the musical fruit: movement #17.

the musical fruit: movement #17.
song: "alison's starting to happen," lemonheads
fruit: lemon

back in the early nineties, the best candy-themed band to come out of boston was the lemonheads, fronted by evan dando. since i enjoyed the original song, i liked their biggest hit, their cover of simon & garfunkel's "mrs. robinson," the first thousand times i heard it. i heard a few songs off the album but never picked up it's a shame about ray (which it was added to after its popularity as a single). for some STRANGE reason, i pegged evan dando as whiney & mopey, that time's john mayer & i didn't really want anything to do with him. plus, i was just coming out of my gangsta rap phase around the time the album came out, so it wasn't really in my wheelhouse. even without my support, it ended up being their biggest album, going gold.

i finally gave it its first full listen last night with rhino's 2008 collector's edition of the album & it's a lot more rocking than i always assumed it was. the eighth son on the album (out of thirteen), "alison's starting to happen," falls into the category of "songs i've heard before" & now that i've heard the whole thing, i can definitively say that it's my favorite song off it. the song's a bouncy, two-minute rocker named for bassist nic dalton's girlfriend at the time. the lyrics near the end of the song are all "alison's getting her tit pierced. alison's getting a mohawk." i initially heard it when it came out (& i was in high school) and remember thinking "whoa, that chick's one of those punk rock girls that the dead milkmen sing about." good times. speaking of good times, the youtube has some footage of the lemonheads playing the song before enormous crowds at the 1994 glastonbury festival. the lyric quality's shite, but the song still rocks.

ok. i don't know why my camera decided to make me so damn red in that picture above. no amount of photoshop trickery seemed to fix it. i'm not that red. you have no reason to worry about my blood pressure or anything. i wasn't wasted either. my camera just decided to hate me at the time. not even the tremendous acidity from that first bite into the lemon could make my skin turn that red. to be honest, i'm actually more of a shade of green. my white skin color aside, that first bite was definitely the pulpiest/most acidic thing i've done this year. i was going to go all the way & eat the whole lemon (y'know, for love of the blog & all), but that first bite quickly slashed & burned my resolve into a million little pieces.

...so don't call me a trooper, because i'm not. i managed to finish off about half the lemon, but didn't even bother with the second half. as it was, downing half a lemon gave me a little case of the heartburn...& that, boys & girls, is why we usually squeeze lemons onto things or mix them with other things, tasty things like sugar. instead of finishing it, i just let it dry out on my kitchen counter overnight, which is sort of a shame, because i could have at least used the juice from the other half to write messages in secret code to my friends, secret messages like this one: MEET ME AT TREE HOUSE. 2PM. see you there!