One of my favorite t-shirts is the one Booger wore in Revenge of the Nerds that said HIGH ON STRESS… that would have been the perfect tee for me to wear every day from early 2004 to mid 2005. It was a total roller coaster ride littered with fun things like unemployment, horrible relationship decisions, my cat/muse Devo passing away much too early, and having to move 10 times before all was said and done in November of 2005. Good times! In Ace Frehley’s ode to his party animal lifestyle “Insane” he sings I live five days to your one and you know it’s true. I’m pretty sure that I was living five days to your one during that time. Not due to partying or alcohol like Ace – I rarely did either of both which is kind of surprising, particularly with alcohol. It was all fueled by good ol’ stress.
For about 2 months straight in April-May my diet consisted mainly of black coffee, jelly filled donuts, and Cheetos – the puffy Cheetos, because I had some severely painful dental problems that I couldn’t afford to (and was to afraid to) fix. I’m typically a crunchy Cheeto guy but there’s no way my decaying choppers could have handled those. For the most part I had to chew food with my front teeth because my other teeth were in such disrepair that any sort of chewing with them sent me into a world of pain. That April I bought my first pack of smokes in probably 6 or 7 years. Although I knew that was one of the worst possible things to do I convinced myself that I’d just have a couple of cancer sticks and that would be that. Suuuuuure. That quickly turned into a pack-a-day habit that would continue for a good 3 or 4 years. Oops. I remember being surprised that they were so expensive – $3.75 a pack. That was over a dollar more than when I’d previously smoked in the mid 1990s! I laugh at that on the inside these days when I see cigarettes going for upwards of $13 a pack in NYC.
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In hindsight I’m glad I went through it all. Out of all of the doom and gloom came a nice chapter of Iced Ink and Finnegan tunes that I would never have created otherwise. “A Sparkling Shade of Green” was part of that all. Sometimes songs end up being about a completely different source of inspiration than what they started with – such is the case with “Green”. After it was written it went through 2 name/concept changes before I settled on the title. The song reminded me of my Grandma Alice and her then-new car that she named Fern, a zippy little sparkly bright lime-colored Saturn.
Among the many things my brother Chuck and I have in common, we can both say we’ve owned one of Grandma’s rad cars. When she bought Fern, she signed the title of her old black Ford station wagon over to me which was a total lifesaver at the time. I remember she called me and said something along the lines of “Would you mind if I gave you my car?” She wasn’t joking, that’s just how she phrased it. SO CUTE. Would I mind? Heck no!
I referred to the car as “Black Sunshine”, named after the White Zombie song. Years later when she was no longer fit to drive, Chuck ended up with Fern which he still drives to this day. At the time I adopted Black Sunshine I was driving her ex-husband/my grandpa’s Pinto station wagon that I inherited a year or so prior (gee.. see a pattern here?)
My 2 wagons:
The Pinto was the most fun car ever to drive but not very reliable. As soon as I hit 56mph on the highways it would start rattling – I always thought that was my grandpa hollering at me from beyond to not go so fast and and waste gas like that. After a while I simply couldn’t afford to keep up with the cost of Pinto repairs. Black Sunshine was in great shape, or at least much better shape than the Pinto, so that became my main set of wheels. I remember a brief moment of shame when I went to meet Grams at the DMV in the Sears on Rice St. in St. Paul to transfer the title: When I went in to hug her I realized that I had a pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket that caught her eye. DOH. She was a pretty hardcore smoker herself back in the day, but still… it’s not a great feeling when grandma finds out that you’re smoking.
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It was always so cute seeing Grams pull up in Fern for family gatherings. Minty/lime green happens to be my favorite color (see: the guitar I’ve been playing for the last 8 years) and I thought it was the cutest thing that she went with a color like that vs. the typical bland car colors you tend to see out on the road. And so the song became “A Sparkling Shade of Green”, one of two songs dedicated to Grams (the other one is here). I always think back to playing this song at The Cabooze in Minneapolis, one of the largest venues I’ve played my acoustic stuff at. My Aunt Joan who nicknamed me “Finnegan” when I was a kid happened to be in town from Warshington so it was an honor to play that music with her there, at a cool venue, no less.
It goes like this:
