I think my iPod must know that I've been writing about it--it's been unusually cooperative lately, playing favorites of mine from a variety of albums (except for a little slip-up yesterday, when it played the mediocre live version of the Jam's "The Gift" for the umpteenth time; I really need to take that track off the machine). This morning, for instance, it played two Undertones songs ("I Gotta Getta" and "Teenage Kicks"--how can you go wrong with those?), and two songs from my favorite Richard and Linda Thompson record, "Pour Down Like Silver" ("Dimming of the Day" and "Dargai"--big chills up and down my spine), and a Solas instrumental that would have had me stomping both feet if that weren't a dangerous thing to do when driving a stick shift.

And then, in a completely surprising move because it's never played a Replacements song before, it gave me "Answering Machine" as the final song of the morning drive. Yowza. That song doesn't automatically turn me into a gibbering puddle of weepiness, the way it used to, but it still gets to me. In a Big Way. I started thinking about how the ending, with the recorded message and the looping guitar and Paul wailing area codes, is simply the sound of someone pulling his heart out of his chest and shredding it with his guitar strings, and that the relative (okay, not even relative) tameness of his current stuff is less the product of his having quit drinking--as some fans would say it is--than it is the product of just growing up, owning a house, having a kid, and not feeling so damn raw anymore. I can't begrudge him that; I don't generally feel that raw anymore myself, and one reason I still love a song like "Answering Machine" is that it reminds me of what it was like to feel that way all the time and gives me a safe little taste of it, without plunging me back into being a 25-year-old capable of six extremes of emotion in one afternoon. It also reminds me of what it feels like to love a band that much, and to hear a band that seemed to be describing my own life in every note. I don't feel that so much anymore--there are bands I love just as much as I loved the Mats, and that bring out just as much passionate devotion in me. But it's different; I'm not really looking to bands to make sense of who I am so much anymore. Which is good, I think, but sometimes it's fun and poignant to remember what that felt like.

The Replacements weren't the only band who ever had that effect on me; they weren't the first, and they weren't the last. But they were the ones who did it most, and most effectively. Like a lot of people back in the mid- to late '80s, I wasn't always completely sure that Paul and I weren't the same person.

And like a lot of people back then, I've got a Replacements story. Yeah, I'll tell it--ya got about a week?

But first, I think I need to tell my Clash story, and maybe my Gang of Four story too. So let me go to this morning's series of pointless, teeth-grindingly annoying meetings, and then I'll tell. Don't start me talkin'...