It’s been a while since I trolled young people, and settled well into cold winter I have precious few opportunities to chase off cheese-eating cretins who try to make a shortcut out of my yard. Indeed, our university is in winter break, so I can’t even hope to menace the drunken kids who stop by our hedgerow to take a leak.
It is from this perspective that I’m wondering: what the hell is a Lumineer, and why the fuck won’t they stay out of my music player feed? Now, lots of people rip on Millennials for lots of reasons, apt and not, and I don’t want to be that guy stirring up the generational stew. I know plenty of asshats my own age, but I need to know: am I the only one to come to the rather horrifying cultural realization that Generation X is the first demographic in modern history whose children are actually begging us to turn our goddamn music down? My own flesh and blood has, just recently, complained wearily she could hear the Wild Flag jams I was using to shake snow off the roof through her head phones, and it was spoiling her Edward Sharp moment. Sigh.
If I hear one more shoe-gazing, patchy-bearded twinky strumming another acoustic barbiturate ode to something really, really, really poignant I’m going to puke on his shoes.
I get it. These coffeehouse pseudo-troubadoors (Pseudodoors?) feel things nobody has ever felt, and they feel them profoundly, deeply. Really, really, really deeply. But give me a break, man.Those Wes Anderson characters aren’t templates. For the love of the gods, buy a Sonic Youth record and figure it out. You can me miserable, melancholic, even maudlin without being so damnably dull. Watch and learn:
Every year, when the Christmas music is stowed away, I look forward to catching up with Steve & Edye’s holiday album, “That Holiday Feeling.” Until next season, guys….
I don’t have a big, personally significant story that goes with this song–it’s just a freaking fantastic tune by a super cool band that too few people know about. If I needed to claim a personal theme song it might very well be this one. Just imagine me walking through the scene, maybe wearing boots and a cool jacket, looking grim and cocky. It fits. Cake rocks. This isn’t the last Tunesday appearance for them.
And yes, if you noticed, this week’s Tunesday post is actually posting on WP Wednesday, which where I live is still Tuesday by four hours. Why post late? Becuase I’m busy, and because I liked the Memorial Day post a lot and wanted it to stay up at the top of my blog stream longer, so more folks would notice it.
In one magnificent moment, the time it took for a needle to drop on a vinyl disk, everything I thought about music changed. I was a big admirer of the Velvet Underground, and for a while spent a lot of time arguing with people–often strangers at parties–that the Velvets were bigger and more important than the Rolling Stones and Beatles combined. So, it was a no brainer when I read a review in the pages of Spin magazine in which a Spin critic raved over a new Canadian band, Cowboy Junkies, and their new album, especially their cover of “Sweet Jane.” The reviewer went on to describe the album as “the perfect 3am listening music.’
I was sold. I immediately–within an hour–ran out and bought the record, brought it home, and was stunned by the sweet, resonant a capella voice that embraced me, with a mournful, unanticipated beauty.
Sweet Jane. 1989. The Johnny Carson “cameo” is a nice bonus.
The rest of the album, the Trinity Sessions, was equally remarkable. Recorded at Toronto, Ontario’s Church of the Holy Trinity on a cold day in late November 1987, the band huddled around a single microphone and made what is quite possibly the most intimate album ever made, its eclectic mix covers and originals begging the question: was it rock, or folk, or country, or blues? My friend Brett Day, the notorious, British-born Pittsburgh-based sculptor, musician, and all-around renaissance man, once proclaimed, “when I first heard “Trinity” I thought, “my god, punk rock music can absolutely be played at 1 mile per hour.” He came as close as anyone to hitting the nail on the head.
There’s a moment, on the live album 200 More Miles, when a fan shouts “Rock and Roll!” between songs, and singer Margot Timmins, who always seems to have a cup of tea and a vase of flowers on hand for performances, leans into the microphone and says. “Well, before I rock and roll I always like to sit down….” which is deeply informative.
More than a quarter of a century later, the Junkies remain my favorite band. I’ve seen them several dozen times live, more often than not for free (for a long time they had a real penchant for doing festival shows) and the love affair continues….
