Friends,
Tomorrow morning my paid subscribers will receive substack for the Scud Mountain Boys song Glass Jaw. The post will include a new audio recording of the song as well as some ramblings and recollections. Subscription fee is $5.00 per month if you’re interested.
Thanks, and here’s a brief passage from tomorrow’s post:
When I was living in Northampton, MA there was a pretty great video store called Pleasant Street Video on, you guessed it, Pleasant Street. It has to be long gone by now. But in 1994 a cool video store was almost as cool as a cool record store. And Pleasant Street Video was cool for sure. Youtube and Netflix and streaming were still a few years on the horizon. I didn’t own a computer till 1996. I’m positive I didn’t even have an email address (jpernice@ix.netcom.com) till 1995 at the earliest. (Brief aside: The first time I ever heard of email was right around then from Berman. He and I were talking as we exited Bartlett Hall on the UMASS campus, and he told me he was going to send an email. At that time if you were a student at UMASS you could get an email address and drag your ass all the way across campus to the Lederle Graduate Research Tower and use one of the few terminals capable of sending and receiving email. “What the hell’s email?” I asked him. I was only half interested. I had sworn off computers completely in 1987 when I had a nervous breakdown in a computer programming class in that very Lederle Graduate Research Tower. I had been “studying” to be an engineer when I got up in the middle of a lecture, walked directly to the bus station, hopped on a bus to Boston and withdrew from school. Good times.
Berman explained to the best of his ability what email was. I wasn’t having any of it. But I did go over to the LGRT—for the first time in seven years—with him if only to face a demon that was no longer there.
I ended up going through grad school using a manual typewriter. There was no glory in it.
Anyway, I rented a lot of movies from Pleasant Street Video. A dude who worked there was a big Boston Red Sox fan like myself. One day when I was in there we were shooting the breeze about how certain Sox players seemed more prone to injury than others. Maybe we were talking about Nomar Garciaparra when I joked, “He’s got a glass groin.” That got a chuckle. A few minutes later I left the store with Fassbinder in my hands and “glass groin” buzzing around in my head. By the time I’d walked all the way home I’d decided that a song called “Glass Jaw” was one I’d rather write.
If I were standing at the same glass groin/glass jaw fork in the road today it would be a coin toss.