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In Search of Lost Sound (part two)

This is part two of my whoever-knows how many part exploration of my musical history.  Self-indulgent to a fault, I know, but at least I'm honest about it!

The first album [well, actually, it was a cassette. I didn't have a real record player, just a little Walkman.  My parents weren't big fans of me buying music (they thought it was a waste of money), so it was easier to sneak a cassette into the house than an album]  I ever bought was Men at Work's Cargo.  No, that's not the album with "Down Under."  That's Business as Usual.  Cargo was their follow-up with songs like "Overkill" and "Dr. Heckyll and Mr. Jive" and "It's a Mistake" that were actually a pretty big deal in the early 80s but have disappeared into the void of time since then (like the band itself).  I don't remember what I liked about the group specifically.  I guess their music was catchy and their videos were silly (yes, I had MTV).  I guess those qualities were strong enough for me to feel the tug of going to the record store and buying the album--something I really hated doing because the store was one of those where everything was behind a counter and I had to call someone over to take it out for me.  Isn't that annoying?  I don't know when stores stopped doing that and let people buy music just be pulling it off a shelf--but back when I was first buying music, I had no choice.

My second album?  Why Business as Usual, of course.  I thought it was a letdown, though.  Beyond "Down Under," it was pretty dry.  Listening to these today, I get the reason they were popular in the early 80s.  Lots of tasty hooks, good beats, fun melodies, and plenty of horns--they took all the popular bits of music from that time and mixed them together in an Australian bag of iconic fun.  It didn't last, but it was fun for a while, which is exactly what pop music is all about.

At that time, I still knew nothing about music other than the fact that I liked it and wanted to hear more of it.  Of course, my taste left something to be desired.  That was, in part, because I was still a little afraid of music.  Long hair, screaming, freaky clothes--those were alien to my rather conservative upbringing.  Guys like Men at Work were harmless and, therefore, perfectly acceptable--not just to my parents (who knew nothing about music and would have preferred it that I shared their ignorance) but to me as well, who, at 14, was a big fan of Reagan and was as straight-laced as you could get.

Ah, but then I bought The Police's Synchronicity.  I remember looking through the cassette's liner notes, noticing all the odd fonts, and thinking, "This is too wild for me.  Those letters look like graffiti!"  At that point, I resolved not to buy any more albums.  Ha! Well, The Police were (along with Michael Jackson) the biggest thing in music at the time.  [Oddly enough, I didn't buy Thriller until about a year later--after I'd been thoroughly indoctrinated in music.  I think I waited because so many of my "rocker" friends hated Jackson's music.]  I remember listening to their music over and over again over several weeks and months.  The music itself wasn't spectacular, but the lyrics--they seemed deep and significant.   Now, I was not well-read, but I tried to be.  I tried reading lots of serious novels and even got through a few of them (like 1984 and Dune).  More than anything else, I wanted to seem deep and intelligent and sophisticated, and The Police seemed all those things.  I even bought Jung's book on synchronicity just so I could learn more about the album's title and its implications.  Synchronicity appealed to me in a big way because it was just the kind of thing that made me feel special, important, knowledgeable.  As naive and silly as that might sound today, it did teach me something about music: that it's not just fun, entertaining tunes.  There was depth there, as well.  I wanted to learn more.

The road to musical knowledge, however, ran through MTV and local Top 40 radio (KIIS FM in LA), so my first few months of serious music listening, reading, and shopping consisted largely of obsessing over the standard hits of the day: Duran Duran, The Thompson Twins, The Fixx, Cindy Lauper, Phil Collins, Howard Jones, and on and on.  This music was a lot of fun to listen to--they had the hooks and those great, shimmering moments of brilliance in them (the big drums kicking in the middle of "In the Air Tonight," the "flex-flex-flex-flex" at the start of "The Reflex," and even the cool synth bridge in Van Halen's "Jump") kept me listening even when the other parts of the songs sucked.  Still, in the back of my head I knew that this stuff wasn't really what I was looking for. 

