20s

Sabotage

Beastie Boys – Sabotage

My husband’s car has satellite radio, though we aren’t subscribers so usually it’s just a button we don’t push. However, right now we have a free trial and I was running errands over the weekend driving his car around flipping through the stations. At one point the dj mentioned that Green Day’s Dookie had been released twenty years ago. That reminded me of an article I read a month ago about 30 albums turning 20.

Some of those albums do you make you blink and say, really? It’s been 20 years? But some others I think, yeah, that sounds right. A couple I even think, oh, I would have thought that was older. I mean, Hootie and the Blowfish, that’s old, am I right?

Back in 2011 when all of 1991’s albums were turning 20, I felt it. I felt old and I felt how could that be? It can’t possibly have been that long ago! In the three years since then I have figured out why that is and why I’m not fazed by the twentieth anniversaries this year.

In 1991 I moved to Washington, DC, had my first “real” job, and was living the life of a young, single person in a city. I was sharing a house with other 20-somethings, went out to shows a lot and basically did whatever I wanted. Life was relatively carefree and I soaked it up. Music has a way of making little time capsules from distinct periods in our lives. The music you listened to in high school. The college years were huge for me. Those three years I lived in DC definitely have a strong association with certain bands and albums.

At the beginning of 1994 I was still working at my museum job in DC. I would quit that job in late February and go to Europe for a month. By the end of the year I was living up in Maine, I’d bought my first car and was working at LL Bean by day* and an insurance company at night. Life had done a 180° and once the daily grind settled in, the years became less identifiable. There was little to set 1995 apart from 1996. I wasn’t married, I wasn’t having children, there were no markers to note as the years rolled by. I don’t think it was just the fact that the insurance company job was soul-crushingly boring, I think that’s kind of just what happens when you’ve been out of college for a couple of years. There’s your whole adult life ahead and things aren’t parceled out in chunks the way they were in your younger years. Even getting married and having kids, for me at least, weren’t the sort of events that wrapped up stretches of time in the same way.

For people experiencing that “Whoa!” factor this year with the albums that are 20 years old, I can say, it gets easier. This album, Ill Communication by the Beastie Boys, feels 20 to me. It feels like it’s been around a long time, an old friend. It is my 25th college reunion this year (not that I’m going) and so 20 doesn’t seem that bad, really. Lately I’ve been thinking about an album that’s turning 30 this year and I’m not even freaking out about it. Yet.

* If you live within, oh, say, a 50-mile radius of the LL Bean headquarters, chances are high you or someone you know has worked at Bean’s for the holiday season. I did it twice; once as a packer, and the time mentioned above in returns. I can vouch for their guarantee policy. They really will take anything back.

Bicycle

Memory Tapes – Bicycle

I had a very bicycle-themed Christmas this year, which is a little strange since none of the people who gave me these bicycle items know that this fall I tried to resurrect my old red bike and get back into riding shape. It’s a pretty easy bet that I would like any bicycle related thing though, so I was happy and appreciative.

I got little metal bicycle earrings, a set of four small juice glasses with different bikes on them, a book, and a 500-piece puzzle with pictures of a dozen or so bicycles. It sort of feels like a sign. I guess I might just have to try a spin class.

I think I would really like spinning IF I could bring my own music and not have someone shout at me when I should pedal faster, or whatever it is they do that makes this a group activity. There’s that too. I would prefer to be by myself. Just me, the open road, the tunes in my ears. When I lived in DC, I often rode my bike to work. We had this intern from Germany at our office who was about my age and he’d bought a bike too. People thought we would make a cute couple, and we were good friends, but as he once said to someone who suggested it, “we can barely cycle together.”

I have never liked exercising but bike riding was never about the physical fitness aspect, it was always a much more elusive feeling that I’m not sure I can explain. It’s sort of being at one with the bike. You and this two-wheeled metal frame, rocketing through the landscape, it’s damn near close to flying. You have those slow sloggy moments too when you notice the little details of your surroundings while trying not to look too pathetic as a runner passes you on the uphill. That has only happened to me once but I remember it vividly and I’m pretty sure I could call upon that memory in a darkened spin room when I need a little motivation.

