|
Caught
In Flux #3: Andrea
Bierwith Music that is an uncalculated, unself-conscious expression of an individual’s identity and worldview has always been relegated to the underground. At the other end of the spectrum, commercial artists are generally (unless self-produced) removed from the production process. I wonder if artists unconcerned about the producer’s interpretation of their statement (their songs) really have one! I really dislike the propaganda people are fed that they must have loads of expensive equipment in order to make and release recordings. Look at what Daniel Johnston has done with one-track recording and a toy organ. Surely 4-track recording is sufficient for the rest of us! It’s great when musicians use technology in creative ways (e.g. Azalia Snail and many people on the ambient scene). These people add treatments and effects to their music to broaden their creative statement, not to limit it. Realizing that technical ability is not the key factor with playing music and writing songs is one key step. Having the confidence to begin is another. This isn’t always easy – support isn’t always available. Instead you may run across a bitter "unsuccessful" (as they define themselves) male musician who’ll tell you you’re too old to start playing guitar (after all, you are over 14!) because he is threatened by you. Don’t listen to him! Having some thoughts or information that you are compelled to tell people via your songs is another step. At that point there it no backing down from your involvement in music, and your feelings of self-worth will soar! Karen Broyles In 1991 I was 14, and the only way I was going to hear any music was on MTV. One night, kind of late, I was watching the R.E.M. Rockumentary, but I didn’t want to go to bed so I kept watching after it was over. The video that came on was Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Thinking back on it, that turned out to be my least favorite song on that record, but it was way more than enough to be interesting. I bought Neverinind at the mall. I felt kind of hyper and dizzy listening to it. Nirvana may not sound like a big revelation to you, but it was to me. It was a revelation that such a thing could even exist. All this time, I was having one of the best school years I’d ever had. I was failing a lot of classes, but I had a real group of friends for the first time since second or third grade and I wasn’t as shy and antisocial as I had been. Then I moved to Macon, GA that summer. Of my two good friends, one never wrote to me and the other did only rarely. I had no way of meeting people until I went to school, but by the time school started I felt even more weird and antisocial than I ever had. The sort of pretentious kids who listened to alternative music were the ones that bothered and intimidated me the most. They made me feel ugly and unpopular, but mostly they made me realize that what I knew about music was nothing special. I wanted to know about things I liked, but I didn’t know how. When I was in middle school I thought only cool people could know about music (unless, of course, the music in question was Vanilla Ice or Depeche Mode). I guess I still feel that way to some degree. I can’t, and couldn’t, really imagine being in on anything special unless by a fluke. Still, I went ahead and wrote to K Records. I had no idea that it would make me so happy just to get their catalog. I came some from school and it had come earlier than I expected, and I just jumped up and down for a few minutes, which is definitely not something I do all the time. That was more than a year ago, and a lot has happened, even with all the waiting for the mail. I feel better, and music matters to me more and more all the time. Jonathan
Caws-Elwitt Hilary
Caws-Elwitt Lara Cohen I started buying records and trying to read about these people in my dad's rock & roll books, although they were usually relegated to the One-Hit Wonders section if they appeared at all. By the time I was 14 I started writing Runt just as an outlet and to see if maybe I could find anyone else who liked this stuff, too. That's how met my friend Joey, who basically took it from there: making me tapes, taking me record-shopping, and telling me about bands. I think with a lot of music, this kind especially, once you get into it you're kind of sucked in altogether, just because it's so interconnected that there are always a million things to follow up on. So that phenomenon is probably responsible for the rest of my education. Kim Cooper It was Easter break 1978, and fellow day student C.J.'s mother had a new, vaguely Mafioso boyfriend. He gave her great presents, like an ancient case of Coca-Cola with the original cocaine formula. When "Johnny" asked Mrs. J. to go away with him for the week, she accepted eagerly, even though there was no one available to look after her daughter. Somehow deciding that C.J. would get into less trouble if she were to spend the week completely plastered in her own house, Mom laid in a supply of a dozen sickly-sweet liqueurs and some Hungry-Man frozen dinners. It wasn't long after the lovebirds' departure that C.J. rang me up and asked me to come over and help drink the stuff. Perched atop my humiliatingly chunky wooden skateboard (one of Dad's flea market "bargains"), I sped over. C.J. lived in a rambling beach house featuring ghastly/exquisite period details like a wet bar, pool table, novelty light fixtures and (I believe) actual beanbag chairs. We settled onto the shag carpet and began drinking unfortunate combinations like Drambuie and Triple Sec...Kahlua and Grenadine...Bailey's Irish Cream and Red Hot Cinnamon Schnapps. What did we know of alcohol etiquette? It's difficult to believe in retrospect, but our virgin stomachs were somehow able to keep these mixtures down. Our little girl heads, however, simply reeled. At some point, C.J. brought out a pile of albums she'd brought as a "humorous" souvenir of a recent visit to London; included among these were Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols and the first Clash album. We spent the night drunk as hell, listening to music too vital to be played on any radio stations I'd ever heard, making prank phone calls that deteriorated into invitations to any "guys" who wanted to come over and drink with us. I remember a kid called Randy -- famous in Oxnard Shores for not having a sense of smell -- passing out on C.J.'s waterbed, whereupon we drew Kiss makeup on his face with indelible markers, smeared his ears with Vaseline and shredded cigarettes over them, tucked a moldy salad down his shirt and eventually pulled the plug on the waterbed. Randy never stirred. Later we Krazy-Glued granola bars and sleeping pills to the bathroom door in a uniquely Californian tableau and scrawled lipstick graffiti on all the mirrors before passing out together under the pool table. The excess continued, more less apace, for several days. Curious about the weird music that had become the soundtrack to our debauches, aware only that it was called "punk rock" and came from England, I went one day to Salzer's Mercantile, a depressingly pine-walled record store/head shop in Ventura. I couldn't afford any of the English imports in stock, but did purchase several issues of Creem. I read these rags religiously, pretending to get the pop culture and musical references, gradually building up to a shaky understanding of the distinctions between the various subgenres fighting for attention in that fertile time. As befits a kid who loved Mad magazine, horror movies, senseless cruelty, reptiles and comic books, my allegiances swiftly swung to punk, and were firmly cemented once Patti Smith's "Because The Night" started getting played on AM radio. I suspect that frequent listenings to that estrogen-fueled 45 hastened my early menstruation. Rock lifestyles fascinated. I remember attempting to emulate Keith Richard during summer vacation. I'd read that he often stayed up for several days at a time and, utterly unaware of the chemical aids enlisted by the Stone, managed an impressive 40-plus hours of consciousness before I crashed and burned. Not long after this, my father sailed off to Guatemala with my kid sister, and I moved in with Mom in Hollywood. Twelve years old, my bedroom overlooked the Sunset Strip, two uncles owned local record stores, and 7-11 down the block got a new Creem on the ninth of each month...it seemed like paradise to me then, and it still does. No doubt I would have eventually developed my musical tastes in Hollywood anyway, but I was lucky enough to have a head start thanks to some bad parenting, a selection of sucrose-laced neutral spirits, and a couple of "novelty" records brought out for a laugh. Jen Fleissner Actually, I had spent that July at my first-ever summer camp, a truly terrifying experience during which I was tormented by a posse of hipster girls who were seasoned campers. (My only revenge to this day occurred when one of said tormentors, Wendy Kahn of Scarsdale, N.Y., came into Tower Records when I worked there in 1986, and was revealed to have become a total mall babe with nasty frosted hair.) A more benevolent camp memory is that every