What popular things were you into or aware of WAY before everyone else?

Cafe Society
61

Count me in as an early-bird (for North America, anyway) PWCTTS. I heard Tori Amos on CBC radio a few weeks after Little Earthquakes was released in the US. I was 12 years old and angry and confused, all I could think as I heard her speak was; “This person is making more sense than anybody else I have ever heard.”
I converted my friend Megan and created a monster when I shared LE and UTP with a boy who sat behind me in French class - he became one of THOSE EWFs - you know the kind I mean. I saw him on the listing at The Dent using someone else’s e-mail address, and always wondered what was up with that.

I also bought ballerina slippers and capri tights before everyone in the world started wearing them. I am sure I’ll be back in here, I get the feeling that there are a few more stuffed in the back of my mind that are juuust out of my reach.

62

I remember seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman for the first time in “Boogie Nights” and thinking, ‘Holy Crap that guy is good. He’s going to win an Oscar some day, guaranteed.’

63

I was into anime before everybody was. Then everybody was and it wasn’t interesting anymore, because for, I dunno, ten years I’d been getting fansubs and crazy import stuff and now you could just walk into Best Buy and pick up this stuff. So it lost its’ shiny.

64

[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
I was listening to the Silversun Pickups this time of last year and they only recently seem to be gaining any mainstream popularity. One local station keeps playing “Lazy Eye” and then saying, “That was “Lazy Eye,” by the Silversun Pickups, from their new album Carnavas.”

Yeah, new if new is a year old.

I don’t even LIKE them that much, but I’ve been listening to them a little for over a year.
[/QUOTE]
Me too. I first heard them a bit longer ago than that, though - my two favorite songs by them are off of a 2005 EP.

Music is weird that way. Last summer no one I knew had heard of Cartel, but then this spring the CW made them their “it” band, and people are buying their “new” cd. Which came out close to two years ago.

Thanks to proximity, I was into Guster long before they ever became remotely popular this decade. They played my college in 1996 (and before that. my neighbors already were fans) and I liked them so very much until their 4th cd when they lost the hand drums all together and exclusively used electric guitars…they will go back to their old sound, I’m sure of it. ::sticks fingers in ears and hums:: If you look on Amazon, their first CDs have two release dates - the ones local fans have, and the reissues on a real label.

65

[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
Never heard of them. Must have been before my time, old man! :wink:

I asked my husband (we are both class of '89), and he never heard of them either.
[/QUOTE]

Well, a whole lotta folk never heard of them, but I hear they had a really hot bass player who got kicked out of the band several years before you young pups woulda started college.

66

I guess you could count emo for me, even though people were into it before 1991, when I first went to college. I didn’t know it had a name then, but my favorite songs on the college radio were the hardcore punks songs with whiny singing and melodic hooks.

By the same token, the Internet and specifically msg boards/Usenet. Sure, thousand and thousands of ppl were using the Internet back in 1991 and most were posting to Usenet, but that was several years before it was even a significant fraction of %1 of America.

You don’t want to know how many things I’m aware of JUST before everyone else, and that’s worse, because then you only get a couple months or so to savor it by yourself before everyone’s into it :mad:

67

I learned to program an Apple II plus the summer before 9th grade (1981).

I used email in 1985 to talk to my friend at Vassar from my college.

I used “Gopher” in 1993 (a precursor to the web as we know it now).

I saw Tracey Chapman live in our coffee house on campus soemtime in the mid 80s.

My son had one the first Webkinz stuffed animals in town (won it in a raffle at a toy store).

Pretty lame list, huh.

68

I was a geek before it was cool to be a geek.

-FrL-

69

In college at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln I hung out with a lot of local band guys, and once in a while they would mention this 14-year-old kid in Omaha who was making some pretty good music. So, I bought a Commander Venus CD from the local record store, but I didn’t really see what all this fuss about Conor Oberst was about - just some kid singing angsty songs, whatever.

I carried that CD around for about a decade before ruthlessly thinning out my music library before a cross-country move. Immediately after I gave that original CD to goodwill, Bright Eyes (Oberst’s new “band”) exploded all over music and basically invented emo.

Along those lines, I also heard a lot of complaints about what a dick Nick Hexum was long before anyone outside of Nebraska had heard of 311. I saw them in a dinky club in Lincoln once - at the time a friend of mine was casually dating the group’s ‘rapper,’ Ese Martinez. Now he was a nice guy; very serious about poetry.

70

My freshman year at Columbia, representatives from Ideal were on campus handing out samples of a new toy they were planning to market. Outside Eastern Europe, they were brand new. No one at Columbia had ever seen anything like it.

I was never able to master it, but seeing how addictive everyone found them, I could tell the Rubik’s Cube would be a huge hit ere long.

71

Clay Buchholz. I’ve been touting this kid to anyone who will listen since the early part of this year. So he goes out in his 2nd major league start and throws a no-hitter. :cool:

72

Not really popular, but something I was aware of before anyone else –

In 1980 I was working handicapped students. I had this one kid who was also an epileptic. Part of the job was training him to clean a game room with pinball machines and video games. I noticed he seemed to become hypnotized by the lights and colors of the games, and he’s often have a seizure.

