Sunday 20 April 2014 - Filed under Dreamscenes
As I watched the new set emerge from the haze at the horizon, I was struck by the beauty of these fresh rings, and of the older rings slowly passing by overhead. The wispy clouds drifting underneath them gave the scene a vast and stately depth. It was amazing to me that we had only learned that planetary rings were given off by a planet because of disturbances in the core.
Sunday 20 April 2014 - Filed under Dreamscenes
The instrument was basically a twelve-foot length of silver-gray seatbelt material that would automatically retract into its spool when released, but I was pleased to discover I could still play an excellent rendition of “Eruption” by Eddie Van Halen on it.
Tuesday 8 April 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
I first became aware of Zoë Keating by her lack of presence in Melora Creager’s thrash-cello outfit Rasputina. Don’t get me wrong: she was definitely a presence on the album Cabin Fever, which is a lovely crazy romp all over the stylistic universe, but nothing that made her stand out from the other two musicians. The reason I say “lack of presence” is because soon after starting to tour, Keating broke a finger on her fret hand, which made it impossible for her to properly play the power chords necessary for Rasputina’s catalog while it was healing. She gracefully exited the band, hinting at solo efforts to come that didn’t require barre fingerings. I was intrigued: what does one do as a solo cellist in this day and age?
Well, if one is Zoë Keating, one delves into technical solutions to make a solo cellist sound like a whole posse of cellists. She uses a laptop, software, delays, control pedals and effects to loop, sample, cudgel, tweak and coax various themes, motifs and riffs into a seamless whole. Her first album, One Cello x 16, recorded in a warehouse space in San Francisco, was an amuse bouche for the ear, five compositions that defied the “classical” pigeonhole that her instrument of choice would otherwise consign her to. I was immediately entranced. No, this wasn’t a Windham Hill sampler; this wasn’t bloodless New Age music designed without heat or light for maximum sales penetration. This was chewy chamber music with a technogeek backbone. This was the hookup.
It’s pretty obvious that I come from a background in low-end stringed instrumentation. Multitrack layered cello is right in my wheelhouse. However, before one accuses me of taking airs to beat Moses, the electric bass guitar has nothing on the cello. I’d love to learn cello, truly I would, but I’m a lazy bastard. I’d have to buy a cello, for one, and they’re not as cheap as a bass. Also, I am very happy with using the crutch of physical frets to make sure my notes ring pure. Going fretless scares me, although I’ve dipped my toe a time or two, and I’m just not that good. Add bowing, plucking, fingering, theory, sight-reading, the whole nine yards, and I’m just a dilettante with four strings, happy to thump along as best I can. But I am in love with the lower end of the scale, with the things one can do when one is not a six-stringed attention-whore married to the G-clef and easy groupies, and with the amazing spectrum of tonality and timbre one can coax from big fat meaty strings. And I love the acoustic puzzle of fitting together a myriad of modulating lines of melody and harmony. Zoë Keating was all of that and more.
“Tetrishead” comes from her second album, One Cello x 16: Natoma, an altogether more confident outing recorded in the same warehouse, that takes the concepts from her first and expands them in various directions. There’s theme and variations, there’s simple mood music, there’s snarky almost-thrash, and there’s stuff in-between. “Tetrishead” is some of the in-between. The title is pure technogeek, and if you set your mind’s eye you can see the tetrominoes of the titular game appear, spin, and set themselves in time with the basic rhythm she thumps out on muted strings. There are three or four motifs that come and go as the song progresses, hummable themes that weave in and out of the basic tempo as it repeats itself again and again. Such, of course, is the nature of looped multitrack recording, but this is a benefit, not a detraction. Chamber music, as it existed back when there were chambers to play it in, was all about the hide-and-seek of disparate parts that came and went as the suite progressed. Keating was just able to take modern technology and do it to MIDI word-clock exactness. And it’s great fun.
But the thing that elevated this particular song beyond just the fun and games of my normal interest in multitrack recording, base-level sounds and technical geekery, is by parts timing, circumstance, and just pure genius. One particular night, as I was driving north from San Marcos, Texas in order to see my beloved in Austin, I had One Cello x 16: Natoma playing in the car as a favorite commuting selection. “Tetrishead” came on, and as the distance slipped by I could feel the inexorable progression of the song find and meld with the highway hypnosis of long-distance driving. The interweave of motifs and themes became something of a fugue state, that finally became paramount about the last third of the composition, when the multiple voices gave way to a simple ostinato.
