Luscious Jackson – Citysong
Last week was a hot and busy week. This song always says summer to me. Even without the video filled with shots of New York City in the summer. Maybe it’s the line about the bike messenger. I spent the summer between my junior and senior years of college as a bike messenger in Philadelphia during one of the hottest summers on record and loved it.
LCD Soundsystem -Dance Yrself Clean (clip from the movie Shut Up and Play the Hits)
One night only. I don’t think I know anyone who would want to go with me. I might have to go alone and I hope there will be dancing in the aisles.
If you want to hear the full song, this one might be my favorite video version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj9Sv1JpmPs
Radiohead – Bodysnatchers
Still marveling at the Radiohead show last night. So, so, great. There are videos from the show but they’re jumpy and the quality is mixed so I’m posting the album version. However, when they busted this out in the second encore, it was fucking amazing. Just as blistering as I always imagined it to be.
For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself.
Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
My 5th grader told me this evening that she used some of my deodorant this morning. I didn’t see that one coming. I guess her teacher has been complaining that when they all come back to class after gym, they’re a bit ripe. Today was gym class and she didn’t want to be smelly. Cue Nirvana.
I told her that when we’re at the store next, we’ll get her some deodorant of her own. I wonder if they still make Teen Spirit.
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten
Camper Van Beethoven – (I Was Born in a) Laundromat
I was just checking out the Radio Time Machine (thank you kottke.org) which has a slider you can move to check out what was popular on mainstream radio stations in the past. My fellow college radio DJs will remember that music played on mainstream radio at the time was awful. That’s why college radio was so important to us. Even if my college’s station was a weak AM station that you could pick up in about three dorms, we saw it as our mission to play music you were not going to hear anywhere else.
One of my fellow DJs was a big Camper Van Beethoven fan. It took me a while but eventually I came around and became a Camper fan myself. This came in handy when I graduated and moved back home to Maine without any plans for my future.
Luckily, an entrepreneurial college student had decided to open a record store that summer. This small town had a record store before but it trended more to classical and jazz and really wasn’t remotely close to the kind of record store I’d grown accustomed to in the Philadelphia area while in school. So I eagerly awaited the opening day of the new store. I think I was their first customer. Before summer had ended I had talked my way into being their first full-time employee. The owner and his two friends who had helped him get it off the ground hadn’t really worked out who was going to run things when they were in classes since none of them had graduated yet. There I was, ready to jump into the gap.
The owner was a huge Camper fan and their new album, Key Lime Pie, was coming out in September. He ordered lots of copies of it, imagining it would fly off the shelves. If you listen to the songs on the Radio Time Line from 1989, you’ll see two Milli Vanilli songs, two Phil Collins songs, three Paula Abdul songs, and so forth. While the new Camper album was the most mainstream thing they’d done to date, it was still well out of the ordinary. Needless to say we had several copies left.
Not long ago I got an e-mail from the owner of the record store. He has not only survived but grown a little chain of stores and one of those two friends who had helped him get that first store off the ground is the person who created Record Store Day. They are going to be profiled in a book about record stores and he wanted to include me as the first employee. I’m almost famous!
New York Dolls – Pills (live)
I’m reading Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever and although I’m not old enough to have been aware of the music scene during those five years (I was 6-11 years old and we lived just outside New York City not in it), much of the book is familiar.
Thanks to my older brother exposing us to bands like the Ramones, the Velvet Underground (and solo Lou Reed), the New York Dolls, and my own memories of hazy, dirty, hot summers, and a city with huge crime and drug problems, I don’t have a hard time picturing the events he chronicles.
Joy Division – Isolation
I live in a small town, I work in a city an hour away. I am not at home enough to get to know many people beyond our immediate neighbors, almost all of whom are retirees and, while very nice people, not exactly a go-to group for new friends.
I like a lot of the people I work with but having that hour commute looming at the end of the day kind of puts a damper on any after work activities and on a weekend, the last thing I want to do is make that drive.
Isolation, even when surrounded by people.
Noisy Cats 