Closer to the mark was Run-DMC.  I was the manager for my high school's basketball team, and yes there were a bunch of black guys on the team that I became friends with.  They turned me onto rap long before rap was anywhere near popular in mainstream culture.  The first time I heard "Rock Box," I was blown away--it was something completely different, something truly revolutionary.  I felt it even then as a music noob.  It was raw, harsh, angry, exciting, and powerful--and it still holds up today.  Then again, the more rap I heard (I did buy Run-DMC's album), the less I enjoyed the actual rapping part and the more I appreciated the beats and the samples and the fact that they took the best bits from other songs and repeated them over and over again.  That was something I'd always wanted to do with music--celebrate that great, shiny moment of brilliance in an otherwise mediocre song and play that bit forever--and they did just that.  It was awesome.  Of course, it took Public Enemy to turn it into high art worthy of study, but Run-DMC paved the way.

Run-DMC certainly showed me how music can challenge me sonically, but U2 and Bruce Springsteen showed me what music was capable of. Springsteen's Born in the USA and U2's The Unforgettable Fire were both released around the time I started getting into music.  It took me a while to get into both artists, but when I did they truly transformed not only my taste in music but my entire outlook on the world.

In Search of Lost Sound (Part 1)

This is the first of a series of entries I'm going to add detailing my own musical history in an incredibly thorough, obsessive, and self-indulgent way.  I apologize for nothing, not even the opening sentence below!

I barely listened to music for 14 years. This was, in part, because my parents weren't into music much, so I didn't have many opportunities to learn about or experience music.  But there were exceptions, and those exceptions were often rather intense experiences as I look back on them.  See, I was an obsessive little kid.  When I was 5 or 6, I fell in love with Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" for some reason.  I think they played it during a golf tournament or something and I really liked it so my dad bought the single for me.  I think I listened to it over and over again on our record player for a week and a half until my sister hid it from me and probably ripped it apart out of sheer frustration. 

[Come to think of it, I've always done stuff like that--fixate on one thing and make that one thing consume my interior life for brief but intense periods.  I still do that, actually.  I've been a huge fan of the iPod since they came out.  I've had (I think) four iPods in all, including my current 80 gig that allows me to carry around about a quarter of my entire record collection.  A few weeks ago, I bought an iPhone recently and spent a week learning everything I could about how it worked and what programs were available for it--and above all figuring out exactly what songs and albums and videos to add to it from my enormous collection.  I wanted to streamline my iPod collection down to 2 or 3 gigs to create a sort of "Best of" list I could carry around in my pocket.  I knew I needed whole albums from Boards of Canada and Pan Sonic and Sigur Ros and Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby and Richard Thompson and all my other favorites, but there were scores of individual songs I could throw into the mix to create a truly diverse and inspired collection...stuff like "Do the Mussolini Headkick" by Cabaret Voltaire, April March's "Chick Habit" (heard first at the end of Tarantino's Death Proof), a bunch of songs from Portishead's eponymously titled second album, "What Goes On" from VU's third album (their best, if you ask me), some cool stuff from Wire including their awesome stuff from the last decade, my favorite White Stripes songs (I really like "Take Take Take"), along with some Sly and the Family Stone, Waterboys, Pole, KImya Dawson, Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Amiina, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Gang of Four, Fairport Convention, Radiohead, Kraftwerk, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seed.  Some of this really is my "best of" stuff; others are just things I enjoy listening to right now (and will be swapped out at some future date). So I organized, arranged, picked, and chose all these songs, along with 28 different awesome complete albums, and put them all on my iPhone and was happy until I realized I'd left a few things off and needed to figure out what to take off so I could add those other things.  And so I did that for about a week, fixating on what was on the list and what could be on the list, going back and forth on my iTunes from playlist mode to catalogue mode just imagining the many possibilities.  I'm still fine tuning the list as I write this, in fact.]

