Remembering The First Records I Ever Owned

When I was seven, I had a very good year. Of all the years I spent in school the best year of them all was second grade, especially compared to kindergarten and first grade which I will tell you sucked. I hated school those first two years and I cried almost every day that I had to go, I don't know why this happened, it just did. By the time second grade rolled around my parents had separated and I was the self appointed seven year old man of the house so I had to stop crying or at least keep it hidden. I did OK in my new role; I prepared lunches for my younger brother and sister, made sure we all got to school on time and double checked the door as we left to make sure it was locked lest someone steal that Atari 2600 from our basement apartment

That year was the only year I remember enjoying school; it helped that our teacher was young and fun. While my previous teachers were stern and looked like gargoyles, my second grade teacher looked like she belonged on TV and she'd let us play music in the afternoons as long as we got all of our work done. The music part was awesome because in 1982 I got my first two records of my very own. The first record was a .45 of Buckner and Garcia's Pac Man Fever which the teacher would let me play and the second was a cassette copy of AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" which she would not.

For several months I tried to sneak Dirty Deeds into the cassette player and I was denied. I just wanted to let the class rock out the way we did at home but I could not, all I could play was Pac Man Fever, a song that is awesome but pales compared to "Big Balls" or "Problem Child" Finally in the spring I thought my big break had come, you see the teacher named Citizen of the Month for March 1982 just like Neil). This was a big deal, they even sent a letter to my mom (see below, click to enlarge).




A few days after that letter arrived at home I was given a ribbon AND I got an ice cream for free at lunch but that wasn't enough for me, I was determined use my new top dog in the class status to rock some AC/DC after recess. When it was my turn to pick the music I said I was putting Pac Man Fever on but instead of going to the records I stopped at the tape player and pulled the tape from my pocket. The tape was cued to "Big Balls", I pressed play and ran back to my desk. It started but the teacher barely let the class hear Bon Scott sing before she ran to the back of the class to tuned it off; Bon hadn't even got to the Big Balls part. She didn't explain why, I assumed she just didn't like the band. That was the last time I ever got to pick the in class music and my mom had to call the school to get back my AC/DC tape.

Pinpointing Where It Started and Some Music I Still Like

If music and I went to couples therapy and I was asked when I started to notice my feelings for music changing, I’d have to say that it was when the idea of an all day (or multiple day) music festival went from sounding awesome to sounding like torture. How exactly did I get from hitchhiking to the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991 to see Ice T and Jane’s Addiction to hearing the lineup for Coachella and saying “you couldn’t pay me enough to do see that”? I’m not that old.

I was reminded of this because I read that Mission of Burma is playing the Pitchfork Music Fest again this year. If I were in the Chicago area I might lay my feelings for Pitchfork Media aside (they are partly to blame for my current hatred of music) and consider buying a ticket just to see Mission of Burma. I was too young to see them in their original 80’s incarnation and when they came to my town after reuniting a few years ago I was unable to make the show. There’s a distinct difference between Mission of Burma and most other reunited 80’s acts is the fact that they are releasing new material that is at least as good as their early output. Compare the two songs below the first is from 1981 and the second from 2006, that’s a quarter century book ended by a sonic ass kicking; click on the links to hear them.

That’s When I Reach For My Revolver mp3 (from Signals calls and Marches 1981)

2wice mp3 (from Obliterati 2006)

Mission of Burma on eMusic

From The Old Blog: Judas and The Broken Hearted

Further exploring the ways in which I have loved music in the past. Sorry if you've heard this story before, I'm just trying to give you a sense of what music has meant to me in the past so you understand what I'm trying to recapture. I promise that this will all make sense eventually.