1988 was probably the most pivotal year in my developing taste in music. Until that point, I’d pretty much been a bit of a drifter, taste-wise, taking what I liked from what my friends exposed me to–I could still remember being excited for months before the first “Asia” supergroup album came out in when I was junior high, and a year later I was sitting in my friend Andy’s room, blown away by bands I’d never even heard of before, like Husker Du, The Minutemen and The Jam. Thanks, Andy!
The radio soundtrack to my youth was vintage Pittsburgh Classic Rock, pretty much the same three dozen songs iconic radio station WDVE still plays today: Journey. Zeppelin. Styx. That shit. I knew all the words to way too many Kansas songs, and like a lot of people I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Journey. Those summer nights are callin’. Don’t stop believin’ , man.
In college I listened to what the local college radio played–some cool stuff and some not so cool stuff. We joke in hindsight–it was the eighties, but on the other hand, it was the eighties. Billy Joel was the King of Rock, and Bono was just some Irish Dude with a bad haircut standing in the snow--not the most earnest dick in rock spending the rest of his career trying to match that big, perfect anthemic single.
In 1988 a lot of things changed. I’d been listening to more hippie music thanks to a room-mate in that old yellow craftsman bungalow on South Sixth Street, a great college house with beautiful woodwork and a ping-pong table that we nicknamed “The Slaughterhouse” after meeting Kurt Vonnegut, who was an both an unapologetic asshole and just as magnificent as I’d hoped. We thought it was a cool name, but it never stuck–not even with us. We called it “the house.”
1988 was the year of N.W.A.’s eye-opening and mind-blowing album Straight Outta Compton, the subject of Part 3 of this post (coming next week at this time), and the equally fantastic Eric B. & Rakim album Follow The Leader, the playing of which earned my a “what the fuck are you listening to?” from another roommate. This, of course, made me want to play it again. And louder, if only to drown out his John Cougar Mellancamp.
It was against that background that I stumbled into some very different revolutionary music–a friend and I took some girls to see my favorite band, Cowboy Junkies (another 1988 band, deserving of their very own post), in the Dormont Theater, and the opening act was an unknown folk singer named Tracy Chapman. None of us knew the first thing about her, and we were curious. Now, our idea of what a folk singer should be was an amalgam of, say, Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez filtered through the only contemporary folkie getting any college radio play at the time, Suzanne Vega.
We expectied a soft spoken little pale girl–not a waif, but maybe a sprite. Probably in a little sundress. What we didn’t expect was a powerful, yet quiet and unassuming young black woman who stunned us to near silence for the entirely of her too-short set. She was dressed all in black, like Johnny Cash. I still remember the uncertainty in her eyes, the embarrassed smile at our applause, and the way single spotlight reflected off the frets of her acoustic guitar. I’d never before seen an audience demand an encore from an opening act, but we couldn’t get enough.
I also remember thinking: and this is what regular people get from church.
Kristen Hersh and her band, Throwing Muses, have been among my very favorites since I initially heard the song “Juno” from their first full length album, House Tornado, grind it’s way out of my stereo speakers back in 1988. I’ve begun to realize what a magnificent year that was for my musical tastes–maybe there was something special in the air, maybe something in me, but I discovered a phenomenal number of artists that year that still hear regular play at my house, and for the next several Tunesdays I’ll be sharing some of them with you.
That album, House Tornado, was utterly vital and fantastic, and Hersh’s deeply personal writing struck a note with my poetry-addicted mind. And doesn’t she look cool in her modest skirt, cardigan, and bad-ass rock and roll guitar pose? Of note: I bought House Tornado on vinyl a few weeks after its release, then bought it again as one of the first three CDs I ever bought (the same day I bought my first CD player–I was a late and reluctant adopter) because, at the time, it was my favorite album.
Juno (1988) Not the best quality video, but….
Bright Yellow Gun (1995) Doesn’t this one want you to break traffic laws?
I love to tell stories with words and images, often with a darkly magical twist. While speculative fiction & dissecting pop culture are my primary passions, I also work with clients & brands by assisting with content creation, editing, marketing & design.
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