Ambulance Fever (2010)

My old high-school friend Steve recently e-mailed me the following, with no accompanying words other than a "Too bad no sound" subject heading. By "no sound," I guess he meant actual voices; I think the song that plays overtop for the first half works just fine.*

I don't want to write too much here, because if the video should get pulled, anything I say won't mean nearly as much without the pictures. I learned from the Obama blog how tenuous YouTube links are; I think about half the video I embedded has since vanished. (Truthfully, I'm still waiting for YouTube in general to drastically curtail access. I use it regularly in the classroom now, not just for Ed Sullivan clips and the like, but also for science and math--it all seems too good to be true.)

I will say that this gets as close as anything I can think of to what it was like to be in high school in my hometown of Georgetown in the mid-'70s. Dazed and Confused, if you will, except it's not a movie--this is the thing itself. I feel like I should recognize most of the faces, but other than what I think is one of the Bratkin sisters around the 3:20 mark, I don't recognize anybody. I'm about five years younger than the people here. And this wasn't my life in a literal sense, in that my friends and I did our drinking and drugging in our own little universe that mostly ran parallel to the one documented here. (Adam Goldberg's triangle in Dazed and Confused makes for a rough analogy.) But in a much deeper sense, I lived this exactly. I've tried to write about that time on many occasions, in Why Music Sucks and elsewhere. I think I caught some of what it was like, but I just can't write well enough to put into words what's above. What the Dead Sea Scrolls or a newly unearthed Robert Johnson recording might be to someone else, that's more or less how I feel about this footage. Not to over-dramatize or anything.

Of special interest: right at the five minute mark, two people walk past G&S Television, where 35 years ago I bought the albums that launched my record collection.

*2026 update: the sound has been removed since I wrote this 16 years ago. I can't remember the name of the song that played overtop--nothing famous--but in context, it worked perfectly.