Album: Separation Sunday
Year: 2005
So like most people who have a writing bent, I’ve tried my hand at writing fiction.
I’ve written a couple of unpublished short stories, and I started a novel in the early 1990s that had I been able to somehow finish then (ha!) would have been a contemporary novel about being young and if I would be able to finish now (double ha!) would now be a pure nostalgia piece.
And as you can imagine, all of the fiction was just thinly-disguised versions of all of the crazy shit we were up to in the 1980s, just as Craig Finn’s best lyrics feel like they were based upon real people and incidents.
Your little hoodrat friend makes me sick
But after I get sick I just get sad
‘Cause it burns being broke, hurts to be heartbroken
And always being both must be a drag
Delivered over a relentlessly chugging guitar — think “Just What I Needed” — that verse sets up the rest of the song, and here’s the thing. I’d never ever heard the word “hoodrat” before this song. Maybe it was an age thing, maybe it was a regional thing.
Luckily, Finn’s right there with some telling details
Tiny little text etched into her neck
It said “Jesus lived and died for all your sins”
She’s got blue black ink and it’s scratched into her lower back
Says “Damn right, He’ll rise again”
Yeah, damn right, she’ll rise again
Damn right, you’ll rise again<
By the time Tad Kubler ditches the Cars guitars for the big guitars, I know exactly who this hoodrat was, even as I was being by Franz Nicolay tossing enough organ & piano into the mix to make the whole like Pleased to Meet Me as played by The E. Street Band.
Meanwhile, Finn and backing singer Nicole Willis are harmonizing on the defensively catchy chorus:
But I ain’t never been with your little hoodrat friend
I ain’t never been with your little hoodrat friend
I ain’t never been with your little hoodrat friend
What makes you think I’m getting
With your little hoodrat friend?
While Finn is admitting that they got high together and talked about religion and not having sex with each other, she also makes an observation about her scene changing, as they always do. And even those she was still young, you could just hear the weary sigh that accompanied this:
She said City Center used to be
The center of our scene
Now City Center’s over
No one really goes there
Back then we used to drink
Beneath this railroad bridge
Some nights the bus wouldn’t even stop
There were just too many kids
You can see it, can’t you? The bus approaching the stop near the bridge, the driver hesitating for a second, and then deciding “fuck this, it’s just too much trouble,” and driving off, leaving a whole passel of kids with no way to get home.
It’s such a beautiful detail, and while it probably only ever happened a couple of times, it’s still a beautiful way to define those summer nights where everybody just happen to show up for no other reason than there wasn’t anything else to do that night and maybe other people were going to be there.
Which seems impossible in the time of instant messaging, but for years and years and years, I would go to various hangouts in the Tower District without any kind of plan outside of have a drink or a few, never knowing who might be there or who might not be there.
Not every night, of course. I mean there were shows to go to and parties to go to and pre-made plans over the phone, but those were the exception, not the rule. So I guess I was a hoodrat for a time.
“Your Little Hoodrat Friend” performed live
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