I was mapping out my trek to Governors Island for the Vendys tomorrow and thought about this and it cracked me up so I figured I’d share:

My brother Chris was — and I say this not because he was my older brother, but because I’m pretty certain it’s true — probably the smartest person I’ll ever meet. But he had completely arbitrary taste in music.

Not downright awful taste, just haphazard. He introduced me to a lot of music I still enjoy today, like the Beatles and early-period Mighty Mighty Bosstones stuff before their major-label albums, but he also unironically enjoyed some of the worst music I’ve ever heard.

Later in his life, he claimed that he didn’t hear correctly and tried to blame it on an ear infection he had as an infant, an excuse I’m pretty sure stemmed from a combination of his absurd competitive streak and the fact that my sister and I both played and performed an awful lot of music through college.

He said he didn’t understand why notes an octave apart were considered the same note, and when I explained the science behind it — double the frequency, half the length of string, etc. — he thought it interesting but maintained he couldn’t discern any similarity. Maybe he couldn’t. (I should note that he was always supportive regardless; he showed up to just about every concert my sister ever had when they both lived in Boston and bought me my first bass.)

Anyway, one evening during the summer of 1995, on one of our countless trips to Shea Stadium, he announced that he stopped at the music store during his lunch break at the makeup-case factory and found — and he was proud of this, as though he uncovered a real treasure — a Chris De Burgh greatest hits CD.

I was 14, mind you, and blissfully unaware of “Lady in Red” at the time.

Chris didn’t buy the CD because of that anthem, though. He bought it partly because he and the singer shared similar names, understandable I suppose, and mostly because he was certain that Chris De Burgh’s second-biggest hit, “Don’t Pay the Ferryman,” was a downright awesome song.

He put the CD in the discman he had Velcro’d to the dashboard — connected to the tape deck through that amazing CD-to-cassette contraption I still haven’t figured out — and cued up the tune.

“This song’s great; it’s really scary.”

It played a bit. My tastes were still developing but I was getting into punk rock by then, and though I struggled at that time to find fault in almost anything my older brother did, my sense of decency overwhelmed the hero worship, and I spoke up.

“Ahh… dude. This song, ahh… This song kinda sucks.”

“What? ‘Don’t even fix a price!‘ It’s spooky!”

“I’m sorry, I, ahh… It’s not spooky at all.”

“Well, maybe if you saw the video. It had a really cool video. There were, like, ghosts and stuff.”

I think probably in truth he was a bit chagrined, maybe indeed realized that the Chris De Burgh compilation CD was not the world’s wisest purchase, but was unwilling to demonstrate buyer’s remorse.

I never thought to look up the video in all these years of YouTube until I started searching for details on the ferry to Governors Island. To my brother’s credit, though, the video is, well, kind of awesome. It’s not really particularly scary, and the music certainly didn’t age well, but there are, inarguably, ghosts and stuff.