I don't know exactly what attracted me to "Rhinestone Cowboy," but I'm certain it had something to do with the moment between the verse and the chorus, the moment of silence between the words "I'm gonna be where the lights are shining on me" and "like a rhinestone cowboy," the moment when the drums stop and the melody is fading away ever so slightly...until BANG the "like" and the big drum and the strings sweep in.  That moment is infinitely small--it's not even a real silence--but it was powerful for my little ears, in part because it perfectly captures the anticipation that something big is just about to happen.  And though I liked the chorus and probably sang along to it a million times (both while the record was playing and when it wasn't), it was always a little bit of a disappointment, as it didn't live up to the promise of the pause, the promise that something truly transcendent would emerge from that half-silence, when in fact what did emerge was more music.

Even then, I was looking for something more than just music.  Of course, before I could really discover what it was I was searching for, I had to start with the basics.  I needed to learn about music.  That took a while, as it turned out.  My childhood musical focus was limited to what was in the house--stuff like The Muppet Movie album and the Annie cast soundtrack.  I'd hear things on TV or on the radio or at a a friend's house, but I never had much of a referent, a place to go and learn more (this was decades before the Internet, obviously). 

So I really cherished those albums I did have, those songs I did understand.  And, like with the Campbell song, the moments that stood out, that propelled me to listen to songs over and over again, were small, almost innocuous things like the almost out-of-tune banjo picking at the beginning of "Rainbow Connection" or the high-pitched parts of "Tomorrow" (when the voice is almost floating too high to hear) or, later, the rumbling synth cymbals at the start to Vangelis's Chariots of Fire theme, which even today gives me chills (the movie too).  I listened to each of these songs innumerable times, often waiting for those unusual moments--waiting to hear something that I didn't quite understand.

So I liked music--I understood that at an early age.  However, I didn't really capitalize on this interest in any meaningful way until one moment in high school when I went to an assembly where some kids were performing a bunch of skits and other things.  Towards the end, one guy came on stage and lip-synched and danced to Michael Jackson's "Beat It."  I didn't know much about Michael Jackson; I didn't even know what lip-synching was.  But the music slapped me in the face.  That beat, that groove, that voice... where did they come from?  Is there more of it?

That did it.  That woke me up.  I had to hear more.

This is the first of a series of entries I'm going to add detailing my own musical history in an incredibly thorough, obsessive, and self-indulgent way.  I apologize for nothing, not even the opening sentence below!

I barely listened to music for 14 years. This was, in part, because my parents weren't into music much, so I didn't have many opportunities to learn about or experience music.  But there were exceptions, and those exceptions were often rather intense experiences as I look back on them.  See, I was an obsessive little kid.  When I was 5 or 6, I fell in love with Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" for some reason.  I think they played it during a golf tournament or something and I really liked it so my dad bought the single for me.  I think I listened to it over and over again on our record player for a week and a half until my sister hid it from me and probably ripped it apart out of sheer frustration. 

[Come to think of it, I've always done stuff like that--fixate on one thing and make that one thing consume my interior life for brief but intense periods.  I still do that, actually.  I've been a huge fan of the iPod since they came out.  I've had (I think) four iPods in all, including my current 80 gig that allows me to carry around about a quarter of my entire record collection.  A few weeks ago, I bought an iPhone recently and spent a week learning everything I could about how it worked and what programs were available for it--and above all figuring out exactly what songs and albums and videos to add to it from my enormous collection.  I wanted to streamline my iPod collection down to 2 or 3 gigs to create a sort of "Best of" list I could carry around in my pocket.  I knew I needed whole albums from Boards of Canada and Pan Sonic and Sigur Ros and Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby and Richard Thompson and all my other favorites, but there were scores of individual songs I could throw into the mix to create a truly diverse and inspired collection...stuff like "Do the Mussolini Headkick" by Cabaret Voltaire, April March's "Chick Habit" (heard first at the end of Tarantino's Death Proof), a bunch of songs from Portishead's eponymously titled second album, "What Goes On" from VU's third album (their best, if you ask me), some cool stuff from Wire including their awesome stuff from the last decade, my favorite White Stripes songs (I really like "Take Take Take"), along with some Sly and the Family Stone, Waterboys, Pole, KImya Dawson, Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Amiina, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Gang of Four, Fairport Convention, Radiohead, Kraftwerk, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seed.  Some of this really is my "best of" stuff; others are just things I enjoy listening to right now (and will be swapped out at some future date). So I organized, arranged, picked, and chose all these songs, along with 28 different awesome complete albums, and put them all on my iPhone and was happy until I realized I'd left a few things off and needed to figure out what to take off so I could add those other things.  And so I did that for about a week, fixating on what was on the list and what could be on the list, going back and forth on my iTunes from playlist mode to catalogue mode just imagining the many possibilities.  I'm still fine tuning the list as I write this, in fact.]

