(1981, Epic Records)
Two stages of my life this one reaches into, as it’s one of many albums I jacked from my folks record collection. Once I moved away to Richmond for college, that “Big City” song spoke to me a little differently, once I was old enough to admit all country music didn’t suck (although most of it does). And then, I was couch crashing between a trailer I shared with a dude in Farmville on Lindy Hamlett’s tobacco farm, and my girlfriend’s big ol’ haunted house across from Chimborazo Park in Church Hill, and she got pregnant, so we got a for-real house place together, renting from that fat ugly bitch who’s ripped off college kids in Oregon Hill for decades now, and we weren’t going to get married until it was our time, because we were committed, but then the midwife said my name wouldn’t be on the birth certificate at that point in Virginia state law unless I went to court afterwards and got it added, and it just seemed pretty goddamned trifling. So we went downtown Richmond, got a marriage license, found a dude in Chesterfield near Bon Air who did the justice of the peace thing, went to his house, and he married us. Afterwards, he told us how he had cancer and was gonna die so was going to ride his Harley leisurely cross-country for a few months that spring, then come home to die with his family. We had him take pictures of the moment with a camera my grandmother gave us that probably was a free gift from a Reader’s Digest subscription, so a few weeks later when I went to remove the film, the camera broke, I go in the closet to try and roll it back up hoping it didn’t get too exposed, but it did.
Anyways, on the ride back to our house, wife 8-months pregnant, me 7-months sober, we were listening to the Legend AM 950 on the AM radio, and they played “Big City”, and I had put that on a mixtape for my wife the year before. It made sense to show up, since being stuck in the middle of Richmond wasn’t us or where we were supposed to be, but that’s where we were at. And “Big City” covered it all.
It was only about two years earlier that after a party where everyone took shrooms, me and my eventual wife, who weren’t even dating really, “borrowed” her friend’s minivan, gathered up our dogs, I took my last $180 out the bank, and we co-opted a fifth of Jack Daniels green label from the party, and headed west, ultimate goal was Montana. She passed out in the passenger seat around Staunton, and I gave up finally around Clifton Forge, almost to West Virginia, riding the middle lane of I-64 for long late night stretches. We slept behind a K-Mart strip mall, woke up, ate breakfast at some joint, and came back. “Big City” covered that, running away to Montana. So it made perfect sense to us coming home from the cancer-of-the-peace dude’s house. Across the street from our rented dump was Mamma Zu’s in Richmond, and the rich folks rolled in nightly, clogging up the street with cars obviously not owned by locals. We went up and had dinner there, the only time we ever paid for a meal there. I had a zine back then where I talked shit about the place and the rich assholes that came there, so the owner, being a pretty strange dude, came to our house once he found out who I was who wrote that, and gave us a coupon to eat there once a month for free, forever. We did a lot when the first born was still a baby, but once we moved, we haven’t been back in years. Every year, on our legal anniversary, we talk about going back, wondering if the owner would be around and still hook us up, thinking about that moment in our lives. This album, and the title song, is pretty much our wedding photo from then, and always will be.
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