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Music

What New York City Public Sleepers Think About Everclear

It would be easy to assume an old man with a large plastic bag containing a smaller paper Cinnabon bag sleeping in a library next to a liter of club soda would have a limited awareness of Everclear.

Man on 2nd floor of NYPL

It would be easy to assume an old man with a large plastic bag containing a smaller paper Cinnabon bag sleeping in a library next to a liter of club soda (not pictured) would have a limited awareness of Everclear. He is actually one of the most vocal supporters of the band’s Songs from an American Movie, Vol. 2: Good Time for a Bad Attitude, which he came to know via an appearance of the song “Rock Star” in the 2001 movie of the same name starring Mark Wahlberg. The man has typed over 40 paragraphs in defense of the album on a now-defunct message board. He thinks former bassist Craig Montoya is Mark Wahlberg and doesn’t associate Mark Wahlberg with Marky Mark, though he knows most of the lyrics to “Good Vibrations” by Marky Mark. He is looking forward to seeing Contraband starring Mark Wahlberg because of the poster where he has “all that money strapped to his abs. Where’s he goin’ with all that money? With money like that… Why can’t he afford a bag? Some kinda bureaucratic B.S., I bet!”

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Man in Lifethyme

Since he first heard it in 1999, parts of “I Will Buy You a New Life” have frequently become stuck in this man’s head. Unfortunately the part that loops through his head the most is before the last chorus, where Art Alexakis sings “Will you please let me stay the night” over someone else singing “No one will ever know,” which the man actually hears as one person singing “William none will let me never know.” He has been Googling this phrase and other things that could possibly sound like it for the past 45 minutes. After this nap he’ll finish his cantaloupe.

Couple on the Manhattan-bound 7 train

Since the reception following her nephew’s bris last February, this man and woman have silently enforced each other’s shared misunderstanding that Everclear could actually be former member of House of Pain, Everlast, who also had a series of radio hits in 1998. The Everclear/Everlast confusion has been low-level enough that neither the man nor woman have been offended when the other has ignored subtle cues that could lead to a potentially helpful conversation regarding the artists’ identities, changed the subject entirely, or made comments so passively supportive of the other’s idea of who the artists are that each has privately interpreted the other as “totally clueless.”

Woman on 4th floor of the NYPL

This woman’s hat was missing for about a week. A few hours ago she found another one – on the bus, of all places! She’s happy to have a hat back where it belongs. (On her head, of course.) Her head is nice and warm. Boy, is her head nice and warm.

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Foliage on 4th and Broadway

These three bushes or Christmas trees near Other Music appear if not sleeping, then extremely relaxed and on the verge of sleep, and likely identified by at least one of the three people who recently passed them as “sleeping.” Grown hundreds of feet from each other on the same farm in upstate New York, these masses of foliage have vastly differing exposures and personal histories with Everclear. Three hours ago they entered a tense conversation primarily concerning the two front trees’ escalating desire to convince the third that “Art Alexakis” isn’t a stage name, which resulted in an Other Music employee placing them a block away, outside a port-a-potty, where they are currently resting.

Two men in NYU’s Bobst Library

The man on the left has only heard Everclear’s cover of “Brown Eyed Girl” once in 2002, when he mistook it for the original Van Morrison song he had never heard except when his wife sang its chorus in the shower sometimes. A CD of World of Noise is currently under the passenger-side floor mat of the man on the right’s Dodge Stratus. His daughter dropped it there a few weeks ago and is the current highest bidder in an eBay auction for two near-mint condition cassettes of World of Noise and Sparkle and Fade ending in 23 hours. The man on the right knows all of Everclear’s radio hits and frequently tells people that Art Alexakis seems like “a really decent guy.”

Previously - Deleted Scenes from Drive