A FAN’S NOTES

Oh No, Not You Again

The news in my morning newspaper becomes bleaker with each passing day. Friends: The Reunion will air May 27. The original sitcom ran for 10 excruciating seasons between 1994 and 2004. I have never sat through an entire episode. The show made my skin crawl and chipped the enamel on my gritted teeth.

At the onset of the Friends decade I was transferred from Canada Safeway’s Edmonton-based Alberta Division advertising department to its corporate parent in Calgary. I arrived late for work my first day at head office because it was located out toward the airport and I was unfamiliar with my new city’s transit system; I’d mapped out the route but did not consider how the various train and bus schedules meshed. I knew some of my colleagues very well; others I met for the first time that morning. I was one of the department’s two or three smokers.

Television back then was on the verge of a massive transformation. Specialty cable channels had begun to proliferate. The analogue signal was going to be digitized. Bulky TV sets would be squashed, flattened like emptied moving cartons. Even though video cassette recorders existed and had for some time, it’s fair to say that Friends was one of those weekly traditional network shows that everybody watched at the same time, perhaps the last of its kind.

In my twenties I’d seen snippets of Thirtysomething and had cringed at scenes of self-absorbed existential angst about very little. I was damned if I was going to make time for twentysomethings going through the same motions in my thirties, even if the hand-wringing was interspersed with hilarious hi-jinks, reckless abandon sans alcohol and drugs. I didn’t particularly enjoy my job, but a morning at the office after Friends the night before was a particularly exquisite form of career Hell.

“Isn’t Phoebe such a ditz!?”

“Wasn’t Chandler hysterical!?”

Oh, how they laughed.

Office dynamics are fluid. We’d sit outside around a cement picnic table so the smokers could smoke. While I appreciated my colleagues’ pariah inclusiveness, I found Friends morning coffee breaks painful. God, I tried to join the conversation: “Jennifer Aniston? Courteney Cox? I would” or “Wouldn’t you like to beat that whiner Ross to death with a Louisville Slugger?” Ultimately I found myself alone with my habit and fellow addicts, but, you know, the weather had turned.

Friends did, however, leverage contemporary music to clumsily accentuate the theme of that week’s script. When I was growing up we had a black and white portable television, second-hand, tucked away in the basement. Its viewing was not encouraged. We had books after all, and they were there to be read. Upstairs on the second storey my sister had a pale blue and white Fleetwood suitcase hi-fi set up in her pink bedroom, Beatles on the wall. I heard her LPs and 45s. Maybe I was inadvertently bred to be nascent Amazon’s prototypical customer, books and music. In my prime as a record shop haunter, 10 or 15 years before Friends, it was all about albums. They were carefully sequenced works of art. I recall the 90s more by song, CDs I’d no wish to buy because of the other eight or nine potentially lame tracks; one hit and all filler, the industry was regressing backward into 60s product, all tamed Elvis and no pelvis. My passion as a fan had subsided somewhat and I believed my time had passed.

“Right Here Right Now” by Jesus Jones knocked me out; it still does, that curiously upbeat existential drone of despair from 1991: "I was alive and I was waiting for you, right here, right now." Same went for “Get What You Give” by New Radicals and “Dizz Knee Land” by Dada. I was wordstruck. “Good,” a Better Than Ezra track, really was, something of a grunge update of country classics like “Hello Walls” and “The Grand Tour.” What really entranced me from that era was a shambolic, seemingly one-take cover of “Sunshine (Go Away Today)” by Paul Westerberg, former leader of the ingloriously imploded Replacements. The original hit was a deceptive Top 40 diatribe by Jonathan Edwards. Anger has rarely sounded as catchy since.

One day after work I disembarked the train two stops too soon, the downtown side of the Bow River. It must’ve been a Thursday or a Friday. I knew A&B Sound or HMV would be open until nine. I wanted Westerberg’s version of “Sunshine.” I assumed he’d just released another solo album I hadn’t yet heard about. With a little help from a clerk who actually liked decent music I found the song on a newly released Friends CD soundtrack. I thought, “Oh.” I stood before the new releases rack jiggling the jewel case. I can’t tell you what the other nine or 10 songs on it were although I must’ve scanned the back sleeve; the cast portrait on the front was an insipid affront. I thought, “I’m not sure I can allow this CD into my house.” Visitors could very well notice its spine on the shelf between Aretha Franklin and Peter Gabriel. And what about contributing money to the franchise, the Friends brand? I asked myself if I hated Friends more than I liked Paul Westerberg. I put the disc back in its slot.

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of pop culture complaint since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is coming soon. Don’t miss out on the literary sensation of 2021. Bookmark this blog for breathless updates.