Blogs
Banned Books Week: Fahrenheit 451
Michael Chabon’s Real and Imagined Storefronts
Our guest blogger is Matt Werner, author of Oakland in Popular Memory, on sale now at Diesel, Oakland. Visit Matt online at www.mattiswriting.com
Digital Landscape, Analog River
I've played music, toured, and put out records for the past fifteen years. Last week, I received a copy of my own band's new LP in the mail, something that is always a delight and has lost none of its novelty over the years. But this time around, there was a crucial difference: this was not a vinyl release, it was a vinyl reissue, its reprint date falling approximately 13 years after the record's initial pressing. The album artwork had been cleaned up, new photos had been added, the vinyl was a brilliant electric blue, the package included a free digital download of the album, and it felt like getting my first record in the mail all over again - which, in a very literal sense, it was.
In 2012, it's easy to think of music as a purely digital phenomenon; the audio equivalent of a PDF, a file that can be sent and received quickly with minimal degradation, working well enough on various devices, possessing compression rates that are adequate if not ideal. Like the printed word, music is all too frequently reduced to something that sleeps, genie-like, on a hard drive or digital cloud until summoned with a few idle clicks. When the aforementioned record first came out in 1999, vinyl was a secondary, subservient format: CDs were bought and sold by the case, while LPs were just for collectors, generally sold in ones and twos. By 2012, the digital/analog poles had moved even further apart: now, because the reissue came with a free download, a CD wasn't even necessary, and LPs had received a strange, posthumous promotion from secondary format to only format.
How to Become a Record Store in Three Easy Steps
Linda and the Neat, Pink Turntable
With the revival of vinyl as a popular medium for music, I find myself surrounded by a new generation discovering vinyl records for the first time. I’m definitely dating myself here, but I had my first experience with turntables and 45 RPM’s in 1965.
The Bass Line
I first heard Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon" when I was 5 years old. Every spring, as part of the graduation celebration for the small grade school I attended in San Francisco, the entire student population (hovering somewhere around 100, all told) would crowd beneath a wildly painted canvas, surmounted by what seemed to be an enormous saurian head, to perform the "Dragon Dance". This quasi-shamanic ritual is probably the most memorable event of my K-8 years.
Our whole tribe -- young ones to the rear, towering 8th graders at the head -- would gather beneath the painted serpent, take hold of the waist of the person in front of them (if I happened to be placed behind one of my female classmates, this became doubly memorable -- an institutionally sanctioned opportunity to lay hands on the divine feminine form!) and begin moving our feet in slow rhythmic symbiosis to the hypnotic beat: One-two-three-step! One-two-three-step! (We would kick our feet out to the side on the "step!") Snaking our way through the school yard, I experienced a kind of communion, not only with my fellow classmates as we merged out individual selves into this mythic beast, but also with the generations past and future, who had and would perform the same rite of passage. My soul felt distended across time, as Augustine suggested. We were all merged in the great cosmic serpent that moved to the rhythm of Hancock's "Chameleon".
L.A. Noir
This is an essay about Los Angeles, Noir, black metal, and jazz. The only jazz record I listen to with regularity is Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. I will not say that all jazz sounds the same to me, defensive shorthand for acknowledging a lack of appropriate training to understand a genre of music. That being said, I do lack the appropriate knowledge and training to suppress my incredibly powerful associations between jazz, elevators, and low-reception highways in economically depressed regions. On the other hand, when people tell me they don't like "classical," I want to self-immolate. Fiery death brings me to another obtuse genre, Black Metal, which incidentally, was my doorway to Charles Mingus.
I worked with a guy at Celebrity Rehab who was from Columbus, Ohio and had tattoos of skulls and frogs. He kept pushing Black Metal on me. Black Metal arose from Scandinavia in the 90's, a movement locally appreciated for church burning, murder, and satanic worship. Bands such as Mayhem and Gorgoroth sacrificed goats at their stage shows. The Ohioan insisted its grimness, its unwillingness to compromise were good qualities. I bought De Mysteriis Dom Sathanis by Mayhem from Amoeba Records on Sunset. I couldn't get more than a minute into it. It was too much. The drummers use double bass drums. The singers imitate goblins. Not orcs, or trolls, which I would be fine with. I love trolls. I don't like goblins. They are, by nature, devious. That was my first encounter with metal.
A Love Supreme
Wade Simoneaux would never forgive me. He’d thrown the first boy/girl party of the school year and I had promised him that I was a sure thing. When the games turned to Seven Minutes in Heaven, as they surely would, our deal was that I would eagerly go down to the basement with him and return to our friends, seven minutes later, my lipstick smeared and a smile on my face. Wade wanted to be popular in 7th grade and was certain our fake make out session would erase his reputation as a nerdy hick with questionable sexual preferences.
But downstairs in the basement, Wade’s big brother, Brian, was listening to Coltrane, and Wade soon discovered that my ‘word’ was fluid and my heart was corruptible. I sat down in his mama’s red leather bean bag chair and spent the rest of the night listening to the as-yet unscratched album of "A Love Supreme", and, Wade went back upstairs to the party alone. The only one of us whose reputation changed that night was mine; I was now the ‘slut who stuffed her bra and made out with older drug addicts'. I happily took the hit in the name of “A Love Supreme.”
Brian ran away from home the next night because his mama wouldn’t let him go see Jerry Lee Lewis at the Saenger in New Orleans. And I ran away from the Simoneaux house with his precious vinyl of “A Love Supreme.” Coltrane saw me through my parents’ divorce and stayed with me those endless nights on the roof of our house, above the chaos, looking for UFOs, when words weren’t even worth it.
Covers Recovered
I was compelled to buy my first jazz album after hearing Siouxsie and the Banshees haunting cover of Billie Holiday’s "Strange Fruit". It was during my goth punk phase (long before goth was trendy) and I was immediately taken with its dirge-like horn section, which brought to mind a Southern funeral procession. I remember going to Mystery Train Records in Cambridge, MA in search of a Billie Holiday album with her version of the song. Amidst the bins, I found what I was looking for. I don't recall which album it was, I only remember it had her face on the cover. I took it home, put it on the turntable, positioned the needle to the corresponding thick black line, sat back and got chills as I listened to her unique vocals render the lyrics of one of the saddest, most heartwrenching songs I've ever heard.
Cheryl