No. 659 – All My Life

Performer: Foo Fighters

Songwriters: Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett

Original Release: One By One

Year: 2002

Definitive Version: None

When Chuck started at The Dispatch in 1999, he was like any new employee—everything was good, no complaints whatsoever. I had been the same way when I started, too. It didn’t take long for him to see how things went at the Big D. Unlike me, however, he navigated the straits much more successfully than I did. Still, he had to have a release valve, and that became the parking lot under the late, great City Center.

When I started at The Dispatch in 1994, City Center was a crowded, thriving downtown mall. It’s now an open-air downtown park, which, coincidentally, is what the space was before the mall was built in the late Eighties. In between, it transformed to a ghost mall that had boarded-up stores upstairs and empty walkways below.

But while I was there, night-time Dispatch employees, who didn’t have parking access on the back lot, could park underneath City Center for 3 hours for $2. Then, when the street meters went off at 6, you could drive your car over in front of The Dispatch. It worked out great, actually. I’d get to work after 3 to take advantage of the timing; then, around 6, I’d take my dinner break and get something at the mall to eat and move my car.

I can’t remember the details as to why, but over the years, the night-time parking situation changed. It finally got to the point where by 2002 it made as much sense to just drive the car out of the parking lot, take a quick lap around an adjacent building and drive back into the entrance, because in a bid to hang on to shoppers who weren’t coming any more, City Center had free parking after 6.

At the end of the night, particularly on Mondays when just Chuck and I ran the show, we’d walk together over to City Center and typically spend another half-hour or so having a “current-events” discussion about this or that or just generally recalibrating before heading home.

One time we were talking music, and Chuck said he needed something new to have in his CD player. One by One recently had been released, and I suggested the Foos. He knew of them by name but didn’t know much about them, so the next day I brought him this album to copy to his iPod.

About a week later, we were doing our Friday night thing at the Thurman Café, and Chuck went up to put money in the juke before our table placed our food and drinks order. Chuck strolled over and said, hey, guess what they have on the juke? As soon as he said it, the chunky guitar at the start of this song fires up. The chorus starts blasting and Chuck fires the Secret Devil Sign and headbangs a bit. I LOVE THIS SONG, he announced to no one in particular but certainly for my benefit.

He had told me earlier that he really liked the album, but this was independent confirmation. Ah yes, another convert.