Moondog Matinee

I'm a pretty blatant Blind Melon fan. Their self titled album came out right when I started realizing how important this music shit was to me. I don't just remember the feeling of that cassette case in my right hand with my walkman in the other, I can still imagine the fucking smell of that album as I sat in the backseat of my parents' minivan on some vacation to nowhere in particular. 

Those solo road trips with my music took me from a fan of music to a fucking fiend for music. I started to take these road trips with one or two friends once I got my license and the truckstop tape displays were where I would drop 5 bucks on some random tape I would never even think of buying on CD from Sam Goody bro. 

One tape I remember specifically (as it pertains to this band Moondog Matinee) was the Best of The Guess Who. That fucking tape. That fucking throat. Those fucking songs. 

Those fucking songs are what I think of when I think of highway music bro. I don't think of the strangely intoxicating odor your body can emit after driving for three days straight, I don't think of shitting in strange bathrooms with the phone numbers of even stranger strangers scrawled on the stall walls, I don't think of getting pulled over by hick cops and having your car searched for no other reason than you smell like reefer; I think about the Allman Brothers, The Guess Who, Blind Melon, The Doors, etc.. 

These fucking bands gave my addiction to music forward momentum. 

I'm also a fucking sucker for rock and roll movies. The first time I saw Almost Famous I shat literal rocks and rolls of shit. My rock and roll dreams were unfolding in front of me in story form, but better. Almost Famous, The Doors movie, Rockstar, any and all of these movies make me sentimental for the time when music was all I wanted out of life. I didn't need a house or a car or a savings account, I just needed to fucking jam bro.

So here I am fifteen years later slapping my steering wheel to some band I've never heard of, but I've heard somewhere in my fucking memories, Moondog Matinee. 

Moondog Matinee sound exactly like all of those memories of rock and roll sentimentality, topped off with the visuals of the movies that fed my rock and roll dreams. The distortion feels warm as shit, the vocals are fucking stellar, the vibe is bluesy without sounding cheap, the songs are crafted in a way that highlights not just the musicians playing it, but the people listening to this shit (before stripping off their clothes and fucking everything in sight like our parents did), Moondog Matinee have given me a fucking classic rock niche boning classic rock niche boner. This is classic ass fucking ass fucking rock for 2015 performed by, what I can only assume are people who grew up like I did, in the back seat of the car bumping the same fucking tunes their dad bumped, not because we were forced to but because the music our parents loved was fucking awesome (except Procol Harem. FUCK THAT SHIT.).

I can't think of a more perfect way of setting you up to be in fucking lust with these assholes then to tell you they remind me of how happy music used to make me. 

Of course this was before I found out about PR reps who have never actually listened to your music, or record label owners who try and sneak a few extra thousands of dollars out of your agreement without your knowing, or booking agents who will only book your band if someone else who does coke with him recommends you to him when he's sober, or bar owners who say a "percentage of the door" is $100 even if you couldn't unload your equipment until the bar emptied out a little bit.

The music business is fucking gross and it's full of extremely shady and evil people.

But fuck those people. Moondog Matinee is perhaps my favorite "is this classic rock?" album of the summer and you should totally fucking fanboy the shit out of these assholes, or you're a fucking asshole.

Cool? 

Cool.

Love,
Dad