Wednesday, June 11, 2014

He Tells You All His Secrets But He Lies About His Past


The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.  He could run, but he couldn't hide.  Everywhere he went, there he was.

Pick your cliche.  They all applied to him back in 1987.  Within a year of moving to New York, his life upstate was almost exactly like it was back in Atlanta again, only worse.  He had met a woman up there, and immediately transferred all of his unresolved feelings and emotions about Denver onto her.  It was fun for a while, but when things ultimately didn't work out, he was right back in the funk again.


It was around this time that he first got into Tom Waits.  It really wasn't all that far of a leap from the country music and western swing of the year before to the distorted Americana of Waits.  He enjoyed Waits' swordfishtrombone (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), but it was the unsettling Frank's Wild Years, with its dark lyrics and boozy melodies, that matched his 1987 frame of mind.  With a voice sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car" (Daniel Durchholz), Waits' lyrical milieu of run-down bars, degenerate characters, and thwarted dreams and ambitions described well the rust-belt towns of upstate NY in which he was living and working.  Waits provided the perfect soundtrack for the raw emotions he was feeling at the time. 




To be sure, he was listening to a lot of other music at the time as well.  He was still listening to The Art of Noise, still listening to The Style Council, and still listening to all the other music that was being produced that year - he was a contemporary man living in contemporary times.  He owned a radio.  But looking back at that year, he mainly remembers Waits' music and that gravelly voice in his head, singing about the cold, cold ground and being sent off to bed forevermore.

He was in a dark place.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

And This, Folks, Is Why You Don't Wear White Pants After Labor Day


In 1986, he got the change he was looking for and then some.  He didn't head off to Denver, but instead took an assignment from the environmental engineering firm for which he worked and left Atlanta, Georgia and his life of the past five years and started a new office for them in upstate New York. 

The funny thing, though, is that with the move, he stubbornly became more entrenched in southern culture than ever before.  He was frustrated by his inability to get sweet tea and proper barbecue at northern restaurants, and he bewildered New York drivers by proudly displaying a plate on the front of his car reading Pocahontas Road Church of God, Bessemer, Alabama.

He probably never listened to more country music in his life than he had that first year upstate.  He favored western swing bands like Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and Asleep At The Wheel (who actually came through Albany a surprising number of times).  He listened to Top 40 country artists like George Strait and Randy Travis, as well as old-school stuff like Merle Haggard and Ernest Tubb.  Friends back in Georgia would mail him cassette tapes of WRAS Album 88's Cowtipper's Delight radio show and WRFG's Sagebrush Boogie to keep him current on the latest redneck trends.

1986 was the year that the first Steve Earle record, Guitar Town, came out, and while it was more country rock than country, its twangy sound was still one of his favorites of that year.


He was starting over, making a new beginning, hitting the reset button.  A new location for a new life. He could identify with Earle's lines, "When my boots hit the boards I'm a brand new man, with my back to the riser I'll make my stand."  He was now in his 30s.  It was time for the brand-new him to make his stand.

The problem with this kind of retrospective, however, is that it creates the impression that each selected song is ALL he listened to that particular year.  Yes, when he looks back on 1986, he remembers country music in general, and yes, Steve Earle sort of stands out in his memory. but that's not all that he listened to by any means.  While he was listening to Earle's twangy sound in 1986, he was also still following The Art of Noise, who were also exploring twang as well that year and released their mix of the classic Peter Gunn, featuring twangmaster Duane Eddy on guitar.

Monday, June 9, 2014

The Paris Match


Just as a reminder, these biographical/retrospective posts all began upon hearing the Atlanta bands Tantrum and Hello Ocho cover the Tom Tom Club's 1981 song Wordy Rappinghood, which reminded him of what he was listening to back then, which led to a fond remembrance of the female-fronted post-punk bands like The Slits and The Au Pairs he had liked back in the day, which then led to this current chronological review of what he was listening to between then and now and how he got to be where he is now, musically speaking.  The personal and autobiographical portions of these posts are included only to help explain the context of his musical preferences. Also, "he" is discussed in the third person only because the current author considers "him" to be past incarnations of whatever it is that he now regards as a "self."

In 1985, despite his limited success and upward mobility (trust me, he still had a long way to go), he couldn't quite shake the melancholy that had taken hold of him the year before.  He listened to The Style Council a lot that year and appreciated Paul Weller's diversity of musical styles and willingness to let the mood of the song take precedent over his own role in the band, sometimes even handing the vocals over to others, or letting the band take over and play an instrumental.  Paul Weller, incidentally, would go on to later save his life, but we'll get to that in due time.



He would mail mix tapes to Denver - literally tapes - cassettes containing a mix of Style Council songs (You're The Best Thing That Ever Happened and My Ever Changing Moods) as well as other music - and she would reply with mix tapes of her own, which he would search over and over again for possible hidden clues as to what was really going on in her heart and if she was really ever going to return to Georgia as they had discussed.  She even wrote little cryptic snippets of poetry on the cassette labels, the meaning of which he could never quite fathom:
The heart is a beach, there is no shore to its opening.
Thirty years later, he still has no idea what that means but it still brings tears to his eyes.