I don't know exactly what attracted me to "Rhinestone Cowboy," but I'm certain it had something to do with the moment between the verse and the chorus, the moment of silence between the words "I'm gonna be where the lights are shining on me" and "like a rhinestone cowboy," the moment when the drums stop and the melody is fading away ever so slightly...until BANG the "like" and the big drum and the strings sweep in.  That moment is infinitely small--it's not even a real silence--but it was powerful for my little ears, in part because it perfectly captures the anticipation that something big is just about to happen.  And though I liked the chorus and probably sang along to it a million times (both while the record was playing and when it wasn't), it was always a little bit of a disappointment, as it didn't live up to the promise of the pause, the promise that something truly transcendent would emerge from that half-silence, when in fact what did emerge was more music.

Even then, I was looking for something more than just music.  Of course, before I could really discover what it was I was searching for, I had to start with the basics.  I needed to learn about music.  That took a while, as it turned out.  My childhood musical focus was limited to what was in the house--stuff like The Muppet Movie album and the Annie cast soundtrack.  I'd hear things on TV or on the radio or at a a friend's house, but I never had much of a referent, a place to go and learn more (this was decades before the Internet, obviously). 

So I really cherished those albums I did have, those songs I did understand.  And, like with the Campbell song, the moments that stood out, that propelled me to listen to songs over and over again, were small, almost innocuous things like the almost out-of-tune banjo picking at the beginning of "Rainbow Connection" or the high-pitched parts of "Tomorrow" (when the voice is almost floating too high to hear) or, later, the rumbling synth cymbals at the start to Vangelis's Chariots of Fire theme, which even today gives me chills (the movie too).  I listened to each of these songs innumerable times, often waiting for those unusual moments--waiting to hear something that I didn't quite understand.

So I liked music--I understood that at an early age.  However, I didn't really capitalize on this interest in any meaningful way until one moment in high school when I went to an assembly where some kids were performing a bunch of skits and other things.  Towards the end, one guy came on stage and lip-synched and danced to Michael Jackson's "Beat It."  I didn't know much about Michael Jackson; I didn't even know what lip-synching was.  But the music slapped me in the face.  That beat, that groove, that voice... where did they come from?  Is there more of it?

That did it.  That woke me up.  I had to hear more.

Boxed Sets and Year End Lists

I enjoy year-end lists, if for no other reason than they highlight movies or albums I missed over the course of the year.  My favorite year-end list is at Brainwashed, with the key section (for me) being the reissues of the year and the boxed sets of the year.  From the Reissue list, I found out about the Nico Frozen Borderline: 1968-70 set, which includes two of Nico's late 60s collaborations with John Cale, The Marble Index and Desertshore, with additional unreleased demos and alternate takes included for good measure.  From the boxed set list, I found out about Robyn Hitchcock's I Wanna Go Backwards, which combines Hitchcock's first two solo albums (Black Snake Diamond Role and I Often Dream of Trains), his later work Eye, and a two-disk set of unreleased, b-side, demo, and live tracks. 