A few days ago I was writing about researching music in the library as a teenager, frequently this meant reading about Bob Dylan. I had already been thorough all of the biographies I could find (my favorite Behind the Shades had just been released) so I was spending my time going through thousands of newspaper articles when I came across something that blew my teenage mind; it was an article about bootleg Dylan albums and among the records mentioned were tapes from the 1966 Albert Hall shows where Dylan is called Judas by a crowd member and advises the band to “play fucking loud” to annoy the folkies (the insufferable hipsters of the day). Today it’s easy to find this show because it was officially released in 1998 and you know that it didn’t take place at Albert hall at all but when I was 16 I didn’t know that one day it would come out on CD so this became the holy grail of records for me. Someone had invented the internet by this time but I didn’t have access to it so at mysterious record shops everywhere I’d strike up conversations with the proprietor and then ask them if they had any “OTHER Dylan records I could look through...wink, wink”. Maybe because they really didn’t or maybe because despite my smooth style they thought I was sent in to bust them for selling bootlegs, they usually said no. By reading some more old magazines I discovered that The “Albert Hall” show was included on an Italian 10 LP bootleg called “Ten of Swords” but seeing as how I earned $4.50 an hour working after school it was unlikely that I’d get to Italy to search for it. In time, I stopped searching...remarkably this coincided with the time that girls starting to pay attention to me. I know, hard to believe but true.

Fast forward a few years to the fall of 1998, I’m 24 years old, still living on Long Island and had just been broken up with...I’m heartbroken but I think I’m handling well. On a Tuesday morning I’m buying the biggest cheapest bottle of gin I can find and one of those value three packs of old porn magazines from the liquor store in my neighborhood, it’s my day off and I plan on spending it forgetting. As I leave to go home I pass the Spanish language record store and I’m surprised to see a picture of a very young Bob Dylan on a promotional poster on the glass door; underneath it says The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert - On Sale Now. Underneath that it says “Be Back in 10 Minutes” Now I don’t know where you buy your Bob Dylan records but I had never considered that checking the Spanish language record store, mostly because Bob rarely sings in Spanish but there was my holy grail of records right there in the store. I sipped gin in the car as I waited for the guy to come back (kids don’t do this) and tried to remember the Spanish I’d taken in school. El Bootleggo?

When the guy came back I went through an elaborate series of pointing and gesturing before he said “Can I help you?” He owned the place and was a big Dylan fan, he had ordered it for himself and a few extra copies just in case, and it was officially released that very day. Needless to say I bought one and raced home to immediately put it on the second “electric” disc. I didn’t leave the house for the rest of the day. I played each song, listened for the crowd reactions and listened very closely just before Like a Rolling Stone when he turns to the band (soon to be The Band) and says “Play Fucking Loud”. Done and done and for that day there wasn’t a heartbreak in the world that could touch me. Play Fucking Loud indeed.

This Is TheMinneapolis Police, The Party Is Over

In an effort to explore the roots of my music geekdom lets get in the way back machine and visit 1990.

When I was 16 I inherited a box of records from my uncle Bob, Mostly 70's comedy and Dylan records although the inclusion of the nadir of Dylan's career, the self titled mess of half finished ideas and Self Portrait outtakes qualified as both. Soon afterwards I started picking up vinyl in used records stores and among the first things I found was The Replacements "Stink", from the original Twin-Tone pressing, pristinely wrapped in plastic and cheap at $5.00. I took it home that day along with some other records that have been lost to various moves through the years.

It was 1990 and the Replacements hadn't broken up yet. Thanks to time spent in a bad girls basements sharing cigarettes and 40's of malt liquor I was well versed in their stuff, especially Hootenanny, and Let it Be which were my favorites. I wasn't familiar with this record, with it's black and white cover that looked like it was created with a rubber stamp and copy machine but I bought it anyway.

I was a pretty astute music fan for a kid and I knew that there was something more than what was on the radio or on the still in it's early stages MTV. It just took me a while to find out what it was. If I didn't believe that my heart and soul was firmly entrenched in raucous rock and roll before I played that record, I believed it afterwards. Stink out did the Replacement's stuff I knew already as well as almost everything I had heard from anyone up till then (I say almost because the Pixies had already hit my teenage radar by then). Remember, this was a pre Nirvana world we were living in so the garage style, heartfelt, trashy rock was harder to find even if Johnny Thunders was still hanging on by a thread somewhere.

