May 7 Album Releases/1997 and 2013

Two major albums of my life were released on May 7ths, Tuesdays before my Friday birthdays on May 11.

1997: Hanson's Middle of Nowhere
2013: Deerhunter's Monomania

I may not have made it clear in this blog how passionately I care for the music of Bradford Cox, as Atlas Sound and in Deerhunter (except where I alluded to "my favorite gay male rock star"). I care for his music very, very, very much. At age 13, I learned what it was like to be consumed by love for a band, the first time I saw Hanson on MTV. I am still thrilled to love Deerhunter/B. Cox as much as I do, because so many people stop caring about bands as they get older (and fuck that).

I would like to draw out the differences between experiencing a record that comes out 4 days before your 14th birthday, and a record that comes out 4 days before your 30th birthday.

1997: CD
2013: LP

1997: You go with Mom to buy it.
2013: You go with yr main man, Slim Volume, to buy it.

1997: Purchase at Fred Meyer's electronics department in Lacey.
2013: Purchase at the 40-year-old record store Rainy Day Records in Olympia.

1997: Sit at your desk in your bedroom writing in your journal and listening to the CD straight through several times.
2013: Make veggie dogs with grilled buns and broccoli orange salad with coconut and raisins and yogurt-mustard dressing and play the LP while eating dinner; play it again while folding laundry after dusk.

1997: All-consuming obsession.
2013: This album is a mystery.

Galaxie 500, Today

Note: Slim Volume will from this point forward be a guest blogger; all unmarked content can be considered written by Lifeguard of Love. (this essay on Galaxie 500 happens to be in the form of a letter to Slim Volume). 

Dear Slim Volume,

Remember how you got Today by Galaxie 500 in Iowa City? You said you’d been meaning to listen to it for, like, ever.

It was summer and we were in Iowa City so that you could meet with someone at the university. You were applying for graduate school. We rented a car in Waukegan, Illinois, where my grandparents live. Uncle Roger insisted we get a Prius. I didn’t like it because it had a really lousy blind spot for someone my height. I guess we were 24. 

We borrowed some CDs from Uncle Roger, notably Tonight’s the Night. We listened to Neil Young a lot but we didn’t have that record. We listened to “Albuquerque” and said it really sounded like the city Albuquerque, although in hindsight I’m not sure we’ve ever been to Albuquerque; maybe we drove through once.

We stayed at a motel with a pool. I went swimming by myself while you organized your papers. It was just after dark. It’s really great to swim at dusk. Later I drove to a convenience store for beer and Sun Chips and dried apricots, with the moon roof open. I listened to “Albuquerque” over and over and wished I had rolled a number but I certainly had not tried to bring weed on the airplane. I dreamed of getting stoned and the longing was almost better than getting stoned.

We probably watched shows about serial killers or “dumb criminals” in bed because that’s what we did when we stayed at motels then. 

In the morning we went to a motherfucking Perkins, where we ate omelets with toast and meats both inside and outside the omelets, and the meals also came with enormous peach pie muffins. What the fuck.

Later, once we’d been to more college towns, we realized how much Iowa City was just like any college town: Bellingham, Eugene, Boulder, Tuscaloosa. They’re all more similar to each other than other cities in their states. 

The University was like a “real university”, we marveled, as we’d gone to The Evergreen State College which, like every other institution in the South Puget Sound area, was built by Californian architects in the 60s and 70s who disregarded our extended rainy seasons and made all the buildings squared and separated from one another (both my elementary school and high school have been heavily renovated  from their original 60s and 70s designs and are now unrecognizable).

We got a parking ticket and never fucking paid it. We were in a rental car.

While you were in your meeting, I went to a vintage clothing store. It was well curated and in a little cobblestone alley. I could definitely imagine living there. I got a groovy psychedelic shift dress. Once when I wore it several months later, your coworker picked me up and spun me around in the middle of a crowded bar.

The professor you met with focused on Asian history; your focus was on the American West.

We went to an antique store that had really great shit and we brought home an enormous Miller High Life sign; I don’t know what we were thinking but clearly we got it on the plane without checking luggage, and we also carried on a rather large rock my mom found on the beach in Zion. She had you carry it on. The security people made you promise not to hit anyone with it; you agreed. I also purchased a backpacking backpack and a sleeping bag; what the fuck; how did we carry all that on the plane? How did we eat that Perkins breakfast? 