single morning, Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" would be played on our bunk counselor's transistor radio. I dug it but, no matter how I tried, could never understand the words. "When the rainbow changes you will know?" (This being no more misguided than my belief, around the same period, that the chorus of the Eagles' "Life In The Fast Lane" was "Flying in the batplane.") And thus my fandom began. I started making blank tapes (the first ever included "Strawberry Letter 23" by the Brothers Johnson, as I recall). I used to wait for hours by the radio for a song to come on so I could tape it. I remember doing that for Billy Joel's "My Life" when it first came out. I was heavily into Billy Joel. Billy, ABBA and ELO were my three faves. ELO was the first band I ever saw in 1978: the Out Of The Blue tour, giant spaceship and all. My uncle took me to Madison Square Garden, and it was one of my first ever times ever getting to stay out so late. The first single I ever bought was also by ELO: "Sweet Talkin' Woman," a song I adored. It was on gorgeous purple vinyl. At the time I figured maybe all 45s came in different colors. Later my sister sat on it and cracked it with her butt, so I bought another, which was boring black, alas. I bought a lot of singles at a funny little (now defunct) store on West 99th Street and Columbus called Ansonia's Records and Tapes. They would order things for you if you didn't have it, so I got some oldies there too. 45s cost about a dollar. The first album I got was Barry Manilow Live, solely for the song "Mandy," which took up about two minutes on a double album with an entire side of commercial jingles that Barry had written for places like Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remember laughing hysterically to these songs with Kate one summer. The next two albums were Rumours, which I still have, and the Star Wars soundtrack. I was still primarily buying singles, though. By sixth grade, everyone in school was beginning to listen to music, and people would bring things in and play them during lunch period on this turntable that was mysteriously present in our classroom. I remember bringing in "Sweet Talkin' Woman" and having people be all suspicious because the opening was just a string section. Then, when the guitars kicked in and it started to rock out, everybody relaxed and started dancing around. Phew! -- I was still cool. It was at one of those lunchtime sessions that I first heard the songs from Saturday Night Fever, which sounded amazing to me, totally new and exciting. I got heavily into the Bee Gees. I bought Bee Gees Gold, which has all their late-60s Beatleish stuff on it. A few years later, when disco was "dead" and they were absolutely the height of unhipness, I used to protest that really, they'd had this earlier phase that wasn't disco at all, and nobody would ever believe me. I wore the Spirits Having Flown concert T-shirt, which had lots of silver glitter in it, to school in eighth grade and all day people shouted in my face, "Bee Gees SUCK!" I never wore it again. The true sign of my future rockcritdom, however, was during that whole period -- and straight through 11th grade, in fact -- I was compiling weekly Top 20s of my favorite songs, meticulously charted with the number of notches moved up or down, drops and adds for the week, etc. I was a huge Casey Kasem fan and used to copy down the entire American Top 40 every week as well. (I remember being truly shocked the first time that a song I didn't like at the time, the Stones' "Miss You," hit #1. Up until then, I think it had always been either the Bee Gees or their proteges, like Andy Gibb or Samantha Sang. The songs on my own Top 20 didn't have to be new, though. They could just be whatever I had heard for the first time that week. At the end of the year I would compile a giant Top 100 from all the lists and play it for my sister as a holiday special on my own radio station, WJEN. No doubt all this stemmed from my obsessive listmaking habits which continue to this day, but I was also becoming more aware of the rock-critic world, as I began to read, of course, Rolling Stone. I would occasionally buy things I'd never heard of because they got good reviews there. One such purchase was Rachel Sweet's Fool Around, a definite keeper. But not until ninth grade did I branch out in a serious way, with results that would shape my musical tastes for good. What happened was that X's Wild Gift got named Album Of The Year of 1981 by the New York Times, to which my parents subscribed. Hmmm, I thought, best of the year and I've never even heard 'em! Thus, I went to the record store -- some now-defunct place in the Village -- and snapped up X, as well as (I think) London Calling, The Pretenders and The B-52s. All of which I enjoyed. But Wild Gift was definitely the greatest fascination. It sounded so utterly unlike anything I had ever heard: disjointed, atonal, crazed. I wasn't sure what intrigued me about it, but I used to play it over and over, trying to figure it out. The lyric sheet also smelled really good. I remember playing it once for a sitter who stayed with us while my parents went on a trip; she was a bit alarmed. In any case, looking back it seems clear to me that X have had the biggest impact on what I've liked and continue to like: those discordant male-female harmonies, that country-meets-punk twang. They were definitely my favorite band all through high school, though I was always too young to go see them (and not cool enough to know about the fake ID scene). I also loved the Go-Gos. They were the band that my friends and I always listened to before dances to get revved up. There were five of us and each of us had a corresponding Go-Go. I'm proud to say that mine was rocker babe Kathy Valentine. The school I went to was definitely hip, music-wise. While eighth grade was spent in cultivation of a fine appreciation for Styx, REO and Journey, thereafter new wave was the order of the day. The big crowd-pleasing songs at our dances were "Rock Lobster" and "I Wanna Be Sedated." As a result, I felt like I had an experience diametrically opposed to most of my college friends, who were total AOR heads in high school and only discovered things like the English Beat in college. My school was full of annoying ska boys. But I never listened to Neil Young, for example, until going away. While new wave reigned, though, punk was less of a fad. There were always a few dudes in mohawks who would skank around when the token hardcore song was played at the dances, but in general the mood was embodied by one of said ska boys who sniffed, "L.A. punk is lame," when I enthused to him about The Decline of Western Civilization. My 11th-grade boyfriend was a different story. He got me into a lot of crucial stuff: the Jam, the Feelies, Television, Gang of Four, early Roxy Music. When we were dating he had just bought the first Dead Kennedys' album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. The morning we broke up, we had to sit there on his bed in silence and listen to that whole record, very loudly, so that he could clear his head sufficiently to break the news to me. Just a tad harsh, that experience. But I spent the while rest of that summer listening to Fresh Fruit every day (hard to believe now, but true!), just loving it, making it mine enough that I could be the one saying "Fuck you." So there I was, a former pop fan, having figured out that boy-rock was cool. The above-mentioned boyfriend wasn't much of a popster. He thought it was totally lame that I liked Duran Duran, and I remember lending him the first Bangles EP along with some other stuff, and having him return it last, saying offhandedly, "The Bangles suck, by the way." As though that was all that could be said on the subject. And I figured it was, since I aligned him completely with the rock-critic world in my mind. I remember asking him exasperatedly, "Don't you like anything that critics don't like?" Thinking it over, he replied that sometimes critics liked things that he didn't, but no, he didn't think there was anything he did like that critics didn't. So critics were boy-rockers who didn't like pop, apparently. My initial experienced as a DJ on my college radio station didn't do much to alter this impression. Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, Big Black, and later Dinosaur (pre-Jr.) were more or less hegemonic, and while I was psyched to discover a world beyond new wave, I never quite felt that the noise mode expressed all that I wanted to say or hear. Homestead and SST were the cool labels, and the operative sound was decidedly post-Minneapolis: tense, gloomy guitar shit, with none of the Replacements' scruffy sweetness. Left to my own devices, I cathected in desperation to Salem 66 and (later) Scrawl, and wondered half-heartedly where all the girls had gone. Then in my junior year, my friend Jane became music director, deposing the head boy, and the whole department went through a phase of playing all this '70s pop on the air back to back with our latest underground faves (themselves now a slew of noisy chick-led bands from the UK: Talulah Gosh, the Primitives, the Shop Assistants, etc.). Jane herself was partial to "Sky High" by Jigsaw. But ABBA were cool too. This was, of course, before the nationwide '70s revival kicked in, and you couldn't get away from the damn Swedes. At the time, it was still incredibly exciting to find out that I wasn't the only one who thought you could love X and ABBA at the same time. It all seems obvious and silly now. Maybe in Christgau's Record Guide, the '70s version, which was my Bible all through high school, hadn't given ABBA straight Cs I might've figured it out. But as it was, it took a decade to bring me right back to the summer of '77. Thanks, Kate Theimer. Karl Freske Obviously, there was no turning back. I haven't listened to the radio in six and a half years. I did, however, just buy Cyndi Lauper's first album. Claudia Gonson I didn’t have a stereo until I was 14. The only music I heard was from the jukebox at Armando’s Pizza in Cambridge. There I heard classics like "Muhammad Ali: Floats Like A Butterfly, Stings Like A Bee," "The Night Chicago Died," "Run Joey Run," "Bad Bad Leroy Brown," "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," and, of course, "Billy Don’t Be A Hero." I played classical piano feverishly until I was a senior in high school, so you could say that was also a part of my early life. The first tune I remember thinking that I’d better get hip is when my older sister, who was really punk rock, started calling me a geek and said l couldn’t do anything "cool," meaning improvise, on the piano. Through her, I had recently fallen in love with David Bowie, so in a fit of indignation I figured out all Bowie’s songs on the piano, plus all the other songs I heard on the radio. As a result, I was super-popular in my freshman year. Kids came during recess and crowded around the piano requesting singalongs, mostly the Police and James Taylor and such bullshit. As a younger sister, I have always been a copier, a follower and an imitator. My sister showed me most of what I knew as a kid, and in fact it was my sister who showed me Stephin. She had been friends with him, and she handed him down to me after she was done. Similarly, she handed me down John, who was to be my boyfriend for the next four years. In the end of ninth grade I liked Bowie and Rocky Horror, the B-52s and other such glammy gay stuff. Stephin and John liked Eno, Ono, the Ohio Express, Lotte Lenya, Pet Clark, early AC/DC, Einsturzende Neubauten and Weekend. Imagine my surprise. When I first introduced Stephin to John, they had a big argument about the strengths and weaknesses of Lindsey Buckingham’s solo album. To say the least, I felt a bit daunted by them both, and quickly lured them to teach me the difference between Rainy Day, the Rain Parade and the Raincoats. Another way in which these two guys shaped my musical sensibility was in showing me how to listen to recorded music. For both of them (I think this is still true today), the pinnacle of genius musical production was The Archies’ "Sugar Sugar." So one summer day, John sat me down, played me the song, and taught me how to listen to it. He pointed out how the tambourines came in on the second verse, how analog reverb was used on the instruments, how they miked the room. It was 1983, and the Paisley Underground was really happening, so the three of us got heavily into bands like Game Theory, the Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock and the Bangles. We were also into the early Rough Trade bands, especially the Raincoats and Weekend. Stephin and I got fake IDs in New York and saw Game Theory on their first tour. To this day, l am still very attached to these bands. This is probably because any music you hear between the ages of 14 and 18 will have the most profound impact on your musical taste. I have never talked to a psychologist about it, but it sure seems true. Alyssa
Isenstein I wasn’t a voracious music buyer in the early 1980s. Between 1981 and 1984 I was buying and listening to really bad records. And then I got to junior high and decided to get cool. I sort of hung around with the punk rock kids who listened to the Circle Jerks, Beastie Boys, Sex Pistols and Clash. I thought the punk rock kids with their black clothes, mohawks and metal jewelry were really cool, and they thought I was cute. By eighth grade I was super cool. I was listening to the Pet Shop Boys, New Order, the Cure, Heaven 17 and Duran Duran. I began telling people I was into new wave. In 1986, the summer between eighth and ninth grade, I went to England and discovered Sigue Sigue Sputnik. I was truly on my way to becoming a punk rocker. I moved to a new house and a new school in 1987. By that time I was really into the Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, the Chameleons, the Cure, Joy Division and all those other English gothy bands. I even had a few punk rock friends and we would hang out and be punk rock. Sometime around 1988 I bought the Creation Records compilation Doing It For The Kids at the Ooze in Portland. My life was changed. My Bloody Valentine, House Of Love, Primal Scream, Razorcuts – these these were my new favorite bands. Anything with the Creation Records Product logo on it would make me turn cartwheels. I also got really into all the 4AD stuff around that time, and discovered Factsheet Five, Option, Puncture and the fanzine section at Tower Records. I would listen to the alternative rock shows like "What Does Your Brother Know" (which was hosted by Rebecca of the Spinanes) and "Barren Landscapes Broken Hours" on KBOO. That was where I first heard the Ex, Legendary Pink Dots, Husker Du and everyone in between. It was in those glory days of 1988 and 1989 that I decided to do a fanzine. My first issue didn’t actually come to fruition until 1991, but that was after I moved to New York City and discovered even more indie-type rock. I got so into the whole "indie" thing that I started publishing Second Skin on an almost regular basis, started a little indie label called Dalmatian with my friend Will, and even worked at (according to Newsweek) the country’s hippest independent label. I recently graduated college and decided that pursuing a New York indie-rock career just isn’t the path for me. So I’ve moved back to Portland where I can live happily after sporadically publishing my zine, releasing the occasional seven-inch record, and playing in my obscure band Jupiteria. Yasmin Kuhn They’d get good and drunk, Fanny Mae would come out to see how we were getting on and tell the story of the time she saw Bessie Smith at the juke joint her aunt and uncle ran. She lived with them when she was young. The music would always keep her up at night and she’d peek through a crack in the door to see what was going on. Many stars came through their place, although they weren’t always stars at the time. Howlin’ Wolf played there whenever he came through town. Grampa would carry me home and Grandma Wills would yell at him for exposing me to those nasty people like Stinky and his still. Wills was a good churchgoing woman and didn’t want me spoiled by those down-and-dirty blues. To cleanse my soul she’d bring me to church to hear the gospel. I’d try to sing along, still too young to know the words, wondering and amazed by those big round ladies and their big hats belting out the word of God. It left a powerful impression on me to this day, as did Stinky’s and Major Lou’s down-home squeaky blues. I think that’s where I picked up my taste for whiskey, too. Grandma Wills always said I had a voice like an angel. Even if I didn’t know the words, I’d make them up and sing along with her back in the kitchen while ass baked peach pies for the family, and a special little one for me. Dave McGurgan In 1984, this guy at my high school Frank Finizio lent me a copy of Minor Threat’s first LP. He invited me over to his house after school to watch his band, Your Worst Nightmare, play in his bedroom. It was the first punk band I ever saw and it was wildest! The floor was bending under the weight of five guys playing thrash and punk rock in a small bedroom! The guitarist was playing so loud his fingers were bleeding! It was my initiation into punk rock. That same year, my dad once again –in another precedent-setting and mind-boggling wave of good taste – recommended Husker Du’s Zen Arcade as something I should get. I guess he read in the Philadelphia Inquirer that it was an underground masterpiece. Indeed it was. I quickly moved onto the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime. I studied and mimicked the drums on both of these albums and beat out the drum patterns on my knees with a brand new pair of drumsticks. In 1985, Your Worst Nightmare needed a drummer. I said I could do it. I had never actually played a drum set before, but when I got behind the kit for the first time I instinctively knew how to play. Our first show was in Green Acres, a neighborhood in Wilmington where all the punk kids lived. We played hi Wayne Romanowski’s parents’ garage. I was so nervous that I froze up on the middle of the first song. Not a good idea, especially if you’re the drummer. Since then, I have never been nervous about playing live; I’ve just done it and it’s been