In the summer after my sophomore year had ended, I thought more about John Cale and how I should give him another shot, if only to finally confirm that he wasn’t any good and that my roommate was totally wrong. One night in June I downloaded Paris 1919 on iTunes  and listened to him again—and again and again until, finally, out of his fuzzy superficiality (I mean this in the best sense) this creeping feeling that John Cale is really, really great finally seized me.  As I played the album for the third time in a row, I realized that John Cale’s music isn’t just about affect, it’s about the lush Surface and, like his friend Andy Warhol, the Concept. John Cale copy and pastes styles, attitudes, and music, and that was something I could understand. Pastiche.

I saw this photograph while browsing around Tumblr recently and it reminds me of another thing I realized about John Cale that ultimately made him so appealing to me: he’s always out of focus (in photos, music, history, everything), present but slipping away, from collective memory (the Velvet Underground is Lou Reed, right?) and anyone’s interest until it’s almost like he’s not there, and maybe was never there in the first place. It’s a kind of disappearing act, a performance of his absence in the popular narrative of counterculture music in order to forefront an otherness within the self, to say “I’m here, but I’m not me,” I’m Graham Greene, I’m a rock star, I’m a dandy, I’m Welsh, I’m New York, I’m an avant-garde composer, I’m wearing a mask that’s my own face, I’m everyone. “Somewhere between Dunkirk and Paris … Most people are asleep, but I’m still awake …” I see John Cale in this space, the psychic flatlands between the waking world and the dream world, where the differences between you and, say, the book you’re reading or the song you’re listening to crossfade, the edges bleed and, for the length of a song, you’re sort of not you. I don’t want to say that John Cale exists in (or allows for) some utopian inter-subjectivity, only that his work forgoes a stable image of its author for something else, perhaps a multiplicity of authors, which makes his work so much more compelling than most of his contemporaries. When my third play of Paris 1919 ended around three in the morning, I went to sleep in a haze of admiration. I wanted to be John Cale.

David Bowie called himself a collector once in an interview: “I collect personalities.” In some ways, it’s like John Cale collects genres as well as personalities. And rather than use them to design an aesthetic that ultimately signifies a coherent body of work, like Bowie does, Cale sublimates them into a much less coherent oeuvre that fails to point to any one characteristic aesthetic. If David Bowie is about one man trying to be different, John Cale is about different men trying to be the same.

I guess I like the idea of pretending to go away even if you remain in place. John Cale’s never the same person twice, and he’s rarely the person you think he should be. In Paris 1919, Cale begins by setting Dylan Thomas to music in “Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a deeply personal song that must’ve spoken to something in Cale. It comes off, to my mind, as though he wrote it, like, it has that honesty I think a lot of writers prize. Autobiographical honesty. But he didn’t write it. In fact, it was written some twenty years before Paris 1919. The album shifts through styles (rock in “Macbeth,” honky tonk in “Half Past France”, classical-ish in “Paris 1919, to name a few), but ends brilliantly with “Antarctica Starts Here,” maybe my favorite song on the record. It’s a smooth conclusion to the album: a lush electric piano and bass guitar that evoke late night lounge clubs in Los Angeles, little white candles on round tables and red curtained walls.

The song’s about this prototypical late 60’s Warhol superstar, actually, somewhat like Lou Reed’s name songs (“Lisa Says,” “Caroline Says,” “Candy Says,” etc). Presumably she’s a gorgeous woman entering the late stage of her wobbly, glamorous life. Everything’s fading, and the pain of it is so unbearable John Cale had to make it into calm, atmospheric music that raises above a whisper only for a moment at the end. I guess the title means everything that surrounds her has grown cold. But what’s important about the song is that it’s not so much John Cale as it is Lou Reed. It has the feel of Berlin and Reed’s post-VU work (“Street Hassle,” right?), all these sad superstars fading into the wallpaper of the end of the 1960’s.

I started playing “Antartica Starts Here” while I was writing the previous paragraph. I normally don’t play music while I write, but I hoped that listening to Cale’s music as I wrote about it might inspire me. Not really thinking, I switched the song to “Caroline Says 2” by Lou Reed. I listened to the chorus about how cold it is in Alaska, and it occurred to me that the two songs are basically the same.

I’m pretty sure John Cale copied Lou Reed, maybe even consciously translated or rewrote the song into his own album, but then I realized Berlin came out three months after Paris 1919. In linear time, I guess I’m wrong, which really throws a wrench in my theory because it’s essential that Cale would copy Reed and not the other way around. Lou Reed is the steadfast original. He’s not interested in having anyone else write his songs for him.

But then, OK, I took a nap to clear my head for this essay, and while I napped I had this dream in which John Cale came to me. The dream was brief, but before I woke up John and I had this  exchange: “Andrew, while Paris 1919 came out before Berlin, ‘Caroline Says 2’ is actually an old Velvet Underground song that Lou repurposed for his album. I did in fact rewrite his song.” I woke up and realized my proposition wasn’t wrong at all. I remembered exactly why I thought Cale rewrote the song: even though Paris 1919 came out after Berlin, “Caroline Says 2” is itself a rewrite of the earlier Velvet Underground song, “Stephanie Says.” So Cale rewrote a rewrite and got “Antarctica Starts Here.” Lush Surface, Concept. Thank you, John Cale.

