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from Just Say Maybe
In April of 1994 my sister Bonnie spent a week in her room sobbing into her flannel shirt and ripped jeans because her idol, Kurt Cobain, had stuffed enough heroin up his arm to put a rhino down and then blew his face off with a shotgun. She had been something of a prude about Nirvana, slamming her door in my face when I wanted to listen with her and her friends.
“Stay the fuck out of my room, Ashley!” she’d bark, her hair looking ridiculous, dyed red with Kool-Aid.
It didn’t matter that she didn’t want her “baby” sister tagging along with her friends. All I was interested in was the music and she played it loud enough so that I could hear it through her bedroom door. Mom bought me my own CD player for Christmas-1994, a Sony model with detachable speakers and a duel cassette player for transferring music from one tape to another or from CD to tape, for which I bought a stack of blank tapes from Strawberries at the Pheasant Lane Mall. Sneaking into Bonnie’s room I pilfered her Nirvana collection and put them on tape for myself. Meanwhile Bonnie began telling anyone who would listen that her Easter was now going to fall on April 8th, the day Kurt Cobain was found rather than the day he actually died. Like a lot of teenage girls, I suppose myself included, she could be a bit dramatic.
A stack of blank cassette tapes opened up the promise of making mix tapes, sitting with the radio on, the tape advanced to the right position waiting patiently for the DJ to play the song you wanted to record. This was my way of starting my own music collection, the CD player on top only for recording music, or as the later vernacular would call it “ripping”. The radio was an avenue to entertainment I had never been truly exposed to with the exception of my dad’s classic rock station and the vinyl LPs that still graced the turntable stereo in the living room. A year passed and Bonnie moved beyond Nirvana and adopted the Phish, a sound that made me gag just slightly more than the smells that came from her room while she listened to it. As her musical taste declined I was forced to seek out other music on my own and it was while I was waiting for a song by Alanis Morissette that I heard the most amazing thing that any thirteen year old girl in the post-Nirvana world had ever heard. That was the day I fell in love with The Smashing Pumpkins.
I sat in my swivel chair knocking myself back and forth on the rolling wheels, my Airwalks dirty and loosely tied. Billy Corgan’s voice had a quality to it that I had never found in Kurt Cobain or any other musician. The instrumentals in the song spoke to me with a lyrical storytelling was too much for me to bare and I pushed PLAY/RECORD after the first chorus. The song ended and I rewound the tape, playing it back and getting the same chills and goosebumps on my arms and legs that had been there when I heard it. I sat fixated on the dual black speakers, watching as they vibrated with each pulse of D’arcy’s bass. It was all so hypnotizing and I sat with my mouth hung open, the Red Hot Fireball I’d been working on dropping out and rolling across the floor.
Just Say Maybe © 2016 by James Windale
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James Windale 