Being 56 and retired, out of all the music videos I have ever seen through the years, I can't think of any other that evokes so many memories within myself than this one.  Watching it last night brought all of them back.

I remember when living in Springfield, IL to attend junior college, how much I hated this video when it would come on MTV back in 1986.  This was before I paid attention to the lyrics and the gritty, visual, and accurate portrayal of people trying to make it big in an urban setting.  Then, when I caught on to the brilliance of this song, what it evoked, the rest of the album soon followed, with me soon falling in love with it.

Then, while in military advanced training in Alabama in 1990, in a PX store, I came across Bedtime Stories.  Being alone and away from family and friends, that album also spoke to me.  Sirens in the City was like a sequel to Welcome to the Boomtown.  Hello, Mary was a song we all thought of when wanting to reach out to that unrequited love we ached for so badly.  It was like this album was made and released just for me and at this particular time in my life.

Then, by chance, in early 1993, while out of the army, back in my home state, unemployed and while perusing through the CDs at Best Buy, I saw a CD with a photograph of blood-stained hands hovering above a US Flag with David Baerwald's name on the CD and could not believe my good fortune.  Being a subscriber to all sorts of music periodicals like Rolling Stone, Spin, and other entertainment magazines, none of them had written about an upcoming Baerwald release and here one was!   I got the CD home and heard Secret Silken World and fell in love with it on its first hearing, excited that now with Welcome to the Boomtown and Sirens in the City, there was a trilogy of gritty urban tales of the downtrodden trying to exist in the city.  And the other songs - Born For Love, The Postman - that just floored and spoke to me and how I played songs over and over again.

Later, after being hired by a police department and maybe in 1995 or 1996, when home emailing was just starting and soon with all sorts of "Bulletin Boards" surfacing, I found this one site that listed videos that were rumored to exist of particular songs.  It mentioned besides Welcome to the Boomtown, two, three, or four other videos by David & David/David Baerwald were available for purchase to be played in nightclubs and bars.  Hunting these down was like a murky deep dive into a yet emerging electronic labyrinth.

Then, along the way, this site was located.  I wish I could remember how I even found it back then because, of course, Google did not exist.  But, man, I wish others could experience the excitement I had of the initial discovery of the DBIS in the infancy of the "modern" internet.  Fuck, man, this meant there were other fans out there of this wonderful music and talent. 

Not only that, later, the person we all admire so much even started participating in this site, and soon, we learned of not only other morsels of his music out there but were promised a special two-CD collection of his music we would be able to purchase. 

When that came in the mail, that home-made cardboard sleeve, stamped with its own number, I parked myself on the couch and listened to the CDs with a Discman while reading through the lyrics and liner notes. 

And I mention all of this because while watching that video, ALL of these memories and thoughts come back to me.  Seeing and hearing the music in this video is like examining all of the memories held between a pair of bookends. One bookend remains in 1986 while the other is in the present, with the remarkable thing being while the 1986 bookend will remain stationary, the bookend of the present will continue to expand so long as I live. 

Best wishes to all......