A good playlist is always essential. In college I made a tape synced for my bike route so I had just the right sort of beat and inspiration on different spots along the way. I have recreated it as best I could for my iPod, and it’s not bad, but it was made for that specific 17-mile stretch and it doesn’t work as well on my current streets. This song might be a good biking song. It has a certain lost-in-the-moment feeling to it. The fact that it echoes New Order at the 3:38 mark is ok, I love New Order. I can almost see the green leaves whizzing by now. I just have to wait a good five months for that to be a reality. If I hit the gym this winter, maybe I’ll actually be able to pull it off.

Nothing Natural

Lush – Nothing Natural

Back in the early 1990s I was living in Washington, DC, working at a museum, spending all my money on NME and Melody Maker and tickets for shows at the 9:30 Club.

I was kind of in a weird place, musically. I still loved all the music I had been listening to in college but I felt like I was becoming a little self-destructive and that I needed to branch out and find things that didn’t crush me. I loved that – the ability the music had to absolutely level me – but it wasn’t really helping me get on with life. Hence my weekly trips to the bookstores in Dupont Circle and Georgetown for the NME and Melody Maker.

Grunge was big at the time, and I liked most of those bands too, but there was something about the shoegazers that really appealed to me. This was lose yourself in the sea of people all moving in unison in the dark (still smoky) club, kind of music. Lush, Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, I saw them all at the 9:30 Club. I don’t know if most of the people there were blissed out on some drug or other but I was immersed in the music blistering in my ears.

It was a short-lived moment. I left DC in 1994 and a lot of those bands broke up not long after that so listening to this music is always a real time warp for me. It’s so completely those years of being done with college, out on your own, supporting yourself, figuring out what you’ll do next.

No Clocks

Pylon – No Clocks

Here we are, back to Eastern Standard Time. Boo. Hiss. Bah humbug.

I hate this day. So many people just adore the day we set the clocks back because they think they gain an hour of sleep. Unless you are a childless person who has to set the alarm and be at work somewhere early Sunday morning then no, you do not get an extra hour of sleep. You wake up at whatever time you would wake up and, if you’ve set your clock back before you go to bed, it is whatever time it says it is.

What you lost, however, is an hour of daylight at the end of the day. I guess if you live significantly farther south or at the western edge of your time zone, this isn’t such a big deal. Here in New England we are at the eastern edge of the time zone and from now until after the winter solstice, it’s all down hill. Let’s weigh it up. One hour of sleep, if you actually woke up, looked at the clock and said, “Oh good, I can sleep for another hour!” and then successfully fell back asleep on this one Sunday, or plunging darkness at the end of the work day for the next two to three months. Hmmm.

Overly dramatic, maybe. I think I have undiagnosed (because I’ve never done anything other than bitch about the darkness) Seasonal Affective Disorder and my office is a windowless interior space so to leave at the end of the day and have it already be dark, just depresses the life out of me.

I went to the grocery store late this afternoon and the clouds that had covered the sky for much of the day were breaking apart with the last rays of the sun lighting them up with amazing colors. I stopped to take a picture. It was 4:44 p.m.

sunset

The sky at 4:44 p.m. on November 3, 2013

Pretty. But I would find it much prettier if it had been more like 7 p.m. If only we could spring forward in March and then never fall back.

What’s Good?

Though this song (and this video version) is from Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss album, I first heard it in Wim Wenders’ film Until the End of the World. I loved that movie. I was living in DC when it came out and between its initial release and the extended showings at a bunch of second run movie theaters in the city, I probably saw it about five times. It had such a great soundtrack too, which I snapped up as soon as I found it. The version on the soundtrack has an intro that’s missing here but I fired it up in the car this morning as I had a little Lou Reed tribute on my drive to work.

I only saw Lou Reed once, on tour for his New York album. The Feelies opened up the show at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia. I remember when Lou and his band came out, he said they would be playing the whole album, in order, start to finish, so don’t bother yelling out any song titles. That was kind of unexpected for me but I figured, hey, it’s Lou Reed. He can do whatever the fuck he wants.

stub

My ticket stub

9-9

R.E.M. – 9-9 (live at the 9:30 Club, 3/18/83)

Raise your hand if you remember the old 9:30 Club at 930 F St. N.W. in Washington, D.C. I lived in DC from 1991-1994 and I spent many, many nights there. I loved that dark, smelly hole in the wall. I’ve been to the new 9:30 Club at least once, maybe twice, and in many respects it’s a better club, but it will never take the place of the old club in my heart. The list of bands I saw play there is long and varied but when I tried to find a video from any of those shows to use here, I struck out. I contemplated using any one of the videos from inside the club I did find just to illustrate a point but I went with this version of  9-9 instead since today is 9-9 and it was recorded there, just audio only.

