It was maybe three or four years ago that I heard this song while I was out doing some Christmas shopping. I was amazed. Sound Castles by The Buzz of Delight has got to be one of the more obscure records I own. Sure, Matthew Sweet went on to greater solo fame in the 1990s but I never met anyone who knew about this EP. Plus, I was in Macy’s, or someplace totally mainstream like that, not anywhere that was handpicking the music being piped in.
It was only in trying to find an mp3 of it later on that I discovered it had been on a new wave Christmas compilation in the mid-90s and that Matthew Sweet had released an album of his early recordings in 2002 that included the Buzz of Delight tracks. Maybe it isn’t as obscure as I always thought but hearing it, or any tracks from that album, always takes me right back to my college dorm room.
This post is part of #WhereILivedWednesday, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants, and as such is a slight departure from my usual video first format. The song is below and you’d better press play, it’s so worth it.
In the summer of 1979, my parents sent my older sister and me to stay with my Aunt Linda for a few weeks. They had arranged for us to go to a day camp at a private girls’ school in her town, where I could do gymnastics and my sister, tennis, in addition to your usual camp activities like batik, pottery, swimming, and the like. I wasn’t quite 12 years old yet so I didn’t realize that they were actually trying to get us out of the way while their marriage was falling apart.
We loved Aunt Linda. She was my father’s only sibling and we didn’t see her that often since she lived three hours upstate from our house. My dad was pretty stressed out and yelled a lot but my aunt Linda never yelled, she mostly laughed. She was so much fun and staying with her was going to rule. We had our own room in the old tower part of the house that even had its own sink.
Of course, all the bedrooms had their own sink since it was a convent. I don’t know about you but every convent I’ve been in has sinks in the bedrooms, and as I had another aunt who used to be a nun, plus my Aunt Linda, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in convents. The convent was an old house on a dead-end one-way street (I swear I’m not making that up) that had had renovations (for all the sinks!) and additions built onto it over the years. We had to go up these almost circular stairs, past a larger than life-sized Infant Jesus of Prague statue to get to our room but it was cool because it was kind of our own little hangout.
The Sisters also ran a day camp for younger kids, right there on the grounds of the convent. When we got home from our day camp, we were allowed to hang out with the campers who hadn’t been picked up yet, swim in the pool, play ball or jump rope on the black top. The other nuns were just as good at arts and crafts as my Aunt Linda so we got to make whatever things they had done that day, or learn fun camp songs (they weren’t even religious!). There was also another building with a teen rec room that had a juke box and a foosball table and even a soda machine! This was living!
The secret to all of the fun wasn’t just the amenities, however. These women were a riot. If no one had told you that they were all nuns, you would never have guessed it. Well, except for Sister Josephine who was kind of old and crotchety and still wore a habit (the only one who did), even indoors when she would shush us all because she couldn’t hear the Merv Griffin show despite the tv volume being turned all the way up. My sister and I didn’t have to go into their prayer session in the evening after dinner, we were free to hit the rec room or watch something besides Merv on tv. It was a pretty sweet set up.
They had a PA system at the camp so they could announce when it was time for the groups to switch to a new activity or come into the main camp building for lunch. One time at the end of the day, when we were already back from our camp, my Aunt Linda was getting ready to make an announcement only she didn’t realize the PA was already on. It must have been a long day and they were a little punchy. The big movie that had just been released that summer was The Main Event, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal and the theme song was getting a lot of airplay on the radio. My Aunt Linda grabbed the mike and did her best Barbra Streisand imitation of that song, getting all the way through the slow-burn intro before someone had managed to clue her in that she was belting out a mildly racy disco hit to the whole camp.
Press play, you won’t regret it.
That was one of the last times we stayed up at the camp/convent with my Aunt Linda. My dad moved out at the end of the summer and Aunt Linda and some of the other nuns moved to the midwest about a year later. But my sister and I have our memories of that great summer of ’79 at 440 9th St.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tonight I am taking my twelve-year-old daughter to her first concert (we have decided not to count the time we took her to see The Wiggles when she was almost three nor the time when she was six and staying with my sister who took her along to see Steel Pulse at an outdoor show, since she doesn’t remember either one). Another one of my sisters took her son to The Who for his first concert and friends have taken their kids with them to all manner of shows.
Before having kids, if I thought about it in the abstract, I imagined that I would influence my children’s tastes in music and they would be the coolest kids in school. For a while when they were very young, this was not far off the mark. I drove the car and controlled the stereo. I picked out the DVDs they watched and picked ones with soundtracks I liked (did you know there’s a surprising number of Ramones songs in Scooby-Doo movies?). But once they started taking the bus to school and hanging around with their peers, my music became something your parents listened to and not what they wanted to hear. I tried to bridge the gap for a while, making them CDs with songs I liked that got radio airplay, but currently there’s not a lot of crossover.
So tonight’s concert is my daughter’s favorite and I’m just accompanying her because she’s too young to go unsupervised. I am going to try hard not to embarrass her because I remember the one and only time I had a parent with me at a show.
I was in college in the Philadelphia suburbs and while I went to concerts in the city as often as I could, the last train left 30th St. Station right around midnight. If you missed it, you had to take an infrequent subway out through a rough neighborhood to the high speed line, which ran until 2am but only about once an hour. Most of the shows I went to were in theaters or sports stadiums because shows at clubs were always going to end after the last train. Every once in a while I could convince a friend with a car to come along but it was tough and the whole needing an ID or being 21 thing didn’t help.
