Alison's Starting to Happen - The Lemonheads - It's a Shame About Ray - 1992

Now that the Pitchfork crowd has reclaimed The Lemonheads, I feel less bad defending them. Though honestly, on one hand, I only ever really liked this one album, and on the other, I never really stopped liking it. Sure, circa 1994 Evan Dando was a gigantic smelly tool bag, but that shouldn't detract from what is really a pretty solid folk-pop-rock album.

And as for this song in particular, probably the song with the most spiky punk attitude on the record...I always...you know how some songs you have a very specific memory associated with? This is one of those songs.

I was 19 and starting work as a summer camp counselor in Northern Kentucky. My buddy and my girlfriend at the time had both been counselors and had talked me into signing up. I realized pretty quickly that A) new counselors were not quickly taken to and B) my buddy and my girlfriend were not members of the cool crowd. But late at night after the first day of staff training...I was hanging with the hippy counselor girls and realizing that THESE were the people I should be hanging out with. We had a lengthy discussion about this song, and the girls were mildly scandalized by the "Alison's getting her tit pierced" part (piercing, in 1993, in Northern Kentucky, was still pretty outre...as were The Lemonheads)...I guess in my mind that was the beginning of another phase in my life.