Big Medicine Head- the Icehouse, Sparks, NV - January 24, 1992

This show was the first I saw legally in a bar (see My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult). We first heard Big Medicine Head through a friend of ours, Robin, who worked with us at Western Union. Her brother was in the band and she had introduced us to their music and passed on a cassette of Rex Hotel, which was pretty neat and had a lot of Nevada references. It’s interesting to read the review on download.com – they call them a country band similar to Wilco. More than 20 years later Wilco is now one of my favorite bands, but at the time I absolutely despised anything “country.”

I vaguely remember the show. The Icehouse was a funny old bar in Sparks with a long history – I think it sold ice at some point as well as functioned as a gay bar for a while. It was pretty neat to see a band we had some kind of connection to in a small setting, rather than just seeing big stadium/ampitheatre shows like we were used to.

Probably a better story than the show itself was how I got to be friends with Robin. We both joined Western Union at the same time, in the spring of 1989. Western Union was the hot job to get in Reno when you were in college – it paid pretty well for pretty simple work, answering calls to check on money orders and sending the occasional telegram. I found out about it because my high school boyfriend kept trying to apply there and flunking the typing test. My friend Kim has also taken the test and spelled champion “campion” – thereby missing it by one word. I went in figuring I would probably do fine on the spelling but I knew my typing wasn’t that great. Turns out I got a lucky break. I aced the spelling test and was only a couple of WPM off the typing score – so the testing person decided I should at least get to take the math test before they made a decision. I guess I did pretty well on that because they offered me the job. Ironically I probably type in excess of 100 WPM now.

Cory wound up getting in too and we started the same time, with a two-week training class. We learned all kinds of stuff, telephone scripts, memorizing state abbreviations, learning how to calculate telegram costs and look things up on the stinky old green-screen systems. After our training we got to go on the floor to take real calls, and we partnered up to take our first calls together. Robin was my partner and she was listening as I took my first telegram.

I didn’t realize this at the time, but Western Union did quite a lot of traffic in bereavement messages. I don’t think I ever even heard the word bereavement until I worked there. Lucky for me, that first call was for such a telegram. The woman who was calling had a really thick, deep-south accent and I was having a lot of trouble understanding her. She must have told me at least six or seven times why she was calling, and I had no clue what she was asking for. Finally, I figured it out. A bereavement message! Oh, like you send to a funeral home. Ok…

When I got to addressing the message, I had to confirm every letter with her. We were trained to say things like “do you mean B as in boy or D as in Dog,” etc. So, I was trying to help this woman sound it out when Robin wrote on her notepad and showed me – “no, D as in Dead!” It was all I could do to keep from laughing hysterically, and Robin was laughing so hard that she had to disconnect from the call and walk out of the room.

In any case, that story and my several years at Western Union were certainly more memorable than Big Medicine Head – though I did go ahead and download that track for my iPod.