Episode 31: The Subjective Greatness of ’America’s Greatest Hits’

Are you the same person you used to be? The question was posed in the October 2022 New Yorker article “Becoming You,” and it’s an easy one, perhaps an inevitable one, for a middle-aged person to ask while staring into the real or proverbial mirror. Especially after moving back to your place of birth after two decades away.

Every family history has a few good “dumb shit” stories, when something happens that’s so dumb it crosses the threshold of stupidity into the absurd, and once it’s over the only thing left to do is laugh about it and file it away as another dumb shit story to be told and retold in the years to come. And when it came time for Travis and me to pick up our Rocco's Super Bowl sheet pizzas near the end of Dad's 75th birthday weekend, shit got dumb.

Holiday drinking is an international sport, a holly-jolly right for all. The Christmas lights go up and everyone gets lit, ho ho ho and a bottle of rum. I’ve suited up and worked my elbow every season since my freshman year of college, but for the first time in 26 years, I took myself out of the game until Christmas Eve following the last underwhelming sip of red wine on Halloween night. Spending the season sober was a calculated decision, one I had been considering for months – for years, really – as I found my relationship with alcohol changing.

Erica and I did not set out to make 2022 a big concert year, especially a year of big concerts, but that's what happened after scoring tickets to Nine Inch Nails' homecoming show and a shared bottle of wine led to an impulse trip to Long Island to see Phish while our kid was away at band camp. We are not tourists of our own pasts, but it's hard to ignore the nostalgic tinge to these two concert experiences or the aging Gen X vibes – different yet similar – that dominated both.

Long before music, baseball was Mark Lanegan’s first love. Growing up in Ellensburg, Washington, Lanegan did what most 20th century American boys did: he played pickup games until it was too dark to see the ball. For certain music fans, it’s difficult to reconcile the counterculture lineage of an artist like Lanegan with said artist’s passion for popular sports. Billy Joel throwing out the first pitch at Shea Stadium? Sure, whatever, who the hell cares? But Mark Lanegan, the dark prince of grunge, a high school hurler with professional aspirations?

Returning to Boise last summer for the first time since moving away in 2020 was particularly disorienting – seeing a place I once called home through the odd-fitting lens of a quasi-visitor – and a year into this new rhythm in my work life, the Hudson me and the Boise me feel like different people, and I haven’t figured out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Listening to "A Bit of Previous," I get the sense the core members of Belle and Sebastian, now in their late-40s and early-50s, are at a similar juncture in their lives – perhaps, like me, asking themselves where the hell the last 20 years went – as the prevailing theme on the album is aging, and in the hands of Belle and Sebastian, it sounds incredibly dull.

My initial response was to sit up in my hotel bed and guzzle water, hoping a little hydration would work the razor blades out of my throat. No luck. Soon enough, my nose started running. Then the sneezing. And coughing. Here we go. Clearly this was not from talking loudly in crowded rooms and noisy bars, nor a temporary reaction to a new environment, but something worse – hopefully not THAT something.

Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek and Gerry Beckley were punching bags from the start, dismissed as watered-down ripoffs of Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stllls, Nash & Young and associated Laurel Canyon luminaries, and while America did ride certain stylistic coattails to ’70s radio success, "History: America’s Greatest Hits" – which is being reissued on vinyl for Record Store Day April 23 – is one of my favorite best-ofs in our library, an album I’ve loved since high school and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

I recently reread "On the Road" and "The Dharma Bums" to see what was there for me in my 40s, partly inspired by a comment my friend Marcus made last summer: how Kerouac’s writing, as a guidebook for life, is great when you’re between the ages of 18 and 22, but not so much after that. I didn’t dust off my Kerouac to counter Marcus and prove him wrong, but I didn’t want him to be right either.