Del Fuegos: “I Still Want You” #SOTW

Del Fuegos: “I Still Want You” #SOTW

The Del Fuegos

This week’s song of the week is more about an event than about the song.  I’m sitting in my living room listening to The Del Fuegos LP BOSTON, MASS.  I picked it up at Reverberation Vinyl in Bloomington, IN this past winter. Despite my Boston roots, I’d never owned a Del Fuegos record. Shame on me. But I always held the band in high regard and here’s why.

As a young and impressionable metalhead, I went on a summer vacation with my family to Quebec.  By some strange chance, we stayed at the same hotel as a couple of touring bands.  The chance was especially strange because this was the olden days, when bands were accustomed to staying in posh hotels while on tour and my family was decidedly not accustomed to posh hotels.  Nonetheless, there we were and there, in the lobby, were these people I had seen on V66 (New England’s awesome version of MTV): The Del Fuegos.  Shy as I was, I declined to approach them but we ended up in the elevator together and I mumbled, “hey, uh, you guys are from Boston, yeah?”  “Yep,” they replied.  I told them “I am too,” and they responded with way more enthusiasm than I’d expected, talking hometown crap with me for the duration of our 14-storey journey.

I left the elevator not so much starstruck as struck by how very cool these guys were.  Real leather-jacket-wearing dudes in a rock band just talked to me like I was a viable person!  As an introverted teenager, this meant a ton to me then and it still affects me now.  It definitely shaped my expectation (of myself and of others) of how an artist should respond in public situations.  Damn good dudes. [I should note, also, that later I ran into headliner INXS’s frontman Michael Hutchence and he was also kind, but not in the same “rock and roll is folk music, cuz, uh, cuz it’s for folks” kind of way.]

As for the song, as I sit and listen to BOSTON, MASS in its entirety for the first time, this tune is the one that I recall most fondly from that time.  Little metalhead that I was, I was still a sucker for a sweet sentiment. Preview and buy “I Still Want You” here:

I Still Want You - Boston, Mass.