Travel Music 2: Drunk in a crowded house, 1987.

Perugia, Italy, 1987.

I'd spent ten days in the Italian hill towns, using a patchwork system of buses and trains to visit Florence, Siena, San Gimignano and Perugia. The chosen domicile in Perugia was a youth hostel affiliated somehow with a religious order, which didn't frighten me because it was quite cheap.

There I met a fun group of American college-aged travelers (I was a bit older at almost 27), and in the joyous way things worked, for a few days we split off in ever-changing small groups to explore the vicinity. One of them, a fellow whose name I've forgotten (Josh?), accompanied me on a bus ride to Assisi; he was an Ivy League history major, but I managed to hold my own in a discussion of the beginnings of World War I. See, the IU Southeast education was fine, after all.

Josh also had been in Italy for a few weeks, and was in the process of mastering the art of cafe-lounging and girl-watching with aperitifs. I couldn't afford many, but it was much fun.

One night all of us convened in the hostel's kitchen and cooked up a massive meal of pasta, vegetables and fruit. There was wine, which led to song, in turn bringing the night staff to quiet our exuberance. At some point very late, I crawled to my bunk bed, made it to the top -- I weighed 200 lbs then, not 260 -- and donned the miniature/a> radio earphones to make the rounds of the Perugia AM dial.

The first song I heard was Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over," and although there was something familiar about it (Neil Finn's residency in Split Enz, to be exact), I couldn't place the connection. It wasn't until I got back home in the fall of 1987 that I made a positive identification.

By then, I was planning the next trip.