It’s Spotify Wrapped season again, mofos, which means it’s anti-Spotify season again, with suggestions that you should consume conventional music-conveyance media instead of stream, as though the two don’t go together in a yes and sort of way.
Once I’ve worn something out on the streaming service, particularly something new by an active band, I usually acquire a physical copy via Bandcamp (semi-recently: Course in Fable by Ryley Walker, Country Tropics by Old Saw, You Took That Walk for the Two of Us by Andy Boay, The Expanding Flower Planet by Deardoorian, and Dawn by Ulann Passerine/Steven R. Smith) or directly from the record company (lately more often than not from Philly’s own, No Quarter: Hear the Children Sing The Evidence by Bonnie Prince Billy, Third and Ipsa Corpora by Nathan Salsburg, Evolution Here We Come by Chris Forsyth, This Is Basic by Basic, Daylight Daylight by Steve Gunn).
If it’s an old release, I get it via Discogs or hope to find it on tri-annual Princeton Record Exchange visits.
I listen to and acquire records (now called “vinyl”), less often recently in part due to having to interrupt the flow of WFH’ing to stand and flip the side but also due to $$$ — at the aforementioned Princeton Record Exchange, they clearly semi-recently upped the price from $1.99 to $7.99 on tons of records, simply by adding a centimeter-long leftwards horizontal line from the top of the “1”.
I listen to and acquire CDs (recently classical CDs acquired for $5 a bag at my local public library’s biannual book sale), since they’re so inexpensive and allow for 60+ minutes of consistent sedentary concentration during the work day.
Same with books: I would mostly read conventional print books but there’s movement in the direction of other media and I know better than to resist the flow. I’m always reading at least one (usually two or three) print editions while also reading ebooks (particularly in languages other than English because the dictionary and translation functions are so efficient for clarifying/learning BUT ALSO everything in the public domain is available for free via Project Gutenberg so it’s easy enough to build a sweet canonical electronic library AND SADLY BECAUSE the text is consistently sized and therefore easier for me to read now that I’m clearly going blind thanks to advanced age).
And lately, the past year or so, I’ve started to move away from listening to podcasts and integrating more audiobooks into my life. Listening to audiobooks doesn’t replace reading print books but it does take the place of listening to podcasts. I tend to prefer audiobooks that don’t require total attention, that can be lived with in a way, although I feel like I listen closely enough. What’s interesting is that scenes or images in the book are doubled/imprinted by images of where I was when listening to them. I used to walk and read all the time, so I’m accustomed to imprinting scenes in novels with where I was when I read them, but it’s more pronounced with audiobooks because eyes are free to see.
Below I’ve compiled impressions of a few audiobooks I’ve listened to recently related to ye olde rock music (excluding The Grateful Dead, its own genre requiring a unique page), with a few old-fashioned print books thrown in too. Images link to the audiobook on Spotify or the publisher’s page for the book. The image at the top of the screen is okra. (This video narrated by Jesse Jarnow is worth watching if you don’t associate okra with anything special.)
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad
Probably the most enjoyable audiobook I’ve ever listened to — worth it alone for Franzen reading the chapter about Mission of Burma or Fred Armisen reading about The Butthole Surfers. But every chapter, even for bands I’ve never really liked much (Black Flag, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Mudhoney, Fugazi), completely activated my imagination as I listened, transporting me from wherever I was while listening in my current middle-age suburban existence (driving to and from Costco listening to the chapter on The Replacements, working out listening to the chapter on the Minutemen, doing a ton of dishes after our dishwasher broke listening to the chapter about Minor Threat, mowing the lawn listening to the chapter on Sonic Youth, waiting for daughter to get off bus from summer school listening to the chapter on Dinosaur Jr, sitting pool-side as wife and daughter float around in the water listening to the chapter on Mission of Burma).
As the father of a unique young daughter, it was comforting to hear how isolated and weird all these kids were before they started their bands, how immersed they were in music, and how that isolation and immersion ultimately paid off. The Minutemen chapter is probably the most inspiring or interesting and affecting with the death of D. Boone, but all the chapters are memorable.
