“Kiss Me On the Bus” – The Replacements
(Words/music: Paul Westerberg, available on Tim, Sire 1985)
Elsewhere on this blog, I wrote about how Paul Westerberg’s lyrics in many of my favorite Replacements songs drew on both adolescent spirit and the wisdom of hindsight. Of course, this is only something that resonated with me once I reached a comfortable distance from my teenage years. I first loved the Replacements as a teenager because these songs made a lot of sense when a lot of things stopped. It also helped that these songs were often exciting, loud, energetic, and generally clever – all of the qualities I wanted to emulate even if I didn’t know how to go about doing that.
My introduction to the band even ties into one of the quintessential teenage experiences. I bought my first Replacements album the same day as my first date.
Appropriately (whether it’s based on the kind of teenager who becomes a Replacements’ obsessive or because you know me personally), I didn’t quite realize that it was a date until after the fact; a friend of mine convinced me to go to the homecoming dance with her, and I was too thick to read past “it would be fun if we went together.” Regardless, I don’t quite remember why, but the afternoon before the dance I ended up at Circuit City and came home with Tim. Whether I went out specifically to buy the record or that I had previously read about it and found it at a reasonable price, I came home and gave it my first listen on my boom box while I cleaned myself up for my first semi-formal dance. I imagine that the giddiness in the first half of the album, particularly on “Kiss Me on the Bus” either resonated with me or fed into my nervousness.
It’s odd how memories and associations start to shift over the years. A lot of the songs on Tim tie in to specific points in my life (“Bastards of Young” became the anthem of my aimless years, and “Left of the Dial” became my college radio show’s calling card), and the lingering memory of that first date (with no offense intended – it was a lovely evening) is the preparation for it, including coming home and putting on Tim for the first time. The first half of side A, whether spinning on my turntable in my apartment or funneling through my earphones in the grocery store, always seems to find a way to bring a small part of me back to a time in my life where “lather-rinse-repeat” felt like the best idea in the world.
More on The Replacements: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
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