‘It’s Bittersweet . . .’

 by whiteray

A little more than ten years ago, I did a lengthy series of posts for a blog, assembling what I called the Ultimate Jukebox, the jukebox I would have in my place if that place were part malt shop, part crash pad, part juke joint and part heaven. 

The list of recordings – all of which could fit on a 45 rpm – totaled 228 tracks. Over a couple of years, I added twelve records that belonged in that mythical jukebox but that I had overlooked for one reason or another, bringing the UJ up to a nice round 240 tracks. 

The bulk of the tunes came from, as anyone who’s read any of my stuff might expect, the 1960s and 1970s, the decades in which I grew up and fell into young adulthood. What interests me this morning – not having looked much at the UJ spreadsheet in the past few years – are the sixteen records I chose from the 1990s. It was not one of my better decades, with most of those ten years spent alone and depressed. 

Music was my medicine. As I’ve likely noted here before, for many of those years I lived within easy biking distance of the Minneapolis location of Cheapo’s, a major Twin Cities used record dealer. And Cheapo’s got a lot of my cash, as I bought about 1,500 mostly used LPs during the 1990s. (Not all of those came from Cheapo’s, as I also frequented a few other retailers and many garage and yard sales.) Well, as I’ve said before, there are worse addictions.

Those memories sometimes keep me from looking too deeply at the tunes from the 1990s that I pulled into my Ultimate Jukebox, if not the tunes from the entire decade. But it’s likely useful – and, one hopes, interesting – to pull one of those sixteen records out of the figurative box once in a while. Today, it’s “Bittersweet,” a 1993 track by Big Head Todd & The Monsters. Here’s what I wrote about it back in 2010, an assessment that I still hold: 

I imagine I first heard the long, strummed groove of “Bittersweet” on the radio, likely Cities 97, but wherever I heard it, I liked the song by Big Head Todd & the Monsters enough that – in a time when vinyl releases were rare and I had no CD player – I went out and bought the album on cassette, a format I tended to avoid. I think it was the long slow groove of the song that pulled me in, but it’s the story in the lyrics that keeps the track – which went to No. 14 on the Mainstream Rock chart – near the top of my list of favorites. Every generation finds its own versions of universal truths and tales, and “Bittersweet” is one generation’s version of the thought that even if you get what you dreamed of, you might find that it wasn’t what you really wanted. 

Here are the lyrics and, below them, the video: 

A little light looks through her bedroom window
She dances, and I dream
She's not so far as she seems
Of brighter meadows, melting sunsets
Her hair blowing in the breeze
And she can't see me watching 

I'm thinking love, love
Love, love
Love, love
Love, love 

It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender 

It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender 

I said I'm older now
I work in the city
We live together
But it's different than my dream
Morning light fills the room I rise
She pretends she's sleeping
Are we everything we wanted? 

I'm thinking love, love
Love, love
Love, love
Love, love 

It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender 

It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender 

I said I know we don't talk about it
We don't tell each other
All the little things that we need
We work our way around each other
As we tremble and we
As we tremble and we bleed
As we tremble and we
As we tremble and we bleed 

It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender 

It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender