Audiography
This is an experiment in autobiography in which I describe my life in terms of the music I listen to, one album at a time. I usually make fun of this sort of indulgence, so feel free to point out any examples of my hypocrisy that you happen to find.
The Hold Steady, "Boys and Girls in America."
Vagrant, 2006
This is a hard one for me.
About nine months ago, my wife of a year and a half told me she wanted a divorce. I can't say I was entirely surprised; she had become increasingly cold to me in the months preceding this announcement. Whenever I had tried to talk to her about it, she brushed off my concerns and said nothing was wrong. The more I tried to make her feel better, the worse she had seemed to feel and I'd been growing increasingly concerned that she was unhappy in our relationship. Since she wouldn't talk to me about, I wasn't sure what I needed to do. She ended up making that decision pretty clear.
Of course, these warning signs don't make the actual act any easier to deal with. We had been together for almost five years in all. I had moved to North Dakota to be with her while she finished grad school and during the two and a half years I had been there I had gotten a customer service job and had started grad school myself. But I had no real connection to the place, no real friends in the area and no interest in staying there alone. So pretty much within 10 minutes of her saying she wanted a divorce I knew I would be moving back home to Oregon.
We arranged for a divorce hearing and the date was a little less then two weeks away. During the time in between, I dropped out of school (I'd only completed a term and wasn't too interested in the program, so that wasn't too big of a deal), gave notice at my job and started packing up everything I owned. It was a hard week for me, made more so by the fact that it was the middle of winter and the average daily temperature rarely rose above zero. In that weather, you don't go outside or go driving around unless you need to, so I really didn't have any way to blow off steam. That I kept my job right up until the day before the hearing didn't make matters any better, since doing customer service required I be pleasant and helpful to the worst sort of greedy, self-satisfied assholes. I'd like to say that since I was quitting anyway I took the opportunity to tell off a few choice pricks, but I'm constitutionally incapable of taking my bad days out on other people, so I just ended up stewing in my own frustration for a week and a half. My soon-to-be-ex-wife did me the favor of not being around the apartment much during this time, crashing with friends while I got my affairs in order.
My spare time was spent watching endless streams of stupid comedies (I thing I watched "Animal House" four times, along with almost every Marx Brothers film). When I got tired of that, I listened to music. I couldn't concentrate on any of this though, but it managed to distract me on occasion.
One thing did get through and gave me some form of passive release. A few weeks before all of this I had purchased a copy of the third album by The Hold Steady, "Boys and Girls in America." I didn't know the group at all and had picked it up purely on recommendation.
I had no idea what to expect from the album and it took me some time to get into it. I've always had a slight aversion to Bruce Springsteen and this group reeked of E Street Band gloss. But the songs stuck in my head and I kept coming back to the album. When my wife asked for a divorce, I latched on to this piece of music. It's combination of anthemic rock and down-to-earth storytelling gave it a cinematic quality that pulled me in. Tales of drinking, parties, heartbreak and loss gave me something to absorb outside of my own trouble. That it was all done so well and that the lyrics had an uncommon depth to them (band leader Craig Finn is up there with David Berman and Colin Meloy as one of the best, most literary lyricists in rock today) only made me appreciate it more. I listened to it during breaks at work, while packing up all my books, while driving around town doing the various chores I needed to accomplish to wrap up my life there. The album, at turns frivolous and poignant, was the kind of distraction I needed to focus on the task ahead of me.
The divorce hearing was on a Tuesday morning. She helped me load up my car and I managed a few self-deprecating jokes before we headed to the courthouse. It occurred to me for the first time that this might be for the best. She had developed a life in this place, become successful and had a growing social circle. I had been killing time, waiting for her to finish up her education so we could move somewhere else. She became more comfortable while I just got by. As hard as it was, this might be a chance for me to start over.
We went through the legal motions and said some solemn goodbyes. She said she hoped we would meet again sometime. I don't think we ever will. I got into my car and drove off, down to Fargo and then onto Oregon. Back home.
Recommended Tracks: "Chips Ahoy!"
Best Line: "Sometimes I think that Sal Paradise was right/Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together."
