1991

1991 was my year of the crisp.

I think I will start drawing autobiographical comic books.

(sorry for the bummer)

I have no memory.

musically the big things for me were:

Massive Attack 'Blue Lines'
KLF obviously - absolute pop-genius gods at this point
808 State 'Ex:El'
The Shamen (they ruled!)
anything by Shut Up & Dance
Prodigy 'Charly' (blew me away, hadnt heard 'Radio Babylon' tho of course!)
Belgian techno (anything on R&S)
u2 'Achtung Baby'
Guns n Roses 'Use Your Illusion'

didnt get into Nirvana until the next year (for shame!) but there you go

dear lord its a timewarp

1991: good music, bad everything else.

You are so busted, Jess.

Anyway, here’s an extract from Sunday July 16 1989. I was fourteen.

"Had two weird dreams last night. The first one had me doing a ouija board and being transported into a devil-worshipping hell. This is probably a premonition of my punishment for what we did at Aedin’s party. The second one involved a gay man going down on my boyfriend. Strange indeed.

Met John in the village tonight. He’s nice but I wish Kevin hadn’t told me that he fancies me. It’s very embarrassing."

Age has brought with it little advancement.

It was an educational year.

Drank too much, procrastinated over university work, ended up writing dissertation in 4.5 days, didn't revise properly etc and only got my degree "by the skin of your teeth" according to one of my lecturers.

Debts meant I had to move back in with my dad for the first time in years - took a long while to get used to that. Moved from Nottingham to Southampton where I didn't have any friends.

Worked for a few months testing computer software but that work dried up so I ended up selling Encyclopaedia Britannica for a few months. Quite an interesting job despite all the bollocks but it's commission-only so after paying all my petrol costs etc I think I actually lost money.

Finished the year getting a job as a cashier at a petrol station. Shit job, shit money, and we had money deducted from our wages if people drove away without paying or nicked stuff. Thankfully there was no Partridge attached to the garage.

began two-year involvement with another that i shouldn't have touched with Ned's or Dan's hands.

I should rather hope, because the image of you waving both of our hands around after having been removed is troubling.

I went to a bloody awful music school that's all about hiring 16-yr olds who'll work for $9/h. That year, however, I had a phenomenal guitar teacher there who was so much more inspired than anyone else I ever had there. He got me started on the jazz-oriented Berklee books, would teach modes, improvisation, composition and did it all with the most insane black humour I've seen from anyone ever. I don't think anyone else there ever dreamt of trying things like that. They were more just about teaching you standard playing methods, maybe learning a couple pop hits, putting no effort into the lessons at all. I really intend to track him down to call him and see what he's up to these days at some point. He was an inspiration when I started to teach.

I was possibly even more into reading and writing than music at that point. Extra-curricular stuff I read that year included Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Haroun & the Sea of Stories, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare in addition to more normal sci-fi, fantasy, Gordon Korman, Mad, etc. I also followed politics really closely. I was opposed to the Gulf War and the Meech Lake accord.

We went to India that summer. Weirdly, I don't remember it quite as well as everything else. I remember hanging out with some of my cousins, remember a lot of temples (I think I had faith at that point), remember the weather, remember my parents spending a lot of time shopping for jewelry which I found mind-numbing to the point of pain.

And the usual puberty/hormonal stuff.

don't know if they still bust moves to "Iesha" or not.

And they went to no. 1 in....1991. back on topic!

music? i'm pretty sure i was still spinning paul's boutique and digging REM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIdmm9Bss40

april 27th, 1991

Turning 30, so I stopped trusting myself.

I had Now Dance! '91 for my eleventh birthday. It had such dance classics as 'Sunshine on a Rainy Day' and 'There's Nothing Like This'. We went to Maxwell's in London for hamburgers. There is a video of my gran circa this time asking me to play 'I Love My Sexy Shirt' (think she meant the Right
said Fred song).

Always associated this with 1991, but I guess it was the first month of '92.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP7KdIvirFQ

Either way, same school year. My first year of junior high. Hated it then. Miss it now.

I was in seventh grade and took a graphic arts class that year. I made a 'paint' drawing on an apple of an F-14ish fighter jet launching a missile at some kind of base or ground facility and put the text "Operation Desert Storm" on it. All the kids in my class thought it was very cool even though I was generally not thought to be very cool.

I also remember telling a friend in that same graphic arts class that I wanted to marry Mariah Carey.

in 1991 i was 24. i'd dropped out of college and moved back in with my parents to live in the basement of their washington DC townhouse for a year. i was working in the maintenance shop of the washington international school, mowing lawns and doing general handyman shit, depressed as hell. my life was a rotating circuit between home, work and the godlike yesterday and today records in rockville, md., where i spent the bulk of my income and free time. i'd go out to shows occasionally, mostly at the 9:30, but more often stayed in watching movies, listening to music, drinking beer and brooding.

