Dreams of McBean

...the fuck?

I wake up at 3AM from dreams of hanging out with Stephen McBean, of Black Mountain, Pink Mountaintops, Jerk with a Bomb, etc. There are a couple of other people there -- a bunch of us are sleeping in the same room; I'm crashing there on a narrow couch, in preparation for something that everyone is going to do the next day -- and the bearded, personable McBean and I are chatting about various things, only two items of which do I remember. Though I have not personally met the man, I did a brief phone interview with him a few months ago, about his early days on the Victoria punk scene and his job, alongside Brian Goble of the Subhumans, with the Portland Hotel Society. During that interview he mentioned - for real! - that he had Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA on, or at least near, his turntable. And I meant to follow that up with him, but I didn't - because people need to justify listening to Bruce, you know? So in the dream, I do ("What was with the Born in the USA thing?") and McBean admits that yeah, "usually the man kills the music" (ie, overpowering it, dominating it, etc). Then he tells me - this is the second thing I remember - that he has his entire record collection listed online at www.asyouvereceived.com - which, I have checked on waking, is not a functional URL, tho' it's a great domain name if anyone wants to get on it. A Yahoo search for "Stephen McBean's record collection" is also fruitless. At about this point, some motherly type comes in and starts helping make the beds, which are at weird angles to each other. Mine is so skinny I worry that I'm going to fall off.

Then I wake up.