The Story of "U.V.A."
Here we go, folks...
I’m not sure it ever occurred to me to try and write a song until I got to high school, but, boy, once it did and I tried, I could…not…do it. After a year in college and in Skeleton Crew, I eventually wrote a couple of instrumentals but nothing with lyrics.
Then I saw someone in a class (hi there, Allen Hall) who, shall we say, piqued my interest. I didn’t immediately associate this interest with songwriting, though, of course, this is what ultimately happened.
On February 24, 1989, while living in Chadwick Place apartments on Lee Boulevard, I sat down to play guitar. I strummed around a little bit but didn’t feel like playing any of the stuff I usually played, which, at the time, was a lot of Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg (at least on acoustic). And then something happened that (a) had never happened before, and (b) became the template for many, many other songs I’ve written since. I looked at my left hand on the guitar neck, paused, and began playing. I know it sounds cheesy to say I was opening myself to the universe to see what it would let in, but that’s honestly close to the truth (and it’s certainly no coincidence that, as an English major, I was consuming a ton of Wordsworth and Coleridge at this point in my life). What it let in, and what came out of me, was the riff for “U.V.A.” I knew instantly it was a keeper, so I kept playing it and decided to start singing, and what the universe let in / what came out of me was the words to “U.V.A.”
It took about two hours, and then it was done, in something very close to the version that has existed ever since. I still have the original notebook with the original handwritten lyrics.
At the time, Skeleton Crew played covers by Metallica, the Misfits, Mötley Crüe, The Cult, and others (can’t recall if we’d discovered Jane’s Addiction yet) along with two instrumentals: my “Something Completely Different” and Craig’s “Prime Mover.” “U.V.A.,” of course, sounded nothing like any of this, so I wasn’t sure how this new song would fare as an S.Crew original. Neither were Tim and Craig, who listened quietly when I played them the cassette (as we drove around Starkville). When the track was done, I remember silence, some eventual comments like “Cool, man,” and a general sentiment of “How are we gonna make this work?” Over the next few months, we collaborated on an arrangement, and it was during this time that Tim and Craig came up with their iconic drum and bass parts.
I must pause here and ensure that anyone who reads this absorbs a simple, adamantine truth: Tim’s opening drum fill and Craig’s impossibly melodic bass line are THE elements that really make this song what it is. I love the germ of “U.V.A.” and what I wrote, but it would be borderline meaningless without the incredible things Tim and Craig created. Their playing elevated “U.V.A.” beyond a demo containing a bunch of lovesick strumming and wordplay — they made it a real song. Thanks forever and ever, you two.
Anyway, I don’t remember how much we played the song live for most of 1989, though I vaguely recall a frat gig that summer being the first time we actually performed it in front of people. But it was that fall when things really took off.
Like most late-20th-century Starkville bands, Skeleton Crew used to rent practice spaces at the storage units on Industrial Park Road (Scarborough Heights!). One night in October-November 1989, we invited some friends out to hear us practice (hard to get a local gig back then if you weren’t a human jukebox, which we weren’t). Little did we know that the radio station WKOR was renting the space just next to us where they kept their big boombox for live spots, and a few of them just happened to be there while we were playing this new-ish song of ours. A gal named Melissa came up to us right after we finished the song (I mean, like, within seconds) and said she loved it and thought she could get it on the air. We played it live the next day for her and the station manager, and he said he’d play it if we could get a decent recording. So, we soon recorded the version that wound up on the Rage EP at Mitchell Studios on Highway 25 (where we also recorded the rest of the EP). As I recall, WKOR played it for the first time ever on Thanksgiving 1989, and over the next few days, the song received significant airplay, driven by call-in requests. I distinctly remember a friend of ours saying she’d called in to request it and the DJ sort-of exasperatedly saying “Look, we’ve already played it, like, three times today…”
I also distinctly remember a gig at the Gag House (if you know, you know) in December of that year where we performed it for the first time since we’d gotten airplay. The Gag House shows tended to attract lots and lots of people (we had no Dave’s Dark Horse Tavern or anything even close to it back then, kiddos), though I’m not sure how well-attended this show was because the date was inching up close to the Xmas holidays. However, in my (possibly flawed) memory, there were a ton of folks there. And these folks were dismayed, to say the least, when we opened the evening with a cover of the song “Flower” by this band we’d just discovered called Soundgarden. Eventually, we played “U.V.A., and the place levitated a little.