I was 15 and finally made a few friends despite my stuttering showing no signs of leaving. I was getting really into mail order catalogs for music since I lived no where near a music store. Started smoking and stealing beer. We lived near a big lake and on most weekends there were plenty of trucks pulling fishing boats parked at the hotel in town. Each truck would have a large cooler full of beer on ice, sometimes booze. So we would just pull up beside a truck and grab the whole cooler and drive off. Not sure how we never got busted.

Now-departed jazz legends I saw headlining at the now-closed Bermuda Onion in '91: Tony Williams, Sun Ra (shook his hand!), Elvin Jones (gave me an unsolicited big sweaty hug) and Sonny Sharrock (still got a shitty cassette recording of part of the set plus a brief conversation we had in between sets). (Also saw Sonny Rollins that year.)Now-departed jazz legends I saw headlining at the now-closed Bermuda Onion in '91: Tony Williams, Sun Ra (shook his hand!), Elvin Jones (gave me an unsolicited big sweaty hug) and Sonny Sharrock (still got a shitty cassette recording of part of the set plus a brief conversation we had in between sets). (Also saw Sonny Rollins but that was at Massey Hall and he's still alive.)

Also: Bought a crappy secondhand alto sax and taught myself to make some pretty irritating noises.

I've been trying to recall with precision what I was doing in 91, and it is really hard. I think the 1990-92 period is muchly blocked out of memory, for likely good reason: it was my first live in relationship and it was a fairly abusive and unpleasant one for a lot of the time.

In 91 I lived with this guy in a tiny 3 room flat, sometimes having fun, and sometimes being completely traumatised by his assholish, manipulative behaviour. Middle of the year, I think (I remember winter was coming on so it must have been) we moved into a big crappy 3 bedroom house with his best friend L, and for a while that was great fun - that crazy share house "we can do what the fuck we want" stupidity you get at the age of 19-20. I remember one night us playing Janes Addiction records really loudly and pakouring all over the walls in our sneakers and leaving scuffmarks. There were some fun spontaneous parties, lots of booze around.

I was in a band briefly though we never did any gigs while I was with them - I was replacing a male singer and though I did ok it became obvious pretty fast that the songs didn't suit my vocal style so they turfed me again. I remember breaking in my first pair of Docs walking to the house the band lived in.

There were some awesome gigs - I saw Ride, but missed MBV *and* Nirvana somehow (geez). Wait maybe that was 92. Its all such a blur.

I existed in a group of friends I never felt a real affinity with, as if they all secretly catted me out behind my back, and I was partly right: they all knew my horrible bf was cheating on me that whole time but no one felt the need to actually let me know, which is low of them.

I read a lot of NME and MM and Viz, got really into Monty Python stuff for a while, and enjoyed Canberra going thru a hilarious copying the Manchester craze phase where everyone ditched their goth gear for tiedyed hoodies, floppy hats and baggy pants.

There are quite a few embarrasing photos. I was 20 and a bit clueless. I moved to melbourne early in 1992 and never regretted it.

My most vivid recollection from that year was when Nirvana bumped Michael Jackson from the top of the US album charts. That's when I knew the '80s were finally over....

I was 13 years old in 1991 and finishing 8th grade and starting high school. To do so I switched from public school to a Catholic all-girls HS and it was mostly horrible. My friend group at school friend dumped me 1/2 way through the year via a note in my locker because everyone thought I was (THE HORROR!) a lesbian due to the fact that I said I wanted to be an obstetrician. I was extremely awkward and wore Sally Jesse Raphael style enormous green glasses. After the friend dumping experience I had nobody to sit with at lunch so ate my lunch in the basement every single day until right at the end of the year I became friends with a group of girls who would remain my best friends for the rest of the year. Despite all this I somehow managed to land my first boyfriend. His name was Carlos and we made out on the bed in my friend Marissa's wood paneled bedroom. I had struck up an unlikely friendship with a "cool" girl named Emily because we both liked Erasure and in my HS yearbook that year she wrote, "Have a great summer and good luck with Carlos! So glad you finally let him go up your shirt! K.I.T.". He dumped me about a week later.

1992 was somewhat better.

until right at the end of the year I became friends with a group of girls who would remain my best friends for the rest of the year remainder of high school.

My friend group at school friend dumped me 1/2 way through the year via a note in my locker because everyone thought I was (THE HORROR!) a lesbian due to the fact that I said I wanted to be an obstetrician.

lol 8th graders.

i mean, getting dumped by yer friends isn't LOL but 8th graders thinking that you were lesbian b/c you wanted to be an obstetrician is LOL.

In hindsight the whole thing was hilarious though not so much at the time obv. btw I got confused and the friend dumping and boyfriend having actually as in the 2nd half of 9th grade which was 1992. Oops.

