chunks of flommus
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reminds me of the moby dick waterslides in omaha (rip)

“It’s 45 degrees. Whew! (wipes dry forehead) Time to fire off this cardigan and cruise Dodge.”

In the Midwest
there’s always a week in January where the temps reach up into the upper 40s from being in the negative teens.

It feels warmer than it is due to the contrast and people wear shorts and drive with the windows down. In the suburb I grew up in, high school dudes would drive with their shirts off which I guess was impressive if you had the kind of dudebro body that could bench 80 whole pounds and you needed the world to know of your Adonis-like physique.

Winter pays for summer
as it were, so now we tuck in for a few months of rain, then there’s one stupid warm week in February where we trick ourselves into believing that spring came early, and finally that first awesome spring night when you’re happy to just sit on the porch with your dogs cuz it feels so nice out.

On a related note,
after much consternation and toil, the classic Def Lep records are on Spotify in their pure Release Day form. No more re-recordings. These are the real deal.

When Hysteria (1987) was out I pretended to hate it because the cultural landscape was a *vastly* different place and the last lingering tentacles of monoculture meant not admitting to liking stuff on the radio in favor of the more intellectual alt rock that existed at the time only on (very) late night MTV and college stations you couldn’t get on your radio anyway.

What’s crazy in retrospect is that Def Leppard were essentially a power-pop band that *looked like* a metal band. A seemingly irrelevant detail but one that governed so much in those days. There were some heavy metal trappings here and there, mostly in hair and iconography, but by and large this was power(full) pop. There’s a reason this stuff dominated the radio for like 36 months and sold trillions of copies, and it’s worth noting and underlining that this album’s success owed heavily to future Mr. Shania Twain Mutt Lange’s highly-skilled fingerprints all over its slick lacquer.

This is a level of quality that all-time classic albums should aspire to, regardless of genre. You could break off pieces and scatter them to AOR, Top 40, and Adult Contemporary radio and land hits over all of them, which as I recall this one did.

I’m having *the best* Fort Crook Road Skateland flashbacks. This was the sound of the suburbs in Winter 1988 and that is in no way intended as an insult.