The point I wanted to make was about the ubiquity of cell phone cameras at shows these days. Back in June I went to see the Joy Formidable at a club and there were more people filming the show than there were dancing. When the person most likely to try and get a pit going is the 45-year-old mother of two kids (that’s me) and not the dozens of 20-something-year-old guys, you’re doing it wrong. I suppose to each their own and maybe they’ll enjoy their crappy cell phone videos with people singing along loudly and off key, but I’d rather dance.

Now, I’m not a Luddite and I have been known to grab a quick picture at most of the shows I’ve been to since getting a smart phone. Usually in between songs and just a still, not video, and mostly because I don’t want to be trying to get some great video when I could be dancing or paying attention and just being in the moment. But of all the annoying concert behaviors out there, I find the constant filming to be far less intrusive* than the drunken bros hollering stupid comments or the amount of talking taking place when the band, that we’ve all paid money to come see, is playing. Those drive me much more crazy than someone watching the show through a 4″ screen instead of the real life thing in front of them. I just feel like those people are missing out.

At first the filming really bothered me. But how many shows have I been to since this trend took off where I went online the next day to try and find videos of the show? Quite a few. And didn’t I just download the whole mp3 set from the Replacements first reunion show in Toronto and watch the videos people posted from there? You bet I did. I don’t want to be taking those videos myself, and lots of the ones you find are just awful and not worth watching because your own view was better, or the person holding the camera is shouting and singing and ugh. But I do so love having some live footage to be able to go back to if it’s done well.

Which is where the old 9:30 Club comes in. If you want to see some footage from inside the old 9:30 Club, just look up any live video of the mid-80s DC hardcore bands like Minor Threat, and you’ll find some. Most of the old footage you find will be taken from the video camera that someone used to operate up on top of this pole in the middle of the floor. There were these pillars placed in really inconvenient spots, architecturally holding up the building no doubt but when you were in the mosh pit, you had to be mindful of where they were. Some employee would get hoisted up into the crow’s nest spot on the top of that pole with a video camera and shoot the whole show. I’ve heard conflicting reports of what became of those tapes. One was that they just had it on closed circuit as it played what was happening on stage to small tv sets in the back bar and downstairs and there weren’t tapes of every show. The other was that they all burned in a fire at a house where they’d been stored after the club moved up to V St. Either way, the ones that made it to YouTube are rare, rare videos, and a real treasure. I always thought that would have been a cool second job but in reality the poor person up there was probably close to passing out every night as smoking was still allowed and it was easily 100 degrees or more at that height on some nights.

Here’s what I would love to see become the norm at clubs and concert halls. People could take a couple of pictures here and there, sure. But if the club could film it, from some unobstructed spot like they did at the old 9:30 Club, then make that available somehow, maybe people would go back to enjoying the show in person. I don’t know how you could work it out so no one is short changing the bands**, and I’d like for it to still be something special, that you were really there and not just watching the video of it. I have a fair number of old bootleg audio tapes from shows back in the day. Some I acquired just because they were offered to me but the ones I really loved were the ones of shows I’d been to. And if there were video from a couple of those shows? I would give a lot of things for video clips from a handful of those shows. A whole lot.

* I’m on the short side and I like to get as close to the front in a GA setting as possible so I can see the band and not just some big guy’s back. For the most part, I haven’t had my view obstructed by hundreds of cameras held aloft just because I’ve put myself where that’s not much of a problem. If I ran a club, I’d want a sloped floor so that the short girls can still see farther back (the TLA in Philadelphia is like this as it was a movie theater before – I saw movies there in college – and when they ripped out the seats to turn it into a club, they kept the sloped floor). Ideally I’d relegate people who insist on filming to the sides, maybe up on a slightly raised floor, out of the way of the people who really want to dance/watch/listen. And people who take pictures of themselves with their friends and the stage in the background? They are just losers.

** One thought was maybe it could be made available after the tour ended so as to not give the whole thing away or give people a reason to not pay to see the show in person. For me any video is never going to be as good as being there and even when I’ve seen a stream of a concert while it’s taking place (like Coachella, 12-12-12, etc.), it’s not even close to the experience of seeing it live. That said, this exists and it’s so freaking incredible.

New Town Velocity

Johnny Marr – New Town Velocity

Every once in a while the “recommended for you” videos that show up on YouTube if I’m logged in are actually very welcome suggestions. This was the one I was presented with yesterday and I’ve listened to it a lot already.