Low, low, low on the scale, a simple five-note theme emerged solo and moaned over and over again as my travel continued. My ear pegged on the progression and kept following it as layers began to build. More and more voices came into play, but below them the low cello continued its simple baseline drive. Even as the themes ran into themselves and merged into sheets of singing strings, the ostinato continued. I kept tracking it as it buried itself under more and more shimmering layers. I am prone to alphanumeric synaesthesia, and it sometimes presents in music as a spectrum of colors ranging from deep-note brown climbing through gold and brass to silver and white on the very high end. The composition became a slow-moving river of deep earth sliding its way under stacked layers of various precious metals melting through my brain. It wasn’t until the entire song had dissolved into nothing but overlapping unison notes and thumping rhythm slaps did that snaking basement dissolve. And it was with great surprise that I emerged back to myself, to find myself five miles farther down the road, and with my ears ringing with sound.
That is why, Dear Reader, “Tetrishead” is my absolute favorite track on another definite Desert Island Disc. Sometimes I listen to it just to see if I can fall back into that fugue state, and feel the movement of the earth once again.
Sunday 6 April 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
It all begins with a bassline. In this case, it’s a solo ascending scale that drops back to E, but that’s merely part of the story. The real story is the reason that bassline is included here.
In my early life I was diagnosed with many talents; as a child I would regularly draw cartoons, write novels, build masterpieces and read anything not nailed down. I was going to be a carpenter, or an astronaut, or a fireman, or an astronomer, or a cartoonist, or a writer. And, of course, such is the case with just about every single child out there, past, present or future. Everyone has a budding genius for a son or daughter, and I was no exception. I only mention this to note that at no time was any musical talent discerned or encouraged in this list. If not tone deaf, I was definitely tone dumb, and I betrayed only the bare minimum of any rhythmic sense. Music was just not something I did. Of course, I wouldn’t be here writing these essays if I was tone deaf. On the contrary, since I couldn’t carry a tune I could at least carry a jambox to provide myself with the musical stimulation I craved. And, again, such a thing is not unusual. What is different is how this musical stimulation managed to beget a late-blooming talent at the end of my first college career.
May of 1992. It was a… difficult period. The long-distance relationship I’d nurtured for two years had finally succumbed to time and distance and collapsed into acrimony and recriminations five months previously. A combination of idealism, shyness, intellectual hermeticism and painful self-consciousness has always made my love affairs fraught with difficulty, and these tendencies were only reinforced by my pledge to save myself for a distant consummation. It might have been a little easier to deal with if I hadn’t stumbled onto a perfect subject for unrequited infatuation and obsession almost the same week my earlier girlfriend had finally dumped me — and at a wedding, no less. She’d been in my Economics class, she’d been idiosyncratically attractive. Our eyes had met during the service, and I was surprised to see her smile. During the reception she had come up to me and we’d spoken like long-lost siblings, even though we’d never really talked before. Could the omens have spoken any clearer?
But this particular youthful Sybil hadn’t gotten the message. For the next semester she flickered hither and thither through my life, disappearing then reappearing, to the point where I began to believe she was nothing more than a quantum sprite of my imagination. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what her intentions had been in seeking me out. Even correcting for my obvious hyperbolic tendencies, there still remains a sense of flight-and-return, of yea and then nay, and of a completely heedless manipulation of a confused soul. Did she mean any of it deliberately? I have done enough clueless things in my time to believe that she had nothing but the inadvertent cruelty of oblivious youth behind her actions. It didn’t make it hurt any less.
So… I was groping for solace and something to turn my mind to that didn’t involve other people and their mendacious behavior. Something that might yield to application and practice, and bring a sense of accomplishment and achievement over time. It was time for me to learn the bass guitar.