Best Moment: The closing crescendo of "Hot Soft Light" with the line "There's a cross, there's a cross and in the center there's a hot, soft light." It sounds like a religious invocation, but I'm pretty sure it's about an AA meeting.
"Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis
Columbia/Legacy, 1959
Sometimes a piece of music can become so familiar you don't even hear it anymore. It becomes a mood, a background, rather than an aural experience. You need to be separated from it for awhile before you can really hear it again.
"Kind of Blue" was my first jazz album. I knew jazz before I heard it. My parents listened to jazz and blues all through my childhood, to the point where I was more familiar with John Lee Hooker than I was with, say, Green Day. But it was always just "jazz" rather than a particular era or a certain artist. The music had an aura of coolness that really appealed to my younger self, who was looking randomly around for anything that would set him apart and make him interesting.
The summer before I entered high school, my family took a long road trip from Oregon up through Glacier National Park and on to Mount Rushmore, with a stop at Yellowstone on the way back home. I took the opportunity to explore jazz a little further and raided my parent's CD collection for things to listen to on the trip. "Kind of Blue" was one of these, which I selected because I had seen it everywhere and assumed it would be a good introduction.
This presumption turned out to be correct. I got to the album a couple days into the trip, listening to it one evening while reading a mystery novel in the hotel room my family had piled into. I put down the book after a few minutes, no longer able to focus on it. It just wasn't as interesting as what I was listening to. The music wasn't intense or thrilling or passionate, but it was beautiful and subtle. I felt relaxed while listening to it. If I could ever say I had a sublime experience with an album it would be the first time I listened to "Kind of Blue" all the way through.
During the rest of that two week trip I listened to the albums countless times. It made surprisingly good road music for those long stretches of ranch land between national parks. Jazz now had a face to me. I started picking up other albums through the next few years, starting with Davis ("Milestones" was a high school favorite) and soon going through the solo works of his sidemen, discovering Coltrane and Monk, Rollins and Hancock, soon spreading out further and gaining life long passions for Dave Brubeck and Art Pepper, Jimmy Smith and Dexter Gordon and so on and so on. "Kind of Blue" remained the gold standard and all other albums were ranked in how close they came to what I perceived as its perfection.
By the time I got to college I had a small jazz collection that was expanding every few weeks. I was listening to bales of music, but "Kind of Blue" remained on regular rotation as a chill out album for when things were getting too heavy for me. By the time I got my degree I hardly listened to it anymore. To this day I still only get to it a couple of times a year. I've so much other music, have expanded my tastes so far that any one album will have trouble getting recognized. I've put the album in its context, a solid introduction to jazz as a style and a form, the most accessible piece of music in his catalog. My experience with it is not a unique one.
Yet that doesn't change the affection I feel for the album. It's such a key part of my musical history that my collection would never be complete without it. Its popularity doesn't take away from its beauty, and it deserves all the accolades it receives.
Best Track: All of them as it works best as a piece.
Best Moment: The slow burn opening of the first track, "So What," which builds from a rainy day meditation to a gorgeously toned jam.
"You're Living All Over Me" and " Bug" by Dinosaur Jr.
SST, 1987 and 1988
At some point in high school I became increasingly interested in rock criticism. I was writing music reviews for my high school paper and my obsessive reading of the Rolling Stone archives online had given me some sense of rock criticisms history (albeit limited). During my first year of college I began investing in this interest, picking up some collections by classic rock critics such as Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer. It also led me to pick up a book by Michael Azerrad, entitled "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991." I purchased the book mostly for the sections on the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth, the only two bands covered in the book that I recognized.
I was in for an interesting ride thanks to this book. I started reading it that Spring Break and found myself wrapped up in the stories of bands such as Black Flag and Husker Du, groups whose music I had barely heard yet whose characters came forth to me as bold as reality. Though I hardly noticed it at the time, reading this book led to a sea change in my musical taste. I started buying the albums mentioned in the book over the next few years, starting with the classics and slowly working into the back catalogs. Getting a job at the college radio station at the University of Oregon helped accelerate the process, giving me a chance to listen to a whole world of music of which I had hardly been aware. Going through the chapter titles of "Our Band..." is now like listing off a group of my favorite bands. Mission of Burma, The Minutemen, Big Black. Nearly every band mentioned in the book has now become a treasured entry in my collection, even the important bands on the fringes of the stories, that for some reason didn't get their own chapters (the Meat Puppets, Naked Raygun). My radio show for a time was basically devoted to 1980s indie rock, so much so that some listeners (what few there were) and fellow DJs always assumed I was older than I was, since they couldn't understand how I was interested enough in these bands to put them on regular rotation otherwise.
