Well it snowed quite a bit last night. It was treacherous when I came home around 6:30 yesterday and on top of all the snow was a freezing rain making everything, including walking, dicey. I hung out and watched television last night while Bill chewed my ear off. Sometimes he’s just like child who has had way too much sugar. Last night he had a pound of sugar. The funny thing is he mentioned how tired he was and how he wanted to sleep all night. By 8:30 I was asking him if he was planning on going to sleep soon.

Around 9:15 he finally went to bed. At 9:30 I walked into the bedroom and he was out cold and snoring. I read my magazines and watched some more TV including a dvd of one of my favorite bands Wire. It was a live show on German TV Rockpalast from 1979. They used to be one of my favorite bands. I can’t say I dislike them, but I think I’ve outgrown them. They were a major influence on my music back in the day. It seemed like Wire fans were few and far between. As far as I knew, no one else in Lodi liked or even heard of Wire except for me and my brother Frank.

Frank gave me a copy of their album 154 for Christmas in 1979. I didn’t know who they were really, just that they had a couple of songs I liked, namely ‘I Am The Fly’ and ‘Dot Dash’ that I heard on WPIX FM. WPIX was a major radio station in New York that played disco, then went New Wave for about a year and a a half then went to Love songs, nothing but love songs. But for that year and a half there was suddenly a station that played new and exciting things.

That Christmas evening while itching to get away from my family I decided to go to the movies with Dave Bell a friend of mine and my brother Brian. I picked Dave up and as we headed to the theater Dave asked to pick up his friend Stan. A slight detour to Wallington and then we were off. I tape recorded some of the 154 songs and was playing it on my boom box. Stan chirped up and asked if that was Wire that I was playing. It sure was and that established a friendship with Stan that exists to this day, if only marginally.

I loved Wire enough that when they reunited after breaking up (hiatus/we can’t stand each other) that I cut short a pretty decent vacation in Kitty Hawk, NC in 1987 to take a six hour bus ride to Philadelphia. They were great and as expected they didn’t or wouldn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) play their older material. You know, the stuff that made them what they were, semi-legendary underground legends. I had the opportunity to interview them a few days later while they were in New York, playing at the Ritz as well as McSwells.

I wasn’t the gushing fan boy and they were not exactly fun or anything like that. I have the cassette somewhere but never transcribed it or really listened to it.