totally natural. I played in Moribund, The Stiffs, Big Bitch Magnet, Mustard Trucks, FVK/EMG, Spit, Canal Ghim, Original Siamese Trio and Vineland, to name a few. I just retired from rock this year, but I suspect that somewhere down the line, someone is going to bail me out and get me playing again. Until then, l’m extremely happy being a nonrock guy in Philadelphia. Jon Melnick Next in the long line of influential TV bands: the Banana Splits. Actually, I think my mom liked them more than me. She claimed that she ordered the four-song EP from the back of the cereal box for me, but I don't ever remember asking her to do that. I still have the record and I'm sure my mom could not tell me today who the Banana Splits are. Barry White had some connection with writing or producing some of the songs on my EP. By the time the Hudson Brothers had their own Saturday morning show, TV bands no longer held such a strong allure. From 1970 to 1972, I was passively exposed to light Top 40 from my parents' selection of car radio stations and annoying peacenik folkie stuff from well-meaning camp counselors. The former consisted of "American Pie," "A Horse With No Name," "Heart Of Gold" (a Sonic Youth/Neil Young double bill was really hard to imagine back then) and "It's So Nice To Be With You." You can guess the selections in the latter category. I did not like nature, arts and crafts, and most of all camp singalongs. I just wanted to stay indoors and watch TV. Bugs always seemed to bite me when singing "Joy To The World." On my tenth birthday, I was given three singles from a friend of my parents: Steve Miller's "The Joker," Elton John's "Benny And The Jets," and Ringo Starr's "You're Sixteen." This seemingly meaningless gift changed my life; form this day onward I became an addicted pop music fan. At the time, I only owned one of those gray plastic close-and-carry stereo systems with built-in speakers. Still, those three singles got played ad nauseam through the tiny speakers. I soon acquired some early favorites like Sweet's "Little Willy," Elton John's "Crocodile Rock," Wings' "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey." When packed off to summer camp that year, one of the camp counselors insisted that his friends listen to this great record he heard the previous year: David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars. I kind of snuck behind them and hung out while they blasted "Suffragette City" over and over. They were mildly impressed but blase. I was amazed; it was a clear departure from Elton John's "Daniel." Next step was the magazines. Every month I purchased Sixteen, Circus and Rolling Stone. I found Sixteen silly: I did not worship the ground that Tony DeFranco walked on. On the other hand, Rolling Stone went totally over my head; I read an entire cover article on Suzi Quatro without ever comprehending a single word of it. At the age of 11 and 12, Circus was right up my alley. Those were the days when Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, Queen, the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Mott The Hoople, Kiss, and of course Led Zeppelin graced the covers. About this time, I also began buying albums -- or, more accurately, I conned my father and grandparents into purchasing them. The first few included Elvis' Golden Records Vol. 1, Deep Purple's Machine Head, Ziggy Stardust, Chuck Berry's London Sessions (I loved "My Ding-A-Ling"), and the Beatles' red and blue collections. At age 12, live music is pretty close to impossible to see. I do remember seeing Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods at Six Flags Over Mid-America (!!! -- ed.). I had to convince my friends who thought "Billy, Don't Be A Hero" was the uncoolest song ever written. If I remember, both Bo Donaldson and Paper Lace had hits with "The Night Chicago Died," with Paper Lace's version edging out Bo Donaldson's in the end of national exposure. I also remember having tickets but being too sick to see a triple bill of Black Oak Arkansas, Slade and Head East, all huge local favorites in Missouri. One of the essential staples of Top 40 radio was the record giveaway contest. Contests these days consist of two tickets to see U2 in Ireland or something along those lines. In the 1970s, however, people went berserk on the radio when winning an opened promotional copy of a Bay City Rollers album. When I was in Florida staying with my grandparents, I won a copy of Elton John's Caribou from a local Top 40 station. We searched all over the boonies of Miami looking for the radio station. My grandma kept repeating, "My groceries are going bad for some song called 'The Bitch Is Back'?" In 1977, Television and Blondie may have been happening in New York City, but I was still looking for Foghat albums. The first time I heard the word "punk" connected to music was in 1977, when I heard our upstairs neighbors (college students) playing the first Ramones record with the windows open. Actually, I think they were making fun of it, since most of the time they played Yes and Gentle Giant albums. A couple of days later I asked them what they had been playing and one of them replied, "Some New York punk band called the Ramones." My initial reaction was one of embarrassment. The lyrics were stupid, it sounded like it was recorded in a trash can, and it was very fast (kind of medium today). I also found it very compelling and exciting. I went to the Record Bar (the midwestern version of Sam Goody) and purchased it. Subsequent birthdays and holidays yielded the Ramones' Leave Home, the New York Dolls' first album, Richard Hell's Blank Generation, the Dead Boys' Young, Loud & Snotty, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols, and Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True. I never really made an association between these records and something called punk or new wave. I still liked Queen and Bob Seger as well as the Ramones and Wire. Both alternative and mainstream music were on major labels. In fact, some bands considered very mainstream now, like Cheap Trick and the Police, were considered moderately alternative or new wave at the time. I never grasped the division between punk and mainstream until I attended a late-1978 Styx concert (poor taste again) and an announcement was made concerning an upcoming Elvis Costello show. The vitriolic reaction was astounding. The crowd went nuts with hatred. I purchased tickets for the Elvis Costello show the following morning. This was during his angry period when he managed to alienate the audience with an unusually short show (40 minutes) and angered the sponsoring radio station by giving mention to its rival. It was strange, though, that KSHE-95, a conservative AOR station with a pot-smoking pig as its mascot, even sponsored it. To a lesser extent, some of these divisions exist today. My primary dissatisfaction with present trends (besides the killing off of vinyl) is the tendency to romanticize the past with the result of underexposing current music. I think that the music of today is as good, if not better, than the classic punk of 1976-1977, or the Rough Trade output of 1980 or any other major era. Certainly it is more relevant than listening to 15-year-old songs to the exclusion of new records. Bill Meyer I jump up to 1969 for my next cluster of musical memories. My friend Bradley had a bunch of Beatles singles, and I can remember a bunch of us dancing around like maniacs to "Revolution" and "Hey Jude." I also really dug the Archies’ "Sugar Sugar," Steppenwolf’s "Born To Be Wild," and that song "In The Year 2525." Shortly afterwards I first became interested in albums. I browbeat my Dad into buying the soundtrack album from Easy Rider, only to find that I didn’t like most of it. But by 1971 there were two records that I played incessantly in my room whets I wasn’t watching TV: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Partridge Family record with "I Think I Love You" on it. My family spent much of the 1970s in Europe, so my listening during those years was focused by the BBC and US Armed Forces Radio. I whiled away many long Saturday afternoons in Belgium listening to American Top 40 and Paul Harvey ("Hello, Americans, this is Paul Harvey. Stand by for NEWS!"). In 1976 I noticed that bands characterized as playing "punk rock" were listed in the Brussels Bulletin, but I had no idea what that meant. That was when I began buying albums, and a motley assortment they were: the first was Jethro Tull’s Songs from The Wood, followed by The Eagles, Boston, ELO, Gary Wright and Queen. I first found out what punk rock was after returning to Michigan. I was a complete misfit and spent many lunch hours alone in the high school library reading back issues of Rolling Stone. There I read about Television’s last performance. It was described in ambivalent terms, but something about the article made me want to check the band out, even though I was a massive Yes and Genesis nut at the time. So off I went to the public library to check out Television. There I also discovered Brian Eno, Horslips, Oregon and Circle (Chick Corea’s pure improv band with Anthony Braxton) during my senior year of high school. I was thus primed for college, where I met Bob Pomeroy (who edits Moe magazine), who owned actual punk rock records by the Clash. Pere Ubu, Young Marble Giants, the Fall, Talking Heads, and Gang or Four weren’t far behind. It’s been downhill ever since. Stuart