Dinosaur Jr. was one of the last bands in the book in which I took an interest. This was partly circumstance. Unlike bands such as Mission of Burma, who had had the majority of their catalog reissued around that time, Dinosaur Jr.'s early albums were often difficult to come across. The radio station didn't have them, so I simply didn't get a chance to listen to the group until my senior year. Around this time another DJ at the station made dubs of the band's second album from a record he had and put it in the catalog. I gave a random track a spin one evening during my show (I think the song was "The Lung"). I enjoyed the song enough to put the album on regular rotation, playing at least a track a week until I had gotten through most of the album, a song at a time. I would like to say that I was instantly taken with the group, but the truth is I was somewhat underwhelmed. I found it interesting, certainly, but I had been absorbing so much new music at the time that the group was just another drop in the lake.
At some point the station picked up a copy of "Bug," the band's third album. The opening track, "Freak Scene," impressed me enough that I went and bought the album, along with its predecessor "You're Living All Over Me," which had both just been re-released on CD. I tried to get into the music, and I certainly enjoyed what I heard well enough, but I didn't have the patience for either. "You're Living..." felt scattered and frantic to me, while "Bug" was felt overshadowed by "Freak Scene," which I considered the band's best song.
I find it frustrating when I don't like something. I go into everything wanting to enjoy it, even if I suspect I won't. The world is so much nicer when I find something I like rather than another piece of pop culture refuse to toss on the shit pile. What I have found is that sometimes it takes an entry point, some piece of something that makes you realize why other people like it. From there you can begin to understand a work and maybe start to enjoy it yourself. My entry point for Dinosaur Jr. came one day late in the spring of my senior year when I was listening to my iPod on shuffle while walking between classes. "Kracked," the second track from "You're Living..." came on. At first I hardly noticed, preoccupied with other things. Suddenly it occurred to me: "Holy shit, this is awesome." I started the track over and gave it another listen. I fell instantly in love with the snaky opening guitar line leading into J. Mascis' slacker drone of a voice lamenting a shattered relationship with a refreshing sense of fatalism. When I got home, I listened to "You're Living..." all the way through again, right up to the high pitched, distorted version of "Just Like Heaven" that ends the CD reissue ("Holy crap, that's a Cure song, why the fuck did I not notice that before?"). "Bug" soon followed and I began to become a devoted fan of the band's energetic yet lackadaisical style.
I've picked up more of the band's work since then, including the classic "Green Mind," and its decent follow-up, "Where You Been." Much like Husker Du and Mission of Burma, the band has become a perennial favorite, a group I'll still be listening to long after anyone else knows who they are or cares.
Suggested Tracks: "Freak Scene," "Kracked," "No Bones"
Best Line: "Sometimes I don't thrill you/ Sometimes I think I'll kill you/ Just don't let me fuck up, will you?/ Cause when I need a friend it's still you." ("Freak Scene")
Best Moment: The two guitar solos in "Freak Scene" that Mascis uses to replace lyrics, letting his guitar speak for him where words fail.
"Rocket to Russia" by the Ramones
Sire, 1977
I got into punk slowly, in small increments over the course of a few years. I had heard what passed for the genre on mid-nineties alt-rock radio while I was in high school, which was almost legendarily mediocre (though I still consider Green Day a great pop rock act, despite their failings). My explorations really started in earnest when I picked up one of the "Punk-O-Rama" compilations (volume five, I believe), in part because it had the word "punk" in the title and in part because it was dirt cheap. It was a solid comp (to my memory at least. I got rid of it years ago) and introduced me to a number of bands I would never have heard otherwise (the Dwarves and the (International) Noise Conspiracy stand out the most).
