside the dj booth, the feel of the wooden chair arms, toodling to the bathroom and leaning my head against the friendly purple beside-toilet headrest (as widely advertised circa 1995).
"It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", REM. Actually, I'd been a fan of REM since grade nine, and I'd heard this song approximately seven zillion times by the time I hit university. So it was no revelation to hear it at Clark. But in truth, this song actually and always reminds me of meeting Matthew Currie on Stephen Avenue Mall as he was busking in the summer of 1994, and we hadn't talked in two years, and we were still mad at each other, but I watched him do this song, and then we hugged and walked away, and then at the same time turned back and hugged again. ...And didn't talk again for three years.
So tonight here's a buncha cheers to Turner, and big cheers to Sean Monkman, plus special cheers to the phenomenon of Clark and all youse who made it great, Joey and Harry and Anne and Adam Teather and y'all and sundry. Whoo! And gimme an "I Am Superman" for good measure, in a nod to my first-ever visit to Clark with Sean Nazerali, oh-so-early in the fall of my first year at Queen's.
[Do you know us? Would you like a copy of the limited edition DJ Turner 92 - 96 Clark Hall Essentials cd? Let us know, it can be yours for nuthin'!]
Categories: Olden Days | Turner