Moxham Actually my earliest memory is musical -- an appropriately summery version from a caravanning holiday -- recalled whenever I hear "Greensleeves." As if that wasn't enough, my Dad sang in amateur musicals, so our house rang to Gilbert and Sullivan -- as well as a comprehensive classical repertoire. Whatever. One day, in the Infant School playground, I distinctly remember singing The Beatles' "Twist And Shout." I was caned, aged ten, for doing the Twist -- to the (Welsh) National Anthem! Then the faithful monophonic Bush gramophone in our front room was usurped by an exotic stereo "Music Centre" which, in true brotherly style, I got to inherit from my elder brother's Naval booty. Falling asleep in headphones playing the endless cicada runout groove on Brian Eno's "Taking Tiger Mountain." "See Emily Play" the first time I got stoned -- Ha! Read it and weep, suckers! And then one evening early in 1975 a friend, Matthew Davis, offered to teach me the guitar -- and that was the beginning of a 100 percent increase in my ability to appreciate music. But that's another story. And now that difficult Top Ten scenario -- alright, make it
a baker's dozen. For instance (in no particular order): Sean Murphy
But indie music came later. The summer before ninth grade, we took the only family vacation of my childhood, to Disneyland. My Dad had a cousin who lived in Orlando, so we stayed with her, and she had a daughter, Kerrie, who was my age. I didn't know her at all, but I was just sitting in the hallway, bored out of my skull, when I heard "Sunday Bloody Sunday" coming out of her room. That was something I recognized. And we started talking about U2 and other bands, and she knew a lot more than I did about music, but it was just cool to hear about this stuff...Oingo Boingo, Ultravox, all this other stuff...she had all the band names written on her school notebook. When I got back to Boston, I started searching the radio dial for stations playing this sort of music. And it took a while, because the stations were scratchy, but all of a sudden I was hearing things: "that's when I reach for my revolver...that's when it all gets blown away..." and "don't give it up now," and a lot more things that didn't quite register. Sometimes I made tapes of these weird radio shows and played them for friends, and most of them thought I was crazy for listening to this stuff. They were dealing with the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Steve Miller. I just went and dug out the only one of these tapes I have left. I've finally figured out what all the songs were, but it took two solid years of DJing at WPRB to get them all. The Beastie Boys were easy enough, and I heard the DJ mumble something about "Wedding Present" or "um...that song was called Yogi's Ark," and then there was this great punk thing that nobody else ever knew. I was doing a show last winter, pulled out this record I had played a few times, and then, "THAT'S IT! THAT'S THE FUCKING SONG"! "5:00 A.M." by The Left. The last song I hadn't tracked down on that tape; I jumped around the studio for five minutes and had a huge smile on my face for the rest of the day. People who saw me thought I had lost my mind, even after I explained the whole story to them." My entrance to the world of seven-inch vinyl was similar to those tapes that everyone has. I had bought a copy of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" sometime in 10th or 11th grade; it was supposed to be rare, and it was the only way to get the song "Hey, Hey, What Can I Do" (until that damn CD box set came out). Then there was the Police's "Roxanne," with "Can't Stand Losing You" on the flipside, but my first indie single would wait until the summer after senior year of high school. I was interning at WMBR in Cambridge, and they let me do shows occasionally. When I wasn't there, I was listening to WMBR and WZBC and WHRB constantly. And there was this one song I heard almost every day that summer: "Eileen, what have you been eating?" The DJs would never really say the name of the band, and WMBR didn't have anything in its stacks that sounded like it, and the people I talked to in record stores didn't know what I was talking about. "It's this really cool song...I think the band is Rex, or Rix, or Kicks, or something like that." It was really frustrating me. So one night in August I went with some friends over to Harvard Square and we wandered into Newbury Comics to look around, kill some time, basic summertime things to do as a teenager in Boston. Some of us had been trading tapes of this "weird" music -- The Clash, Buzzcocks, Sex Pistols, Misfits, but not much beyond that level. So we're all poking around in Newbury Comics and there it was, on this little record sleeve, in black and orange ink: "BRICKS. The Girl With The Carrot Skin." And this awesome drawing of a huge carrot surrounded by smaller carrots. I had finally found out who did that song. So that night I bought my first Bricks 7" (and the Dinosaur Jr. "Just Like Heaven" 12"). During my next show at WMBR, I brought my single and played it, and another DJ came up to me and said, "Wow, so you've got a copy of the Bricks single too. I think every fucking DJ at this station owns their copy of that single." Looking back, it seems sort of strange that I could place so much importance on one act, but I know buying that single was a major part of the stupid music kid I am right now. David
Nichols
In 1984 I started contributing freelance to Smash Hits, a different kettle of fish altogether (mainstream pop), though ironically my first assignment was interviewing Sam Sejavke (anyone who's seen the film Dogs In Space will understand why this is ironic). In essence, though, my involvement with music was always been an attempt to a) get involved in the conversation, as Mayo Thompson once put it, b) demythologize it, which I think the Cannanes have always done, probably to our detriment (a lot of people think music is so mysterious and powerful, and there's so much pretentious, self-important rock out there...), c) put my own narrow-minded opinions across, my own que sera sera cynical world view. I don't really enjoy playing live -- unless it's a challenge -- and I don't even like the recording process, at least until now, when my brother Michael and me have formulated ourselves into a band called Blairmailer. The Blairmailer LP we made a few weeks ago pretty much vindicated everything I ever said about music -- because it was unrehearsed and half of it was composed in the studio, but it's the best thing I've ever been involved in. Partly because my brother's a genius, but also because records aren't "records" (i.e. archives) anymore, if they ever were -- they're particular constructs. May I say, however, that despite all of the above, one of my main goals in life seems to have become collecting all these fairly obscure singles that were hits here (or maybe just played) around 1975 or 1976, when I first started enjoying pop music. Nick Gilder's "Roxy Roller," for instance, which I could listen to 1,000 times over and not get bored. And Trevor White's "All You Wanna Do Is Dance." I think these songs must have just come along when my mind was starting to grow its last little spurt; a little musical blob developed on one side and I was captured in this glob of music time. I think you just develop like that by chance. Anyway, since the mid-1980s I've made sure never to dismiss any musical form or style, and I try hard not to be a poseur. But probably don't succeed. Anne
Rubenstein Probably the first record I ever bought was a Rolling Stones album, but the first one I remember buying was Frampton Comes Alive. I started buying records at age 12 when I started babysitting. Before that I listened to my parents' records: the Band, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Tom Lehrer, Broadway soundtracks, Free To Be You And Me, Judy Collins. Later I bought The Eagles' Greatest Hits and pretty much all of Steely Dan, starting with the lamest (The Royal Scam) and working backwards. Records were really cheap then, so cheap that nobody ever sold used records. All singles were seven inches and had thin, plain sleeves with big holes in the middle. My sister Sara was (and still is) much cooler than me although 2 years younger. I don't remember how she got the money -- she never babysat -- but she started buying David Bowie albums at age 10. She had this huge crush on Bowie; mine was on Elton John. Thus she began having a thing for guys in flashy outfits while I became a fag hag. Come to think of it, I remember reading Elton John's Rolling Stone interview in 1974 or '75 in which he sort of came out ("I'm, uh, bisexual"). Where did I find a copy of Rolling Stone? A little later my sister and I started buying Creem. Even though it usually referred to bands we'd never heard of (Bad Company? Blue Oyster Cult?), the writing made me laugh. Actually, I still read rock