I don't know where Melissa from WKOR is now, but it's no exaggeration to say that, without her zeal and advocacy, very few people would know about or even have heard this song. Thank you, Melissa.
In January 1990, we played a Music Makers show in Lee Hall Auditorium with the mighty Cafe Des Moines and a semi-national act called the Gunbunnies. We played first. The electric, gushing reaction that “U.V.A.” got is a moment I will never, ever forget no matter how long I live. It was absolutely mind-blowing.
In February 1990, a gal called me and asked if she could get a copy of the song to give her boyfriend for Valentine's Day. I delivered a tape to her at Rice Hall that night. She tried to pay me; I declined. How could anyone even accept payment for something like that? How is it remotely possible I could have written something that someone liked enough to give to another person as a gift?
Also in February of that year, we recorded six more songs — “When I Grown Down,” “Paging Dr. Mengele,” “Amy as a Stimulant,” “Prime Mover,” “Something Completely Different,” and “Bowhead” — that ultimately comprised the Rage EP. We sold and gave away lots and lots of copies of this cassette (and also sent many to record labels and radio stations), and it’s always super cool to hear from people who had a copy that melted in their hot car, or that their brother borrowed and never gave back, or that what they had was a fifth-generation duped copy, et al. (For what it’s worth, I and some other people I know still have a handful of cellophane-sealed Rage cassettes.) Here’s where I want to share a few of the things that have happened around or as a result of "U.V.A.," including some of the stories I’ve heard from folks about their experiences with this song.
• I moved back to Starkville at the very beginning of 1996 and hadn’t thought about “U.V.A.” in years when, lo and behold, a fellow English Department TA somehow figured out I was the guy who wrote it, and he fanboyed HARD at me. It was surreal, and it set in motion a small series of events that put me in touch with the amazing folks at MSU’s recently revived radio station, WMSV, some of whom knew the song from back in the day: Scott Wilson, David McCarty, Suehyla El-Attar, and more. They were instrumental in getting not only “U.V.A.” on the air again but also other S.Crew songs along with material I’d written in the intervening years, and you can draw a straight line from their kind interest to the fact that I’ve had something like a music career ever since, including all my many solo gigs, the Persians and our album (which contains a then-newly recorded version of “U.V.A.”), the Tuffskinz, the Bold O’Donaghues, and, in some ways, my own kids’ esteemed presences in the Starkville music scene. To all you WMSV folks, I could never thank you enough.
• In the late 90s, my brother-in-law was fishing with a friend of his when the friend started fretting about a girl he really liked and said to my brother-in-law, “She’s a real UVA.” My brother-in-law stared at him slack-jawed and said, “What did you say?” The friend got all insider-y and was like “Oh, that’s an old Starkville thing, you wouldn’t know anything about it,” etc. My brother-in-law — whom I’ve known for nearly the song’s entire existence — pointed at the Ford Explorer they were using to tow the boat and said, “You see that Explorer we drove here today? That belongs to my brother-in-law. He wrote ‘U.V.A.’” The friend damn near fell out of the boat.
• Around 2000, I got an email from someone who had recently been at a wedding reception in Jackson where a guy pulled out an acoustic guitar and started playing “U.V.A.” The emailer said there were maybe 150 reception attendees singing the song in unison and that it was the best part of the entire night.
• When we moved into our current Starkville home in 2002, I quickly became friends with the guy next door. As we got to know each other, I learned he had been a Starkville High kid back in the Skeleton Crew days and that he loved "U.V.A.," and he learned that I had written it. To this day, he’ll still sometimes, in the middle of a conversation about something else, say, “Dude, I can’t believe you’re the guy who wrote ‘U.V.A.’”
