A whole day Bare Naked

Spotify, if you use it, has a DJ mix.  Go to search and type in DJ and it should come up.  It’s an AI DJ that will mix things from playlists, frequent plays, similar genres, similar vibes or song types, and stuff like that.  I’ve been in the mood for some shake up, so I’ve been digging my DJ recently, and I think my cooking mix will be getting a new recipe soon.  See what I did there?  LOL

I bring this up because I was listening yesterday and the DJ was spinning a mood and the mood was live performances.  Nothing was really jumping at me and some of the songs were arranged in ways that were a bit jarring to me as I cooked.  Not that I didn’t like the songs, just I wasn’t used to them and that was throwing off my cooking timing.  

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this here before, but when I cook, I use music as a loose timer for myself.  It’s a technique I’ve been using for a bunch of years, not only in cooking, but in a lot of things.  I know some music pretty well, so when I’m doing things like sautéing or reducing, simmering or letting steam, whatever, I can use a song or songs to time that.  

Oh perfect.  The Sundays or Sneaker Pimps (or whatever).  About 4 minutes on this song, so I’ll go about a min past that.  

Things like that.  If you are reading this and thinking to yourself… Wow, that sounds familiar.  Has A written about this before?  Did I read about this?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I got the idea from the movie Hudson Hawk and if you’ve not seen; DO!  It’s quirky, snarky, biting, funny, and fun.  Add in Danny Aiello and Bruce Willis as the leads, Andie MacDowell as the lead female, and then just sit back and watch the ridiculous.  It’s silly.  However, it is meta.  It’s poking fun at cinema and some genres and that wasn’t popular in the 80’s and 90’s like it has become today.  Now, we have and enjoy the Scary Movies, Epic Movie, Tropic Thunder, and Tucker and Dale vs Evil, but besides Mel Brookes or I’d hear an argument for Steve Martin’s The Jerk, but mostly things like Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero tended to miss audiences when those movies were made, so that drags down their scores.  Don’t be scared if you see mid 50s on Rotten Tomatoes or mid 4/5s on IMDB.  Trust me and watch it.  Tropic and Tucker and Dale are both worth it as well, IMHO.

So, I use music as a timer… an idea I got from a movie.  It works for me, but I need to know the song and live or rearranged songs make that difficult and throws my rhythm and timing off.  See what I did there?  LOL

Yesterday, though, I was thrown for a loop.  Bare Naked Ladies came on and I have a soft spot in my heart for BNL.  Some of their songs bop.  Yes, they are poppy and light, not my usual type of jam, but it’s like fast food…. Sometimes you just want that in your life.  The song and band isn’t what threw me for a loop, it was the live version of Brian Wilson.  However, I wasn’t confused or taken out of my groove.  I knew this version.

A long time ago, about ’04 or so, I went to SoCal (living in Da Bay at the time) with my good friend Jenn.  Jenn and I have fallen out of touch because of life and marriage and kids and all that, but her and I were close for a number of years.  She was flying down to see her mum and then take her car (mum’s that is) and drive back to Da Bay with it.  So, we headed down and I got to experience Ontario, Claremont, and the San Dimas areas of CA.  We spent the weekend with her mum and having a good time, but Sunday we were driving back up and that’s usually a 8ish hour drive.

That’s when things got wild.  I had my old click wheel iPod with me and at a whooping 60GB… whoa!  Look out for us.  Unfortunately, the car did not have the hook ups I was expecting to play music.  That’s ok.  We discovered this while on the road, but we had about 90 minutes until we passed Magic Mountain and we could find a Best Buy and I could get us back to good.  Oh, the best laid plans.

For those that know, we were taking The 5 North to Los Banos and then cutting over.  It’s the quickest and easiest… Usually.  See, on this day, there was a fire outbreak at the Pasadena edge of the Angeles National Forest.  It was also windy.  Not howling winds, but good 10-12mph gusts.  The CA Fire Service shut down part of the 210 that we were on and we’re starting to reroute traffic to avoid the fire situation.  

Trapped.  That’s what we were.  6ish miles to our next exit and 2ish miles past our last.  Because of where we were and the National Park, the radio was spotty or static.  We had, in our possession, a Bare Naked Ladies CD.  Rock Spectacle.  

11 live BNL songs.  That was the music we had.  The end.  That was it.

We were friends, so we could laugh about it, chat, fill the time, but good lawd do I know that album inside and out.  I think we were stuck for approx 3 hours.  Then, we needed to fight rerouted traffic and we CERTAINLY needed a bathroom and provisioning stop.  We ended up leaning into it and NOT stopping to get the connectors we needed.  Towards the end, we were OVER IT and switched over to radio, but by then we were back in the Bay and radio was a fine option.  This one trip, though… I probably heard that album front to back a dozen times.

To hear that version randomly pop up at me 20 years after the fact was surprising and took me for a loop.  That trip.  The memory.  Those songs.  That band.  That one album.  I haven’t thought about that in years.  Loooooong years.  And if Jenn (by some miracle) reads this… Hi to you and thanks for the trip and memories.  Also, hugs, how’s the fam and the kids?

The other reason I thought of this is because of Kiddo.  This isn’t my only weird and random road-trip stories, but most of the others are not safe for blog, if you take my meaning.  It does make me wonder.  What will Kiddo’s albums or memories be of random road trips or adventures be?  Who and where will she be?  On what adventure?  All I know, is PG or NSFB adventures, I hope she shares because I’d love to hear those stories.  Especially the way she tells stories.  I think she will be a tale slinger, much like Dada.  It will be rich in details, full and alive, more telling itself than being told, and the others there will let Kiddo sling the tale injecting it with life and humor.

Let’s go, Kiddo…. Life is an adventure and even with the best laid plans, you need to remember this; Sometimes you throw brunch, sometimes Brunch throws you!