zines for the writing, even when I've never heard the bands (Come? Mudhoney?) New Haven, our home town, had a lot of rock stations. The AM was disco and that was great, but they tended toward endless repetitions of novelty hits like "Fly Robin Fly" and "Disco Duck." The FM station was for stoners (I guess you'd call it lite rock now), and played endless "Stairway To Heaven," "Layla," and all the records of Aztec Two-Step. If there was a black station I never found it, so I found out about Kool & The Gang, Funkadelic and K.C. & The Sunshine Band from my junior high classmates. The someone shot the math teacher at the local public high school and my parents made my sister and me switch to private school instead, which was cool with me since my junior high classmates beat me up occasionally and often threatened to. However, in private school our classmates only listened to the Dead, except for the only genuine acid casualty, a Swedish exchange student who liked ABBA. One autumn night in 1977 I was sleeping over at my friend Alex's house. (A year later she told me she was a lesbian; seven years after that she married a Marine she'd met on the Libertarian BBS and moved to Georgia, but at the time she was my very best friend.) We wanted to watch Saturday Night Live, but in those days it was only on for three weeks in a row, with the fourth week some lame newscast. So it turned out to be the newscast night, but we decided to watch it anyhow since we'd already gotten permission to stay up late. And the last segment of the turned out to cover this strange new British phenomena called the Sex Pistols. Alex watched for about 15 seconds, said "Oh, gross!" and shut it off. Of course, by then it had already changed my life. Shortly thereafter, if not before, Creem started writing about punk in New York and my sister bought her first Iggy album, under the misapprehension that it was a Bowie album. Then as Sara entered ninth grade and I started 11th, we met Michael Prigger (also starting ninth grade) and he changed our lives even more. He was already in a band and hung around with New Haven's very own punk crowd. In retrospect these people were not punks at all, but a group of arty bohemians, avant-gardists, old hippies, Yale students, local misfits and petty criminals. Mike invited us to see his band play at New Haven's punk bar, Ron's Place, which shared a street corner with all the local transvestite whores. (Later these kind men taught me what little I knew about makeup application.) We snuck out of the house and went. It was tiny, hot and smelly. The bartender was a Vietnam vet who beat his wife, the waitress. He refused to sell us alcohol. Only one bathroom functioned; the other was for drugs. The amps barely worked. Of course we loved the place. From this bar a scene evolved: three or four local bands and their friends. A used-clothing boutique, a proto-fanzine, a gallery. All the bands sounded very different from each other and none sounded much like "punk." A few -- not the best -- were power pop, the rest what you might call indie rock, but the idea didn't exist then. My sister joined a band. I just danced. We got boyfriends. I kissed a girl for the first time. Our clothes alienated our classmates. We suddenly knew lots of people who didn't live with their parents and did have cars. Fortunately, our parents were getting divorced and paid no attention. There were drugs and booze, but nobody cared if you didn't want them. It was a small, warm, gossipy, stupid, accepting scene, and even though some people involved with it are dead now, and a few are semi-famous, it never felt as if anyone was moving in any particular direction at the time. The scene just was. Then I went away to college and Ron's Place closed and the scene stopped existing. Some other things happened after that, but that's another story. Mike Schulman But I didn’t know shit from what color those singers and players were; I just loved their sound. I was mesmerized by the otherworldly simplicity of those crude recordings, so different from the Parliament and Spinners records I was used to hearing. I had no sense of nostalgia to color my hearing – to me these were not "oldies," but living, breathing records, and I loved them to death. I would play the same Jacks and Five Satins records over and over, learning the background doo-wops and the simple lead vocals. Not that I can or could ever sing, but it was impossible for me not to sing along. I guess it was the electric appeal of those battered 45s that got me hooked on music (and seven-inch singles). A few years later, I discovered a very similar sense of excitement from the simple and direct music of punk rock. But I still return to those early ‘50s rhythm & blues records when I need to be reminded of the simultaneous heights of dirty funk and sublime beauty that rock and roll can attain. Amy Spano
I had a brief moment of Top 40 listlessness; then I got into thrash metal. I started listening to thrash so I could find common ground with my older brother, who was rapidly separating himself from his childhood (which kind of included me) after reaching high school. Fred got out of metal by his sophomore year, but I, going into my eighth grade year, was still into it. Metallica was my band. Then, right before ...And Justice For All came out, I fell out of metal in very much the same fashion as with rap. This time, classic-rock radio was my ticket to ride for about three months. I kept hearing this song on the radio that I liked, and one say saw the video at a friend's house and found out who did it. Being young and penniless, I begged my mom to buy Document by R.E.M. for me (which she did). Next came Dead Letter Office. I noticed they did three songs by a band called the Velvet Underground, so I decided to check them out. A classmate made me a tape. I really liked them, but I still hadn't developed the musical bug that plagues me to this day. I wiped off the dust from my radio dial and rediscovered WLFR, the local college station that was very helpful during my thrash stage. Next I went into Sound Odyssey, the local record store and went to the "new wave" section, where R.E.M. could be found. I had wanted to check out some other bands, but I didn't know where to start. I don't know why I picked up a Feelies cassette, but the important thing is that I did. I noticed that they did a Velvet Underground song too, and since the average amount of time I could stay in the store was ten minutes (I was so intimidated by the beady-eyed punk boys and girls always sprawled across the counters), I bought the Feelies' Only Life and bolted out of there. I went home and put the cassette on my trusty GE slimline box and was blown away. Where my friends and I sat in the cafeteria, there was a boy who I knew liked R.E.M. and lots of other bands. I asked him if he knew anything about the Feelies; he did, so I asked for other suggestions. He gave me a few (like XTC, the Replacements and firehose), and that was that. That same day after school, I was listening to WLFR and heard firehose (except I didn't know it was them). I called the DJ and asked her who it was. I don't know who was happier, me or her. The next day I went back to Sound Odyssey and bought firehose's fromohio and this was it; from this point on, I was insatiable. If it had the SST logo on it, I bought it. I discovered the power of liner notes and thanks lists; I also never refused a babysitting job. Whomever my favorite bands thanked I checked out (in turn, I came across a lot of really bad things). Right after I graduated from high school in 1991, I moved in with my sister for a little bit. Musically, this was very beneficial, because not only did she live near Philadelphia (which was a big source for obtaining records), but she also lived within the WPRB listening area. It's through WPRB that I started hearing seven-inch records and well, I guess that sort of ends it. Actually, something else that might be noteworthy is that the first song I actually memorized entirely was "Jack & Diane" by John Mellencamp. This was in fourth grade, during the height of my rap stage. We were on a class trip to a glass museum or something like that, and this girl had it on tape. Most of the kids knew it and we desperately wanted to get a singalong going (it was a long trip) with something current, as opposed to "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" or something. So we had a practice session on the bus for those of us who didn't know the song. Within an hour, the teachers, chaperones and bus driver had the great fortune of listening to 30 fourth graders sing "Jack & Diane" about 20 times. I'll never forget that. It was the greatest thing, such a communal effort. Brandon Stosuy Elisabeth
Vincentelli