The record started with the sound of the Minneapolis police breaking up a party and 14 minutes and a few seconds later it ended in a fury of noise. Somewhere in between I realized that this was the sound of my heart. Yeah, 8 songs in 14 minutes and change, that's not even time enough to be famous.

Here's a live version of "Dope Smoking Moron" as well as the unreleased "Skip It" recorded in 1981 (My god they are impossibly young in this clip):

More on Why I'm Here

Thanks for stopping by my new blog. I've only been here for a few days after a long run at betheboy.com and I'm still working out the kinks. However I'd like to explain a little further about why I'm doing this.

A few days ago I wrote about the reasons for starting this blog and I'd like to expand on that thought just a little more. This blog is about music and me, because if music and I were married we'd be in the middle of a trial separation. After many years together, music and I have lost that certain something and we're trying to figure out what to do next. The inspiration for this blog actually came from an unlikely source, a baseball book by Joe Posnanski called The Soul of Baseball and it recounts the year that Posnanski spent traveling with baseball legend, the late Buck O'Neil. I highly recommend the book and not just to baseball fans; it's an absolute treasure of a book. There's a scene early in the book that got me to thinking. In it, Buck O'Neil who is 94 when the book takes place, is talking to another older gentleman about baseball. The man tells Buck, that he doesn't go to games anymore because the game has changed. O'Neil replies "It hasn't changed. We've changed." This hit close to home for me and it was the first time that I thought to say to music "It's not you music, it's me."

For many years music was absolutely magical to me and I've simply lost my passion for it but it's not because music has changed. There are still people making great records and people making terrible records but I'm not listening to them because I have changed. I have gotten older. The question isn't "What's wrong with music?" the question is "What has changed about me?" and more importantly, what can I do to change it.

Have I just gotten older? Can I reverse this change? I've said it before but it bears repeating the goals of this blog are as follows:

1) Remember the things that drew me to the music I love in the first place
2) To find out how I've lost that musical lovin' feeling
3) Find a way to make my relationship with music work again

It's like winning back an ex except, music probably won't constantly tell me that they can do better than me. At least I hope not.

The Answers are Due Back in Two Weeks

This originally appeared on my old blog but if you haven't read it, it's new to you. It gets at the roots of my music nerdiness.

For about two years, for most of 1990 and 1991 I was rarely allowed out of the house. Why? Mostly because as a kid I did stupid things and got in trouble. My father, tired of getting calls from school about me, kept me on a tight leash. I went to school, came home, and that was mostly it, the only other place I was allowed was the library and I went as often as I could. My local library in the early nineties had limited resources and of course no internet yet but it did have something that changed my life, microfilm...thousands and thousands of microfilm cartridges that allowed me to read decades worth of music periodicals.

As a teenager I considered myself pretty musically savvy but I had very little sense of musical history. I knew my favorites of the day backwards and forwards but at 16 my musical history sense didn't go far; I knew that Velvet Underground influenced the bands that I liked and that Lou Reed was the singer. I knew Bob Dylan's Greatest hits Vol. I and II like they were old friends but not much more . It was through the library's periodical index that I first read about The Modern Lovers and The Stooges; it was where I learned that Devo was more than just "Whip It" and where after seeing on MTV News that a guitar player named Johnny Thunders had been found dead in New Orleans I went to find out about the New York Dolls.

