mehan jayasuriya

1.) One fateful afternoon in the fall of 1994, my friend Evan came over and prophetically announced that he was going to show my brother and I something that would blow our minds. He tuned the cable box to channel 18, a channel called MTV that we had never really thought to watch. Those were the days when MTV actually played, you know, music and we soon found ourselves watching some pre-TRL countdown show the name of which I’ve long since forgotten. A few unmemorable songs passed and then, just as I was about to lose interest in the exercise, a music video that was striking both visually and musically arrived as if on cue, seemingly tailor-made to rock my 11 year-old world.

The video was, of course, Green Day’s “Basket Case,” which held sway as the de facto jam for much of that year. It was likely the first song I had ever heard that resembled punk rock in any fashion and as such, it made quite an impression on me. There was just one problem: after three blissful minutes, the video was over and as time began to pass, I could feel the song’s melody slowly slipping away. Since I had no way to hear the song again, save for watching MTV in the hopes of them replaying the video, I decided to repeat what I remembered of the song in my head at every occasion, so as to retain my grip on its melody. I vividly remember standing outside of the public library in Racine, Wisconsin, waiting for my parents to pick me up, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk and attempting to sing the song to myself, even though I didn’t know any of the lyrics. Instead of the actual words, I tried to shoehorn the lyrics to a song that I did know quite well—the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired”—into the now horribly warped “Basket Case” melody that lived in my head. I really wish I could remember what that sounded like.

After about two weeks, I had saved up enough money from working odd jobs around the house to buy a copy of Dookie on cassette. Thus began an illustrious career in record collecting that continues unabated to this day, much to the chagrin of my bank account.

2.) The following summer, I developed an obsession with the idea of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. I say “the idea of” Siamese Dream because I had never actually heard the album. Due to a confluence of factors—the band’s name, the album title, the cover art, the Pumpkins’ eminently doodleable “heart” logo—I had decided that this was a record that I was fated to love. And so began my quest to actually hear Siamese Dream.

After asking around at my school, I learned that this kid, Tony, had an older sister who owned a copy of the album on CD (a format, which, at the time, struck me as terribly sophisticated and slightly futuristic). I asked Tony if he could get his sister to dub me a copy of the album onto a cassette and after a few solid weeks of pestering, he finally produced a copy, replete with a tracklisting scrawled out by his sister on a piece of notebook paper. Upon reading the tracklisting and realizing that the album contained a song called “Silverfuck,” I immediately began to worry. What would my parents think if they found this tape? After a few classes during which I could feel the cassette beating inside of my Trapper Keeper like a Telltale Heart, I disposed of the handwritten tracklisting, for fear that my parents would see it.

Upon bringing the tape home and listening to it on the stereo in the family room, I remember feeling an initial twinge of disappointment. During the course of my obsession with the idea of Siamese Dream, I had formed an idea in my head of what the album sounded like. Incidentally, the album in my head sounded quite a bit more like Queen than it did the Smashing Pumpkins, a fact that can probably be explained by my brother’s rampant Queen fandom circa 1995. As time wore on, however and as my memories of the idea of Siamese Dream began to recede, I started to fall in love with the actual Siamese Dream.

One day later that summer, I decided that the time had come for me to own an actual copy of Siamese Dream. I wanted to page through the artwork and lyrics and was curious to know what the song titles were. Unfortunately, being 12 years old, I didn’t have any money or any prospects of making any in the short term. So I waited until my parents had both gone to work and then went into the drawer in the kitchen where my dad kept the two dollar bills I had earned by selling frozen pizzas door-to-door as part of a school fundraiser. He had warned me that these two-dollar bills were collectible and that I would be unwise to spend them. Despite his warning, I removed the two dollar bills from the Ziploc bag in which they were kept, hopped on my bike and rode down in the hot sun to the local K-Mart where I purchased a copy of Siamese Dream on cassette for the low price of $9.99 and four two-dollar bills worth of guilt.

I do feel a bit vindicated in hindsight—according to eBay, a two-dollar bill appears to be worth roughly two dollars in 2010—and as it turns out, my teenage intuition was dead on. I continue to love Siamese Dream to this day, even if I can’t bring myself to defend most of Billy Corgan’s other endeavors.

3.) Living, as we did, in southeastern Wisconsin, we could occasionally pick up radio signals from Chicago. On good days, we could get a weak signal from Q101, which handily bested the Milwaukee stations in terms of the tastes of its DJs. There was a particular night of the week—Fridays, maybe?—when Q101 would count down the most requested songs of the week and they would occasionally premier a highly-anticipated new single as a part of that program. I remember sitting in my bedroom with my brother in the summer of 1996, the record, play and pause buttons depressed on the tape deck with my index finger hovering over pause, waiting to hear the new single from Weezer. I loved the jerky, start-and-stop delivery of “El Scorcho” from the first time I heard it and was really glad that I had taped it, so that I could play it back at my leisure. 

You see, in those days, one of your favorite bands putting out a new single was an event, something you eagerly awaited and then proceeded to discuss and mythologize on the playground long after the fact. The day after Q101 debuted the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” I stepped off of the bus and immediately ran up to the group of stoner kids who seemed most likely to share my enthusiasm. Before I could get a sentence out, one of the kids responded, “We know” at which point I looked around the circle and realized that the stoners were just as awestruck as I was. Or maybe they were just high.

It seems like the release of a new single or a song getting played for the first time on the radio is probably no longer an event for people in that age group but I wonder if there’s a 2010 equivalent that gets kids similarly excited and talking about pop music. Is it the album leak? Or the seemingly inconsequential iTunes release date? Do kids run off of school buses to discuss the Lady Gaga video that debuted on YouTube last night? I really hope that they do.