Yes, there was logic behind my decision. Back in high school, it was my habit to take long walks with the family dog with my Walkman tape player for company. I had a huge collection of copied tapes, and an arsenal of NiCd batteries that rotated in and out of the recharger to keep things playing smoothly. It came to me one late evening, as I was walking up a steep hill near my parent’s house on the way back from our walk, that what I was humming along with was not the guitar, not the keyboards, not the drums. It was the lower frequency instrument, one that I’d never really given much thought to. I was singing along with the bass. In the subsequent months this discovery bore itself out. Sometimes I would include a snippet of the main melody, sometimes I would jump to a lead break or solo progression, but mostly I was hearing and recognizing the bassline. This was a new and interesting thing to think about.
As with everyone who grew up in middle America, I knew several people who played guitar. It was pretty much a male rite of passage: save up and buy a cheap Korean Telecaster, noodle around on it until your parents got mad, leave it in the garage to collect dust, forget about it after college. I had never wanted to do any of that. I wasn’t a musician, I was (in high school) a cartoonist and a writer. I wanted a better computer, not a guitar. But the idea of me being a bass player… well, that was a horse of a different color. That was idiosyncratic enough that it snuck in under the radar…
Well, it was just a thought, and I really didn’t have the money, and I was busy. So it went for four or five years. I would occasionally mull the idea over momentarily, then think about something else. I would occasionally mention the idea in idle conversation, and then move on to something else. One of the things that made my long-distance girlfriend so attractive was that she played bass. I didn’t want to steal her thunder, so that was that.
Now I didn’t have a girlfriend, bass-playing or otherwise, and it was time. I gathered up my courage and headed down to where the music stores congregated, in the south part of downtown Austin. At my side was one of my friends, who was ecstatic about my decision. I was glad for his presence, in more ways than one.
I had announced my intentions a few days earlier, on a warm Friday evening while everyone in my social circle was hanging around the house that served as a dwelling for four of us and a meeting place for the rest of us. The reaction had been less than expected. In fact, it had actually been somewhat hostile. I was a little taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would have though this a bad idea, much less any of my friends. Later on, I came to a hesitant explanation, and with the intervening years I think I was pretty much correct: my foray into music was a direct threat to those people who had already staked their claims on their proficiency with a musical instrument. I was the writer of the group, what was I thinking in moving beyond my assigned role in the social order? Whether through naïvete, earnestness or cluelessness, I had never predicted any such reaction, and blundered my way through social constructs that most had thought were fixed. And, indeed, what I heard at that point in time was the first rumblings of a tectonic breakup that would move through our social circle in the coming years.
Except — and this was big — for one friend. He though it was the most awesome thing I had ever come up with. We had no bass players in the pack, why the hell not? We could even start a band! To be sure, there was some measure of vicarious living as he went with me to pick out a bass guitar — what guitarist wouldn’t like a bass in his stable as well? — but his enthusiasm was unfeigned. He went through the pros and cons of each instrument I tried, looked on protectively as the sales guys pitched their wares, noodled around with acoustic guitars when I went into practice rooms. And, finally, he grinned like a fool when I took the plunge and purchased a “’62 Blue” jazz bass knockoff.
Some words about my first bass. It was manufactured by Peavy, which is known more for their amplifiers than for their instruments, which gave me some initial skepticism about the guitar. That being said, it sounded good, and it felt right to my hands. The neck wasn’t as round as the Fender Jazz Bass it resembled, and the two banks of passive pickups were surprisingly hot. It was a little more expensive than an entry-level model, but I felt that the extra tone control the two pickups gave me would keep me from getting bored. What really sealed the deal, however, was the guy who sold me the bass. A year or so earlier, while noodling around on a guitar at a party, one of my friends had pointed out I was playing it left-handed. I was surprised, but that was how I had picked up the guitar, and that’s what felt the most natural to my hands. The other music stores had a standing $150 charge for a left-handed instrument. I asked the guy what he thought I should do. He looked at me squarely and said that I should go with what was most comfortable, because otherwise I wouldn’t practice. And then he said he could get me a lefty bass for no extra charge.
That was it. Done deal. I really wanted to play. I really wanted to learn. I didn’t want to buy it and never practice, for whatever rationalization that might occur to me. My friends’ negative reaction had inadvertently steeled my resolve: if they assumed I would fail, I would stack the deck as much as possible in the direction of success. So I handed over my Visa card and went home with a left-handed bass and a head full of determination.
