No. 922 – Shame In You

Performer: Alice in Chains

Songwriters: Jerry Cantrell, Mike Inez, Sean Kinney, Layne Staley

Original Release: Alice in Chains

Year: 1995

Definitive Version: None

When Debbie and I moved in together, the prime locations in our apartment defaulted to the person who had the better stuff. The living room was Debbie’s room, because she had much fancier living-room furniture than I had. I got to put my stereo and TV in her entertainment center, because my stuff was newer and better. (Hers went upstairs in the master bedroom.)

But aside from the stereo and TV, which really could have belonged to anyone, there was almost no evidence based on the living room that I lived there until you looked above the sofa. We skirmished a bit over this, but in the end I won by using the simple argument. This is OUR place; we should mix things up a bit.

That wasn’t the issue; the issue was WHAT I wanted to put up—two very cool posters of baseball cards that I had received as a Christmas present years before and had framed. My counterargument: They were part of an exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. If it’s good enough for the Met, why can’t it be good enough for a living room in Gahanna, you know, as pieces of contemporary art? Debbie dubiously relented, but in time, she came to love the posters, but they were demoted from the living room to the family room at our house. So much for art.

Anyway, this album came out not long after we moved, and I can’t help but think of the Gahanna living room, which is obviously where I played it when it first came out. As I recall, it was a somewhat gloomy November day, and that couldn’t have been a more appropriate backdrop. The baseball-card posters looked cheery on the walls, though.