Particularly enjoyed the last chapter on Beat Happening, the only band covered I’d never listened to/knew nothing about. And also throughout but particularly in the Mudhoney chapter it’s exciting when it’s all about the early Seattle grunge scene and there’s the first mention of the “grease monkey”-looking singer guitarist with the piercing eyes and his super-tall bassist . . . Really just a wonderfully executed collection of relatively contemporary adventure stories.
Loved also that Greg Ginn, the founder of SST Records, had seen the Dead seventy-something times.ˆ
Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad, Kurt Loder (Narrator)
Had high expectations for this after loving the audiobook for Azerrad’s follow-up Our Band Could Be Your Life, but, maybe because it’s read by the official voice of MTV News Kurt Loder (who every once in a while unexpectedly mangled syllables in a way that seemed familiar — and sure enough he’s from Ocean City, NJ), it came off seeming a little Rolling Stone book-length feature? Interesting, particularly the early days growing-up stuff for all three main members of the band, as well as the handful of drummers who came before Dave Grohl. And loved the early image of young Kurt making up punk rock songs on his guitar in his bedroom without having heard punk rock yet.
I wasn’t really all that into Nirvana when Cobain was alive, other than saying aloud “dude’s definitely a star” while watching the video for Heart-Shaped Box my senior year in college right around the time he died (weeks before, I think). The next year working in the kitchen of a barbecue restaurant in Austin we played a tape of In Utero over and over and I came to love it, respecting how he’d backed up sensationalist self-harming lyrics with action (ie, “look on the bright side . . .” etc), singing aloud with gusto to lines like “you can’t fire me ‘cuz I quit!”
And then the next year I was in a nearly empty bar, more like a little dance hall, one afternoon in Utila, an island on the backpacker gringo trail off the north coast of Honduras, where I stopped in because they were playing Teen Spirit really loud on a PA in there. I sat at the bar and drank like three ice-cold beers as they played the entire Nevermind record at full blast. At one point a young Garifuna kid wearing a cowboy hat went to the middle of the dance floor and danced in what seemed like a country-western style but cooler, bringing out a subtle country flavor I’ve heard in the music ever since.
But generally, this audiobook was informative and sort of grueling knowing what was coming, particularly every time Kurt mentions how his stomach pain for example was so bad it made him want to blow his head off. I didn’t know that when he was young he’d been friends with The Melvins and tried out for them etc. And I really knew nothing about Kris and Dave, all of which was interesting enough as I listened while doing errands, running in pre-dawn darkness, at the gym, doing dishes and folding laundry etc.
Now that I’m nearly twice the age Kurt was when he died, I wonder what it would’ve been like to be his parent, to have a kid behave as he did, a talented artist but a vandal, a high school dropout, living on the streets under a bridge for a bit, working as a janitor sometimes, living in a trash-filled shack, proclaiming himself a punk. How did his parents feel at that point? How will I feel if my own supremely “willful” daughter lives like that over the next decade? And how would a parent feel to then have that same kid achieve monumental superstar success, only to soon after eliminate his map in the most extreme manner?
Will now listen to Azerrad’s reflections thirty years later on everything he’s learned in the years past, all the lies he was told etc . . .
Nirvana: The Amplifications by Michael Azerrad
The only thing semi-similar I can think of is David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, the annotated transcript of a Rolling Stone journalist’s time with DFW, which served as the basis for the related movie, The End of the Tour. Can very much imagine this getting a similar treatment, the journalist’s friendship with his subject and the reconsiderations and regrets of having had that experience. Would make a fantastic movie, really.
Azerrad was a Rolling Stone journalist who wrote a cover story on Nirvana that led Kurt and Courtney to ask him to write an “unauthorized” bio about the band, which became Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. But this, published some thirty years later, pretty much consists I believe of annotations on the original biography, which I’d listened to recently and enjoyed. I’m not sure what this book looks like in print (see The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana) but this audiobook, read by the author, seemed superior or at least more interesting — hits the same major biographical points as the original bio, in less detail, with the perspective shifted from third to first person, adding an engaging, mature, often almost moving “privileged insider” dimension.