It had occurred to him that her leaving to take a job in Denver was the exact and precise karmic retribution he deserved for leaving the former girlfriend behind in Boston in order to take a job in Atlanta, but that didn't make it hurt any less.  Ambition and its consequences were the root cause of his suffering.

It was only midway through the 1980s but he already needed a change.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Are We Living In a Land Where Sex and Horror Are the New Gods?



1984 was another transitional year for him, a year that in many ways saw as many changes as had 1981, the year he left Boston for Atlanta.  In 1984, he left his job with the state and started a new career with an environmental engineering company, a firm for which he went on to work for the next 20 years.  He learned how to make a living by consulting, he traveled the country, and he vacationed in the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, The Art of Noise's debut album came out that year and heralded "the dawn of a new pop sensibility where sequencers, samplers and drum machines held sway" (Charles Waring).  He was fascinated not only by the sampling and the sound of the Fairlight Synthesizer, but also the plasticity of the songs, which were endlessly remixed and reissued.  He became accustomed to the 12" single format upon which those remixes were released, and collected not only Art of Noise singles, but the numerous mixes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs produced by the Art of Noises' Trevor Horn as well.  His conception of pop songs expanded from a fixed sequence of notes and words and sounds to a suggestion of any one of an infinite number of mutable possibilities that could be rearranged, mixed up, and blended with other sounds, possibly even DIY-style, implying new roles and a new relationship to music for non-musician listeners like himself. He likes it that the video above embraces that same DIY attitude and involvement.


FWIW, he first heard both The Art of Noise and Frankie Goes To Hollywood on Georgia State's WRAS, Album 88.

It wasn't all vacations and record stores for him that year, however.  To his surprise, he had fallen in love with that co-worker who had moved down from Boston and had become his girlfriend, but 1984 was a transitional year for her, too, as she had accepted a job offer in Denver.  So 1984 also witnessed the start of the long, painful dissolution of the attempted long-distance relationship that followed. Throughout the year, an undercurrent of melancholy and loss darkened the mid-80s party atmosphere, and lingered around him for the rest of the decade.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Girlfriend Is Better


The pictures from the past two years convey a much more yuppified impression of his early 80s persona than was actually the case (for the record, the cowboy hat was being worn ironically, although he still has it to this day).  In truth, he was barely getting by, managing a redneck well-drilling crew in South Georgia and struggling to survive on the meager state-employee salary. By 1983, though, he was handling rattlesnakes and Speaking In Tongues.

Generally speaking, he was a big fan of the band Talking Heads back then.  Thirty-one years later, he was quite pleasantly surprised to hear that young, local bands would be performing a song-by-song cover of the album Speaking In Tongues in its entirety.  Reviewing that show, he wrote:
From my perspective, Talking Heads' artistic pinnacle was their previous album, Remain In Light, but Speaking In Tongues still holds a special place in my heart.  I was 29 years old when the album came out in 1983, and for some reason, it's always felt to me like "my" Talking Heads album - the one written and recorded by the band with me in mind. This is purely projection, I know, but it was released when I was at that precipice in life when I was finally old enough to critically discern and select among the bands to which I listened but still young enough not to feel self-conscious about my enthusiasms, and to believe that the band was performing, if not for me directly, at least with someone like me in mind.  In any event, I loved the album and played it incessantly for several months of 1983.
The picture above was taken by one of those friends who had also moved down south after he had arrived. She became a co-worker, and even though the girlfriend he left behind in Boston never moved down, the co-worker who did eventually became his new girlfriend.   

Friday, June 6, 2014

Roles Give You Cramps


In 1982, one of his favorite records was Sense and Sensuality, the second album by the British post-punk band The Au Pairs. He knew that he would have been the first person excluded from singer Leslie Wood's radical feminist politics, but he still liked her music, her smoky voice, and her attitude, although he generally preferred their first album, 1981's Playing With A Different Sex. But the more experimental follow-up album is what he remembers hearing when he remembers 1982.  It was the soundtrack for the year.

Life was going pretty well for him in 1982.  He wasn't making very much money, but that was okay.  He had once imagined that the girlfriend he had left behind in Boston was eventually going to come down and join him in Atlanta and he gradually came to realize that wasn't going to happen, ever, and he occasionally felt a sense of loss over that, but that was okay, too.  He was making new friends, and a few friends that he had known back up north had also moved down to Georgia as well, so that was cool.

He has no idea where this picture was taken or by whom, or why he was dressed that way, except, of course, it was the 80s.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Shaky Knees


And we take a break from the way-back nostalgia ("favorite songs from 1979 through 1981") to engage in a little bit of more-recent nostalgia with this recap of last May's Shaky Knees festival.