I mentioned this to my boss, the guidance counselor at the school. He shrugged it off as mere coincidence despite my insistence that the games were causing the seizures.

20 years later, researchers come out with a study that shows the games can cause seizures.

73

Two examples:

Way back in 1970, Jimmy Buffett went to Nashville, and landed a record deal with Barnaby, which released his first album Link.

I was a DJ at a small station in Oregon and liked several of the songs, particularly one that contained the lyrics “a local DJ at the 50 watt station got the whole thing down on tape,” being a local DJ at a 1,000-watt station (which was 250 watts when I got there).

Kept it for better than a quarter-century, and gave it to a local DJ who was a good friend and a huge parrothead.

  1. The year before, in 1969, Al Stewart released his first album in the U.S. Love Chronicles

As the review notes, Stewart dropped the F-bomb in the very last line of his 18-minute title song. There was a “Dear Program Director” letter enclosed from Epic Records suggesting that the record be “auditioned carefully before airing” because “There might be passages on the album that some of your listeners may find objectionable.”

Gosh, do you think?

I absolutely loved it, played some of the cuts on it (though not the daring one) , but Stewart wouldn’t nail the American market until Year of the Cat in 1976.

The postscript to this is that in February of 1994 I was in the Napa Valley while my wife was making a presentation to a rural health conference, and discovered Stewart would be playing a solo show at a local community center. There were fewer than 100 of us there, but the show was magnificent, and I got a chance to talk briefly with him. He was impressed that I still had the album — and the letter — after 35 years. He signed both of them, and I have them to this day.

74

I taped every episode of Betty la fea, years before the now popular show it has inspired, Ugly Betty. The original, IMO, is better.

75

[QUOTE=guizot]
I taped every episode of Betty la fea, years before the now popular show it has inspired, Ugly Betty. The original, IMO, is better.
[/QUOTE]
Of course, “everyone else” needs some definition. Just about everyone in the telenovela market was also watching it at the same time; it’s just that Ugly Betty isn’t that new in a worldwide view.

76

[QUOTE=The New and Improved Superman]
I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers do a free show (in Buffalo, NY) about six months before they broke out with “Higher Ground.”

I saw Nirvana in NYC"s Pyramid Club about a year before they became MTV darlings. (I thought they were terrible live.)

[/QUOTE]

Bah! I saw them when their “hit” was True Men Don’t Kill Coyotes. And they were the opening act.

On the other hand Nirvana at the Pyramid sounds really cool. All I ever saw there was drag queens.

77

(Not to make less of the proud, strong league of the Drag Queens of America)

78

Can I say The Simpsons? For some reason I was really excited when Tracy Ullman got her show. When the Simpsons came on they were instantly my favorite part of the show.

Then they got their own TV show and I thought it was awful. Way too preachy.

79

[QUOTE=Fern Forest]
Can I say The Simpsons? For some reason I was really excited when Tracy Ullman got her show. When the Simpsons came on they were instantly my favorite part of the show.

Then they got their own TV show and I thought it was awful. Way too preachy.
[/QUOTE]

That is exactly the path that my sister took to The Simpsons–she also watched the Tracy Ullman Show and her favorite part was the original Simpsons shorts.

I, on the other hand, was a fan of Groening’s Life in Hell comics during my early college days, as far back as '86. (By the way, the same newspaper carried The Straight Dope, which I’ve been reading since then.) Thus, we were both on hand and ready for The Simpsons from the very first episode. One of the few things that binds us, despite being siblings.

I was building web pages, both personal and my school newspaper’s online edition, back in 1994-5. Back when Mosaic was the browser of choice.

(Yes, I know–it took me a long time to get through college. Started in '86, dropped out twice, finally graduated in '95. I tend to move at a deliberate pace.)

I went with some friends to see a Marillion concert in San Francisco sometime around '91-'92. Yeah, you’ve never heard of Marillion. Well, none of us had ever heard of the opening band. They played a few decent songs, something with a Bo Diddley beat, nothing special. Then the band–Dada–played “Dizz Knee Land” and got a huge response. Everyone went apeshit over the line “I just flipped off President George.” Very memorable. Within weeks that song was all over the radio.

Oh, yeah, one other thing: I saw the first Austin Powers movie in the theater, first week of release, before it caught on with everyone else.

Otherwise, I tend to be way behind the curve. I’m not usually looking for the new big thing, because most of the time I’m not done with the old one.

80

Oh, here’s a couple others. I started getting into puzzle books back in the mid-80s. I’d buy myself a Dell or Pennypress and do my best to finish as much as I could. While not my favorite I enjoyed Number Place and Cross Sums. Then they made it to the UK with Japanese names and suddenly Sudoku was freakin’ everywhere. And Kakuro is moderately popular. Mostly I’m annoyed they’ve changed the names of puzzles I’ve been enjoying for more then half of my life.