Remember those ridiculous glasses with the tiny black lenses? Sure you do. And those dumb ass purple sneakers. They were super easy to find because no one besides me wanted to wear them. (Oh, and you could find them in a dark room. I think they were radioactive.)
No, we haven’t converted this into some kind of retro fashion blog. Far from it! We’re just playing a game that’s gotten kind of popular around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It’s called Five and Ten. You guess what the other players were doing five years ago, then ten years ago, then fifteen, and so on. Every time you guess correctly, you get five points. The person with the most points by the time everyone has walked away in anger is the winner – they then have to go to the local strip mall and open a Five and Ten store. (The game’s a little too complicated, in my humble opinion.)
I’m actually no fun to play against in this game, because if you ask me what I was doing five years ago, I would have to say that it’s very much the same thing I’m doing right now. Same sort of thing with ten years ago. Now if you say twenty or thirty, I have intelligible answers to that. Twenty? We were working on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and I was starting to think about doing this blog. Okay, so that’s MOSTLY like today. No points on that one.
Thirty years ago, I was working for Donald Trump. (Or “Drumph,” in the original Norwegian – Trump’s family comes from that part of Norway that’s called “Germany”.) Well, I was a contractor for him in a sense, playing in a band that performed at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. I’m not certain, but I think around this time of year in 1988 I was playing the last of three month-long engagements we had at Trump Plaza, in one of the casino-side lounges, playing pretty horrible covers. My big song on that gig was Benny King’s “Stand By Me”. (The front person for that group was a singer named Joanna Lee.) At the end of that particular run, I got fired for losing my voice. (Not by Drumph, but by our manager, though admittedly I wasn’t very well liked in that establishment. Attitudinal issues, I believe.)
You can read all about my exploits as a low-flying road musician by dropping me a message via the comments form and asking me to tell you all about it. How easy is that? Now excuse me – I have to go open another Five and Dime.