I practiced a lot. I practiced a whole lot. I practiced so much that I probably drove my roommate nuts. The bulk of how I learned to play was through imitation. I would put on a CD and try to play along with it as much as possible. In the beginning it was hard, of course. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And here again, my friend showed his true stripes. He showed me how to properly finger the frets, how to properly pluck the strings. He showed me how to tune the bass to itself through harmonic resonance. He transcribed some basslines into musical notation and gave me a notebook of staff paper. He played along with me on guitar. All of this I took in and made work, all except the sight-reading. To this day I still don’t know how to read music. Some of it is because I had a bit of the contrarian bent of the self-taught musician; some of it is because I never wanted to be a session musician, required to read a notation and immediately know what to do. Some of it is because I’m not a very intellectual bass player. That last might sound funny, given my other predilections, but it’s the easiest way to describe how I play. I play through feel, through pattern, through groove. Looking at rhythm notation I am less than useless at figuring out what the various flags and crosses mean, but syncopation comes like a reflex and the soul/funk dynamic sings to me like the music of the heavens. If someone transcribed the various basslines I’ve noodled out over the last twenty years, I’d recognize none of them on the page, but play the opening bars and my fingers will twitch in sympathy. Sometimes I’ve dabbled in heavy musical theory in order to compose a progression or a chord change, but it never sticks. Only the groove and the feel, and the knowledge of what best comes next.
And you learn that by listening, long and hard, to songs that make you groove. After all this ink spilled, after all this history related, we finally come to the song. “Texarkana” is off of the REM album Out of Time, which is something of a watershed album. For many it signaled the beginning of the end, a marker than the REM that everyone grew up on was now over. For me it was more of a wake-up call — I enjoyed the album, but it also made me realize I’d probably missed out not having listened to REM. I knew they existed, I vaguely knew some of their songs, but I’d never sought them out. So I went into the back catalog, and found a lot of great music. Truth be told, Out of Time is not a very good REM album, but the last five songs are very good REM songs.
“Texarkana” is one of them, and is one of the songs that my friend transcribed for me, in order for me to learn how the timing worked on the opening bassline. That didn’t happen, but I loved the song anyway. It opens with the bass, which is an excellent start, and it’s an easily recognizable riff that is just fast enough with the hammer-ons to require a proficiency beyond beginner. There’s syncopation and a veering between following the root chords and harmonizing off of them. It’s not a hard bass line, but it’s not an easy one, either. It’s fun to listen to, it’s fun to follow, it’s fun to master. Beyond the bass work, there’s an airy feel to the vocals, a suggestion of distance being breached, a vaguely country twang to the guitar. As with most REM songs, the lure of the lyrics is the sound of them being sung, not necessarily their meaning. And the arrangement of the piece can pretty much be described as a primer in how to write a pop song.
And that’s the meat of the memory: it is a primer. “Texarkana” is a great song, one of my favorites on the album. But more than most of these Snapsongs, it is intimately entwined in memory and remembrance. It was a primer in playing, an example of songwriting, something that stretched me out of my beginning days and hooked me into the real reason one plays bass. It allowed me to bond with my new instrument over that first summer, and started an ethic of practice that led me to play in three bands and compose umpteen basslines for umpteen songs. And it was also an aural reminder of the support that I received from one of my friends, on that day that I decided to break the mold and be something no one had expected. He stood by my desire to learn bass, helped me with the purchase, tried as best he could to mentor me in my new calling. I probably could have done it without him, but I’m glad I didn’t have to try. His support in the face of hostility from the rest of my social circle was golden. Even though I never managed to read the sheet music that he wrote, it was the fact of the writing that made all the difference.
For that, and for everything else, let’s hear it for him, and for “Texarkana”.
Sunday 6 April 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
A quick snippet: senior year in high school. A milling mass crowded into a cul-de-sac of blue steel lockers, some intent on getting their books and packs for the next class, some proceeding more leisurely. Lunchtimes were staggered in my school, with the student body split between early A Lunch and later B Lunch. There was always nervous anticipation whenever new semester schedules were posted, because your assigned lunch would inadvertently choose your social scene for the next four months.
