Unsurprisingly, it's been pretty hot here in Austin. One of my pleasures has been sitting outside at a coffeehouse as the sun sets. My apartment building doesn't exactly have a nice outside space to unwind. I really enjoy going to Café Mundi, sitting below the banana trees and smelling the fumes wafting from the El Lago tortilla factory across the tracks.
Saturday night, I was near campus at sundown, so I decided to go over to Spiderhouse, which has a garden that looks like a funky junkyard. I'd forgotten that the coffeeshop would have live "entertainment," so I was a little annoyed when I went outside, but I hoped for the best.
There was some geeky white dude playing acoustic guitar on the makeshift stage. When his song ended, he tuned a couple strings on his guitar, and said, "OK, this next song is a cover; some of you might not know it."
"I wonder if I know it?" I thought to myself.
"It's a song by Talking Heads." He paused and said, "It's off their album Talking Heads '77."
"Oooh, which one will he play? Maybe 'Uh-Oh Love Comes to Town'?"
With undeserved confidence, he said, "This one is called 'Psycho Killer'."
"No, no, poopy no!" I thought to myself, "Everybody knows this song."
If the dude was some kind of experimental folk artist, deliberately trying to induce the kind of obsessive annoyance that comes from a stupid person carrying on a loud cellphone conversation in the train seat behind you, he is a master of his craft.
My thoughts were racing. "Who doesn't know this song? O my goodness, this is awful. Seriously, who doesn't know this song? I used to hear this song on the radio in my Bug, driving to high school. They play this on the classic rock station in Tulsa, Oklahoma! Who possibly wouldn't know this song?" Considering Austin's alarmingly large population of music geeks, I don't think the guy should have assumed that a crowd wouldn't know the piece.
After the song was over, a heavyset woman came up from behind me and interrupted me from my reading. She held a metal bucket, and asked, "Do you have a quarter so the singer can get some ramen noodles?" I'm sure I gave her a look of genuine hostility, but I grudgingly fished a quarter out my pocket and tossed it in the bucket.
I put Talking Head '77 on the turntable this afternoon, and I immediately started dancing. I felt really goofy and lighthearted, in a way that I haven't felt in a long time. I loved Talking Heads growing up. I was a goofy kid.The summer before high school, my friends and I would watch the video for "Once in a Lifetime" over and over again, trying to replicate David Byrne's dance moves. I used to mow the lawn with my best marching band posture, so the CD wouldn't skip in my early-90s Discman. It was good to feel that way again.
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