We drove through Amish country, the Imana Colonies. I had been there 6 years before, with my BFF and her girlfriend, on our roadtrip. I remembered it as the most magical part of the roadtrip; the most beautiful part of the country. The two of us who weren’t driving had just woken up from naps and gotten stoned.

This time you wanted to listen to Joanna Newsom in the Imana Colonies which were tacky and touristy and not nearly as lovely as I remembered them. The surrounding country was fine and provided a bit of magic. I wouldn’t let you listen to Joanna Newsom because I couldn’t stand her but we listened to Today. I don’t think I really gave a shit about it, but it was good to listen to in Amish Country.

We drove home listening to Weedeater in the dark watching fireflies streak past. Fireflies amused us to no end; we don’t have them in Western Washington. We got stuck in traffic for a long time in Chicago. We got lost when we got back to Waukegan. We arrived at Uncle Roger’s while everyone else was watching the end of an old black and white movie.

Our return flight dropped us in Portland and we insisted on driving two hours home. We called Brianna and she was working late hours so still wanted to come over and party at 1AM. We made the tweeker at the nearest gas station unlock the beer case at 6AM and went to bed at 9AM. You said you were surprised that we partied when we got home but I wasn’t; I expected it the whole flight home.

You didn’t get into grad school in Iowa City but at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Even though I didn’t have to leave my home state I cried for two days about moving two and a half hours away from my parents and my home town. But Bellingham had a lot of good food and I got a job I loved at a copy shop and we had a damn good two and a half years there.

Shortly after we moved to Bellingham we saw Dean Wareham’s autobiography displayed in the public library. You convinced me to read it. I remember reading it in the bathroom of our daylight basement apartment, subdivided out of a turn of the century timber baron’s mansion. The book’s epigram was a quote from Wareham’s Galaxie 500 bandmates talking about how they broke up the band after because Wareham was literally taking over the spotlight, which is a pretty weird way to start an autobiography if you want the reader to feel sympathetic. After reading about how he lived in an apartment where he painted everything white except for the radiator and exposed pipes which he painted red, I decided I had to quit reading the book before he ruined the magical sadness, indeed the aesthetic cuteness that Galaxie 500 held. I thought the line in “Tugboat Captain” was “I don’t want to open your presents” – you know, since he also doesn’t want to go to your party or talk to your friends. But it’s “I don’t want vote for your president”. This refusal to participate (Wareham’s New Zealand background aside) can be read as a political action rather than a childish woundedness. This explains the attraction to Galaxie 500 “…cute objects—formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile…and the unthreatening—get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled.” (Sianne Ngai in this interview http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php)

It’s harder to enjoy Galaxie 500 if Dean Wareham is not wounded and adorable. Now when I listen to Today, I have to imagine him being a sad sap having a bad acid trip and the girl he loves not giving a shit about him and he, you know, forgot why he came to this town. I mean, he is a good narrator of that narrative, the sad sap getting too wasted with his hair in his eyes, which I still love as a fictional narrative –simple, adorable, wounded. Not in real life and not the real Dean Wareham. Here again I am reminded of Ted Bundy with crutches.

Later we listened to other Galaxie 500 albums and they kind of sucked, except for the two live albums.

Love,

Lifeguard of Love

Arches and Aisles by Spinanes

by Lifeguard of Love

Right now I am mad at Spinanes. I am mad at Arches and Aisles for being music for by and about grown ups. I am mad at the cool, collected resign that Rebecca Gates shows her lovers. These are no adolescent love songs, no lyrics like “I’m a square/And that makes you giddy. Did you give up punk/for Lent?” No, this is all vodka on ice (what a grown-up drink), pulling your clothes off and getting it over with (what a grown-up way to make love).

Arches and Aisles opens with a song that wants to be an adolescent love song, the lover meeting the beloved on the West Coast. This is a song about adult lovers who think they’re in love “like kids again” but they won’t ever know what it’s like to be in love like a kid again. It’s all going to hell.

It’s still a great record. 