• When my band the Persians played at Hal and Mal’s once in 2003-2004, we did “U.V.A.,” after which two gals approached me and wanted to know whose song that was. I told them it was ours, and they said, “Right, but who wrote it?” I said I did, and they went, “No, seriously, who wrote it?” We played this musical Who’s on First? for 30 seconds before they rolled their eyes and walked off.
• Ever since I put “U.V.A.” on YouTube, I regularly get messages from people who say, e.g, “Damn i cant believe i found this. I was in 9th grade in Vicksburg, MS when this came out” and “Such a great song! Brings back memories of the Dark Horse woop woop.” Another YouTube user gushed about the song and asked if I had the chords written out so they could learn it, so I made a file allowing them to do just that. I wish I possessed the language to describe what all this feels like.
Two other points about this song:
1. I snuck in two literary references: (a) I based the lines “To my thoughts are you like food to life / Like rainwater, spring, autumn, sweet sunlight” on the title and first two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 75, which are, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life, / Or as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground”; (b) I adapted the phrase “All my pretty honeyed lines of rhyme” from canto I, stanza III of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay, / Nor florid prose, not honey'd lies of rhyme.” Hashtag English major for life.
2. The hook in the song’s main riff — the notes G-F#-E-F#-G played within the D chord — sound an awful lot like the main riff hook in the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” although their song is in the capo-ed key of A and mine is in the non-capo-ed key of G (I used to play it tuned down half a step, so the old recording is in G-flat / F#). As I said before, I wrote “U.V.A.” on February 24, 1989; the Indigo Girls’ debut album was released on February 28, 1989. I’ve been unable to find when the “Closer to Fine” video debuted on MTV, which would have been the only logical way I would have heard the song before the album appeared (I’ve never owned that album or even that song). So, yes, it’s technically possible I heard “Closer to Fine” before I wrote “U.V.A.” and was unintentionally influenced by it during the writing process, but I seriously doubt it, and I certainly didn’t copy it on purpose. (It’s a good song too, BTW.)
I’ll conclude by thanking everyone who has ever been moved by and shared “U.V.A.” along with anyone who’s ever reached out to share their experiences and say what the song means to them. I owe you all a debt I can never repay.
I’m not sure it ever occurred to me to try and write a song until I got to high school, but, boy, once it did and I tried, I could…not…do it. After a year in college and in Skeleton Crew, I eventually wrote a couple of instrumentals but nothing with lyrics.
Then I saw someone in a class (hi there, Allen Hall) who, shall we say, piqued my interest. I didn’t immediately associate this interest with songwriting, though, of course, this is what ultimately happened.
On February 24, 1989, while living in Chadwick Place apartments on Lee Boulevard, I sat down to play guitar. I strummed around a little bit but didn’t feel like playing any of the stuff I usually played, which, at the time, was a lot of Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg (at least on acoustic). And then something happened that (a) had never happened before, and (b) became the template for many, many other songs I’ve written since. I looked at my left hand on the guitar neck, paused, and began playing. I know it sounds cheesy to say I was opening myself to the universe to see what it would let in, but that’s honestly close to the truth (and it’s certainly no coincidence that, as an English major, I was consuming a ton of Wordsworth and Coleridge at this point in my life). What it let in, and what came out of me, was the riff for “U.V.A.” I knew instantly it was a keeper, so I kept playing it and decided to start singing, and what the universe let in / what came out of me was the words to “U.V.A.”
It took about two hours, and then it was done, in something very close to the version that has existed ever since. I still have the original notebook with the original handwritten lyrics.
At the time, Skeleton Crew played covers by Metallica, the Misfits, Mötley Crüe, The Cult, and others (can’t recall if we’d discovered Jane’s Addiction yet) along with two instrumentals: my “Something Completely Different” and Craig’s “Prime Mover.” “U.V.A.,” of course, sounded nothing like any of this, so I wasn’t sure how this new song would fare as an S.Crew original. Neither were Tim and Craig, who listened quietly when I played them the cassette (as we drove around Starkville). When the track was done, I remember silence, some eventual comments like “Cool, man,” and a general sentiment of “How are we gonna make this work?” Over the next few months, we collaborated on an arrangement, and it was during this time that Tim and Craig came up with their iconic drum and bass parts.