I grew up in Corsica, a French island combining great scenery and isolation. Think of growing up in Nebraska, if Nebraska looked like Hawaii, and you'll get the idea. Except that un Corsica, I couldn't get my hands on music magazines or zines, and there was no good radio station. The first record I ever bought, when I was about ten, was The Beatles No. 1. I can't say it did much for me, as to this day I still don't like the Beatles. Then I got a few singles, including Plastic Bertrand's "Ca Plane Pour Moi" (I must have been about 12) and Chic's "Le Freak." My parents joined a record club, and since we almost never ordered anything and were too lazy to send back the Selection Of The Month we automatically received, I got to keep the Runaways' Live In Japan and Donna Summer's Love To Love You Baby. I still have the Runaways record, but I managed to lose the Donna Summer somehow, which is too bad because it was truly great. I also still have records by Thin Lizzy and Status Quo that go back to that record club. In 1976 I got my first issue of what was at the time France's main rock mag, Rock & Folk. They didn't talk much about folk, but since that was the mid-1970s they talked a lot about fusion, jazz, Chick Corea, Weather Report and the like. I didn't care about that stuff, but I devoured the mag anyway, because there was nothing else. I even got my parents to order back issues for me. Rock & Folk had some writers that I realize now were amazing. Phillippe Garnier, for instance, wrote from Los Angeles and did long-winded, New Yorker-length articles about X, Wall Of Voodoo, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Clint Eastwood, Raymond Carver. He was a brilliant stylist who was influential on my development because he casually linked literature, rock and film in a way that was novel, at least in France at the time. Phillippe Manoeuvre was another writer (who then totally lost his edge when he went mainstream) whom I loved, mostly because of his wacky humor. At some point he also had a show on public radio, to which I listened religiously. I learned about the burgeoning French punk scene by reading Rock & Folk, not actually hearing any of the records they talked about: they just weren't available in Corsica. I also read Metal Hurlant (which became Heavy Metal in its American version), which at the time (around 1980-1981) was an inspired mix of comics and journalism -- of the kind referred to, I later learned, as Gonzo Journalism. Manoeuvre also wrote for them, by the way. I guess that's why I became a writer and not a musician, since I really got into the stuff by reading about it and not actually hearing it. For the longest time there was no rock on French TV, so there was really no way to hear things. There were a couple of good shows on public radio, and I remember once winning a limited-edition of Joe Jackson's first album in a signed double-10" package. There was nothing on TV except for variety shows, which I loved because they were truly magnificent and had great production values. I think the first real rock show on TV was called Chorus, and it was on every Sunday at noon, a very inconvenient time for me since that's when we had our weekly family meal with my grandparents. Chorus mainly showed concerts, and I remember seeing the J. Geils Band (a fave to this day), the Ruts and Bruce Springsteen. I didn't see my first rock show until fairly late, because nobody but the biggest French stars would tour Corsica. I think it was around 1981 or 1982, because I hadn't left for college yet. It was a band called Telephone, the first French rock band to really make it big. I liked it, but I can't remember any earth-shattering tremor. Going to college in Paris completely changed my life, of course, but I was beyond "discovering" music at that point. Dina Williams Jessica Willis Sounds dramatic, right? Where I'm from, that din was all I had. My little town had one record store, one main drag, an endless struggle of side streets. Home from school, straight to the record stack, I'd case Dad's collection until I spied the brown and white spine; pry it free, stare at the cover, the gatefold, the mysterious grooves making time in the black plastic. When Mum was watching afternoon TV and Dad was elsewhere, I'd put on side one, wait for the crackling to subside into that nervous little giggle signaling the beginning of the song. I can't say Led Zeppelin II made my problems easier -- rather, it gave my neurosis and frustrating sex tension a voice. Zeppelin made my problems LOUD. Infinitely better than forgetting. Some time later, Dad got me my own crappy hook up. Activity moved from the living room to my bedroom. I started recognizing my younger brother's existence, and we started our own record collection. At school, we were known for having the latest of everything. Even the popular kids would come over to hear new Devo, Motley Crue and Prince. We bought everything that had the underlying message of "go away/buy me." My parents were (and still are) very young, so we could blast away undisturbed. When someone suggested to my brother and me that we start a band, we did. We had five songs by dinner time that very evening. Joshua played rhythm guitar and I sang. Dad let us use his neglected, expensive equipment (he's a couch rocker) -- in any case, we were in the basement making noise every night. I was Robert Plant, especially when I imitated his howl through delay effects. Mum would sit on the cellar stairs and shake her head. "Wild animals," she'd mutter. We took that as a compliment. Something happened to me. Early teens, maybe? I stopped wanting to be a rock star. No, I wanted to be the rock star's fuck now. Perhaps those endless rows of record covers selling dazed chicks kneeling by the idol's knee changed me. I saw my future. By his long leg, ready to yawn, fawn, make dinner. I joined the groupie ranks after reading Mum's copy of Rock 'n Roll Babylon. I started going to all the stadium shows as soon as I got my driver's permit. At 16, I was a bit over the hill, but hell. Did I see any action? After a few nights shivering by the backstage door, I found myself on the back of Steve Stiletto's motorcycle after his band played the Worcester Centrum. He kept yelling over the wind, "You're game, right?" I kept yelling back, "Jessica!" We really connected. Always shivering. Shivering after a night of air conditioning, in the parking lot of an outskirt motel, fancy hotel, whatever. My secret? Hang with the pretty groupies and have a couple of grams in my front pocket. Something else happened. I gave up. I hated music. I hated where it came from, where it passed out. I retreated to Barbra Streisand and Fleetwood Mac. A few doses of Michael, pre-Jacko. I think this saved my life. Music became applesauce. Today, I'm a combination of all these things. What things? I don't know. Writing about music is so pleasurable, I lose time. I can stand in a checkout line, a song comes on the radio, and there I am, staring at Dad's records. I have nothing to say about music. I can only say where I am. Where it binds me, where it distances me. What can I say about language? I love it all -- glottal, nasal, frontal, backness, romantic, vibrating. Music makes me money, gets me laid, slays me, gets me in all kinds of trouble. I went to a show recently. For the first time in years, I sat on the edge of the stage and grinned at the boys, just beaming at those boys up there, playing their little pop. Telling the truth, I hope. Later, backstage, I made out with one of them and spent the whole night laughing. In all my past shivering nights, I never made out and I never laughed. I went home along to laugh and write more. And this is what I wrote: "When he stared at me with that uncertain smile during their slow song, I just melted! Little girls in the audience were so jealous when he knelt down and kissed me, whispering, "It's been a long time, doll face." A real rock 'n roll moment! So this is connecting, corny, cruel, sincere. It has been a long time." Trey Woodard I guess when my friend Dennis reviewed Document, a new album by a band called R.E.M., for our high school newspaper is when I first realized that there were good bands not in the Top 40. We were sophomores in South Florida then, but he had lived in Northern Florida a few years earlier, an hour or two away from Athens, Ga., and had come across this band several albums prior. The album didn't make a huge impression on me at first, but it would. In fact, I wouldn't actually own Document for another three years; I just didn't have an interest in finding non-commercial music. I only played a few tapes regularly then anyway, the closest to cool being INXS's Kick. On a bus to a school function, a friend played Information Society and I liked that (ouch) and bought it, but overall music of any kind just wasn't that important to me (obviously). By the end of senior year I liked a girl who had these mix tapes with amusing bands like Camper Van Beethoven, Dead Milkmen, Violent Femmes, etc., and after graduation, I borrowed a few when I went on vacation. The rest of that summer, I played those in my car along with the Cure and Depeche Mode (bands I now refer to as "gateway bands" because they ease knuckleheads like I was into less commercial music and hook them until they need something better). And, through Dennis, I added the Blake Babies and blackgirls to the list. My freshman dorm floor at the University of Florida may has well have been subtitled "Third Floor Hume East - For Depeche Mode and Cure Fanatics Only." Maxi-singles for every song, and every other room had a