*

At Pike Place Market, my family walks by the Sub Pop retail outlet. I don’t remember if I say anything or if my mom just knows I’ve been checking out all the Kurt Cobain biographies from the library, learning about the “grunge” scene which I just missed by being a teenager in the late-90s. Here, I have the first of a lifetime of overwhelming record store experiences. My mom convinces me to buy the “sampler”, because it is cheap and you get two CDs. 

Upon the first listen, which is also my first time listening to “indie rock” (except for that one time I heard Sleater-Kinney’s “Little Babies” on the radio), I am struck by the difference in production, noticeable in the sound. It’s warm but the vocals sound way back. This is what indie rock sounds like, I realize.

My favorite songs are the two songs by Spinanes, “Greetings from the Sugar Lick” and “Reach vs. Speed.” I think the singer is a soft-voiced male; no maybe it’s a woman, I can’t tell. 

*
 

Arches and Aisles is on the Employee Picks shelf at CD Recyclery in Gurnee Mills Outlet Mall, Gurnee Illinois. It’s the band from the Sub Pop Sampler. The cover is a mystery*. It is black and white dogwood flowers. The band name and album title are in sans serif font in a dark, transluscent magenta on a clear sticker on the cellophane; once the album is opened the title and band name are removed. It is the best graphic design I am aware of.

*

My friend gets a mixtape from someone in California. The first song is by Spinanes, I can tell right away. It’s the one about the West Coast weather.

*

When I move into the dorms at The Evergreen State College, I live with four other girls. Our names are Uliina, Alicia, Aloka, and Alyssa, and one other girl with a name that doesn’t start with a vowel and end with an “uh” sound, like Nicole or something. I don’t remember. She is into “boffing”** and Ren Faire and sci fi or whatever and invites me to eat dinner with her, once. It was just noodles with butter and brown sugar. It was the worst thing I’ve ever eaten. 

Alyssa has dreads and dates a boy that went to my high school who I thought was super cool. She tells me a story about how he works at Subway and once someone smeared poop inside the paper towel holder. We get along well and get high together well but are too shy to become good friends. 

Alicia and Aloka are exceedingly boring and I can’t believe my foul luck, to live with the least interesting people at a school full of hippies, punks, queers, rejects and weirdos. Every morning, and I mean every morning, they listen to – no, blast – “You’re Makin’ Me High” by Toni Braxton, one of my least favorite Top 40 R&B jams of my early years of high school, while they do their hair and makeup.  If they go “out” in the evening, they listen to it again. And again and again, on repeat. In revolt, I play Surrealistic Pillow on my dad’s warped LP from the 60s. It seems to be the music most directly opposed to Toni Braxton. Then I find Arches and Aisles at a used CD store. I’d never actually had the whole album. It was equally good for opposing Toni Braxton.

On Thanksgiving Break I go visit my femme girlfriend who lives in Colorado. November in Colorado is brown, which totally weirds me out. I’ve only spent Novembers before and since in Washington, you know, The Evergreen State. I talk about the Spinanes and she says, Jody Bleyle calls them Spinoidle, and plays me the Team Dresch song where Jody Bleyle says that.

I only live in the dorm for one quarter. Then I moved in with the only other person I knew who listened to Spinanes: Slim Volume.

*

 

“This is how heaven sounds when you get there” he says, at the beginning of side B. He has Arches and Aisles on LP and he got it in Evanston Illinois, what the fuck is up with Spinanes and Illinois? Shortly before we fall in love, he lends the LP to this friend who never gives it back and eventually moves away.

                                                                               

*the only album cover that is more mysterious is Moon Pix by Cat Power  

**You know, where nerds attack each other with big hammers made out of duct tape and styrofoam.

Sleater-Kinney opening for Patti Smith at The Pier in Seattle, July 2001.

A brief departure from strict album talk:

by Lifeguard of Love

Sleater-Kinney opening for Patti Smith at The Pier in Seattle, July 2001.

I was there with this girl, Janet. She was a woman; she was 31. I was 18.

She showed up in Olympia for YoYo a GoGo wearing a leather jacket and hanging out with some privileged teenage queers from Portland. She was blonde and kind of short and kind of butch; not boyish butch but tomboy butch. We figured they were all friends like we were all friends, but then we found out that Janet wasn’t from Portland, she was from back east, she’d lived in New York recently, she’d graduated from college recently, she was 31 and just traveling, living out of her car, with her guinea pig, Louise.

We were just out of high school (some of us were still in high school; my ex-girlfriend was, those kids from Portland were), and we loved Janet and wanted to take care of her because, was this what our futures held? Right now my best friend and I had our own apartment that we’d moved into 3 weeks before high school graduation, so that we could smoke pot and fuck girls on our own terms. We had this now and couldn’t imagine a less-settled life 13 years into the future, being 31 without a plan.

Janet had tickets for the Patti Smith and Sleater-Kinney show. During YoYo a GoGo I gave my ex-girlfriend her ticket from the pair that we’d gotten together. We’d broken up but we spent one night together right before YoYo. I don’t remember if we fucked. The next morning she invited me to shower with her and I declined. All of our friends fucked their exes. I thought I was badass for doing something different. We didn’t really speak again for years.

I rode with Janet driving to Seattle. She left her guinea pig, Louise, with my BFF and her new girlfriend. Janet had been staying with us, parking her car in our apartment building parking lot. Sleeping on the floor? I don’t remember. I asked my BFF last week, how long did Janet stay with us? Who the fuck knows! Slept on our floor…a few days? Weeks? she answered.   

Once during that time period, days or weeks, Janet fell asleep in a chair, reading a biography of Keith Moon. While she was asleep we ate mushrooms. When she woke up she didn’t think she’d been asleep. We kept talking about mushrooms and she was like, “Are you guys going to take mushrooms?” We were like, “We already did!!!!!!” and she sighed and went out to sleep in her car. She had quit smoking weed and gave us a tiny New York bud she’d been carrying around with her. It was in a little drug bag printed with marijuana leaves, and we’d never seen anything like that little bag before. All of our weed came in regular sandwich baggies with the edges sealed with a lighter. We were really impressed by that little, sealable, printed bag.

Janet played a surf music tape all the way up to the pier. She told me about the biography of Keith Moon she was reading. She was a drummer. She was thinking about what to do next in life, and thought about joining the Army to play in drums in the Army band. She said, hypothetically, When I got out in 10 years, you’d be…28…

We got to Seattle and I guess we went to that arcade that’s by the pier. I guess we just wandered around. We ran into my friends Pinkos and Saundra playing games in the arcade; it never would have occurred to me to actually play the games. When Janet wasn’t looking, Pinkos gave me wide eyes and thumbs up. I smirked and raised my eyebrows. I wasn’t even sure if I was on a date with Janet or not.

We could hear the Patti Smith Group doing a soundcheck; it sounded really good. We got in to the outdoor venue and ran into my friends and my ex-girlfriend. “Janet!” my ex-girlfriend exclaimed and hugged her – we all loved Janet and wanted to take care of her. My ex-girlfriend was 16. She didn’t look at me.

I think Janet said something about me and my ex-girlfriend, I don’t remember what. But pretty quickly she split and spent the whole show in the bar.

It was Sleater-Kinney opening for Patti Smith in 2001. They were my two favorite bands at the time. I’m sure it was a great show. Maybe there is more detail in one of my journal somewhere. I’ll look it up and see if I can tell you some songs they played.

Janet and I met up after the show, I don’t know how or where, maybe I just waited outside of the roped-off bar. We went to a fish and chips place that was about to close. Janet was wasted and tried to pick up a chair; I was extremely apologetic to the staff. I remember the fish sandwich I ate being amazing; I squeezed lemon all over it.

I drove Janet’s car back to Olympia. It was totally full of her, you know, life, since she was traveling and living out of it. I couldn’t check the blind spot, so I stayed in the right-hand lane the whole 60 mile drive home.

Janet drummed with drumsticks on the dashboard to Nevermind the entire way.

Modest Mouse are Douchebags

by Lifeguard of Love

Everybody knows Modest Mouse are douchebags. I’ve intentionally never looked at their image, because I’m sure if I did I could never enjoy listening to them again. They were never my music anyway. I never heard them except for that one song on the radio until I met Slim Volume. The first time I heard them not-on-the-radio, I said, “They sound like the Beastie Boys on a Carribean vacation.” (!?!?!) Later, the first time I heard the Pixies (yes, later, it’s my goddamn rock n roll life and I am not ashamed of it), I was like, “oh, that’s what Modest Mouse is ripping off.” Also, isn’t there something about a statutory rape? I know statutory rape can just mean it’s your 18^th birthday and you consensually fucked your still-not-18-year-old girlfriend (we've all been there), but still. Douchebags.