Now, I've been a fan of Hitchcock's since I was in high school in the mid-80s.  I had copies of his albums and his work with the Soft Boys, but somewhere along the line I misplaced them.  So the boxed set was great--a chance to get newly remastered versions of some of his best albums and a whole bunch of extra stuff to boot.  The Nico one, by contrast, was a stretch for me.  I knew Nico from the Velvet Underground, of course, but I'd never paid much attention to her solo work.  But while reading Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again, I kept seeing her name pop up as an inspiration to post-punks from Wire to Depeche Mode.  So I was intrigued that two of her less well-known works would be released.  Hence, I picked that one up too.

So which set do you think I've been listening to more often?  Yep, it's Nico.  The Hitchcock stuff sounds just like I remember it from the 80s; however, my taste in music has radically changed since then (I still love The Minutemen, but a lot of the other stuff seems dated to me).  It doesn't have the freshness and edge that I thought it did--or perhaps it's better to say that I don't feel the same connection to that music that I once did.  I enjoy it, but I don't want to listen to it over and over.

The Nico stuff, on the other hand, was new to me.  And, admittedly, it was a bit difficult to get into at first--the voice took a while to get used to.  But the music on the works (mainly by John Cale) and the astute lyrics (by Nico) really caught me off guard.  It's fascinating works, far more intellectually richer than Nico's reputation might otherwise suggest.  Works that mention Wordsworth ("The frozen borderline" refers to a poem by the big W) are few and far between, but Nico manages to capture the melancholy tones of European Romanticism in a way that is far more interesting than actually reading  Romantic poets like Shelly and Keats.  That set is a truly great listen--deep, moving, emotive, and enduring.

This is the Inkbottle...

I took the name "Haunted Ink" from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.  In Book I, chapter 7 (page 182, to be specific), Joyce begins a lengthy description of the place one of his characters/figures, Shem, retreats to in order to escape his nemesis, Shaun (his brother).  Joyce initially refers to this enclosure as "The house O'Shea or O'Shame, Quivapieno, known as the Haunted Inkbottle."  The "Inkbottle," as it turns out, is a rather nasty place and made even nastier once Shaun barricades his brother in, depriving him even of pen and paper to write with (Shem is the "writer" in this story).  So Shem resorts to drastic measures in this Haunted Inkbottle: he uses his own excrement as ink and his own body as paper.

I wrote an article about this section of Finnegans Wake (published in European Joyce Studies 10) and I've always enjoyed it.  It was in my head when I needed a domain name--hence Haunted Ink.  Of course, if there's one thing that the Internet does not have it's Ink, but the rich media possibilities of the web are sort of haunting, in the sense that words can talk and pictures can come alive.  If that sounds like too much of a stretch, keep in mind that I created hauntedink.com in 1995 when the web was still a baby.  Back then, hypertext itself was considered pretty spooky.  Besides, what better way to honor my favorite writer than to create my virtual identity around his shit-smeared hero!

So this is The Inkbottle, a journal intended as a way for me to get back into the world of music reviews and commentary.  A few years ago, I created Live in El Centro, 25 and Almaty or Bust (see Review Archive), three music-centered journals focusing largely on reviews of electronic, reggae/dub, and Central Asian music (my three passions at the time).  Those were interrupted in 2005 by a few events in my life (new job, relocation, and my father's death).  I've written sporadically since then.  I'm hoping that this new venture will reawaken my own creative juices and offer you, my wonderful visitors, some vague form of entertainment while you're waiting for the porn to finish downloading.

My plans?  There aren't any.  I may review music or films; I may ramble about my hatred of all things Bush; I may detail my life in a tiny corner of California; I may talk about my musical progress and my upcoming album Neolithic; I may write nonsense poetry or imitate Monty Python (badly); I may go into the minutiae of being a LA Angels fan.  Most likely, I'll do all this crap.  Here's hoping a tenth of it is readable.