Azerrad is largely absent from the bio but in this he reflects on his friendship with Kurt and the band, going on tour with them, how he had been used by Kurt and Courtney in a way in part to show that they were good parents, how Kurt had fed him lies as part of the general myth-making (Kurt had never really ever lived under a bridge in Aberdeen, eg), and of course he reflects on Kurt’s inevitable tragic end, presenting the full complexity of the situation. He’s particularly insightful about how Kurt, well versed in the history of rock music mythologizing, cast himself as a sort of doomed romantic hero, creating at every turn a series of perceived antagonists.
Loved the bit where the author compares Kurt to Jerry Garcia (hesitant heroin-addicted figurehead of a supremely revered band), although without mentioning that Jerry’s father had drowned when Jerry was four years old, an essential rupture in his childhood like Kurt’s parents’ divorce when he was seven.
I’ve generally enjoyed this unexpected detour in Nirvana-world recently, and I’d recommend you maybe listen to this one first before listening to or reading the original bio.
Just Kids by Patti Smith
I’ve never really known much about Patti Smith, have never been able to get into her music despite trying a few times, and so I just didn’t really think I’d love this as much as I did. It really won me over pretty early, maybe when her family moved to the Germantown section of Philly and then to South Jersey and I recognized those places as the source of her accent. Should be required reading for anyone who moves to NYC with artistic ambitions. Loved how she slept in doorways and Central Park and lived the way she did for the first few years. Exposure to the city was her college and MFA. Generally reads like a WWI memoir (All Quiet on the Western Front, Storms of Steel) or a Holocaust novel in which luck plays such a part in the narrator’s survival.
Just totally engaging, how she met Mapplethorpe, how they became an interdependent duo devoted to art, their early days essentially living like hippies, seeing The Doors early on — moving to The Chelsea Hotel was really their first major stroke of luck, experience in that community at that time, with all the celebrity encounters (Jimi, Janis, Ginsberg). Loved it for the fact alone that it may interest some young reader to pick up Gregory Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death, let alone Rimbaud. The whole bit with how she met Sam Shepherd was wonderfully done — such a funny scene when it’s revealed who Slim, the wild down-homey handsome drummer for the Holy Modal Rounders, really is and how he can afford to buy her lobster at Max’s Kansas City. Only in New York.
Just generally interesting how they’re confident in their underlying artistic abilities well before they’ve even actually created anything of merit, how that drives their ambition, which drives their efforts and experiments, all of which lead to photography and music, unexpectedly for both. But also this is of course worth it as a document of what the city had been like, an elegy not only for the author’s great friend, the other half of her bonded pair, but also an elegy for the seedy, grungy, affordable, eccentric, experimental, inspiring, artistic NYC that now seems like the playground of the international rich, the bait and tackle shop where Mapplethrope bought flies and beads for the jewlery he made now surely replaced by a Duane Reade or Citibank.
The ending seemed a little rushed and the poems at the end didn’t exactly engage me but overall this was fantastic listening, evoked and animated a world now passed, and I enjoyed nearly every minute I spent immersed in it. Looking forward to M Train next and giving her music a few more shots.
M Train by Patti Smith
Almost quit on it early on, deeming it aimless nostalgic musings, but then there was someone in the trunk of the car in French Guiana, and things proceeded apace as the artistry kicked in, usually with an unexpected revelation, spiraling back to a table, a notebook, a book, a writer, a good cup of coffee, and then off to Japan, Tangier, Mexico, and most movingly Rockaway Beach right before Superstorm Sandy. Ultimately an unexpectedly interesting and affective associative elegy for her husband (MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith [who did not change his surname to hers]), the boardwalk, her old friends, her revered writers (Rimbaud, Genet, Bowles, Plath), a hand-drawn requiem for everything she loved she’d one day lose. Loved the books she mentions, mostly New Directions classics, and added a few to the queue too (A Night of Serious Drinking). At times, unlike in Just Kids, the prose seemed mannered, as though mimicking the sense of an archaic or translated text (something as small as the use of “of” instead of “about”), the word choice elevated yet not in an ironic way, but I generally admired the various textures throughout, especially what seemed like a long prose poem toward the end. After listening to this and Just Kids read by the author I feel like I’ve made Patti Smith’s acquaintance and am happy to have had the experience. If I see her I will say hello/hurrah I awake from yesterday . . .
Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik by Julian Cope
I’ve been familiar for 25 to 30 years with 85% of the recordings mentioned herein, so it was a lower-case thrill to read descriptions of Can, Faust, Neu, Popul Vuh, all the major “west” German favorites, and for me lesser-liked entities like Kraftwerk, Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream. But it was a THRILL when reading descriptions of recordings I’d never heard of, let alone heard, like Witthauser & Westerupp, Cosmic Jokers, Sergius Golowin (Lord Krishna von Goloka), Peter Hammill (Nadir’s Big Chance), Tony Conrad (Outside the Dream Syndicate), Walter Wegmuller (Tarot).
The writing style, the language, was fun too — semi-overblown loose rock gonzo journalism doing its best to make sense of all this cosmic outre output. Very much from the perspective of someone who was there (in the UK) at the time listening to this stuff as it came out, forming impressions mediated at most by John Peel and NME and random record stores. Often humorous: comparing Amon Duul I commune dwellers on bongos and maracas to a band of orcs, describing Can as The Meters playing avant-garde rock. Informative too: I’d never heard the bit about how Jaki Liebezeit (Can drummer) was confronted by a freak while playing free jazz who instructed Jaki to play monotonously, immediately changing Jaki’s approach. Also a good point about how Can could’ve released recordings that eventually came out on Delay ’68 but wanted to come out and make a clear statement with Monster Movie. Knew next to nothing about the musicians in Neu and Faust.
First heard about the existence of the book maybe in the late ’90s, maybe in a piece about Sean O’Hagan of The High Llamas, how he was reading this and wouldn’t stop talking about it. (For some reason when I half-remember this I see, without a doubt, the escalator at the Quakerbridge Mall in Princeton-ish area NJ, as though I were told this anecdote while there or read it while sitting in that area, but no idea why?) Never encountered a copy in the wild and didn’t think about it until a few days ago when I searched for it online and saw that copies were available, sure, if you had a few hundred dollars to spare. So I bookmarked a PDF online and read it with total pleasure this Independence Day weekend on my iPad, which is a recommended way to read it, not because it’s infinitely cheaper than acquiring a print edition but because you can flip from browser to popular music app and save everything mentioned that you don’t know.
Like the Yacht Rock sitcom on YouTube, would love to see a ridiculous dramatic sit-com animated series about all these groups, considering the cross-over among so many of the musicians. The only detraction I’d say is Cope’s less than total reverence for Can’s Future Days and Gottsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar. Also the brief reviews at the end of the albums I wasn’t all that familiar with was like listening to someone tell you their dreams — or, more so, worth skimming for now, and worth returning to once the source material’s consumed and integrated.
World Within A Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music by Jeff Tweedy
Prime example of the Midwestern American voice, viewpoint, aesthetic, moral stance. So intentionally mid because anything else would call too much attention to itself, always erring on the side of kindness/niceness in a way that seems (and is sometimes stated as) the result of therapy. But because so very Midwestern the sense that Tweedy’s constantly checking his primal or evil or “east coast” instincts (see the chapter on that Dolly Parton song) seems perfectly authentic coming out of such a familiar voice, occasionally even rising to seem insightful, inspiring, and enlightened, before immediately undercutting/humbling himself. If you know Wilco and/or Tweedy’s music you’re familiar with the general presentation.
I saw him play solo in Iowa City in early 2006 and his banter between songs seemed like really funny therapy sessions, but the primary memory is that between songs someone shouted out “play some mid-tempo dad rock” and everyone in the crowd laughed. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sort of reaction to a satirical request. But it’s representative of the sort of friendly quasi-familial connection he seeks to create with his music, and has admired, appreciated and written about in this book, which includes short pieces on 30-something songs plus a handful of what he calls “rememories” that he believes have influenced the music he’s been attracted to and made.