I must pause here and ensure that anyone who reads this absorbs a simple, adamantine truth: Tim’s opening drum fill and Craig’s impossibly melodic bass line are THE elements that really make this song what it is. I love the germ of “U.V.A.” and what I wrote, but it would be borderline meaningless without the incredible things Tim and Craig created. Their playing elevated “U.V.A.” beyond a demo containing a bunch of lovesick strumming and wordplay — they made it a real song. Thanks forever and ever, you two.
Anyway, I don’t remember how much we played the song live for most of 1989, though I vaguely recall a frat gig that summer being the first time we actually performed it in front of people. But it was that fall when things really took off.
Like most late-20th-century Starkville bands, Skeleton Crew used to rent practice spaces at the storage units on Industrial Park Road (Scarborough Heights!). One night in October-November 1989, we invited some friends out to hear us practice (hard to get a local gig back then if you weren’t a human jukebox, which we weren’t). Little did we know that the radio station WKOR was renting the space just next to us where they kept their big boombox for live spots, and a few of them just happened to be there while we were playing this new-ish song of ours. A gal named Melissa came up to us right after we finished the song (I mean, like, within seconds) and said she loved it and thought she could get it on the air. We played it live the next day for her and the station manager, and he said he’d play it if we could get a decent recording. So, we soon recorded the version that wound up on the Rage EP at Mitchell Studios on Highway 25 (where we also recorded the rest of the EP). As I recall, WKOR played it for the first time ever on Thanksgiving 1989, and over the next few days, the song received significant airplay, driven by call-in requests. I distinctly remember a friend of ours saying she’d called in to request it and the DJ sort-of exasperatedly saying “Look, we’ve already played it, like, three times today…”
I also distinctly remember a gig at the Gag House (if you know, you know) in December of that year where we performed it for the first time since we’d gotten airplay. The Gag House shows tended to attract lots and lots of people (we had no Dave’s Dark Horse Tavern or anything even close to it back then, kiddos), though I’m not sure how well-attended this show was because the date was inching up close to the Xmas holidays. However, in my (possibly flawed) memory, there were a ton of folks there. And these folks were dismayed, to say the least, when we opened the evening with a cover of the song “Flower” by this band we’d just discovered called Soundgarden. Eventually, we played “U.V.A., and the place levitated a little.
I don't know where Melissa from WKOR is now, but it's no exaggeration to say that, without her zeal and advocacy, very few people would know about or even have heard this song. Thank you, Melissa.
In January 1990, we played a Music Makers show in Lee Hall Auditorium with the mighty Cafe Des Moines and a semi-national act called the Gunbunnies. We played first. The electric, gushing reaction that “U.V.A.” got is a moment I will never, ever forget no matter how long I live. It was absolutely mind-blowing.
In February 1990, a gal called me and asked if she could get a copy of the song to give her boyfriend for Valentine's Day. I delivered a tape to her at Rice Hall that night. She tried to pay me; I declined. How could anyone even accept payment for something like that? How is it remotely possible I could have written something that someone liked enough to give to another person as a gift?
Also in February of that year, we recorded six more songs — “When I Grown Down,” “Paging Dr. Mengele,” “Amy as a Stimulant,” “Prime Mover,” “Something Completely Different,” and “Bowhead” — that ultimately comprised the Rage EP. We sold and gave away lots and lots of copies of this cassette (and also sent many to record labels and radio stations), and it’s always super cool to hear from people who had a copy that melted in their hot car, or that their brother borrowed and never gave back, or that what they had was a fifth-generation duped copy, et al. (For what it’s worth, I and some other people I know still have a handful of cellophane-sealed Rage cassettes.) Here’s where I want to share a few of the things that have happened around or as a result of "U.V.A.," including some of the stories I’ve heard from folks about their experiences with this song.
