Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

I’ve been thinking lately about how 1994 was thirty years ago. It doesn’t really matter that it was thirty years ago – as opposed to, say, seventeen or forty-three – but it’s the fact of saying “thirty years ago” that makes it troubling, I think. 1994 constituted the latter half of my sophomore year of college and the first half of my junior year. I turned 20 that summer, had a job at veterinary clinic, and still lived at home with my divorced mom. The internet wasn’t a thing yet. Beepers were common, but cell phones were not. We still had malls with food courts and record stores, as well as a handful of independent bookstores around town. My social life consisted of playing acoustic guitars with a few friends in the outdoor amphitheater of the local museum, eating a lot of cheap food at Waffle House, and sometimes playing pool at the bowling alley. There aren’t many pictures of us from back then, because film cost money.

Being in college at the time, I can say that 1994 was a good year for the wildly varied non-genre of “college rock,” and the music coming out of the South contributed to that variety. That summer, Hootie & the Blowfish from South Carolina released their instant-classic Cracked Rearview, and a couple of similarly styled albums followed on its heels: Sister Hazel’s self-titled debut and Edwin McCain’s Honor Among Thieves. Indigo Girls were a known commodity by then, and their Swamp Ophelia came out that year. After a few years of dissonant angst from the grunge bands, having some singalong tunes was a nice change of pace. Yet, the alternative scene was going strong in North Carolina: The Connells and Superchunk put out New Boy and Foolish, respectively.  On the rockier side, there were Amorica by The Black Crowes and Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid by Collective Soul. Both of those bands were from the Atlanta area. And jam band folks got one of the all-time greats, Widespread Panic‘s Ain’t Life Grand.

Thirty years ago this month, Florida native Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album was also released, as was the film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, which was set in New Orleans. Wildflowers was one of Petty’s best albums and marked a departure from his ’80s sound in songs like “You Got Lucky.” As for the film, a lot of people I knew had been reading the Lestat books and were excited about the film. Living only a few hours away, most of us had been to New Orleans at least once by then and had a feel for the city and its creepy vibes. 

1994 was also the year of a racial controversy in Wedowee, in eastern Alabama, that made national news. The 1980s and ’90s were an awkward time for racial issues in Southern schools, since many of the required integration plans had had real effects by then. We were truly all in it together at that point. I can remember our local public junior high and high schools having separate homecoming and prom courts, white and black, because whichever group constituted a school’s numerical minority didn’t stand a chance of placing one of their own in the court. Though it probably seems like another form of segregation today, it was seen back then as a progressive move toward achieving equality. Up in Wedowee in 1994, the high school’s leader declared that there should be no interracial couples attending the dance, which received a “What about me?” from one biracial student. His response was to say that he was trying to prevent a “mistake” like her from happening. The situation was picked up by national media, and for a while, those involved became household names. 

Despite that ugly situation, I think back fondly on the mid-1990s. Not just because those were my college years, but because I remember it as a time of hope, generally, since some factors pointed to a good future. Thinking about the Wedowee situation, it sucked that that was happening, but our generation recognized that it was shameful and wrong. Further out, we liked the guys in the White House: Bill Clinton, a Southerner, and Al Gore, another Southerner. New inventions, like mobile phones and computers, were making life easier but hadn’t taken over our lives. People weren’t drowning in social media and walking into phone poles yet. Culturally, the Old South was almost gone, the Sunbelt South had peaked, and the South of the twenty-first century hadn’t emerged. In Alabama, a period of bipartisan government, party switching, and economic development had marked the 1970s, ’80s, and 90s, then we elected our last Democratic governor in 1999. The controversial Bush-Gore election was still a ways off, the hyper-partisan 2000s weren’t on our radar, and the Red Wave of 2010 was unimaginable. For a moment, in the mid-1990s, it seemed to a bunch of GenXers just entering our 20s that the old problems might get resolved and that they wouldn’t be replaced by new (sometimes worse) ones . . . Boy, were we mistaken.