I greatly appreciate hearing from folks on birthdays, and I suspect that my very favorite aspect of Facebook is the small cascade of good wishes that trickle in all day long. Nice to feel connected to so many good folks on the one INHERENTLY meaningful holiday!
The morning has passed very pleasantly thus far, and I look forward to commemorating the ACTUAL MOMENT of birth (@ 1:17pm, Mountain Time, in Cut Bank, MT) with the playing of my favorite single of all-time, Flipper’s immortal “Sex Bomb”, which I’ve actually performed on many occasions (with Deranged Diction originally, with the teenage Missoula Punk band Dissent in 1984, and even with Silkworm once during an encore, at that godawful Pioneer Square “fern bar”, The Fenix Underground, almost exactly 20 years ago!).
I commenced this arcane ritual for my 20th birthday, in January 1983 in my 379 Duniway Hall UM dorm room, a couple of months after acquiring Flipper’s then-recent, 5:15 in duration, 7-inch single. The idea was that I’d put my Pioneer fully-automatic turntable on continuous repeat, start about six minutes before 1:17pm, and let it play through several times, so that the LAST song I heard as a teenager would be “Sex Bomb”, and the FIRST in my twenties would be, etc.
I have not performed The Ritual during each of the past 30 birthdays, due to workplace logistics, but have done so on most of them, at 12:17pm on 31stJanuary since moving to Seattle, to allow for Pacific Standard Time! LOL
My SEX BOMB BABY Flipper compilation cd is at the ready, here at my desk, so in about 80 minutes I expect t’git busy once again!
Looking forward to tonight at Piecora’s Pizzeria….and beyond! No 50th b’day trip to Dilettante is planned at the moment, though I did take Miz Cory therefor her b’day in 2010 or 2011, if memory serves.
– Tom Kipp
P.S. In April 2004, the one time they held “Critical Karaoke” (a fiendish little game conceived by Eric Weisbard, wherein one is allowed to say anything one cares to about any song one may ever have considered “The Greatest of All-Time”, but only for the duration of said song as it plays!) at the EMP Pop Conference, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to pay homage to “Sex Bomb”, a brief performance that I had videotaped, and one that also marked the first occasion on which I publicly began to make the case for “Montana Postpunk”!
