THE LEGACY OF BILL GRAHAM
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The Oblivians

Sample this concert
  1. 1Welcome to Daytrotter00:22
  2. 2Pinball King01:55
  3. 3War Child02:34
  4. 4Fire Detector01:36
  5. 5Reason To Live01:29
The Oblivians Aug 28, 2013
Liner Notes

If you wanted to, you could make the argument that we're all given a little too much time. We can go right ahead and think that it's a race to fit everything in that we want to do before we croak. We can receive that pat, weepy-sounding conversation from older folks about how kids grow up so fast and that you should savor the blitz of the punishing early years as much as possible because you'll get depressed and weepy about them being over before you know it. Everyone tries to convince us that we're speeding our ways to the cemetery, peeling down the road to our demise. But think about how much we fritter, how often we jerk the hours and days and years away. It's a staggering amount of horseshit filler that we pawn off as experience and longevity.

You can practically hear Memphis garage rock legends the Oblivians throwing just-finished bottles of booze at the moon, landing with happy, dead thuds on the grass out back, or with a crescendo of giggly shatter on the hard driveway - just pissing the time away in some of the finer ways of pissing it away. If we've been given too much time, we should all be wise to piss it away the way that the Oblivians might encourage us to. When it becomes obvious that we haven't done anything of substance with our lives, why not just become something meaningless like a pinball king? Why not just raise a stink whenever we have the opportunity? Why not just be satisfied with the steep slopes and the nights of sweaty, itchy sleep that we can't get rid of?

Oblivians songs are little, backhanded slaps to the nuts, administered by the best of buddies, reminding you to pony up and just go for the gusto because you've literally never had anything to lose. They're about suddenly becoming aware that you are definitely detecting a strong scent of gasoline. It looks like there's been a ring poured out onto the ground around you and you either play in the fire or play with the fire that's coming.