Tag: Things I Will Keep

Posted on

Things I Will Keep #5: JILL CUNNIFF, City Beach

Jill Cunniff
City Beach
2007, The Militia Group/Vinyl Films

Here in the steamy state of Texas, August is fucking brutal. It’s my least favorite month. When you’re a kid, late summer is the melancholy time when school is about to start.  When you’re an adult, late summer is the time when you and everyone you know has already gone away and come back from their big summer vacation plans. Nobody’s looking forward to anything. Everyone is just kind of existing and that’s it. There’s no such thing as a “beautiful day” this time of year. The grass and trees are all bleached by the sun. We’re mostly all about the end of the heat wave, that first taste of autumn. It should be here in about a month or so IF we’re lucky.

(Important note: In Texas, summer often keeps kicking the shit out of us into October. I once road-tripped through rural Missouri in mid-September and was awestruck by how the whole landscape was already covered in beautiful autumn yellows and oranges. Where I come from–only about six hundred miles south–a sight like that is still a month off).

The only nice thing about late summer is that I think Jill Cunniff captured it perfectly and made it lovely on her first (and hopefully not her last) solo album.

Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #5: JILL CUNNIFF, City Beach”

Posted on

Things I Will Keep #4: THE NEGRO PROBLEM, Post-Minstrel Syndrome

Cat toy and CD

The Negro Problem
Post-Minstrel Syndrome
1997, Aerial Flipout

One of the reasons why I stopped collecting records is because music, for the most part, stopped contributing anything to my life that I needed.

That’s not a criticism of music. That doesn’t mean that I dislike music now. Music didn’t fail me. I just stopped needing it.

I still hear things, new and old, that I like all of the time. I’m still married to a few longtime favorites (see my Robert Pollard series, for example). I’m also not an old crank who jerks off to the bands he loved twenty years ago and shuns anything new. (A lot of the new indie rock I hear is just as good, maybe even better, than what I came up with in the 90s; I like that they often embrace the synthesizer sounds of the 80s, which 90s indie bands naturally tended to avoid.)

We all follow our own paths and on mine these days I rarely put on music as a voice that I need to hear. Looking back, music was often a balm for my daily depressions. It got me through problems with relationships and jobs and self-loathing. It calmed my nerves and provided comfort, as well as a very real endorphin rush when I’d spend a little too much money on it at a record store counter.

These days, I still get the daily depressions, but now I consider it my responsibility alone to get myself out of it. I need to move and think and write and crack jokes. Other people’s music can’t help anymore. Other people usually can’t even help anymore. It’s all on me.

Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #4: THE NEGRO PROBLEM, Post-Minstrel Syndrome”

Posted on

Things I Will Keep #3: BOBBY MARCHAN, “There’s Something on Your Mind”

Bobby Marchan
“There’s Something on Your Mind”
1960, Fire Records

Among the records that I intend to keep until my fateful final day on the dragstrip of life, many are 45s. I’ve even had half a mind in recent years to collect music on 45s ONLY, but have yet to commit. That’s further down the Path of Enlightenment than I am willing to go right now. It’s too much sacrifice (and it’s not necessarily cheaper, either). I’m just not gangsta enough.

There’s nothing wrong with digital formats (I use ’em, I abuse ’em), but I do think that physical records and CDs encourage more active engagement with music. And IF this is true, the 45 is the ultimate in active engagement. Because you can’t just put it on and then let it go for an hour to play in the background while you entertain house guests or masturbate on your kitchen floor (or both). Nope, a 45 is gonna be all over in a few minutes after which time you either play that sucker again, take a chance on the B-side or put on something else. You have to move and make a decision. You’ve given the act of playing that song your full attention.

You are devoted to the song.

And I can’t think of many songs that deserve devotion more than Bobby Marchan’s desperate, devastated and dangerous cover of Big Jay McNeely’s “There’s Something on Your Mind”. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard.

Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #3: BOBBY MARCHAN, “There’s Something on Your Mind””

Posted on

Things I Will Keep #2: GOD BLESS TINY TIM

Tiny Tim
God Bless Tiny Tim
1968, Reprise

As the years go by, as my metabolism slows, as thoughts about mortality hit me like a bird shitting on my head everyday, as I figure out what I really care about in life, and as I enthusiastically prune my 4-5,000-piece record collection down to a modest stash of essentials, more and more do I realize that I love happy music most of all.

I guess that there’s great angry music and depressing music out there. Cool. Somebody else can listen to it.

Your humble reporter though, as he falls apart like an old Chevy Nova and spends his evenings at home tending to his two cats and his sciatic nerves, is all about the good times and sunny vibes. The occasional arty outsider thing can catch his weathered ear from time to time (watch this space for some of that in future installments, if you dare), but for the most part, he loves pretty tones that make luscious melodies that build up to timeless songs. This sordid specimen of whom we speak is your regular pop nerd and your basic freak for a hook. A real headcase. His younger music snob self would be ashamed. He’s a disgrace, this old short bald guy who never exercises. He wants to put on music and sway and sing along. He wants to play the same songs over and over. He wants to rock out and be flown around on angel wings. He wants to get out of this paragraph in which he’s stuck referring to himself in the third person.

That doesn’t mean that I only love songs about rainbows and candy (though I do love plenty of songs about rainbows and candy). Rather, I’d define “happy” music as music that exhibits a sincere love for life (sad songs can be awfully sweet on the ears when they’re beautifully written). There are many different ways do that.

And this genius first album from Tiny Tim hits a whole bunch of them. It’s a masterpiece of dreamy aural world-building and soul-soothing. I could never get rid of it. My mood lifts the moment that I put it on. I always want to be around it.

Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #2: GOD BLESS TINY TIM”

Posted on

Things I Will Keep #1: Introduction and THE SWEET

Portrait of the Record Collector as a Young Man (Photo circa 2010)

One of the worst things about collecting records is that there are rarely any great stories to go along with it these days. It’s not like those accounts that you read from the 1960s and 70s when record collectors would knock on doors and ask befogged senior citizens if they had any old 78s laying around and then go inside and maybe meet a schizophrenic or a former Nazi in hiding or a woman who once gave Robert Johnson a handjob.

That’s not how it works anymore. If you did that today, it would be creepy. Now we have Ebay and Discogs and you can sit at home at 2 AM and hunt for records with one hand on a computer keyboard and one hand playing with your balls like a normal person. Leave the elderly ALONE. They don’t have obscure rockabilly 45s anymore. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy already found ‘em all by 1972.

Besides, I personally started collecting records because I DIDN’T want to talk to people. It was a hideaway, a great retreat from life. A lot of my collection came from thrift stores where there are few signs of life anyway beyond the decades of microbes on everything.

Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #1: Introduction and THE SWEET”