[Songs My Son Should Know] Oasis | Whatever / Wonderwall / Live Forever

It was a fine two weeks of Anglophilin' all up on the Brits during their big sporty showcase over the past two weeks -- and also reminded me to re-up my annual dues to The Culturists for the Queen, flip through old fanzines with articles praising Martin Rossiter and Louise Wener, and sniff my 90's-pressed vinyl copies of The Great Escape and Different Class. 

Yes, my fondness for Britain knows little boundary, excepts for the shitheads up at Old Trafford and maybe the entirety of UB40's discography.

However, for every Red, Red Wine, there are 30,000 examples of British kickassery: Tudor architecture; three button suits; The Kinks, Queen, and The Beatles; India pale ales; Earl Grey Tea; Bill Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Rowling; fish & chips; 007, Winston Churchill, Simon Cowell, and Kate Middleton; The EPL.   Alan Mother Fuckin' Shearer.

I could really just go on and on, can't I?  But I won't because people get real cautious of others who are too bent on the Eng-er-lish, and I don't want you to lose focus.

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It was the 21st day of April in 1996 -- a Sunday -- when my buddy Alex and I drank cans of Shiner Bock in the general admittance of the old Austin Music Hall, watching Oasis perform their album What's The Story Morning Glory with highlights interspersed from Definitely Maybe -- all at the frenzied apex of the band's world-wide popularity.

We felt like teenaged kings, drinking college beer, ditching the road-traveling school days of Friday and Monday, getting swallowed in the howl of a delirious crowd, and witnessing the extraordinary melodrama of the Ghallager brothers providing a spectacular circus assured to linger long in our cortices beyond the 90-minutes of this English brilliance.  It was an impact that cratered our fragile teenage emotions like soft earth, and likely diverted any residual senior-year shittiness into one of the best years in life.  

Bigger than the Beatles, they said.  Bigger than the fucking Beatles, indeed.

1. The Swamp Song
2. Acquiesce
3. Supersonic
4. Hello
5. Some Might Say
6. Roll With It
7. Morning Glory
8. Cigarettes & Alcohol
9. Champagne Supernova
10. Slide Away
11. Cast No Shadow
12. Whatever (w/ Octopus's Garden)
13. Wonderwall
14. Don't Look Back In Anger
15. Live Forever (encore)
16. I Am the Walrus (encore)

Back in those days, it was a serious pain in the buttox to get a hold of show tickets, and even more so when one was dealing with an out-of-town gig.  You actually had to talk to a human about it.

I really can't even remember how or when specifically we had the brilliant idea to leave town for that weekend -- probably missing some crucial exam -- to act like higher type of class at the old Ginger Man when it was still spectacular and The Tavern before it had 6,000 TVs.

Somehow, we did persevere through the trials of the 1990s-TicketMaster grind, my brother Chris' janky Ford Escort, the middling Sonora to Ozona Dairy Queen HungerBuster shits, and my other brother's pre-hipsta South Lamar apartment linoleum.  Its those kind of trip descriptions that makes one remember it as being legendary of sorts.  We thought it was, at least.

So, as I was saying, I don't know exactly how or when we made the final decision to embark on this adventure, but I would say that this is the song that provided the 'why'.  If I could take away one song from the final semester of 1996, I would say that this would be it.  "Whatever" was never on an official album release, which meant Alex and I wore the fuck out of the 3-song CD single with the constant reversing of the CD skip button.

But let me back up a substantial bit and reflect on the personal devotion to the band as a 17-year old American living by the gospel of MTV Europe while studying abroad in Scandinavia.

By the time I reached my temporary destination of Denmark in the summer of 1995, Oasis was fairly acquainted with Radio 1 and Top of the Pops in Europe on the strength of their first album.

But that was nothing -- I mean, really, nothing -- compared to the hysteria caused by their second album, which dropped in the Fall of that year.  Wonderwall could not be overlooked, even by lift operators and chimney sweeps, shut out from society all through the day.

One of my most distinct memories is seeing -- possibly hearing -- this track for the very first time in the living room of one of my Danish friends apartment.  The memory of that is just burned right up there in my head, forever.

And finally, the song that started all the hysteria in the first place and tapped the world on its unsuspecting shoulder.  Live Forever is as tied to Brittania lore as Queen Elizabeth's handbags, and continues on as perhaps be the greatest closer in concert history.  Most definitely, maybe.

Gonna live forever.