Rob turns to Dick and under his breath says, “I will now sell five copies of ‘The Three E.P.’s’ by the Beta Band.”

Like a kid to a magic trick and with a slight quiver, Dick mutters, “Go for it.”

‘Dry the rain’ (side one, track one of the aforementioned record) floods over the record store and customers begin to bob heads in unison as the groove takes hold.

“Who is this?” asks one bobbing patron.

“The Beta Band,” responds Rob.

“It’s really good.”

“I know.”

High Fidelity sums up the trendy record store lifestyle that so many of us hate to love to be a part of. Watching this scene play out is amusing because we’ve all seen it go down in real life – as the rabid vinyl freaks flip through stacks of records in search of new and used treasures, the clerk puts on something obscure but able to maintain it’s pop-sensibilities and the indie kids slither to the counter find out more. I’m so bad about this trap that I picked up ‘The Three E.P.’s’ after watching the process go down in the movie.

That all said, the album is incredible. It’s not one that I typically think to scroll to on my iPod, but when the Beta Band pops up via ‘shuffle,’ I feel like I’m bobbing my head in Championship Vinyl, circa 2000.  The record is repetitive, airy, muttered and obscure enough to please all the strange-ranger vinyl geeks of the decade. Even digital versions of the recordings are laden with vinyl scratches for the purists guilty of owning an iPod.

I’ve got it on my ‘Top Five Records Thanks to John Cusack’ list. Put on ‘Dry the Rain’ for a friend unfamiliar with the movie and relive the scene as said friend bobs and asks, “Who is this?”

When we hung up I naturally jumped on a light-speed chase down memory lane to Newburgh, IN, circa 2003-04. My studded belt and a so-big-it’s-ironic buckle destroying the finish on the back of my first guitar, a skateboard I loved and wrecked myself for on a regular basis, unabashed rock n’ roll thrashing across my mom’s living room floor (we called it ‘practice’) and the half-working CD player in my ’92 Toyota Previa minivan that played back the albums that shaped me as I drove everywhere and nowhere across the southern tip of Indiana.

No album burned up that CD player like Nothing Feels Good, The Promise Ring’s 3^rd full-length, and no song got me driving faster than ‘Red and Blue Jeans.’ You can’t help but bob your head to the initial sway of the song’s salt-and-peppery guitars sweeping in and out of each other like kids playing ‘tag’ in stereo.  My accelerator always feels the weight of the song as the band unleashes into two separate musical interludes reminiscent of the final climactic minutes of Weezer’s Only in Dreams, divided by a series of ‘do do do’s’ that I dare you not to sing along to.  This and Davey von Bohlen’s repetitive lyrics and the fact that he couldn’t really sing them make this music incredibly accessible and impossible to keep from falling into.

A day after my phone conversation I got back on the road to Nashville in my (newer, much less fun but still incredibly practical) minivan and immediately revisited this masterpiece.  I rolled down the windows, unconsciously crept up to 85 mph on Interstate 164 and let nostalgia take over as Newburgh faded behind me.  As the final notes faded out it felt natural to wipe the sweat and swooping hair from my brow with a solid black wristband, trying to catch a breath in a t-shirt wrapped around my ribs tighter than skin.  I don’t know when or why, but the hair and accessories have been long since cut back and boxed up, and the t-shirts are less like corsets and more like t-shirts these days.  The music, however, will live on and thrive in me like a time machine blasting me back to a very happy chapter of my life with the windows down and fists in the air. I miss it like an old friend and I’ll always be excited to hear its voice calling me back.
-tommy