Peter Sjoblom

Such a terrible decade they were, the 80's. Bad taste has never been any worse than it was back then. Ugly clothes. Fast money. Terrible movies. Silly people with ugly haircuts. The breakthrough of MTV. Very bad music.

I did my best to ignore all that though. I dropped out of school to be a music writer because there was after all some music out there worth preaching about to the masses and I knew the name of it.

Or at least behaved as if I did.

Classes were something I attended when I needed some sleep but life's too short for sleeping when you're young. So I quit. I wrote for the local paper, and I had realized that writing about music was a great way if not to get girls, so at least to get free records, get on guest lists and get served in bars where they really shouldn't have let me in to begin with since I was too young.

I was a teenage writer with a Paisley Underground hang-up and I was 'Almost Famous'.

Anyway, one day I was sent an album by the enigmatically named Thin White Rope. (I later learnt that it was a William S. Burroughs term for ejaculation.) I had to admit that “Down in the Desert” was a really cool song, but the rest of Exploring the Axis didn't impress me that much. I didn't think of Thin White Rope as something that would steal my heart and fry my brain as some of the other bands of the era did.