My particular passel of lunchtime cohorts that day, a fine set of young gentlemen if there ever was one, were hanging out in front of the locker set, shooting the shit and watching people pass by in the hallway. In between grab-assing, dominance jockeying and cutting up, we trying to figure out where we wanted to go to eat. Usually people voted for Sonic, the hamburger joint just across the freeway which was, in fact, one of the most profitable franchises of that brand nationwide. Taco Bell and Dairy Queen were also favorites, but some of us were becoming more adventurous. A local Chinese food place, The Golden Rice Bowl, had also seen its fortunes turn for the better when a group of us had discovered its cheap fried rice lunch specials and began spreading the word.
My memory is kinda hazy about how the term popped up — you always remember the aftermath, not the trigger event — but someone used the word “coalesce” in conversation. One of the people on the periphery, a young female friend, said, “Wait, what does ‘coalesce’ mean?” Eyebrows raised around the group. This was the Science Academy, we were all smartass punks who had vocabularies too big for our mouths. Really? You don’t know what “coalesce” means? Attempting to educate the unfortunate soul, one of my friends replied, squeezing his hands together in a circular fashion, “It means to condense or to collapse, you know, to come together.”
It never makes sense if you’re not part of it, but a lightning round of glances passed between all of us at the enunciation of that final phrase, and, to a man, our voices raised to sing the chorus of the song referenced in the title of this essay:
Co-a-LEH-ESS, right now–
Over me.
The entire group, including the girl who had sparked the whole thing, dissolved into helpless laughter. To this day, that is how I like to sing the song, whenever it comes up in my hearing. I’d like to thank the rest of my high school gang for giving me a little filip of a smile every time Lennon et al. comes grooving up slowly.
Monday 31 March 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
One bright Christmas in the late 70s my younger uncle decided he was going to assemble for his young nephew a proper musical education. This was nothing new. He was the “cool” uncle, only sixteen years my elder, and kinda reminded me of the latter-day Beatles in the way he dressed and wore his hair. More to the point, I distinctly remember, at the age of five, being allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of his music room. It was magical: a cool, air-conditioned space of muted light with long shelves of LPs, their vaguely musty papery scent lingering in the air. I perched on a high wooden stool, full-ear cans draped over my tiny ash-blond head, and waited with bated breath as he prepared the listening session. To my young mind, each movement had the solemn weight and importance of a sacred ritual. The black vinyl was carefully removed, inspected for dust, and placed on the platter with the least amount of skin contact. The platter had the concentric stepped rings of dots that would provide rotation speed indication when spun, and I would watch them flickering into motion as the drive motor was activated. A fine-mesh brush was deployed to remove any last offending dust and to reduce static electricity. Finally, the tone arm was moved into place and it gently, slowly descended onto the leader grooves of the album. YES.
Really, the ritual was almost as exciting to me as the music that eventually played. In fact, maybe even more so: I do not remember any particular song or selection played during these sessions, but according to my parents, my band of choice at the time was Chicago, and I would sit for hours listening to them if I was allowed to. None of that fascination persisted even into later childhood; I knew Chicago existed, but except for “25 or 6 to 4”, I was happy to listen to other music. And still am today.
So, knowing he had a willing disciple and a blank slate, my uncle complied a nice, thick cylinder of 45 singles and wrapped them carefully for placement under the tree. The gift was received in the manner as it was intended: ecstatic joy and a desire to head for my record player. I’m not entirely sure what an audiophile like my uncle was thinking about giving a stack of soon-to-be-rare 45s to a small child with a Fisher-Price record player, but he did it, and for that I am eternally grateful. There were certainly collectable items in that pile, and all of the delicate stereo details contained in their plastic grooves were probably quickly mushed flat by the blunt wedge of a cut-rate mono stylus. I cannot recall all of the selections he gave me, but I did have my favorites. I liked “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin chiefly for the panting noise played on the guitar during the lead-in, and the obvious echo-chamber on Robert Plant’s solo voice. “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen was a great rock-out song, I loved the sparkling chimes during portions of the verses, although the line about “suicide machines” was kinda scary. “Georgy Girl” by The Seekers was a nice catchy tune with great vocals, and a delightfully weird organ sound. My Dad loved “Henry the Eighth” by Herman’s Hermits, but I actually preferred the b-side song “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”. I thought “Harper Valley PTA” by Jeannie C. Riley was hilarious, although probably not exactly how it was intended to be. And to this day I’m not entirely sure why I liked “Sally G.” by Paul McCartney and Wings quite so much, but it was definitely a staple in my playlist.