The primary influence of the CD was to ignite an interest in punk rock through my last couple of years of high school. As I tend to with any new interest, I started researching the genre's roots. This led me to start picking up albums by the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash ("London Calling" is part of my DNA at this point. If I have children, they will know all of the words to "Revolution Rock" long before they ever hear the song) among others. I knew of the Ramones, but I didn't really make the leap until the summer after high school, when a new compilation of their work was released. I didn't buy the comp, but I did listen to it at a Borders in Eugene that had put the album into one of their listening stations. I went into Eugene from my home in Junction City a lot that summer look for jobs before college, and would usually swing by Borders to listen to a few tracks, until my head bobbing began to annoy the clerks at the information desk. The music just seemed to click with me that summer and I knew that I would need to pick some up soon.
"Rocket to Russia" was the album I finally nabbed. I chose it for the simple reason that it was the only one that was available at House of Records that day and I didn't feel like going to another store. I was fortunate that the Ramones were at the time going through a bit of a revival and all of their early albums were being re-released, so I had a bale of bonus material along with the original album.
In the context of their previous two albums, "Rocket to Russia" was the Ramones most refined work to date, to the extent that the word "refined" can be used in the same sentence as "the Ramones." The production was clean-cut and unadorned, yet contained none of the rough edges of their first album. The songwriting was spot on, some of the best of their career. The goofy pop pleasures of "Cretin Hop" and "Rockaway Beach" were ages beyond anything they had done before. "Teenage Lobotomy" is still a classic of early punk rock, and their choice of covers is impeccable, with "Do You Wanna Dance?" and "Surfin' Bird" sounding so ingrained into their sound that they might as well have written the songs themselves. The whole album is a gem from beginning to end, a perfect synthesis of 1960s pop rock and bare-bones basic guitar thrash.
It's also the last perfect album the band would produce. It's follow-up, "Road to Ruin," found them hitting a wall with their early sound. The Phil Spector-produced "End of the Century" is their bid at becoming the pop band they always wanted to be, yet is a flawed experiment (though not as bad as some have claimed). Everything afterwards never came close to the first three albums. "Rocket to Russia" is the perfect realization of their art, their art just happening to be making trashy guitar pop full of oddball lyrics, power chords and off-kilter vocal inflections.
Suggested Tracks: "Teenage Lobotomy", "Do You Wanna Dance?", "We're a Happy Family"
Best Line: "All the girls are in love with me/I'm a Teenage Lobotomy!" ("Teenage Lobotomy")
Best Moment: The classic opening shout out opening up "Teenage Lobotomy"
"Brief Moments With Songs I Am Not Proud of Having Enjoyed"
Song: "Fly Away," by Lenny Kravitz
Album: "5", 1998, Virgin Records
During Spring break of my freshman year of high school, my family took a day trip up to Portland to do some shopping. Being the surly teenager that I was, I got bored very easily when spending time with my parents. We had stopped at the Lloyd Center, a large mall near downtown Portland so that my mom could indulge in her Nordstrom fixation. I had just enough cash for an album and stopped at a Sam Goody and picked up the above-mentioned title (this was a few years before I developed anything resembling good taste in either music or music stores). Eager to give it a listen, I ditched my family and headed for the car. Pushing the minivan speakers to their limit, I listened to the album all the way through, giving "Fly Away" particular attention (and a few repeat listens). It's a terrible song from a technical standpoint. The chord progression is rudimentary at best, the lyrics are almost embarrassing and the production has the feel of someone who is interested in electronic music but hasn't quite gotten the hang of it yet. This is all in hindsight of course. At the time I sang along with that soaring chorus, in my best cracking, white boy voice, blissfully unaware of how lame I looked, and with no one around to remind me.
My Morning Jacket, "It Still Moves"
ATO, 2003
This is not a classic album by any means. It has its imperfections, its indulgences, its errors. But these are the sorts of albums we always seem to love the most, aren't they?
While studying journalism at the University of Oregon, I made ends meet by working at my college newspaper, writing for and eventually editing the entertainment section. It was a good job. I got a shitty paycheck in exchange for being able to write about almost anything I felt like. Did at least 2-3 music reviews a week, which is what really helped me develop any music crit chops I have. I also got to hear new bands and expand my musical horizons a bit, generally by choosing albums with the best names or the coolest looking cover art. When CD by a band called My Morning Jacket came along, I knew I had to give it a listen. I put it in a stack of other albums and took it back to my apartment where I could listen in peace.