BUT WE FUCKING FALL FOR IT! Because something about it is so sincere. [VULNERABILITY AND MANIPULATION] But it’s not like Built to Spill; girls don’t listen to it to dream or learn about how men feel about them. Girls listen to Modest Mouse to imagine what it’s like to be a dude. And Modest Mouse tell us.

But they weren’t Axl-Rose-style, blatantly-mysogynist douchebags. They were douchebags for a new era. They were the mopey sad sack douchebags when interest in safer sex/HIV prevention was fading from pop culture. (note: I am REALLY into historicizing things in relation to the HIV-AIDS crisis and HIV prevention propaganda right now). Because they can’t get laid aside from statutory rape, they resort to displays of vulnerability to make girls like them. Ted Bundy with crutches.

Modest Mouse’s crutches include: motion sickness, love sickness, claustrophobia, recreational drug use, low-grade alcholism, not giving a damn, chronic cough, blasphemy, sleepwalking, fucking people over.

Fuck all those straight-haired brunettes who did you wrong, Ted Bundy. I’ll love you right.

Intro to The Lonesome Crowded West week

I'd like to start out The Lonesome Crowded West week with some choice quotes from when I googled "why I love Modest Mouse" for research on my essay:

“...the songs had the pain of life stitched onto the great sounds and lyrics...”

“I believe it was playing while I was shopping at American Eagle 3 years ago.”

“Some ex. of that time I listened to Tom Petty, mighty Mighty Bosstones, but not much more than the songs I heard on Guitar hero.”

“After that anything I played by MM was just sex.”

And the BEST:

“My 13 year old self liked pop music, so I couldn't appreciate the genius of Brock's tortured lyrics and originality...I just really felt like I could relate to the song...Their music just makes me so happy, and I can really identify with the originality of the music and lyrics because I am also one very strange girl.”

Preliminary Materials on a Theory of Tracy + the Plastics

VERY minimally edited response to Slim Volume's Questions:

by Lifeguard of Love

To work backwards: The artist lets go of work immediately upon sharing it, especially in this case, as Olympia had a pretty major “all ages” scene circa 2001.

To be a fan is a one-sided relationship, but in a small community it becomes more recipricol. As soon as she left the stage, she introduced herself to people as Wynne, never Tracy. The act immediately came off, which may have further blurred the line between performance and performer. Nothing about her seemed to “change” once she was Wynne and not Tracy (no one ever mistook her for Nikki or Cola). One time there was a Sunday early-evening show for some reason, and she was like “Oh my god guys, I’m so hungover I thought I was going to die.” But she did the show anyway. Her performance was performance, but the closeness of the space (including often playing at venues without stages) was also humanizing. She let one of my friends be the singer at one show.

Humanizing, strangely, can lead to further objectification. In a punk rock community, the MORE we think we can relate to a performer, the more we feel we POSSESS them. (what to make of the possessiveness of fans?).

What happens? What happens is that fans are happy. The fans are 18 and don’t have anywhere to put this information about performance, identity, femininty. Greenwood has a faint moustache and a GREAT ass, and that’s all they need. All the queer kids, butch or femme, can dream of her. We don’t know what she means by Modern. We don’t know what the Art Test is. Queer youth group is telling us that we’re Golden.

What made this actual record the flip side of The Need is Dead? It is like it’s companion album, and not just because I listened to them both the first time I did mushrooms (that is not even a true story).

What puts this record into a rock category? I don’t fucking know! I am trying to figure that out.

How did Tracy and the Plastics employ irony in a way that contemporary electronic musicians today (Grimes), 11, 12 years later, do not need to?

*

It was a weekend in February. My girlfriend’s teeth had crashed into my lip while we were making out and I wouldn’t let her kiss me after; since my lip was cut it was not HIV-transmission safe. Queer youth group had drilled so much HIV prevention in me that I’d missed opportunities to have sex with girls when I didn’t have a glove; all bodily fluids were treated equal.