The chapters on songs are all like takes on the little phrase in the sonata in Proust, associations and stories, mostly but not always from his formative years. Lots of interesting and amusing anecdotes, particularly one about Timothy B. Schmidt of The Eagles as well as some amazing moving magical synchronicity-type stories. The songs themselves are all great, sure, but after reading Krautrocksampler I sometimes felt like I was exposing myself to a more Common, Conventional, Connection-orientated Populist (CCCP) input, something that could come in handy if it prompts more accessible output from my Artistic Intelligence. Listened to this on Spotify, read really well by the author, supplemented by this playlist of all the songs considered.
Renegade by Mark E. Smith
Inspiring to read the words of M.E.S. himself, role model for all who might fancy a few pints down at their local, who savor the subtleties of the occasional sporting event, who openly disrespect daft twats if they deserve it, and are fierce when it comes to aesthetic independence.
The Fall by Mick Middles and Mark E. Smith
This is totally peripatetic-uh, interview-heavy, awesome intermittent reading-uh (of a spectacularly joyous sort-uh), that is-uh, if you’re currently totally obsessed-uh by The Fall-uh, otherwise I wouldn’t bother-uh, or better yet-uh, I’d listen me to some Mark E. Smith & Friends-uh then read this sucker on the loo-uh etc.
Have a Bleedin Guess: The Story of Hex Enduction Hour by Paul Hanley
Most interesting about that one phrase toward the beginning of “The Classical” that didn’t age well. Also great at demystifying the psychic MES myth, describing the permeable border between unschooled intuitive zero-fuckery and genius. The cover of this suggests the cover of Blast by Wyndham Lewis, an inspiration for the cover of Hex Enduction Hour and the MES approach. Generally, a swell read for fans. For example, cool to learn they got 6K pounds for the inclusion of Hip Priest in Silence of the Lambs. Also loved the “best album of all-time” reviews toward the end that read like vicious pans (along the lines of the singer is a neurotic drinker and the band is no more than a big crashing beat etc).
Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) by Jon Fine
Rocks, with reservations. The language is intensely readable, consistently engaging, addictive. I looked forward to picking it up whenever possible and read more at night in bed than I’d intended. It excels at characterization of people and places, many I recognized from Oberlin and Brooklyn. Related so hard to the excitement of putting together a band and playing parties in dorm lounges at Oberlin — my college band, which the author would’ve abhorred most likely rightly so in retrospect, played the co-op circuit — Harkness a few times, Fairchild, Tank a few times, etc — and many friends were in bands, one of which incessantly practiced a Pixies cover in the practice space beneath my bedroom in Fuller, where so many memorable jams occurred, sometimes with friends playing guitar or drums without having any idea how to play). All the joys and sorrows of trying to “make a life in art” after college are so well conveyed. There’s real old-fashioned poignancy related to the end of Bitch Magnet (author kicked out), all the hopes crashing down with the dismantling of the most fundamental element of his identity.
The best part for me was a few years after college when he’s losing his hair, walking around the East Village wheatpasting posters for upcoming shows, feeling like he’s losing his edge, or like his studied disheveled look is becoming too authentically hobo. I also really loved the later transition the author makes to a “mature” or at least more stable career, essential for someone of a certain age in New York, sans spousal or familial support. The arc of the sneering self-righteous ascetic rocker ultimately learning to dance in post-9/11 Brooklyn, his post-graduate education, the revelation of a network in the US and Europe supporting weird loud music, all that’s great.
At one point 3/4s through I wondered if I’d really give this five stars and then came to spot-on descriptions of the massive Rubulad party (in 2000, the original singer in Oneida, a great psych band with Oberlin members, sang at least a verse flat on his back with his head resting on the toe of my boot) and the conversation-stimulating Kokie’s in Williamsburg around the turn of the century — and figured I’d now have to give this SIX STARS.
But then we came to the last section about Bitch Magnet’s reunion in 2012 . . . and the only urgency I sensed, its primary motivating energy, related to the author’s ego, like the book started to seem more about status than engaging and sufficiently self-critical nostalgia/analysis. In particular, there’s a page describing interactions with corporate types at drinks or dinners who ask the name of his band and then laugh — a page that made me not really root for the guy anymore, that made him seem insecure and lesser, all of which adds a layer of complexity to the book that maybe sort of improves it in a way by making “liking” it more difficult? The author generally started to seem anti-charismatic, and that too is interesting, like controlled dissonance?
