the Bends is as much about the album as it is about that time of my life

I know exactly what you mean.

My radiohead experience is all jacked up and backwards. Aside from hearing Creep on the radio years before - The first song I heard... or I should say video I saw - was late one night at a friend's house on MTV (remember when they did that? like actually showed music videos?). Anyway - I remember it was just kind of on in the background. And the video sort of pulled me in. and the conversation just trailed off. who is this weird looking dude sitting in this car... and why is the camera panning around like this? I only caught the last part of the song/video, but I was completely hooked. I watched for a couple more hours hoping they would play it again. I went over the next night about the same time hoping it would be on again.

---Did you catch that all of you people born after 1995? We couldn't just pull up shazam or youtube and rewatch something... we had to sit up all night and hope that it would come on the radio or MTV again.---

anyhow - it did come on that night - and I was hooked big time. Bought OK Computer. a year or so later my friend was listening to the bends in his car. I had to have it. Next stop was Pablo Honey. BOOM. The guitar was so crunchy and delicious I could almost taste it. Over the next few years it was about buying every bootleg and live CD I could find. Then I realized sometimes their live shows are amazing and sometimes they had been drinking and the shows (and recordings) sucked. So I backed off for a while on the bootlegs and stuck to the studio releases. I buy them on vinyl now. Vinyl + Digital download might be the single greatest accomplishment of mankind in this century so far.

I got a fever. and the only cure, is more radiohead. And at this point - honestly, I just don't have enough time to listen to it all. Thom and Johnny have both cranked out enough solo stuff to swim in for hours.