Since my fat ass has actually started RUNNING, I’ve had to add several songs to my workout rotation. What will follow is a periodic update of whichever song has given me added juice while crisscrossing my neighborhood and hating everything about it. Download these yourselves and enjoy.
“Pete Jackson Is Getting Married” – Less Than Jake
There comes a time where your usual workout songs stop motivating you. When you only hear them as you struggle through another fucking workout, they lose some of their motivational ability, and you begin to associate them solely with feeling shitty during a huff and puff session. You gotta mix it up.
That’s why I loaded thee of my favorite Less Than Jake albums onto my phone and hit “random.” Man alive, that did the trick. I hadn’t heard some of these songs in eons, and their novelty propelled me to kick ass all over the ‘hood (by which I mean I jogged slowly up and down the sidewalks – but I felt like I was going faster!). The song “Pete Jackson Is Getting Married” came on, and I was suddenly back in Old Brentwood.
In our junior year, five of us moved in together on Brentwood Drive. This is referred to as “Old Brentwood” because two years later two of the roommates had moved out while the remaining three of us gained another roommate and moved two houses down and across the street. This is, of course, referred to as “New Brentwood.”
Old Brentwood was my favorite place to live. I think we got along as well as five dudes could possibly get along. We were the Platonic Ideal of roommates. By the time senior year rolled around, four out of five of us were single, with only Deuce in a serious, committed relationship. We all knew he’d marry her, and sure enough, a few years later, he did. He’d be among the first of our friends to get married, if not the very first.
Concurrently, we all loved punk and ska music. It played regularly throughout the house, and in frequent rotation was Borders & Boundaries by Less Than Jake. Buried deep in the later tracks is “Pete Jackson Is Getting Married.” It’s a charming ditty written for a friend of the band all about what his hypothetical wedding might look like. It’s fun and sort of goofy.
One night while we were drinking, someone thought it might be funny if we all learned this song and sung it as a group at Deuce’s wedding. It’s one of those brilliant drunk ideas you never end up doing, but that’s fun to bat around and bullshit about. It’s the same reason you buy lottery tickets – hypotheticals are fun.
If it ever comes time for an idea to cross over and become real, that takes time and work, and good lord would that song not work sung by a bunch of amateurs in front of a newly married couple’s family. Listen to it, and imagine that scene actually playing out. It’s horrendous. Not funny. Not charming. Just loud and drunk and completely unintelligible.
But when I picture myself picturing the hypothetical scene of us singing this jaunty tune, we’re all wearing tuxes, lightly buzzed, hopping around, and the crowd is smiling and laughing and totally charmed by this dude’s delightful group of idiot friends paying tribute to him in a unique way. And then I remember how we used to go out ALL THE TIME and were able to drink more in a week than I do in 2 months now. Fuck wasn’t that great?
And then the song ends and I haven’t been thinking about the run for the last two minutes. That’s two minutes I’ll take every time.
This is great. I love when you’re on a run and all of the sudden you’re a quarter mile down the road because something adequately distracted you. Or when you read an article and realize its already a quarter to 9 and you’re that much closer to lunch time…
Most of my fondest college memories took place in Old Brentwood. And I’m glad you didn’t try to sing this at our wedding…
Yeah, that would’ve been disastrous on so many levels. But it sure was fun to imagine!