This one time though, it just so happened that my dad was in Philadelphia for business and was staying at a hotel just two blocks from the Chestnut Cabaret. I had planned to meet up with a friend and her boyfriend to see The Connells there and now my dad was going to want to visit with me. I hemmed and hawed but finally decided to turn the situation to my advantage. His hotel room had two double beds so I figured we could hang out in the evening, have dinner, then I’d go to the show with my friends, stay overnight at the hotel with my dad, then we could do breakfast in the morning before his conference started. I didn’t expect him to say that he would want to come along. I tried to talk him out of it but it was just a club show, no seats, I don’t think I had bothered to get tickets in advance, so I couldn’t see how I could refuse to let him join us.
So dad and I went to see The Connells. He stayed at a table on the side with my friend’s boyfriend while the two of us hit the floor. He didn’t last all that long before the combination of age and business travel convinced him that he ought to head back to the hotel. I made my way to the hotel after the show and we spent the next morning hanging out before I headed back to campus.
What’s so embarrassing about that? It wasn’t at the show, it was the years afterward that I had to endure my dad bringing it up. The same exact sentences. “Remember that time we went to see, what was that band, oh yeah, The Con-nells (he always pronounced it as if it were two separate words)? And you two were down on the floor, I could only make out your heads bopping around from time to time so I left. Do you still go to see The Connells?” I am not kidding, for years, like ten, this same conversation took place every single time I spoke to him. Every.Time. If he was visiting and another person was around he would never miss the opportunity to regale them with the story about the time we went to a concert together. If I happened to tell him I was going to a concert he would immediately ask if I was going to see The Connells. (For the record, I saw them three times over the years, not the hundred and ten you would think if you listened to my dad.)
I spoke to my dad last weekend and mentioned that I was taking my daughter to a concert tonight. It’s been 25 years since that show so he doesn’t still remember the name of the band we saw but he started in, “Oh, I remember you used to go to concerts all the time.” I quickly changed the subject. Lesson learned. I will let my daughter be the one to remind me, if she wants to, about the time we went to a concert together.
I’ve been so busy at work lately that I was often doing work in the evenings or, as the lyrics say, “when my work day is over, I’m too tired for having fun” and that includes the old blog.
I’m also pretty behind in keeping up on all the things I usually follow. Lots of articles to read, art to see, and music to listen to.
I have a number (4) of old bikes and I will not part with any of them. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a good place to store them so they’re mostly sitting in our basement, which is far from an ideal solution. About a month ago I decided to haul one of them out of there and bring it out into the light of day to clean it up. I thought that went pretty well so I took it out for a test spin and felt all wobbly and very unsteady. I moved the seat down a tiny bit and that helped a little but it bothered me that I wasn’t able to get right back in the saddle as if 20-odd years hadn’t passed since I was last riding it regularly.
My old red Univega
This bike and I have a lot of history. I got it the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college (coincidentally, the bike it replaced was a five speed version of the green Schwinn being ridden in this video by the guy with the mustache) and during the next three years, we were inseparable. I rode it all over the back roads of the Philadelphia suburbs in college. I rode it in two team triathlons, both times being the only female rider. This was the bike I rode when I was a bike messenger in Philadelphia during the summer of 1988.
I’m sure it’s nostalgia, or maybe a mid-life crisis, but I want to get the old red bike back into regular riding condition. I took it out yesterday for only the second time since cleaning it up. I fired up my old biking tape (transferred to my iPod) and headed out. Being out riding again felt great. I decided to swing past the bike shop while I was out because it definitely needs more work still and I wanted to know if it was actually worth it to pursue that before I spend any money on it.
I don’t have bike shorts anymore, I couldn’t find my old (really old, pre-clipless pedal Detto Pietros) biking shoes, so I wasn’t surprised by the amused looks I got when I rolled into the bike shop in my running gear on a 27-year-old bike whose handlebar tape was tied at the end to keep it from unraveling more. I told them I was thinking about maybe putting a different style of handlebar on it or something because it really wasn’t all that comfortable but maybe it actually isn’t the right size for me, or it’s not worth it because it’s too old, etc. A young guy working behind the counter came forward and said maybe it just needed to be adjusted a little and why didn’t I bring it outside and ride around in the parking lot so he could see how it fit me.
Maybe he was just humoring me but he seemed to think my bike was charmingly old school, not just old. He thought the cloth handlebar tape was really cool. He did describe my old toe clips as death pedals and he thought the tires probably need to be replaced. He suggested lifting the handlebars up a tiny bit and tilting them slightly to take the pressure off my wrists. While he did that he wrapped the cloth around the handlebars again and put caps on the end and sealed it with tape. He inched the saddle back up, added air to the tires and had me ride around again. It did feel better. It felt springy and like it really appreciated having someone treat it right. The young guy waved me off to enjoy my ride home, which I did.
I was trying to come up with the right song for this entry and something said to me, try Valley Lodge. I recently went to a reading and book signing by Dave Hill (he’s the guy in the biking cap, I have a really great one of those too from 1987) but he didn’t mention that they’d made a video for a song off their new album Use Your Weapons, riding old bikes and old school cycling gear. It’s the perfect video for this. I highly recommend his book Tasteful Nudes too.
I read the article about King Krule in the most recent New Yorker and thought, huh, maybe I’d better give that another listen. I remember looking him up a couple weeks ago. I don’t know what song it might have been but it didn’t leave a lasting impression.
Now I am looking at this kid and thinking, whoa. First of all, he just turned 19. I am old enough to be his mother, and not just his unwed, teen-aged mother either. The article said he wrote this song when he was 13. Thirteen! My claim to fame at age 13? Winning the shop award in eighth grade. Sure, knowing how to swap out a faucet and install new light switches has come in handy over the years but kind of pales in comparison to this song.
There were quite a few more that I really liked, some under his former name Zoo Kid, like Out Getting Ribs. It’s a bit weird for me to have a musician be this young and be something I would like and my 12-year-old daughter would not like at all.
Noisy Cats 