I’m not sure quite when it was, must have been age six or eight, that I first pumped gas. After much pleading, I recall my mom handing me the ungainly, unexpectedly heavy nozzle. I hooked it awkwardly into the Honda, and, using both hands, squeezed with all I had. There was the lurching of the hose under me, and the gas shot out, sloshing against the inside of the housing for the gas cap, and coming right out again, directly into my wide-eyed excitement.

Marshall Crenshaw was one of the better pop revivalists of the ’80s, though the deliberateness of his act weighs heavily on some of the tracks and a shimmery gloss of production at times can distract from the craftiness of his borrowing. He covers Arthur Alexander’s “Soldier of Love,” and — like the Beatles and Stones, who took on “Anna” and “You Better Move On” respectively — firms it up somewhat without squeezing any new feeling from the song. But on the lead-off, “There She Goes Again,” the influence is perfectly tempered. When I heard it eight or so years ago in college — not knowing what it was — it glowed like that splash of gasoline under my nose: and I returned to that afternoon, when, wiped down and placated with Dairy Queen, we resumed our errand at the laundromat. The first chords brought me back there, where the song jangled through a tinny overhead radio. From my dorm I had the brief sensation I was seated very high up, on a folding table, above the mountainous sound of the machines, swaddled with the smell of fabric softener, unusually sedate at age eight.

Comments

1. ↩ Andrew / 5 June 2010

   Sony boombox, dad’s cassette tape, my bedroom floor, circa 1991.