Anyway, the wrote me a note on pink paper and left it in my locker before never speaking to me again. I didn't actually find out about the obstetrician = lesbian thing until I was a senior (by which point things had improved dramatically) at which point I learned that literally my entire class had thought this and that it was THE RUMOR of freshman year. btw the note was signed HA squared ~ The Lunch Bunch. Why I was hanging out with a bunch of assholes who called themselves The Lunch Bunch is another issue entirely.

http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/5188/tbhbr.jpg

Pretty exciting year. I was a year into my first job working at a country music station near my small town in the mountains. To this day, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the country charts from 1989-91. It was a goofy time for music. Garth Brooks, GNR, Public Enemy, John Mellencamp. Won an Eric Johnson "Cliffs of Dover" CD one night at a pizza place for knowing what fucking album "Rocky Raccoon" was on.

I grew up near a man-made lake, dedicated by JFK about six weeks before he was shot. The radio station was at one end of the lake and I lived near the middle with my mom, step-dad, blood sister, half-brother and two-year-old half-sister. Our house had one bathroom and three bedrooms. It was tight. They eventually closed in the carport and made it another bedroom with half bath.

I'd get off work from the radio station and drive the long way home -- around the other part of the lake -- and hit the little unincorporated franchise town built by a national timeshare organization. You didn't have to look out for cops if you were young and drinking like me. You had to keep an eye out for the Dept of Public Safety officers. Anyway, I'd cruise the bowling alley parking lot with my buds. Once, I got the Spanish exchange student in a buddy of mine's pick-up and played her the Gipsy Kings version of "Hotel California" from the Elektra anniversary album. Didn't make out with her or anything, but it was a special moment nonetheless.

That spring, my dad divorced my step-mother. He lived in Little Rock, where I had wanted to move since my parents got divorced in the first place. But there was no way I was going to move in with my step-mom and go to Catholic school. So when he got a new three story house overlooking the Arkansas River, I took the chance to finally get out of the three-bedroom house and the bowling alley parking lot to move in with him. The only drawback was that my senior year was coming up and I would have to miss out on a chance to appear in the yearbook's annual TOGETHER 1979-1992 photo.

Moved in with Dad and it really tied a bow around what had been a hard decade for my family. The loss of not really having a father figure was somewhat corrected, if only for a short time and maybe a little too late. We did bond a bit more than we had, and knowing that I was going to be out the door in less than a year eased a lot of friction that you'd usually get when a teenaged kid moves in with a single parent.

I went to Little Rock Central High School. I had come from an all-white school in the sticks to a place where a LIFE magazine cover of the school I was in hung on the wall of the History class. There were black people, Asian people, Native Americans… the hottest girls were these blond Jewish girls and my intolerance of gay people was quickly flushed when I realized that no one was going to try to suck my dick without my consent. It was a lot of culture shock, but at the age of 18, I was more than ready for it and soaked it all in, sitting there at my desk in my stonewashed jeans and white sneakers, taking Spanish I with the sophomores because my country school was so deficient in anything outside of History, PE and Math.

Met a lot of new cool friends who played in their own bands -- and even WROTE THEIR OWN SONGS. Spent a lot of time drinking beer in backyards and parking lots. Drinking coffee at Denny's. Hanging out at band practices and going to shows. I made the video below in 1992, but it does a good job of showing how far I had come by the end of 1991 from working at the country station and playing the Robin Lee version of "Black Velvet".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7C0NkyXe6c

1991 was pretty exciting for me. Haven't had one quite like that since.

Probably the most pivotal year of my life, either this or 1992, the two of 'em together basically. Almost too much to even post about.

^^ Didn't stop me. :-)

My friend group at school friend dumped me 1/2 way through the year via a note in my locker because everyone thought I was (THE HORROR!) a lesbian due to the fact that I said I wanted to be an obstetrician.

as if most all obstetricians were lesbians....

http://www.vitals.com/doctors/Dr_Heathcliff_Huxtable.html

x-post - I guess I said OBGYN because I thought the two went hand in hand and they took GYN to mean WANTS TO LOOK AT VAGINAS BECAUSE SHE'S GAY. Obviously.

1991 was the year my wife and I were married! July 20, to be precise.

Would post on this thread, but for me 1991 was a horrible depressing waste of being 21 so fuck that

"The Lunch Bunch"

i was 6

i remember the gulf war, i had a lot of these at the time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Machines

and some of the best micro machines were used irl in desert storm which was cool

"The Lunch Bunch"

yes, that is pretty LOL worthy.

For Christmas the following year (at which points I had other much better friends) they got each other cheesy bracelets that had "TLB" engraved on them. :/ I shit you not.

I wish 1991 had been a good year for me. It wasn't. I was slowly disintegrating under the stress of 24-hour caregiving. As for pop culture references, I was as effectively isolated from all that as if I'd been a bug in a bottle.

http://carvalcatering.com/_library/images/the-lunch-bunch/lunch_bunch_logo_tag.jpg