However, the 45 that sometimes stayed in my record player for entire days of repetitive playing was “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” by The Royal Guardsmen. Evidently this was a novelty song recorded by a band in Florida without obtaining the permission of either Charles Schultz or his syndicate for the pleasure, and became a minor hit in 1966. It became a major hit in my house in 1978, and I’m pretty certain that my parents cursed my uncle for bringing this particular pop confection to my attention. It. Was. Perfect. I was already a big fan of Peanuts, regularly checking out collections of the strips from the library. I had an entire set of Time-Life books on the history of flight and read them constantly. I had completed a 1/72 scale Sopwith Camel as my first foray into model airplanes with my father’s assistance. The story of Baron von Richtofen and his nemesis Eddie Rickenbacker — which was a bit of popular history I absorbed that is evidently completely wrong — was something fascinating to me. So this was very much a perfect storm of awesome, and I wasted no time playing the song until it is — to this day — burned into my synapses. I even drew out a complicated storyboard depicting the events described in the lyrics and sound effects, including a short back-and-forth dogfight sequence specifically for the instrumental changeup before the last verse. That sheet of posterboard went on my wall right next to my National Geographic map of the Moon.
Unfortunately, I played the record so much it finally cracked. That was a very sad day in my young life. It would still play, but would skip unless I very carefully aligned the two edges of the break before putting the needle down, and the periodic click as the crack revolved around was completely out of tempo with the song itself. I was horribly disappointed. My parents took pity on me, but were probably somewhat relieved to have a respite. To their credit, whenever we went to a record store my Dad would always ask if anyone had a copy of the single available, but the answer was always no. As a minor hit, the song had come and gone, and, believe it or not, in 1979 there was no YouTube or Internet available to preserve a copy for immediate gratification and replay.
Today, of course, it’s very easy to seek out and find these fragments of childhood obsession, which is probably both a blessing and a curse. I did, in fact, look up the song so I could make sure I had the name of the band correct, and learned a little bit of the history of the recording along the way. But I didn’t bother to go to YouTube and listen to it. The song would not have anywhere near the same meaning to my adult self, and, really, none of that is necessary. Everything that made the song special — from the opening German to the machine gun noises to the Great Pumpkin name check — still sounds in my head whenever I feel the need to revisit it. And I can still feel myself crouching on the wooden floor of my room with the record spinning on the toy phonograph in front of me, ready to play my favorite song whenever I felt like dropping the needle.
Friday 28 March 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
I was working in a small print shop as a prepress technician, although I was also doing design and IT work because there was no one else around to do those things. As with many small business situations, there were oddities and annoyances, especially as the basic personality traits of both The Owner and Operations Manager were exacerbated by stress, lack of oversight and the martyrdom of business ownership.
The Owner regularly cleaned and tidied my desk as an outlet for her OCD, even though I’m a person who organizes spatially through stacks and piles, and would operate under a productivity deficit until I could find out exactly where the hell she’d stashed all my important crap. When I would complain, she would curtly inform me that she was The Owner, and my desk was really hers to do with as she pleased. Great, thanks.
The Operations Manager believed he excelled as a crisis manager, and regularly manufactured crises in the pressroom in order to show off his acumen in this field. Part of the problem was the copious amounts of Busch Light he would put away as Press Lubricant; the man truly had skill in drinking and his liver had been trained to peak performance in the Wisconsin back woods. But they paid me, I was able to set up my little department with proper job ticket indexing and reasonable safeguards against data loss, and later on they worked around my schedule when I went back to college to get a design degree. It wasn’t perfect, but we lurched our way through five years of making do. Ultimately, it all ended in tears, but it was an unstable arrangement from the very beginning.
