from Weezer (1994)

I don’t really know what it was about ice skating itself that made it The Thing To Do on Friday nights in middle school. That girls were there had a lot to do with it. It was less competitive than laser tag, which had few girls, even fewer without helmets on. It was a physical thing that wasn’t dancing, which was win-win. This was mostly over the winter, too, so it was a seasonal thing and the pool was out. I guess parents liked it because there was a shred of supervision but also safety in numbers, too, like a lock-in at the rec center. Dix Hills didn’t have a rec center. It had nothing but houses, no places to walk to but school (if necessary) and other people’s houses. Bike riding was difficult at night, so ice skating it was.

It was on one of these Friday nights that I have my first memory of hearing “Buddy Holly.” It registered, so I must have heard it before, but hearing it echo in that rink was as close as I’d come for another few years to a concert, as you know. I was thirteen years old, life was good, and I hadn’t yet been playing guitar long enough to know how anyone could play anything so easily catchy. At that time, I guess girls were a lot like this song: I knew I liked them, but didn’t know how the mystery worked, and didn’t care one bit. It was like magic and the novelty was all. Soon after this blissfully ignorant era, the once intersecting paths had diverged: the mechanical, cerebral approach that had succeeded in lifting the veil from the mystery of “Buddy Holly” (i.e. the chords and notes and how to play them) would towards women render one no wiser and only guarantee a dented wall and a headache.

For all the digital ink I spill over Weezer, it might be a surprise to know I didn’t own a single CD of theirs until college, when I picked up the Blue album. Music and girls weren’t the only things simpler back then: On the invention known as radio, good music would be given away! And for the low, low cost of a tape recorder and a cassette, you could record up to 90 minutes of this music, yours to keep, trade, and use to express the otherwise romantically inexpressible. For the longest time I had all the songs I needed, including “Buddy Holly” and “Say It Ain’t So.” I lost track of Weezer as they lost track of the music world, waiting until 2002 to reconnect with them, getting Maladroit and seeing them for the first time, at Jones Beach Theater. 20 was a little young to be feeling that nostalgic about anything, but it was vivid then as now how fun the band was and how perfectly suited their music was to the mid-90s especially, and to my early teenage years in particular. 28 is not too young to be feeling nostalgic, and more than any other song on this list, “Buddy Holly” actually makes me remember, palpably, what it was like to be that young.

It was my friend Jason who showed me this video on his computer with Windows 95. We’ll revisit with him later in this list. For now, here goes:

1. Green Day, “Basket Case”
2. Melissa Etheridge, “I’m The Only One”
3. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”
4. The Offspring, “Come Out and Play”
5. Bush, “Machinehead”
6. Foo Fighters, “Monkey Wrench”
7. Muse, “Unintended”
8. Radiohead, “Everything In Its Right Place”
9. Stage, “Live Happy, Live With Anorexia”
10. Ludo, “Save Our City”
Dan’s Definitive Top Ten 2010: Introduction