WeblogPoMo 2024 - Song 3: The Presidents of the United States of America - Dune Buggy

I used to take a trip to the north shore with my extended family every summer.

When we’d arrive, my dad would hand me and my siblings a bunch of cash when we arrived accompanied by some variation of this speech: “This is it for the weekend. Spend it wisely.”

One year, my dad performed this ritual in front of the gas station which shared a parking lot with our hotel.

We went in to pick out some snacks, and behind the counter, I saw a cassette tape with a familiar sounding name:

”The Presidents of the United States of America”

A few weeks prior to our trip, back when school was in session, I recalled standing at the bus stop and hearing my friend Lucas telling everyone all about this band.

He said his older brother was into them. They sang about things like cats and peaches, and they totally rocked.

I had looked up to Lucas since preschool. He was effortlessly charismatic. Absolutely hysterical, too. He has this infectious laugh, often deployed after he cracks a joke.

Since I had the recommendation of the coolest kid I knew floating around somewhere in my head ¹, I figured I could parcel out a fifth of my weekend allowance to give it a shot.

I immediately fell in love with the record. I listened to it endlessly for months.

None of the lyrics really made sense to me as a kid. Lyrics have never been something I’ve considered much when it comes to music.²

But as an adult, I get so much joy from rediscovering music from my youth and enjoying the artistry with a renewed perspective that comes with age.

It was tough to only pick one song from this album. So many memories are intertwined with these songs as their accompaniment.

I used to sing Peaches every night to my daughter. Both Lump and Weird Al’s Forrest Gump-inspired cover of Lump often get stuck in my head, my thoughts seamlessly bouncing between lyric versions.

I picked Dune Buggy because it’s the second song from this band that I regularly make my kids listen to.

We have a family playlist filled with songs that each person gets to select, and Dune Buggy is the first song of mine which appears in order.

We will often go through the playlist in that order when we are in the car.

At first, the kids groaned every time the first guitar lick came on.

These days, you’ll occasionally catch my daughter singing loudly along.

And come on, what’s not to love about a blind spider barreling around the sand in a spider-sized dune buggy?