One of the major things they refused to excel at was proper vetting and hiring of employees. There was a core group of about three or four people, myself included, that would suffer their foibles and mop up the messes without too much fuss, but we had to deal with a cavalcade of questionable hires that hit at least once a quarter. Sometimes it was The Owner getting an idealistic idea of how awesome a clueless friend of hers would be at sales, or The Operations Manager hiring a friend of a friend of a friend as a bindery manager, but either way, it usually spelled trouble. When it did, we usually had to sit through a grisly post-mortem with the entire staff present, while the responsible party railed about the incompetence of the offending employee and swore that they’d not be fooled again. Which they always were.
One such situation involved a sometimes client of ours who was something of an artistic musician or a musical artist, I was never sure which. At any rate, he fell upon hard times and casually inquired as to positions available while in talking about a print job one day. The Owner decided he’d be a perfect backup for The Operations Manager, and hired him accordingly. Of course, I’d never seen any indication from my dealings with him that this client had anything approaching any kind of organizational skills, especially as concerning the proper shepherding of print jobs from estimate to press to delivery, but I really didn’t have a dog in that fight. The Owner had decided, and she was The Owner. The Operations Manager wasn’t too happy about working with a flighty artist type, but with the Ownership Card in play, there was nothing much he could do. So the client was hired, and it wasn’t too long before he was sleeping with various comely print buyers and not properly understanding the seriousness of showing up on time.
At any rate, it was Business As Usual, and the rest of us would simply work around the chaos that ensued. Fortunately for me, the New Guy recognized something of a fellow feeling in me, and we began to hang out during lunch and even after work. I suspect that, later on, he wondered why the hell I put up with the craziness that was this particular employment situation, but he didn’t realize that I was afraid of being just like him: a flighty artist with no boundaries or work ethic besides his own self-centered tendencies. It wouldn’t be for another couple of years that I would finally realize that I could be an artist and a responsible human all at once.
However, flighty artists have some uses. He turned me on to a whole lot of interesting and rewarding music, for starters. He let me borrow King Crimson’s Discipline, for one, and when I first heard it I thought, “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” Other albums included David Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel, the odd quadrophonic weirdness of KONG’s Mutepoetvocalizer, and the funk-thrash-craziness of Praxis’ Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis). But the one that really hit home was AIR’s Moon Safari.
The cover of the CD was the perfect pastiche of late 70s pen-and-ink-wash illustration that hearkened to both the apocalyptic feel of the Missile Command game artwork and the high futurist renderings of O’Neill space colonies printed in National Geographic. The music was the prefect distillation of Jean-Michel Jarre into a New Millenial oeuvre that included both a streetwise hiphop beat artistry with the open feel of Outer Space endemic to the best Moog-inspired synth excursions. It was fun, it was retro, it was The Future.
And I had the weird feeling of having a musical out-of-body experience. The first track, “La Femme D’Argent”, had a hugely tasty bassline that appealed to my low-frequency artistry. The space jams and Moog noodling was also fun and directly relevant to my experiments with sequencing and multitrack recording with a keyboard. But it was the overall feel of the music that appealed to a simpler part of my identity, something I hadn’t expected to feel and hadn’t in a long time. While my forebrain was grooving on the synth solos and improvisations, my inner child was back in the late 70s, with all the comfort and uncertainty that middle childhood offers. I could feel the chill of a cold day in Toledo, with the ticking of the central heating system echoing through the house. I could also feel the heft of my Fisher-Price space shuttle toy, with the cargo bay that could open and the three sound effect buttons on the side of one wing. One would make laser sounds, one would make a rising tone like a space launch, and one would make a random bleeping like a signal from the depths of space. It was very odd, and very interesting, to be sitting in a Texas print shop in the dead of December, and remember the exact feelings and associations echoing from a December over twenty years past. The child playing in his parents’ living room and the man he had grown to be, were linked through the oddity of happenstance and the intentional mimicry of a long-lost style.
