Back When "1999" Seemed So Far Away...

Back around the time the song 1999 by Prince came out, we had a band called Party Hats. It was named for a certain part of the female anatomy that gets rigid when exposed to cold, or a wet t-shirt.

 We worked-up some great tunes, including 1999. We had it dicked...every note, every lick, the white noise bursts, all the harmonies and vocal inflections, the badass funkiness and groove, the apocalyptic/party atmosphere...everything. We had that shit down. 

I was dreamin' when I wrote this

Forgive me if it goes astray

When I woke up this morning

Could've sworn it was Judgement Day

Good God, y'all...what a tune. It don't get no better.

 We had a child prodigy/whiz kid named "Little Mikey" Naylor on guitar. He could play the fuck out of the guitar, and he was better looking than Doug and I put together, but we handled the rhythm section no problem. Then we had beautiful Becky, who played electronic keyboards and sang. She had the voice of an angel, and the face and body to match. As a bonus she also had a Juno-60. 

 Besides having a hoot playing the song, we used to talk about how far away the year 1999 was, and what might be happening when the turn of the century finally came about, which was over a decade yet to go. I wish I could remember what we talked about, because I know we speculated on how things might be in '99, but I remember that we all felt like it was still an eternity away. For the record, we also felt like we had the world by the balls.

 Now we're on the other side of 1999, by a decade more than we were ahead of it back then. I wonder what we'd have thought if we'd had a crystal ball...except for Y2K maybe, we'd have probably been pretty cool with most of what was going on in 1999, but if we could've seen the world today, I'm not sure we wouldn't have wanted to fill our pockets up with rocks, hold hands and jump off a bridge into the Cahaba. Not really...maybe...but this is NOTHING like the world we'd hoped we'd have. Nothing. Where'd it all go wrong?