Empire Records
I was browsing used CDs at a Christian thrift store in Trump country. Finding CDs in this random manner is the only way I “buy”and listen to “new” music.
A title caught my eye: Empire Records. It was the soundtrack to the 1995 movie that starred the otherworldly Liv Tyler and and a cast of young beautiful people who worked at an edgy independent record company. Or so that’s all I remember from reading about it or seeing an ad when it came out.
I scanned the track list on the back but the graphic design was so terribly jumbled that I could barely read anything.
Did I feel like a blast from the 90s? That was a formative decade for me, the one where I escaped Portland and became a writer.
I never saw the movie, then or later, but one of the staffers of the school paper I was advising in 1995 reviewed Empire Records and panned it with particular venom. I remember that writer well. She could have been one of the greatest writers in Oregon history, but did not. That, however, is another story. Maybe I will tell it one day, since she left behind her collection of short stories and non fiction and I’ve hung on to them for all these years.
So here was the soundtrack for sale for a buck. Why not? Maybe there was a nugget of a track on the CD that would change my life. Purchases in thrift stores tend to do that to me. Maybe thinking about the long lost writer would motivate me to do something with her writing.
Maybe listening to mid 90s so-called “alternative” (remember when they called it that as a badge of honor?) music might jog something in my creative mind. One never can tell when, where and how inspiration will occur.
I bought the CD and left the store. I popped the disc into the player and hit the road.
Song one came on. I recognized it as a minor hit by the Gin Blossoms, the Kenny G/Casper Milquetoast of alternative rock from the era. I wonder whatever happened to them? Probably playing the Midwestern state fair circuit and private parties for middling tech millionaires.
Song two came on. I recognized it as a substantially bigger hit for the Cranberries. Remember them? I think their female lead singer died a few years ago from chronic alcoholism or some related rock and roll ailment. I never liked the band, but I recall a male student from the mid 90s who was obsessed with the lead singer and knew all the lyrics to the Cranberries’ hits. It always seemed strange to me, but as I think about it today, it is far more interesting than obsessing over lead singers from Soundgarden or Pearl Jam.
I wandered rural back roads and the tracks kept playing. It was all fairly light stuff and there wasn’t another hit. I did hear a b-side from one of my favorite bands, Cracker. The rest of the tracks were totally foreign to me, and I got the feeling they were throwaways by a record company (A&M) of new ‘alternative” bans to the movie’s producers to perhaps break one of them out. None did.
Still, that soundtrack strolled me down mid 90s memory land and my teaching career back then. It was all gloriously pre internet and cell phone, and in fact I remember the first email I ever sent, in 94 or 95, to a teacher who was sitting next to me in my very first internet training. I am happy I got to live through both eras so I can make comparisons. I wonder if people said that sort of thing when television or the automobile came along and then took over.
The Empire Records soundtrack ended. Over the next few days I listened to it again and every time it jogged a new memory from that era: people, girlfriends, students, music, Portland.
A week later, I woke up at two in the morning with an entire short story practically written in a dream, and it was about that mid 90s era, “alternative music” and a sophomore kid named James. That’s what the story is going to be called, “James.” I’ve already started writing it up and I think it has the potential be the best story I’ve ever written. Aren’t the 90s raging in nostalgia circles these days?
All that creative inspiration from a CD purchased for a buck in a thrift store. I have a lot of thrift stories like that. I sense there may be a book in them.
I may have to track down the movie. I’m sure it’s out there on VHS somewhere in a thrift store in Oregon.