Friday 28 March 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
One of the last CDs I bought before leaving Austin, Texas for good in 2008 was a disc by a local band, Ghostland Observatory. Ghostland Observatory is the brainchild of two guys who decided that they would forgo any notions of pandering to the popular crowd and just make music that they wanted to make. And the music they wanted to make was an unapologetic mix of machine-precise beats, analog-infused synth sweeps, a bombastic sonic philosophy and a level of vocal style and showmanship that brings to mind Greg Lake and Freddy Mercury. Their earlier albums were good, but Robotique Majestique was perfect. It was both throwback and up-to-date, and it was pure awesome. I’m pretty sure that the sound is not for everyone, but I enjoyed it immensely. Even though I name-check “Free Heart Lover” here, the individual songs are somewhat immaterial: it’s an album-oriented piece of music, and the album flows through song after song without pulling a punch or missing a stride. It’s sick beats from the 70s without hip-hop nuances; it’s the colors you can achieve in timbre with nothing but basic-wave oscillators stacked atop one another; it’s the suspension of disbelief you can allow a singer if he assumes a commanding tone with no measure of irony, self-consciousness or insecurity.
It bridged a time in my life that was full of discontinuities and modifications. I was newly-married; I was in the middle of my MFA program; I had left the city of my youth and had moved to a completely different section of the country. I was trying to fit in to a series of new situations without roadmap or indication; I was trying to figure out exactly what a professional artist was supposed to do; I was moving away from printmaking as my primary focus and feeling surprisingly guilty about it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised by that last — I had come to art through the vehicle of printmaking, so there was a feeling that printmaking had mentored my conversion and moving to different avenues for my focus was somehow a betrayal — as if one could “betray” a completely non-personal discipline of art-making. To be sure, the printed image and an edition of multiples still is and probably still always will be part of my practice, so I shouldn’t have worried so much. At the time, though, it just felt wrong.
So, Ghostland Observatory was part of the disconnect I felt navigating my way through far South Boston on the way to the printmaking co-op I was renting from. My heart wasn’t really into it, I was spending money and not using the facilities, and getting there was a bit of a chore. As someone who learned to drive in the Car Culture of an expansive western city, driving in Boston was nothing but discontinuities. Roads curved back on themselves, changed names at each city boundary in the metro area, switched from two-way to one-way and back again, and basically acted just like a paved series of cowpaths and bridle paths would act. I discovered that driving in Boston takes patience, forbearance, resilience and a highly-developed sense of the absurd. You learn that the rules are more of a guideline than a law. You allow someone to make a completely illegal left-hand turn in front of you because there is the high possibility that down the road somewhere you will need to do something just as annoying, because there simply isn’t any other way to get where you’re going. And after an hour of this, I wasn’t really in the mood to print when I finally got to the studio.
So Ghostland Observatory was also the disconnect I felt sitting in a large warehouse space in Dedham, spinning a plastic disk around a pushpin in order to draw a drunkard’s walk on Mylar with Prismacolor markers, while all around me, ignored and unused, were the presses, mordants, inks, plates and paper of the craft of printmaking. Making a drunkard’s walk involves long stretches of mindless labor, somewhat akin to needlepoint actually, so having a jambox around was definitely a blessing. As the songs played, I would occasionally stare out the wide warehouse windows at the commuter rail trains chugging by, the Diesel smoke heavy in the moist overcast spring air, and wonder exactly where I was going and what I was supposed to be doing. The random skittering pathway across the Mylar felt like a mirror of my own situation. I didn’t realize I was basically carving out my own reality, groping my way toward a system and a schedule for including the manufacture of art into my normal everyday life. Just like the two guys in Ghostland Observatory, I was going to have to do it without notions of pandering to the popular crowd, and I would have to somehow learn to generate the suspension of disbelief you can allow an artist by that artist assuming a commanding tone with no measure of irony, self-consciousness or insecurity. And this is an apprenticeship I am still learning to this day.
Sunday 23 March 2014 - Filed under Dreamscenes
She introduced herself as my something cousin something twice something or something. She looked like Danica McKellar, but I supposed I could see some of my father’s side in her. She said she remembered my birth — “There was suddenly a baby!” she said. I was confused, as she looked younger than me, but maybe she had aged well.
She then said it was nice to see me, but she was heading to Northern Scotland to become a lesbian. I didn’t know there was a connection between the two.
Wednesday 19 March 2014 - Filed under Dreamscenes
When waiting to play bass at a live venue celebrating a fireworks display, it’s good to remember that an excellent way to practice your chops is with an appropriately-sized bunch of celery.