It's A Story Of A Man Who Works As Hard As He Can

It must be the autumn of 1994, when I heard Duff McKagan's So Fine. 

Kurt Cobain had recently been found lifeless in the greenhouse of his house of Lake Washington, but I didn't even know of Nevermind success.  

I was so childish. I was so alienated by soccer. 

For three years, I had been dealing in Junior High School with guys who didn't really care about punk rock. 

There were more into Beverly Hills 90210-like sitcoms, basketball and rap. 

The craziest music they heard at parties was the 1990's What's Up? hit of 4 Non Blondes.

A few months later, Michael Jackson's Dangerous World Tour had arrived to Mexico City and a friend of mine had invited me to the show. His grandparent owned private boxes in the stadium. It was an event nobody wanted to miss. 

Then Michael Jackson represented my closest connection to music.  
Since I was a child, I had watched almost all of his music videos. 
They were so elaborated and they appeared on TV like a movie.
I knew a lot of his songs. 

Though I enjoyed his music and his videos a lot, and though the way he danced was so contagious, there was something about Michael Jackson that didn't seem right to me.

I was a confused teenager and so I believed that Michael Jackson didn't look so defiant and rebellious as a musician had to be. 

It was weird that even my grandparents adored him. It was unacceptable that I had the same musical preferences of my grandparents! 

I wanted to change my mind and I was looking for another options. 

Besides, I really didn't feel that I wanted to dance like he did. 

Though my friend and myself never found the private boxes of his grandparent and we had to watch the entire show in one of the corners of the stadium, standing all the time, so far away from the stage, it was awesome.

I still remember myself walking thru the alleys of the stadium before the show started, lights were hypnotizing and people were freak out. Beatles' songs sounded as loud as I haven't ever heard them.

Everything changed when I met Guns N' Roses. 

Those were my last vacations before High School and I saw a lot of TV.
Dunno why, but there was a fever for rock n' roll videos.

Estranged was a pretty impressive video. I saw it for entire weeks, wondering who those irreverent and hairy guys on the video were, wondering what kind of music was that.

It didn't sound like King of Pop's music at all. 
They looked defiant and rebellious on the video. 
The singer even wore a T-shirt with Charles Manson's face. 

A few days before my first day on High School, I bought Use Your Illusion II.

So Fine precedes Estranged on the album.
I was so excited and very expectant.
I was about to hear Estranged with high quality sound for the first time!
I was about to meet different people in High School. 

The association between these songs was so intense that it still gives me the creeps each time I hear So Fine. 

Now that I think about it, So Fine it is kind of a conditioned stimulus. 

Except that, for more than twenty years, it hasn't suffered extinction, nor has suffered habituation. 

So Fine

Endless Lover, Butterfly

It was a rainy day and I was really bored, when I met Valentina. Her band played in an improvised bar, located a blocks away from El Estadio Azteca. The audience was preposterous, full of drunk teenagers asking for more tequila and mariachi. They were not the kind of audience interested in listening live music; they were more the kind of audience interested in getting as drunk as possible, while fooling around and looking for kisses.  

The bar was awful, and it looked like a house converted into a bar. It reminded me of the kind of places that the guys in high school used to visit, when they felt small adults trapped in infantile bodies.

My brother and his band played that evening, too. Both bands were at the beginning of their careers. Nos Llamamos rehearsed every single day and I knew all of their songs, 'cause they rehearsed in the house where I lived. Sometimes I hated them 'cause I couldn't even read or study, or even take a nap in the middle of the day. 

I loved their music -they sounded like Sonic Youth-, but they were too noisy and I couldn't focus on anything else when they rehearsed. I was at home the most of the time, and I couldn't avoid their rehearsals. I was a recent graduated student, and I was sick of the research I had performed for getting my bachelor's degree. I was also exhausted of a long relationship that I'd had for almost five years. I was purifying myself from sick love and a destructive relationship. I hated myself and I wanted to change my life, but indeed I just wasted my time. 

Candy's music was something between pop and punk. They didn't sound too different from Joy Division. Not only bass lines sounded at the core of every song, but the bassist was amazing. Valentina attracted me immediately. I fell in love with her when I saw her playing her Fender Precision Bass. I felt dumb, and I started to imagine stories in which we were a couple, staring at each other completely stoned, or traveling together around the city, and so on. I also started to imagine the things she liked and the way she lived every single day. 

I just woke up from a weird dream. I was inside a Van with Nos Llamamos and Candy. I couldn't stop watching Valentina. Her face was full of beautiful and small freckles and her lips were bigger than I remember. They seemed to scream "Kiss me, kiss me!", but she looked a little bit uncomfortable and tried to avoid eye contact with me. 

We arrived to a small bar, and there I told her that I wanted to take her a picture with me, and, out of nowhere, she said that she just had read my blog and that she didn' t know all the bands that I had written about on it. It seemed to me, that we already knew each other. 

She took a deep breath and continued: "Oh, I would do the same, if I had a blog...", and I didn't understand what was the point. 

She agreed to be photographed by me, but asked me to do it soon, 'cause her band had to leave the bar earlier than expected.

When she said all of these words, she was kinda frightened and nervous. Then, she walked away to play with her band, and, Aarón, the guitarist of Nos Llamamos started to make jokes about my romantic interest in Valentina, suggesting that I was so crazy about her that I would do anything for her. I told him it was a stupid thought, 'cause it looked like Valentina was indeed more interested in me than vice versa. 

It was a dream, obviously, and I felt more confident than I really do.

At the end of the dream, Valentina was in front of me in a small table. We were in some kind of coffee shop. She had just said good bye to the guys of her band, and seemed really interested in talking with me. She still looked somehow frightened and nervous. I was just wondering why the hell she had read my blog, and I was considering that maybe she just wanted to complaint about it. 

Maybe once I had written something awful about her band, and I didn't remember at all.

As we started to speak, I was very cold. I wanted to move to another table, 'cause we were on a terrace and the wind was blowing heavily. Then, she looked at me and told me that her band was looking for a guitarist and that she knew that I played guitar, too. Before I asked her if she was inviting me to make an audition for her band, I watched her blue eyes and her lips and I wanted to kiss her. 

Then, I woke up. I was really very cold, and  I hated to have an organic dream.

What if, actually, she really read my blog?