I watched some videos of the author’s bands and some of a recent interview about the book, which I don’t recommend unless you want the voice and images evoked by the text replaced by actual voice and images of the author. It was also sort of “hard to unsee” the way in the few videos of performances the author raised his guitar and gestured in grand rock fashion — he describes this well in the book in text but on film it seemed a little much?
Maybe if instead of pushing Bitch Magnet merch on everyone at their final reunion shows he decided to give it all away out of straightforward generosity and goodwill, even as a self-conscious investment in marketing Bitch Magnet reissues, he may have redeemed himself for me, but it came off poorly when he’s already said his wife sold her company and they’re comfortable, living in the same building as LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy — and all that insider revelry toward the end at the LCD Soundsystem Terminal 5 shows in 2010 came with a whiff of look everyone I’ve found my community, I’m one of them, I belong, I belong! Despite the supposed asceticism early on, there seemed to be a failure at times to restrain himself that also seems expressed, for example, in the oddly phrased subtitle?
But, again, ultimately, overall: this was a tremendous read — a great memoir for anyone interested in this era of music and its overtones will surely hang in the air and intermix with the experience of any sort of artist initially inspired and excited about creating something that feels like their own, discovering a community of the like-minded, and then winding up semi-disillusioned or just experienced (and weary) to such a degree that stability seems appealing as one ages. The last section could’ve been shortened and some unappealing observations cut, but all in all a highly recommended memoir for anyone interested in the experience of musicians obsessed less with commercial success than making original music.
Otherwise, for the record: I acquired and read this on the enthusiastic recommendation of a writer I’d met at a reading in Philly who’d graduated from Oberlin in the spring before I arrived in the fall (and is also cited in the acknowledgments). I first heard of the author’s band (Bitch Magnet) in the early ’90s. The author had graduated two years before I arrived and his band’s name was memorable and mentioned often enough. I didn’t actually hear them until my senior year and when I did it wasn’t my thing. Gastr del Sol’s The Serpentine Similar blew me away around then but I wasn’t all that into all that much music played by college kids at the time (it wasn’t yet called “Indie,” a term I at first associated with the Indy 500). In general I’m not really a fan of harder rock, other than Sabbath, Swans, and some more recent drone-metal derivatives. So many humorless heavy bands at Oberlin but I was hearing for the first time Can and Fela and post-bop (Sun Ra, Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Coltrane Quartet), also old blues and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Beefheart. I guess I was into expansive and often improvisational stuff, an interest that evolved out of a serious high-school obsession with the Dead and JGB and then in the first year or two at college a very weird and more or less unknown band that you could see at the time in rooms with a few hundred people at most for not much money, although by a year or two after graduation I primarily listened to and saw whenever possible Palace, Stereolab, Sea and Cake, Sun City Girls, Polvo, Red Red Meat/Califone, Tortoise, Sonic Youth, Jim O’Rourke, etc.
A Curious Mix of People: The Underground Scene of ’90s Austin by Greg Beets, Richard Whymark
Exceeded expectations and so effectively evoked so many memories of seeing Ed Hall, Crust, Sincola, Jesus Christ Superfly, Fuckemos, The Motards (when I first moved to Austin after college in August ’94 I worked a salsa festival with some of them and we all got kinda wasted), Pork, Drums and Tuba, the Inhalants and so many other bands I remember seeing on posters and probably saw but don’t remember seeing necessarily 28 years later (Stretford is a band I remember always hearing about but don’t remember ever seeing and totally forgot about until I read this book).
So very grateful this book brought back memories of the bathroom at Emo’s . . . like a destroyed shed covered in graffiti and stickers and torn posters, standing in an inch of blackened piss, distorted churning guitars and droning bass in the background, wasted kinda scary dudes all around, many on more serious drugs than I ever did. I definitely never fully connected with the scene or knew any of these people interviewed but I loved the book. It’s really well put together, with a three- or four-page introduction followed by a pleasant polyphonic stream of interview excerpts that cohere and tell a story really well, organized by venues, radio stations, zines, record labels, the Sound Exchange, where I bought the Hey Drag City compilation and first heard The Palace Brothers and Smog right before I left town.
