September Gurls

As anyone who knows me can attest, I have had only two Big Ideas in my life. The first involves me trying to manufacture a line of college-themed barbecue grills, named after our country's great universities, and intended for tailgating on Saturday afternoons during football season. My introductory model will be a little burnt orange number honoring the University of Texas, named "Cook 'Em Horns." Once enough buzz about this little grill spreads, the idea is that I will roll out successive models for other schools, with the next model being a blue and yellow grill called "Tailcook Scandal," which honors the U.S. Naval Academy. (The word "hook" really opens a lot of doors for me, because I just replace it with "cook.")

Anyway, my second Big Idea involves a particular Halloween costume. For years, I have thought that a good costume would be the anthropomorphic paperclip that randomly pops up in older versions of Microsoft Word, complete with big sleepy eyes and gigantic white gloves and shoes. And no matter what anyone at a Halloween party says to you, the idea is that you just respond, "It looks like you're writing a letter!" While people would invariably tell you to get lost, you and I would both know that they were hatin' only because they were mad jealous.

What does any of this have to do with music? Well, um, not much. But both football season and Halloween happen in the fall, which includes the month of September. And one of my favorite songs is Big Star's "September Gurls" (off of 1974's Radio City), which was later covered by The Bangles on their 1986 album Different Light.

Here is the original version:



And here is a live version by Susanna Hoffs (in her distinctive Susanna Hoffs voice), even though it was Michael Steele who recorded the song for The Bangles: