Age Difference

Last night in the mail we giddily received our very own copy of The La’s Callin’ All box set. (Warning: autoplay music on the other end of that link. But it’s The La’s so it’s okay, right?)

We were flipping through the booklet that came with it, looking at all the scans of ticket stubs from various gigs they’d played over their relatively brief existence. I asked J which of the shows he’d been to.

“The one at the Uni, and some others. They were one of those bands who used to turn up on every bill. There was one at the Trade Union… I forget what it was called.”

“Upstairs at The Picket?” I said, finding a stub marked 1988.

“That’s it!”

Today I realized that around the same time J was sporting a pompadour and bouncing at the knees to “Way Out” in a smoke-filled room, I would have been in my pastel-colored bedroom doing The Monkey to “Got My Mind Set On You.”

I’m jealous he got to be there at the beginning of everything I ended up loving. Especially The La’s. This is an amazing box set to squeeze out of a band who commercially produced so little. When I was 14 and falling achingly in love with “There She Goes,” I never thought they’d disappear after one album, or that several entirely different versions of that album would resurface years later once I started to get wrinkles around my eyes. I never thought I’d get to hear it again for the first time. (Then again, when I was 14 I also thought it was cool to get royal blue rubber bands on my braces and write 5-page fan letters to Keanu Reeves, so what did I know?)

And yet here we are.