We went to an all ages performance space called The Midnight Sun. I am most certainly at risk of mixing up this story with a million other stories of shows at The Midnight Sun. This may in fact be a hybrid, this may not even have been the night that my girlfriend’s mouth cut my lip; it may have even been her lip that was cut. This was only 11 years ago. I don’t remember. I was really stoned.

We peeped into the venue. They actually wouldn’t let us in because the place was at maximum capacity. We saw a TV and we were like what the fuck, this isn’t a band, it’s just a TV.

We went and saw Tracy and the Plastics and The Need play almost every weekend for the next several months. Their records, Muscler’s Guide to Videonics and The Need is Dead were flip sides of one another.

 *

Tracy and the Plastics was temporal drag of a very recent past – a past that many of Greenwood’s peers lived with, although we, the all-ages part of the all-ages audience, did not. She employed irony in sound and medium. But then a lot of the fans didn’t get the irony because they had younger parents (???) so they just thought it was cool (???).

 

But that brings in a question of authenticity/sincerity; I personally am still stuck in finding rock n roll more “authentic” than electronic music because it is something you can feel (performing and listening). [I know this to be untrue/authenticity to be not even real, etc., but it is something that grates on me when I think about electronic music in general, even though I fucking love some of it].

 

What about Glass Candy using and recording total analog. You can feel that too? (need to read the section on analog recording in Time Binds by Elizabeth Freeman).

What made Tracy and the Plastics different for me? Was it really just Wynne Greenwood’s moustache and fine ass? Are the teenage hormones that objectify performers the same teenage hormones that make you want to fuck everyone you can just because you can?

On the “legacy” of Tracy and the Plastics

by Slim Volume

Questions to consider:

What are the implications of Tracy and the Plastics bringing dance music (back) to a punk rock crowd? I’m especially interested in this question in terms of the potential of dance music to do the revolutionary work of “killing the rock star” or fulfilling Sonic Youth’s prescription to “kill your idols” not only by providing a song structure and beat that works against heteronormative narratives of closure, desire/faith in fulfillment, and even the authority of the state, but also by de-centering the supposed genius artist, positioning them in a horizontal relationship with “the crowd”.

Tracy, in her interaction with “the Plastics,” seeks to make visible the complexities inherent in the production of the subject in the tangled act of art-making and social performance, to expose as a sham the romantic concept of an artist as an individual genius—the myth that artists are expressing a well-bounded, authentic creative self. But what happens when her music/art is consumed by a subculture that has ritualized punk rock performances? That reads her onstage presence in this context? That renders her identity legible in terms of subcultural queer norms that have tended to reproduce analogs of heteronormative popular culture such as teen heartthrobs, boy bands, etc? Where do the intentions of the artist/producer end and the needs/expectations/interpretations of the consumer begin?

Intro to Muscler's Guide to Videonics Week.

 

Highlight of this Flyer:

 

THE PLASTICS ARE:

LIKE: Being high w/out drugs

LIKE: Jokes about God.

LIKE: THE RE-DO

LIKE: Learning another language.

LIKE: Falling in love w/ the ONLY.

LIKE: Heart-throb

When Slim Volume and Lifeguard of Love were in high school, they went to Tracy + the Plastics shows all the time. Tracy + the Plastics were really good about playing all ages shows. Slim Volume always went alone, up north (he grew up near Seattle). None of his friends were into it. So it was like this solitary experience of performance art.

Lifeguard of Love had a very different experience. She was always seeing Tracy + the Plastics with an ever-growing group of queer teenagers in Olympia. Sometimes their group seemed to be the biggest group at the shows. It was totally a social thing.

Lifeguard of Love and Slim Volume saw each other for the first time at a Tracy + the Plastics and The Need show, when they were 17.

The flyer above is the insert for the Tracy + the Plastics VHS. It is REALLY interesting, because Wynne Greenwood is writing about the "identities" of Tracy, Nikki, and Cola, and indeed identifying herself as not either of the 3. She also describes the equipment she uses. You can see it really fucking huge here if you want to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/weasel_lobotomy/8395372293/sizes/o/in/photostream/