I’m sure I heard it earlier this year when Johnny Marr’s album The Messenger came out but I didn’t have the time then to really listen to it. There’s something about this track, more so than the previous singles, that has a very distinct Johnny Marr sound to it. And I am a sucker for that Johnny Marr signature guitar.

I think sometimes it may be too easy to hang the influence the Smiths had on me, and many other people, on Morrissey’s contribution to the band. It’s true, I can speak or write entirely in Smiths quotes* off the top of my head and I know I’m not the only one of my friends who can do that. Rob Sheffield wrote nearly a whole chapter of his book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran in Smiths quotes and paraphrases. We may all be spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg but it’s Johnny’s guitar that instantly hooks us with those first four notes on “Ask.” “Oscillate Wildly” had as much yearning to it as the other songs without any lyrics at all. The Smiths were as great as they were because it was both the music and lyrics coming together at the perfect time.

I listened to Morrissey’s first couple of solo albums and went to see him on I guess it was the Kill Uncle tour (since I never got the chance to see the Smiths live), but it wasn’t the same. It was missing Johnny Marr. And let’s be honest, Morrissey is nearly a caricature of himself at this point. While Morrissey spent the past year cancelling show after show, Johnny Marr’s been showing up at festivals and elsewhere and just rocking without any of the drama. Morrissey may be the last of the famous international playboys, but he’d probably be completely unknown to most people if Johnny Marr hadn’t knocked on his door.

* By now you’ve all seen this, and it may seem to belie the point I’m trying to make here but it’s just so great. http://thischarmingcharlie.tumblr.com/   [edited 9/18/13 to say, I knew it wouldn’t be allowed to stand. They’ve been ordered to take it down.]

Shut Up

Savages – Shut Up

There have been a lot of shows I have wanted to catch this year that I just couldn’t pull off but this is one I’m really regretting not making. They played their east coast dates right on the heels of the Feelies show and I had just been on vacation prior to that so I was short on time and money. They’re coming back in September but playing larger places, like the widely disparaged Terminal 5 in New York. I might have to do it as a birthday present to myself though because this kicks some serious ass.

A friend was trying to coax me into going down to Philadelphia the other night to see New Order with her. It was pretty tempting. I went so far as to investigate the cheap bus lines and the train but the whole package was going to run into more money than I felt a responsible mother of two ought to be blowing. Back when I was in my 20s and had no one but myself to worry about I would have made the trip and lived on ramen noodles for a week if that’s what it took. I perfected the art of cheap travel in college when someone clued me into the fact that you could hop the local commuter trains from our campus outside of Philadelphia all the way up to New Haven. All that was missing was a local option between Wilmington, DE and Baltimore, and from New Haven to Providence, and you could have (inconveniently and slowly) made your whole way from Boston to DC on the local trains.

I miss that, believe it or not. It wasn’t comfortable, it sometimes involved sprinting up and down stairs to get from one track to another and unless it was an express, you made a lot of stops. But it was a fraction of the cost and you could decide to do it very last minute. There isn’t much spontaneity in my life these days and every now and then I get a little nostalgic for a less complicated time when the biggest consideration was which train I was going to catch.

Away

The Feelies – Away

A week and a half ago I went to the last-ever Feelies show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. It was a show that was a long time coming but so, so worth it. I wrote it up for Caught in the Carousel so please hop over there to read it. In that article I mention this video, which was filmed at Maxwell’s many years ago. Enjoy!

Kool Thing

Sonic Youth – Kool Thing

Kool Thing indeed. Really, can you out cool Kim Gordon? I don’t think so.

I missed that yesterday was Kim Gordon’s 60th birthday. I think it’s easy to forget how long she’s been out there paving the way for women in music because she’s still doing it. I have always loved that she was part of a band that was loud, experimental, noisy. There aren’t a lot of women in bands like that, and even fewer back in the early days. That she not only held her own but was often out front, like in this song, just made her that much more cool in my book. Like she didn’t take shit from anyone.

When she and Thurston Moore announced they were splitting up, I was more sad about the break up of Sonic Youth than of some super couple of alt rock. I didn’t know why and it didn’t really matter to me. Now that Kim has said why, I just think Thurston was a fool. Because Kim Gordon is the hottest fucking thing on the planet in my book. Happy birthday and rock on, Kim!