Cure poster or the "Violator Rose," or both for the totally cool. We even had one resident who (presumably unintentional) was a dead ringer for David Gahan, DM's frontman. I took very little time to tire of that and I went to local record stores for help. By now, I had Eponymous and decided to go back to R.E.M. for my new music. I consumed the R.E.M. collection and added in side projects and stuff like Oh-OK, Poi Dog Pondering, Hugo Largo, Vic Chestnutt and Hetch Hetchy. These were the first bands where I could listen to any song and be impressed. I bought a lot of records at this point, taking chances on everything. Music began to mean something to me. Now, Gainesville was, and is, a sleepy Southern town. At that time (late 1990-early 1991), its roots were still the sound of the South, and of Athens in particular. Hetch Hetchy, aDolphin, and River Phoenix's band Aleka's Attic were the local heroes and they introduced me to the power of local music. To me, they all had three things in common. First, they were all permutations of rock and pop, combining those elements that appealed to what I was raised on. Second, they were all on a cassette of local musicians that I bought, and third, I loved all three. I went to every show I could where they played, and unfortunately, this would be short-lived. That summer, aDolphin broke up, Aleka's went on an indefinite hiatus and that left only Hetch, who were content to play once every two months. I spent another year slowly getting into the Pixies, Throwing Muses, Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, and basically anything I heard about that was moderately cool and even moreso if I could buy it used. In the summer of 1992, Pat Maley released the Throw compilation and that did it. He included addresses for many of the bands, and I was immediately taken and wrote to Kicking Giant, Heavens To Betsy, Bikini Kill, Harriet Records and K. From there it was an avalanche as I poured through the unbelievable volume of the K catalog and its entire Beat Happening discography, stumbled onto Simple Machines, heard the spinART ...One Last Kiss compilation which exposed me to another half dozen bands I had never heard, and so on. Now I can't imagine anything but those bands. The whole attitude of putting out your own music and helping your friends, not using them or stepping on them, is all the proof I need that this is the way to go. I haven't been converted so strong that I'll dump on anything released by a major, but when reality speaks, it doesn't offer a whole lot of encouragement to buy anything new from the MTV meathead department. So I co-write a fanzine now and I support the new local music as much as I can. As far as that goes, I keep all the mail that comes in through the zine and I have posters and clippings and postcards on my wall, which may be kind of dorky, but it's a reminder to me that indie is about the people. And maybe that's why music never meant anything to me before. When the artist doesn't give a shit about you, how can you give a shit about the music? I respect all the bands whose 45s I own because I know this spirit means something to them, too. That's our life. I may no be in a band, but I don't need to me to have a part of what I do mean something to others. Now my taste in good music doesn't mean everyone has to agree on my favorite bands -- that's where musical preferences come in -- but if indie ever means something other than respecting people, then that's where my good taste does come in and that bad taste gets spit out. Mike
Appelstein By the time I was born, music functioned mostly as background in my house (except for a few classical records and Simon & Garfunkel albums), so I was pretty much on my own when it came to culture. The first song I remember hearing was either "Lady Madonna" by the Beatles or "Close To You" by the Carpenters...it was in the car on my way home from nursery school, in any event. For my sixth birthday, my parents gave me a red, white and blue portable record player. Then they took me to Korvettes in North Brunswick, NJ to pick out my first record. I chose "Crocodile Rock" by Elton John. True to my later callings as a college DJ and zine editor, I bought mostly singles for years (forgotten Top 40 junk, TV sitcom themes), and played the B-sides as enthusiastically as the A-sides. When my parents bought me a tape recorder for my tenth birthday, I began creating mix tapes by holding the condenser microphone up to my transistor radio. I would just tape anything that caught my untrained ear. I still have some of these cassettes, and the mixes are truly weird: Heart’s "Barracuda," C.W McCall’s "Convoy," "Jungle Love" by the Steve Miller Band and "Fingertips" by Stevie Wonder on the same C-90. Who knows what I was thinking? By playing these crude tapes over and over, though, I began to pick out riffs and lyrics and listen to music a little more critically. I had a brief, intense Beatles phase at age 10, followed by a mercifully fleeting infatuation with crummy AOR and prog-rock. Then when I was 13, I stumbled across WPIX, a NYC station that very briefly experimented with a punk and new wave format. It couldn’t have lasted more than a year – there wasn’t a proven "alternative" market in 1980 – but that was enough time to hear the crazy bands I’d been reading about in Rolling Stone and Creem. The Ramones, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Devo, Talking Heads, the Velvet Underground, Elvis Costello, the New York Dolls...I heard ‘em all first on WPIX. They became the soundtrack to my early adolescence. This music was alive and strange and no one I knew had heard of it. I felt drawn to it. I never became a "punk," but I certainly felt like an outsider. This music made me feel, if not less alone, then at least like I was in on a great secret. For awhile I was satisfied with what were actually pretty obvious records – Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols, End Of The Century, Argybargy, Fear Of Music, Freedom Of Choice, and other new-wave hits. Then one morning in early 1981, during winter break, I made the discovery that would ultimately change my life. I was killing time, waiting to go to Philadelphia to some family function. I was flipping around my radio dial, reached the far-left end, and there was WRSU, the Rutgers University college station. The DJ spoke with a flat, casual cadence, as if we were friends and just hanging out listening to records (none of which I’d heard before). Immediately it became clear that there I’d barely scratched the surface of what was out there. I listened until it was time to leave and then tuned in the next day, just to make sure it hadn’t faded away or I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. The DJ that morning – I’m almost sure it was Linda Marczi, who later became a good friend – played British postpunk sensations of the day, including Young Marble Giants, Joy Division and Teardrop Explodes. This show, coupled with a Greil Marcus-penned article in Rolling Stone about Rough Trade and Gang Of Four, introduced me to independent labels and kicked off a fascination with early-80s obscurities that continues to this day. Soon I discovered Princeton University’s WPRB as well, which actually played a more consistently independent selection than WRSU. That’s where I heard Husker Du, the Feelies, Minor Threat and the Replacements for the first time. Having these radio stations within my reach was like being able to peer through a knothole into a better world where gym teachers and joyless pep rallies were but farcical memories. There were three other punk rockers in my school. I didn’t have much in common with them outside of school, but we’d hang out during study halIs. They’d make me tapes of American hardcore bands: Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, The Dickies, Suicidal Tendencies, This Is Boston Not L.A. These bands satisfied my teen-angst side, but I also loved pop songwriting, and didn’t make stylistic distinctions between the Dickies and the dBs, Black Flag and R.E.M. It was all part of this nebulous Other Music category to me. I went to see exactly one concert –Devo on the New Traditionalists tour – and marveled at the thousand-plus people assembled in the Rutgers College Gym who actually liked this band enough to see them. And occasionally I’d sneak into New York City and wander around the Village overwhelmed. I brought all these influences with me to college. Living away from home for the first time and being around so many different people shook my world up in a million exciting and challenging ways. Still, I’ve always kept with me the idea that music can be a tool of communication –not necessarily in the U2 "I’m making an important statement" sense, but more of a personal thing. That impulse has informed everything I’ve done with music in my postadolescent life, from my early college radio shows and publishing efforts onward. Even though I’m well past the point where records or concerts alone could "change my life," I still get a similar charge out of new discoveries that I did when I was 11 years old and freaking out over Beatles records from the library. Introduction
|