So this part was written in 2006, not 1996. You can tell by the italics: my words are bent over by middle age, like myself.
This seems as good a place as any to reiterate: I wrote all this ten years ago. That means the zine was the work of a much younger guy, a guy just out of university with no students to try to look mature in front of and no tenure committee to impress. I am resisting the urge to censor our adventures, and the much stronger urge to take out the parts where I sound like a smart-ass Canadian punk. I ask you to read the zine charitably in return. Trust me that lines like “bust a cap in yo’ ass” sounded fresher ten years ago, and don’t ask why I felt the need to explain what The Rockford Files was.
I once read a review of U2’s Rattle and Hum that complained the Irish rockers didn’t know the difference between coming to America and conquering it. Rattle and Hum was their American roadtrip zine: “Look Ma, here we are at Graceland! Here we are in Harlem! Here we are with B.B. King! We’re real American rock stars now!” Bono and the boys can certainly be smug at times, and when white rockers cross the pond to pal around with the black musicians who inspired them, well, there’s a whole weird history there. But Rattle and Hum remains my, and probably nobody else’s, favorite U2 album. I always figured they just had to make that album because they’d come to America and America was so damn cool. They sang with B.B. King because he’s B.B. King, damn it, and they were thrilled to do it.
A couple of years after the road trip I spent a few weeks researching for the Let’s Go travel guide in San Francisco, and I hung out with a bunch of Irish backpackers I met in the youth hostels there. By then, I’d been in the States just long enough to act blasé about it, but they were so excited by America! Everything delighted them. That was probably the best Fourth of July I ever had.
What I’m saying is, hopefully enthusiasm excuses immaturity. In 1996, I was just newly arrived in America, still goofing on the novelty of it all, and parts of this zine make me wince at the smart-ass I was trying to be back then. I’m pretty sensitive to Canadian smugness about the U.S. today, because I’ve had so many good years there and because I grew out of some of that smugness myself. But I hope that my genuine love for the place shines through. I did, and do, think that things like Enterprise Square (the very next post) and Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden (we’re getting to it) and the Things Museum four miles north of St. Joe, Arkansas, are both hilarious and wonderful. I love that side of America, $2 steaks and all.
Not only do I also love RATTLE AND HUM, my favorite part of the film itself is when B.B. King shows up to meet U2 for the first time — because Bono goes from being the cocky, over-confident, sometimes tedious man he’d been in most of the rest of the film to being a nervous, excited, geeked-out little fanboy. Enthusiasm and excitement is always attractive.
Don’t worry, we see it here too.
Mayhap a bit of it is smug exuberance or smart-assedness at work in these blasts from the past, but part of it also reads as an earnestness to relate a really different experience, even if you can’t quite explain it or understand it all. (To add to the U2 discussion: that earnest searching, I thought, was more an “Achtung Baby!” sort of a thing than “Rattle and Hum,” but the former was experienced contemporaneously by me while the latter was a back-catalogue title by the time I got around to it in 1992.) But that’s part of the journey for the reader, too – we’re not sure what’ll be made of it yet and not sure if it’ll all make sense, but we know that everyone survives to tell the tale and gain advanced degrees. Oh, and that the smartassedness goes away, too. (Is that a natural development for grad students, or a new-academic year’s resolution that sticks, I wonder….)