At the time I didn't realize quite what I was doing. I thought I was just passing the time until I could go out with my friends again and drink beer behind that same library, but I was doing a lot more, I was setting in motion a passion for music knowledge that has never stopped. Eventually I did get out again and I managed, for rest of my teens to not get caught doing anything stupid but I never stopped going to the library and never stopped learning more. Of course it's easier now, thanks to the internet, I can learn in minutes something that used to take hours of work but I still research and seek out new things with the same passion that I did back then. It's been years since I pored over microfilm and then headed out to find some record mentioned in an old magazine but every time I drive past the library I think there's a kid somewhere who feels like there's more than what's on the radio and TV and is determined to find it. Thankfully, it's out there waiting to be found.

Behind The Wheel Of Mid Sized Automobile

Over the weekend my car was finally put out to pasture after a long losing battle with obsolescence. After saving my pennies for a year to put together enough for a down payment, my wife and I paid our money, signed on the dotted line and for the first time in a long while, I drove off in a car that I felt confident would make it all the way home.

As I drove off the lot I reached for the radio but I stopped myself before turning it on. What if there was a crappy song on the radio, there most likely would be and I couldn't have the first song played in my new car be something lousy. I believe that it's important to immediately set the tone for a car with good music. Every year there are millions of people who buy cars and just turn on the radio, these people then have to live with the fact that they had little say about the first song played in their car; it could be Rick Astley or Nickelback...this severely reduces the cars value and starts the car off on the wrong note (pun intended) unless you happen to be Rick Astley or in Nickelback. Not wanting to risk hearing a crappy song I drove home listening only to the very quiet engine and the road beneath me; music would have to wait until the next morning.

On Sunday morning I went out to my old car, took all of the CD's out placed them in the new car. I thought about every car I've ever owned and the first song I played in each one, yes I remember them all:

1) 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix (purchased in 1993) - Husker Du - New Day Rising

2) 1988 Plymouth Sundance - (1994) Hank Williams - Move it On Over

3) 1980 Buick Regal (1998) I drove this car for two months it had no radio

4) 1987 Mitsubishi Mirage (1998) Johnny Cash- Rusty Cage (This was the only time I ever relied on the radio for the first song, it was a chilly fall night on Long Island and I turned on the station from Hofstra University, WRHU and Rusty Cage was on. That is good luck)

5) 1985 Audi 5000 (1999) Drove this for 4 months with no radio

6) 1990 Volkswagen Jetta - Yo La Tengo - Too Late (I had gone with my then girlfriend to buy this car and I took the CD out of her car to play in my new one on the drive home)

7) 1996 Hyundai Elantra (2002) The Replacements - Bastards of Young

8) 2008 Nissan Sentra (2008) New York Dolls - Trash* - After transferring Cd's from my old car I blindly reached into the stack and pulled out The New York Dolls - Rock and Roll, this was truly just chance but had I pulled out something different might have put it back. The Dolls feel right for a first song in my new car. New car good mojo mission accomplished.

*For the record The title of the song in no way reflects the quality of the car.



New York Dolls- Trash

So I've Started Another Blog

"I hate music, it's got too many notes"
- The Replacements "I Hate Music"


Yeah, I've started another blog, that's not the worst part though; I've started a music blog. The Internet really doesn't need another person talking about music but here I am anyway, let me try to explain why.

For many, many years I was a dedicated follower and consumer of music. I listed to it all the time, went to go see it performed live and obsessively followed the artists I liked, new or old. Then something changed, I can't tell you why but I remember when; someone sent me some songs off of the first Arcade Fire album when it came out, I listened to them and I enjoyed them but I just didn't care about them. Shortly afterwards someone introduced me to another band that was taking the indie kids by storm and again I just didn't give a damn. That was the start of the retreat and in the years since my musical world has gotten smaller to the point where only a limited number of things really move me anymore. I never thought I'd say this, but I just don't like music very much anymore. No matter how hard I try it doesn't feel the same as it once did, this blog is my attempt to explore what I loved about music and to try and rekindle the spark that it used to give me. There are a few posts up already that appeared on my old blog but I plan on updating this with new stuff regularly, maybe you'll discover you didn't know before and maybe you'll help me discover something new. Hopefully, the process of writing about music that matters to me will help me remember why it mattered in the first place.