I don't remember what other albums I listened to that day, but do remember the first time I heard that voice. The sound of Jim James's echo-soaked singing calling out the opening lines of "Mahgeetah" was like nothing I had heard up to that point. I later learned that he records his vocals inside a converted grain silo, a factoid that just seemed so perfect for the music that the band made. The songs were organic, earthy, full of sincerity. Southern rock with brains and humanity, folk with spirit, Americana with open eyes.
For the next few weeks I was a missionary for this band and this album. Along with the fawning review I wrote, I also played it endlessly on a weekly radio show I did at the college radio station, recommending it to every other DJ I met. I played if for all my friends despite their indifferent reactions. I was aware of its faults. The way the songs would sometimes drag on like a bar band trying to think of the ending, the cheesiness of the horns that covered some tracks with needless gloss. Yet I loved it regardless, and I wanted everyone else to feel the same love for it I did.
Of course I abandoned the album within a few months. Passion burns strong and fast. I kept it, but I stopped evangelizing, occasionally listening to a track here or there. That would have been the end of it had I not gone to Minnesota with my girlfriend/future wife that spring break to meet her parents for the first time. They lived in small town near the Minnesota/North Dakota border. The future misses and I spent a lot of time that week in her mom's car, driving around the country, listening to music and taking in the scenery (what there was of it that didn't involve beet fields). I had never been to this part of the country before, and despite my initial hesitation I found it to be a generally pleasant enough place. One day, during one of these drive, I put on "It Still Moves." I hadn't played it in awhile and at first I didn't really notice it. But something started to click in my head. It was perfect. One that sunny, early spring day, with winter starting to recede from the frozen countryside, this album was perfect. That voice, calling out over the woods and fields and farmland, the music rolling over the landscape. It was the soundtrack of that moment. The music made sense, and the place made sense, and when I eventually moved to North Dakota while my wife and I went to grad school, that slight inkling of understanding made the transition a bit easier for me.
Suggested Tracks: "Mahgeetah," "Golden," "Master Plan"
Best Line: "People always told me/That bars are dark and lonely/And talk is often cheap and filled with air/Sure sometimes they thrill me/But nothing could ever chill me/Like the way they make the time just disappear."
Best Moment: Eighteen seconds into "Mahgeetah" when Jim James calls out in a voice that sounds as if it were bouncing off canyon walls.
"Pork Soda" by Primus
Interscope. 1993
As I've stated previously, high school was a time of intense expansion in my musical palate. One of the consequences of this is that I grew tired of the standard modern/classic rock stations that I had been listening to since the fifth grade. I started to explore some of the stranger fair that showed up when I turned the dial further to the left. These consisted of the NPR station coming out of a local community college, the University of Oregon college radio station (which I ended up working for a couple of years later) and a small station run by a Eugene high school.
I picked up all sorts of things from these stations: Surf rock, classic jazz and blues, a wide array of offbeat indie music as well as liberal amounts of static (I lived 20 miles outside of Eugene, where all these stations transmitted from). One night I was listening to the high school station and was picking it up pretty clearly. They were always a crapshoot for quality music, but sometimes they would hit the nail right on the head. In this case it was the pounding opening bass notes of "My Name is Mud" that did the hitting. Primus was a band I was only barely aware of. Their only hit song was "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" and it didn't get played enough to make much of an impression on me.
This was something different though. The bass was mixed right up to the front (maybe the first time I ever really noticed a bass player) with those high-pitched vocals echoing over the syncopated beat. It was a major departure from any kind of rock music I had heard before. The lyrics were as odd as the voice singing them and the guitars sounded like something out of a horror film. The song stuck with me long after it was over.
A few weeks later I drove into Springfield on some errand or other and went inside Circuit City. It was spring, bright and warm out. I walked over to the CD racks, picked up "Pork Soda," paid for it and left. Back in my parent's minivan, I skipped straight to "My Name is Mud" to fill my craving for it and then started at the beginning of the album and headed home. I had a blissful half hour or so driving back to Junction City, listening to this freakish, off-center band and feeling like the coolest son of a bitch in town.
