There was a time when I marked every summer with a baseball-centric trip with my friend Colin. In our fearless, energized youth, we would load up a vehicle with modest provisions and embark on cross-country journeys built around stops in cities that could boast a major league baseball team: Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, Toronto, and, to help properly date the era of these trips, Montreal. Through all this dedicated journeying, we only made a point of getting to one city that had no home team to root, root, root for. That city was Austin, Texas.

When a city commanded our attention for longer than nine innings, we had fairly simple needs from it: beer, decent food, pinball. Austin had all these in abundance. It was a happy bonus if the city could also boast noteworthy record store, another count on which the City of the Violet Crown delivered. I’m not sure how we found Waterloo Records–maybe through the local alternative weekly, maybe by asking around, maybe it was listed in one of the many articles about the swelling coolness of Austin that filled the hipper magazines those days–but when we walked through the doors we knew we had found a new happy home that would inflict damage on our meager wallets.

I don’t often remember the timing and location of my various music purchases, but I know what I got there. I procured a copy of Wire’s Pink Flag, which I had been looking for to no avail in Madison for months. I got a copy of Lou Reed’s New Sensations. It was an import (I’m not sure if the album has ever been released on CD domestically), but it was very affordably priced. This was music that I already knew plenty about, that I’d been looking for. The third CD I got was a complete surprise. Buried deep within the compilations section was an album entitled I’m In Love…..With That Song! The explanation across the album’s Hootenanny-inspired cover couldn’t be more clear: “23 Australian band pay tribute to the genius of the Replacements.”

I’d love to report that the disc is a treasured part of my collection, a batch of covers that proves revelatory in their artful transformations of beloved (by me) songs. In truth, it’s merely okay. It’s a bunch of proudly raucous, willfully sloppy versions of songs that were proudly raucous and willfully sloppy in the first place. The old records still play, making this fairly redundant. One of the few bands that actually tries something different is Half Miler. It surely doesn’t hurt that they’re working with one of the best songs Paul Westerberg ever penned.

Half Miler, “Here Comes a Regular”

(Disclaimer: While Amazon tells me this CD is supposedly worth a whole bunch of pretty pennies, it also tells me that it’s completely out of print. Since I also don’t see any Half Miler obscurities comps rocketing to the top of anyone’s sales charts, I’m posting this song her with the understanding that it’s completely unavailable through any method that will put money in the bank accounts of either the performers or the songwriter. If anyone with due authority to do so asks me to remove it, I will comply without a fuss.)