Trying a Little Tenderness

If you keeping score at home, and I know you are I've now played the same song over 7 times, make it 8, I just did it again. Why? Because at the moment the only thing I want to hear, the Otis Redding version of (Can't Get No) Satisfaction.

Otis' version of Satisfaction is, bar none, one of the 5 best covers ever done. If you've never heard it, seek it out on CD or even better find the DA Pennebaker documentary on the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Skip past all the hippie crap and check out Otis. If you can find it, there's a split LP of Hendrix/Otis from that day, a historic pair of performances. Over the years Otis' has faded somewhat while we have probably all seen the image of Jimi over his burning guitar. Not to take away from Hendrix but that was a parlor trick, a diversion if you will. In Jimi you have the paradox of a black man playing a variation on the blues to a white audience that didn't understand the blues to begin with, not the real blues anyway. At times Hendrix opted for showmanship over everything else and because of that people hear the guitar but miss that flawed, beautiful voice.

Otis Redding only had his voice, but he brought with him backing band of no less Booker T. and the MG's AND The Mar-Keys but even with the two best backing groups in the world behind him Otis Redding wasn't rock and roll, he was a SOUL singer when that meant "not for white people". I don't think the kids at Monterey cared who Otis Redding was before he took the stage. He may have come on stage a soul singer in green suit but he walked off it a rock star. Given the short sets allowed because of the festival's schedule the band rips through some of Otis' best stuff and he hardly stops to take a breath through "Shake", "Respect", "Satisfaction". Otis moves…well he moves like only he could move. By the time the set ends with "Try a Little Tenderness" only the kids on bad trips aren't enthralled.

Here is the festival footage of the songs mentioned above:

See No Evil

A restaurant in Los Angeles 2006 - Some songs are more than just heard, they are physically felt. Every time I hear the opening riff to Television's "See No Evil" I can feel the song on a gut level. By the time the opening chords fade, the dual guitar attack of Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine kicks in and Tom began to sing I'm already keeping time under table.

"See No Evil" is the first song on Television's first record Marquee Moon an often referenced but infrequently played classic. Television is usually considered part of the 1970's New York punk scene but they have more in common with John Coltrane than they ever did with Johnny Thunders. Television is as close as rock has ever come to the kind of precision musicianship that makes for good jazz. The thing that separates Marquee Moon from it's contemporaries is just how clean it sounds. Unlike the most of the bands that played the mid to late 70's scene in New York there's no distortion or feedback. Marquee Moon is pure, no tricks, no effects just straightforward guitar bass and drums.

When an artist sets to create something there is a vision in their mind of what it will look, sound or feel like. In the movie The Horse's Mouth, Alec Guiness plays an painter who struggles to bring his vision to life. After finding the perfect place to create his masterpiece (which happens to be the apartment of a vacationing couple who is unaware of what he is doing) Guiness spends every waking minute bringing it to life only to admit in the end that he didn't get it right. It just isn't as good as he pictured it. Most musicians experience the same frustration only sometimes it's worse because the sound in someone's head is hard to translate through electronics. By committing music to tape the artist is trying to say that THIS is what they have heard in their mind, THIS is what I have been feeling in my body and living with. Sometimes, like in the movie, the finished product isn't what the artist intended. When you add in the input of producers, engineers and record companies it's a wonder that music comes out sounding anything like it is supposed to (see Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power, or in film Orsen Wells' - Touch of Evil).

The beauty of Marquee Moon is that it feels like nothing has been changed from the band's vision. Every note is crisp and clear and every instrument is balanced in the mix. It's as if the soundboard was plugged directly into the brain, it's virtuoso rock and roll and it kills me every time I hear it. Why can't more things sound this pure? Why can't I transfer thoughts from my head to the page with this much clarity?

What The World Needs Now

Nobody asked for it but here's another music blog.