Great details throughout, off-hand comments that crystalize everything, like a Sound Exchange employee explaining how they were grumpy because they were the ones who were offered Steely Dan cassettes scrounged off car floors by guys who’d been up all night, desperate for cash to get some more of whatever they were on and the record store employees were the ones who had to tell them no. Absolutely perfect bits like that make this oral history so good.
I got this because for some reason I was trying to find a video of Spoon playing “My Sharona” at the Hole in the Wall — I definitely saw them play “My Sharona” there once or twice. The blond singer with the sunglasses had a thing for my neighbor and I’d met him one time right outside my apartment. I remembered a blond female bass player but all the pics I found online of Spoon from 1995 or so were all men, but then I somehow found this book, ordered, opened it, and there was a picture of Andy McGuire, the blond bass player for Spoon, just as I’d remembered.
I worked at Ruby’s BBQ from Sept ’94 to Sept ’95. I was twenty two, lived at 43rd and Duval with a roommate in an apartment complex with a pool for ~$300 a month each. Started as a prep cook at Ruby’s making $4.75 and ending at $6.50 or so, plus a meal, a drink, and tip money, which I spent nearly nightly at the Crown & Anchor, Lovejoy’s, the Hole in the Wall, Emo’s, or sometimes at Antone’s (Ruby’s staff were let in free). Had nearly no money but also super-limited expenses — no car, no TV, no cable bill, no iPhone or internet bill, no streaming services, no subscriptions etc.
I’d moved down there after playing in bands in college, hoping to form a band and conquer the world (joking) — wound up working at Ruby’s and biking over to open mics at the Austin Outhouse fairly regularly, solo acoustic style, recorded a demo tape I gave to a barbecue colleague who worked at the Hole in the Wall to give to the booking person there (who’s interviewed in this) but I quickly got frustrated with everything thanks to extreme early twenties restlessness (also no car to drive around the amp I didn’t have to play with like-minded musicians I didn’t yet know etc) and became more interested in reading and writing and wound up saving cash to travel for a few months by bus from Austin to Costa Rica and back, writing all the time.
I definitely wasn’t into garage punk or crazy Texan psych-punk etc and really to be honest there were only a handful of truly memorable music experiences that year I lived there — Stereolab for free in Aug ‘94 at Emo’s; Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 for $2 at Emo’s in Aug ’95 right before I left for Central America; Boss Hog in Dec ’95 right around when I came back before leaving for good; Maceo Parker with Fred Wesley at Antone’s in Aug ’95; The Flaming Lips in May ’95 at Liberty Lunch; my BBQ colleague Trevor’s crazy scrappy Beefheart-ish band Wonder Whip at the Blue Flamingo; Space Streakings, an incredibly fast Japanese band, just bass and turntable and drum machines and a “singer” who blasted a horn connected to an air compressor or something and ran through the crowd at Emo’s, detonating it, knocking every one around it to their knees. Maybe the best local band I saw was like a cross between Squeeze, Mission of Burma, and Polvo or something, a quartet of guys in their mid-thirties, playing to a handful of people — their wives and children and a few friends and me and the bartender — on what may have been a Sunday afternoon at the Hole in the Wall. They were dauntingly good but I’m not sure if they even had a name. I wonder who they were?
Listening to a lot of these bands via my preferred streaming service, the Fuckemos remind me of what I’d liked about the Repo Man Soundtrack when I was in high school, and they really evoke the sound of that time for me, but so many of the bands (Sixteen Deluxe – I remember slowly biking by a line outside the Hole in the Wall for one of their shows on a chilly misty night) seem to fuse My Bloody Valentine, Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, Pixies, etc. Listening to them now I don’t really feel like my lack of enthusiasm for most of what I saw was unfair but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun to be young and biking around and drinking cheap beer and seeing live loud music nearly every night.
Haven’t been back to Austin since ’97. Heard it’s changed somewhat . . .
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (from New Directions). Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox (from Barrelhouse). Or The Shimmering Go-Between from me (Atticus, the publisher, is kaput).