Though it's not widely considered their best album, "Pork Soda" has remained a favorite of mine. It has a unique production for a Primus album, very up-close and raw, like they're right there in your head. The songs themselves are some of the band's darkest, yet it never loses that morbid sense of humor they were known for. It felt like a manifesto for me at the time, something that I understood and no one else could begin to grasp. Whenever I listen to it now I think of those times, back when I could still dilute myself into thinking that I was a unique human being.
Suggested Tracks: "My Name is Mud," "Bob," "DMV"
Best Line: "We had our words/A common spat/ So I kissed him upside the cranium with an aluminum baseball bat/ My name is mud." From "My Name is Mud"
Best Moment: The opening bass riff that starts off and carries the twisted instrumental jam "Hamburger Train."
"Moondance" by Van Morrison
Warner Bros. 1970
I listened to a lot of classic rock radio in my youth. I didn't really know or understand much of modern music until high school, but in the seventh grade I knew all the words to "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "Moondance." I didn't know the name of the performer, or make the connection that they were in fact perfomred by the same person, but every time "Moondance" was played, I was in full crooner mode. It remained a favorite of mine even after grunge and alternative rock took over my listening habits. I could still hum it by my first year of college, but by then the song had slipped into the back of my memory.
I lived in a coed dorm during my first year at the University of Oregon. It was a three-story dump with the sexes separated by floor. I spent an inordinate amount of time pining for the women that lived above and below me. Unfortunately, my advances were often misinterpreted as just general friendliness (I'm no good at flirting) and subsequently I ended up with more buddies than girlfriends. There was a particular woman whose dogged insistence on being on nothing more than platonic terms was especially irksome to me. She was a pretty, dark-haired bisexual who lived directly below me, spending her free time going to poetry readings and practicing yoga. Unfortunately for me and anyone else who swung that way, she was engaged to this dickhead pre-med major up at Oregon State (I don't call him a dickhead just out of spite; he actually was a jealous douche. This was a fact quite evident to basically everyone other than the woman engaged to him). So my hopeless romanticism had to be satisfied with hanging out in her room and chatting about common interests, with the occasional excursion to film showings or small house parties.
At some point I noticed a CD sitting on the floor of her room with a familiar title. "Moondance" by Van Morrison. I asked her about it and found it was one of her faves. Now that I had a connection between an old radio favorite and my current unrequited sexual attraction, I had a good reason to get the album. A few weeks later, during an especially dreary October evening, I happened by Face the Music, a small independent music store just off campus. Bored and looking to kill some time, I browsed around. Though I wasn't really looking for it, I came across "Moondance." Though it was reasonably priced for this store (FTM had some pretty outrageous mark-ups on their CDs, even for an indie store. It closed about two years later) I decided that since I was approaching broke I would let it pass for the day.
Then one of those serendipitous happenings occurred. I'd paused outside the store to put my headphones back on and realized that the bar next door was pumping some classic rock through its speakers. You can guess what old favorite started playing right at that moment. It was too perfect to pass up, so I went back into the store and bought the album, along with some Coltrane for balance. I headed back to the dorms, hoping to get a chance to hang out with my crush-of-the-moment. She was with some friends though, and I got the distinct impression that my presence was not appreciated. Feeling a little miffed, I went back out into the drizzle and walked around the hilly neighborhoods around the campus, listening to my new purchases.
It was wet and I was lonely and depressed, so it took about four songs before I realized how much I was enjoying what I was listening to. I skipped back and listened to it again to make sure I hadn't missed anything. It's Van Morrison, so you know what the sound is like, that smooth, subtle blend of folk and soul, Celtic mysticism and Motown grace. Songs I could have swore I had never heard before sounded intimately familiar and I found myself singing along as I walked through the puddles and soaked leaves. The album is now a perennial favorite, a cornerstone in my music collection. I have so many memories tied to it that listening to it now can bring back anything. The many times I listened to it at three in the morning while walking through the rain to the college radio station for my show; the time I introduced a friend of mine to it and watched him become as enamored by it as me; the many times I've fallen asleep with it playing softly in the background, my wife laying next to me. It brings back a rush of images, of rain and mist, desire both sexual and spiritual, love and the need for love. But mostly it is just a pleasant experience; a collection of wonderful songs played as well as anyone can play them.
