Groove Holmes

Those of you who are older than me and have already gotten used to those little "oh shit I'm not so young anymore" reminders that seem to pop up out of nowhere, you folks are free to skip this post. Or you can read it and roll your eyes or mumble/yell/slur/say something to the effect of "welcome to the party, jackass" in the general direction of your monitor. Me, I still get caught by surprise whenever one of those moments comes along, but hey, I'm a slow learner.

See the latest of these reminders came not too long ago when I was ripping our CD collection to the 'puter. As tedious as this task was, it was a lot of fun going through all of our music and rediscovering all the stuff I'd kinda forgotten about, remembering how much I liked all these albums, how some of them would stay in my CD player for days on end, particularly the ones I used to dork out to and play along with on guitar. Yes, I played the guitar along with albums. Yes, I sometimes got very into it. Yes, my first college roommate walked in on me doing it one time and I was almost as embarrassed as I would've been if he'd caught me doing the one-eyed chicken choke.

Ahem.

Anyway, one CD I ran across that did not involve any six-string abuse on my part was The Beastie Boys' "Check Your Head." This is the one that damn near everybody in my age bracket had (well, in addition to the two that came before it) because it had the single "So Whatcha Want." I remember being a teenager and buying this album on tape at some crappy music store in a mall outside of San Antonio. It was summer time and I was working as a camp counselor, and on the weekends we did what camp counselors do with their free time: get the hell out of nature and into some damn AC and proceed to act like complete social idiots because we've been out in the woods for days on end regressing into animals. I have no idea why I still have the memory of this album purchase, but hey look, there it is. "Check Your Head" has always been my favorite Beastie Boys album, hands down. It's the one where they seemed to figure out that they could do more than just party music....which of course, as a teenager, I didn't give a shit about. I was like, "Make with the rappenin' cuz that's what's happenin!" But over time I came to appreciate just how great a piece of work this album really is, in large part due to all the little funk jams they tossed in there, especially the one that bears my name.

So the "oh goodness me I'm an old freak" moment came when I realized that this album came out in 1992, thus making it fifteen fucking years old. Fifteen years. Damn. Maybe I'm just surprised because to my ears, it seems to have aged pretty well.