100 VINYLZ: #55 - Fly Like An Eagle LP by The Steve Miller Band

(1976, Capitol Records)
Dazed and Confused was a great movie, and for better for worse made a lot of sense to me as to how I had grown up as a young teenager, getting high at the arcade, drunk as fuck, riding around thinking about sex but mostly sucking reefer smoke more than young titties. There were plenty of people in that flick that I could straight up identify with people back home (for the record, I was probably a mix between the cool younger kid who threw the bowling ball through the windshield and the nerd dude who dreamed about Abraham Lincoln), but the one thing that made no sense to me whatsoever was the hazing bullshit. I mean, there was an older kid named Barry who fucked with me all the time, but that was more because he was a fucking dick than any sort of hazing rituals. God I hated that dude. It didn't help that the girl I lost my virginity to, she had only had sex with one other person, which was Barry's older brother, who was like 7 years older than me and her. Trust me, a 12-year-old dick first time dipping does not have the power that a 19-year-old dick seducing the neighbor's daughter has. But what are you gonna do? I can't make someone else's sexual abuse be my psychological shortcomings.
The second thing that freaks me out about that movie is that the nerd Linklater dude that made it put together this meticulous soundtrack of late '70s classics, and there is not even a mention of Steve Miller in there. I remember as my parents and their grown delinquent friends constantly got their crooked walks on at the kitchen table back then, Steve Miller was in heavy fucking rotation, at all times. Shit, they even had some sort of UHF Steve Miller concert special back then that was a big deal and they all got together and got tore up. The people's house we went to for that, the dude of that family, Tony, he had this huge album collection, all in order, on a shelf, and I remember just gazing at it. All those records. My folks LP collection was more skitter skatter and not organized at all, just a pile that good things made it to the front and shitty things would get buried and occasionally good things would get lost in the much of the back of the piles leaning against the wall.
Steve Miller, and his band, has stayed relevant amongst the young pot-smoking sect, mostly with his Greatest Hits collection, but this album, which has four or five of those Greatest Hits tracks (I think dude only had like three albums when they put that collection together), is my favorite, because it lacks the Greatest Hits collection style of pauses between songs and disparate nature. This is an album, interconnecting, and the songs lead into each other a bit. Now there is some serious ass crap on here (whatever the fuck that "Mercury" song is), but overall, I find it more enjoyable than the Greatest Hits. Shit, I like for nothing more than the "Space Intro" to "Fly Like an Eagle" which we sampled and turned backwards when I was in stupid Solaris Earth Pipeline with the faggot Psyopsogist for a time travel song called "Time Travel" where I went back in time and ended up beating up my own self outside a Mexican restaurant, but then my wife didn't like me because I wasn't me then, I was me now, and she fell in love with me then, so when I drove my Chevy Nova time machine back to now, all my kids and wife and everything was gone. Monkey's paw, with technology yall.