• I moved back to Starkville at the very beginning of 1996 and hadn’t thought about “U.V.A.” in years when, lo and behold, a fellow English Department TA somehow figured out I was the guy who wrote it, and he fanboyed HARD at me. It was surreal, and it set in motion a small series of events that put me in touch with the amazing folks at MSU’s recently revived radio station, WMSV, some of whom knew the song from back in the day: Scott Wilson, David McCarty, Suehyla El-Attar, and more. They were instrumental in getting not only “U.V.A.” on the air again but also other S.Crew songs along with material I’d written in the intervening years, and you can draw a straight line from their kind interest to the fact that I’ve had something like a music career ever since, including all my many solo gigs, the Persians and our album (which contains a then-newly recorded version of “U.V.A.”), the Tuffskinz, the Bold O’Donaghues, and, in some ways, my own kids’ esteemed presences in the Starkville music scene. To all you WMSV folks, I could never thank you enough.
• In the late 90s, my brother-in-law was fishing with a friend of his when the friend started fretting about a girl he really liked and said to my brother-in-law, “She’s a real UVA.” My brother-in-law stared at him slack-jawed and said, “What did you say?” The friend got all insider-y and was like “Oh, that’s an old Starkville thing, you wouldn’t know anything about it,” etc. My brother-in-law — whom I’ve known for nearly the song’s entire existence — pointed at the Ford Explorer they were using to tow the boat and said, “You see that Explorer we drove here today? That belongs to my brother-in-law. He wrote ‘U.V.A.’” The friend damn near fell out of the boat.
• Around 2000, I got an email from someone who had recently been at a wedding reception in Jackson where a guy pulled out an acoustic guitar and started playing “U.V.A.” The emailer said there were maybe 150 reception attendees singing the song in unison and that it was the best part of the entire night.
• When we moved into our current Starkville home in 2002, I quickly became friends with the guy next door. As we got to know each other, I learned he had been a Starkville High kid back in the Skeleton Crew days and that he loved "U.V.A.," and he learned that I had written it. To this day, he’ll still sometimes, in the middle of a conversation about something else, say, “Dude, I can’t believe you’re the guy who wrote ‘U.V.A.’”
• When my band the Persians played at Hal and Mal’s once in 2003-2004, we did “U.V.A.,” after which two gals approached me and wanted to know whose song that was. I told them it was ours, and they said, “Right, but who wrote it?” I said I did, and they went, “No, seriously, who wrote it?” We played this musical Who’s on First? for 30 seconds before they rolled their eyes and walked off.
• Ever since I put “U.V.A.” on YouTube, I regularly get messages from people who say, e.g, “Damn i cant believe i found this. I was in 9th grade in Vicksburg, MS when this came out” and “Such a great song! Brings back memories of the Dark Horse woop woop.” Another YouTube user gushed about the song and asked if I had the chords written out so they could learn it, so I made a file allowing them to do just that. I wish I possessed the language to describe what all this feels like.
Two other points about this song:
1. I snuck in two literary references: (a) I based the lines “To my thoughts are you like food to life / Like rainwater, spring, autumn, sweet sunlight” on the title and first two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 75, which are, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life, / Or as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground”; (b) I adapted the phrase “All my pretty honeyed lines of rhyme” from canto I, stanza III of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay, / Nor florid prose, not honey'd lies of rhyme.” Hashtag English major for life.
2. The hook in the song’s main riff — the notes G-F#-E-F#-G played within the D chord — sound an awful lot like the main riff hook in the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” although their song is in the capo-ed key of A and mine is in the non-capo-ed key of G (I used to play it tuned down half a step, so the old recording is in G-flat / F#). As I said before, I wrote “U.V.A.” on February 24, 1989; the Indigo Girls’ debut album was released on February 28, 1989. I’ve been unable to find when the “Closer to Fine” video debuted on MTV, which would have been the only logical way I would have heard the song before the album appeared (I’ve never owned that album or even that song). So, yes, it’s technically possible I heard “Closer to Fine” before I wrote “U.V.A.” and was unintentionally influenced by it during the writing process, but I seriously doubt it, and I certainly didn’t copy it on purpose. (It’s a good song too, BTW.)
I’ll conclude by thanking everyone who has ever been moved by and shared “U.V.A.” along with anyone who’s ever reached out to share their experiences and say what the song means to them. I owe you all a debt I can never repay.