Suggested Tracks: "And It Stoned Me," "Caravan"
Best Line: "I want to rock your gypsy soul/just like way back in the days of old/ and together we will fold/into the mystic."
Best Moment: Morrison's multi-tracked "la la la's" soaring through the end of "Caravan."
"EVOL" by Sonic Youth
DGC 1986
When I was in high school my knowledge of music went through an extended period of expansion. I went from knowing basically nothing beyond what I heard on the radio my freshman year to being able to spot which Pixies song Weezer ripped the bass riff from for "Undone (The Sweater Song)" by my sophomore (it was "I Bleed"). Much of this was facilitated by my discovery of the Internet and the vast back catalog of Rolling Stone reviews contained within, as well as a growing obsession with Lester Bangs and other rock-critic godheads.
But the primary mover-and-shaker in my mental-musical growth was my longstanding obsession with movies. This led to the purchase of film soundtracks, which lead to the purchase individual albums by different bands once I started paying attention to who was actually playing the songs I was enjoying (I can not tell you how many different artists I got into thanks to the two volumes of the "Grosse Point Blank" soundtrack). At one point I picked up the soundtrack to "Pump Up the Volume," a semi-obscure Christian Slater teen-drama about a high school student who is battling the forces of conformity as a pirate radio DJ. It was a pretty turgid piece of melodrama, but it appealed to me at the time. It also had a rockin' set of tunes scoring it. But the outlasting influence this soundtrack had on me was in the form of just one band, i.e. Sonic Youth. The epic, feedback-soaked "Titanium Expose" was one of the highlights of the soundtrack and caught my attention.
In fact, it caught my attention enough that I did a little research on the band and stumbled across a quote from Neil Young in which he claimed the band's "Expressway to Yr Skull," off of their third album, "EVOL," was one of the best electric guitar songs of all time. Thanks to a Rage Against the Machine obsession that lasted me through high school, I was interested in all the different noises that could be forced out of electric guitars, so this band seemed to be a match for me. During spring break my junior year of high school, I went up to Seattle to visit an aunt. She lived near the University of Washington and I spent a lot of time trolling through that area, trying to look collegiate enough to fit in with the hipsters and homeless people that inhabited the area. Much of my time was spent at a local Tower Records, which had the best selection of any record shop within walking distance. One day, while burning off what little cash I had on hand, I decided to look for Sonic Youth's "Goo" album (which had my, by now much loved, "Titanium Expose" on it), only to find that it was out of stock. Instead, I picked up the only other album of SY's that I knew anything about, "EVOL".
The album had a creepy looking cover and a low price, so along with The Pixies' "Bossa Nova" I headed for the register. "EVOL" was the one I put into my CD player first, right outside of the store. The dream-like, almost hypnotic opening chords of "Tom Violence" had me transfixed as I walked down 42nd Avenue to the UW campus. The album keeps that tone throughout, occasionally unleashing barrages of noise that hardly seem to break the overall mood. There was a grace to the music, a fragile quality of pure atmosphere, texture and mood, perfectly offset by the energy and thrill of the louder tracks ("Expressway" sounds like nothing so much as air raid sirens put to music). Though SY could never be accused of being the subtlest of bands, this is the album that taught me that there was more to rock than bombast. It stuck in my head for some time to come after that first listen (I still think of Seattle in the spring sometimes when I listen to this album, dry yet covered in a solid gray overcast). It became one of my favorite albums in high school. Though it's not considered one of the band's classics, it is to me one of their best works, and it still surprises me with its beauty today.
Suggested Tracks: "Green Light," "Expressway to Yr Skull"
Best Line: "The beautiful paintjob hopelessly marred. Smoke and flames. Alright." ("In the Kingdom #19")
Best Moment: The cacophonic buildup and release into nearly three minutes of beautiful feedback on "Expressway to Yr Skull."
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