Last night, I was up late with the dog and the storm. As I was surfing around the Internet, I came across a brilliant video of Irish band Hothouse Flowers on Letterman circa 1990:

The performance is just wonderful. It’s bare knuckled rock n roll with just enough northern soul to give it a cultured edge. And they blew the roof off the joint.

It’s earnest and loud and fun all at the same time. I could watch it over and over again.

Plus there’s a saxophone solo. And an organ solo. And a piano solo. And the singer’s voice cracks just perfectly as he belts out the final few notes.

They just don’t do rock n roll like that anymore. It’s a wall of instruments blasting at you. You can see the band getting more and more excited as the track goes on. “Forget the pretense, let’s just play, and play really f___ing loud,” I can imagine them saying. “Because we aren’t bloody U2, we’re aren’t Van bloody Morrison. Because we’re Hothouse F___ing Flowers. Because we’re an Irish rock n roll band. And we’re on television in America, in the city our grandfathers built, across the sea, 4,000 miles from home.”

It’s seriously brilliant. Watch it. And then watch it again.

Also last night, I discovered that the entire episode of Letterman is on YouTube.

This was back when Letterman was raw, crude and relentlessly hilarious. The episode itself is a time capsule. The top ten list is about the reunification of Germany:

Michael J. Fox is so, so young. Back to the Future III had just come out. He was so charming, so at ease. You can see why he was famous just by the way he sat in the chair. He talks about being a new dad, about the farm in New England he owns with his wife (Tracy Pollan, Ellen from Family Ties) and how she’s a vegetarian.

David Brenner then comes out and does his “have you ever noticed” shtick, the kind he did nearly weekly on Carson. It’s a stand up act with the host as the setup guy, only they’re both sitting down. He also talks about how he was just in China — back when that was something notable — and how it was a land of bicycles. Bicycles everywhere. How quickly things change.

Letterman then introduces Hothouse Flowers with their album on vinyl, the lads come out and blow the doors off Rockefeller Center, Dave says goodnight, roll credits.

It was a perfect old school NBC-era Letterman episode. A classic.

But wait, there’s more.

When Michael J. Fox was talking about how he wasn’t going to do anymore Back to the Futures, I realized: I watched this episode when it first aired. I remember him saying that. It was the summer of 1990. The summer after my dad died. The last summer before high school. The first summer I stayed up all night and realized that there’s light in the sky at four in the morning. The summer after everything changed and the summer before it all changed again.

I remember that summer. It was MASH at 10, Cheers at 10:35, Carson at 11:05, Letterman at 12:05.

I remembered the Fox interview. I remembered the Hothouse Flowers performance. It all came rushing back to me in a heap last night as the thunderstorm raged outside my window. I remember watching it with that feeling in my gut that only music can give you. That undeniable perfect wave of “holy sh_t everything is going to be okay.”

And that’s why the performance has stuck with me for 25 years. That’s why I couldn’t stop watching it last night. Over and over again. That’s why even right now at this moment as it’s playing in the background I have a lump in my throat.

“And Mary’s in the alley she never stops smiling…”

But wait, there’s more:

It was also during the Fox interview when I noticed the episode’s original air date:

July 18, 1990.

Exactly 25 years ago TODAY.

Today.

And so there I was. Up in the middle of the night on my laptop during a thunderstorm. Watching a decades old talk show, simultaneously fighting back tears and howling with laughter. Only to realize that this episode had a deep impact on me when I was 14. And then further realize that there I was, 25 years later TO THE DAY, randomly watching it on a laptop at my kitchen table at three o’clock in the morning.

It was serendipity at its best.