When I write that John Cale is about genre play, I’m probably being very selective of his long career. I don’t mean to say my argument doesn’t hold water. The diverse range of genres listed on his Wikipedia page probably attests to what I’m talking about: John Cale plays art rock, classical, drone music, experimental rock, folk rock, and protopunk. He’s a spoken word artist. He plays the viola, violin, vocals, guitar, bass guitar, organ, piano, harpsichord, keyboards, harmonica, cello, double bass, saxophone, mellotron, and the celesta. He’s worked with Lou Reed, Nico, La Monte Young, John Cage, Terry Riley, Cranes, Nick Drake, Mike Heron, Kevin Ayers, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, Art Bergmann, Manic Street Preachers and frontman James Dean Bradfield, Marc Almond, Squeeze, Happy Mondays, LCD Soundsystem and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

John Cale knows a lot of people, but he’s still pretty elusive, right? Like, what do you make of the fact that the man who started his career by making pretty hard-edged trance for the Factory ended up writing a totally-earnest song titled “Hanky Panky Nohow,”

and later moved into pretty safe classical territory—even though it’s billed as experimental—with his record Eat/Kiss, which accompanied the rerelease of a Warhol film? But he’s had (many) great moments, like the album The Academy in Peril. It came out the year before Paris 1919 and it’s pretty wonderful, like weird instrumental music with a point of view: although edgier than Van Dyke Parks, The Academy in Peril has the same curious anti-pop pop of Song Cycle. Lit pop. There’s even a track on it called “John Milton.” And wasn’t John Milton all about style? And maybe how style can be a kind of content? Milton forced English to obey a Latin grammar it doesn’t favor because it made the language do new things. John Cale made rock music do the same thing when he forced the genre to absorb others unaccustomed to it.

Recently I had this other recurring dream in which I’m standing in my apartment in Brooklyn and it’s spring. John Cale comes into my living room in the middle of the night to tell me that traffic in the city is finally easing up. (I’ve also been reading Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic, FYI.) “OK, what does it matter? I don’t own a car,” I tell him. “You can do what I do,” he says, “just borrow your friends’ cars.” The apartment is almost completely dark except for this little light just behind his head, not a halo, exactly, but something close enough to startle me. Then I wake up.

 I don’t think John Cale is here, really, or anywhere for that matter; I think the point is maybe the void the question of authorship raises in his work. I mean, not to retreat too far into Barthes & Foucault, but I really do think it’s a legitimate question re: John Cale.  Who are the John Cales that move me in “Child’s Christmas In Wales,” “Ship of Fools,” and “Antarctica Starts Here,” each such different songs?  It’s the same voice in every song, sort of, but a voice that’s always at angles. And then it’s not.

~~~

from Ghidorah

My mouth is a blessed fractal

Tho I don’t understand anything about fractals except that they, in their endless perpetuation of themselves, are a blessed correlative to my influence on everyone who listens to me speak. I can’t stop

Multiplying myself
Across the screen while everyone waits for a surprise
That will come as denouement
To my last act

The wind wants to make everything a desert

The city I am ravaging is on fire tho it was already on fire when I arrived

Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder, a publisher of artist books, ephemera, pamphlets, and glossies. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Antennae, the Brooklyn Rail, Web Conjunctions, Washington Square, West Wind Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints?
Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.

It served as a kind of a commonplace book. Our band’s set-lists from SUBS PLUS in Wilson, NC, from ZIGGYS in Atlantic Beach, NC, and about a dozen other shows in and around Greenville, NC. In some cases there are amounts we got paid ($500 for an outdoor event called FREEBOOT FRIDAYS; $350 for playing PEASANTS CAFE on Halloween, 1999).

There are also names of musicians I played with in and around town, and in some cases what we played when we got together. There are song titles, the chords and solos for which I can only guess at now. This was rural, “Down East” North Carolina. We mostly played traditional music like bluegrass, country blues, blues, jazz. To me these genres are the most communal, the quickest music to access and transfer, and usually fun as hell. A few surrounding towns had Bluegrass Associations where strangers met up on Saturday afternoons. Groups of pickers would huddle in the parking lot and play standards. Theoretically, if you knew the basics, you could show up, sit in, take a solo, play along.

It was a busy time in my life. College, a band, a girlfriend, poems, restaurant work. But I kept endless notebooks and notes around music. Our band was overly serious. We practiced with militancy. We were dicks to each other. I remember one summer, desperately seeking a solid drummer, we drove to the country to meet Clayton, who had answered the ad we had pinned to a board somewhere. Clayton led us to his backyard where he dragged a vintage Ludwig drum kit out of his outdoor shed. It was all mirrored. We set up on his patio and played under the high, skinny pine trees. Clayton’s kick was way, way off. We knew halfway into the first song he wasn’t the guy. Later we tried Brian, then Fred, then Steve, then Benny, and then Scott (Scott had once been the drummer for Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam). Scott was great.

Looking back, I realize that I wrote less or nothing in my notebook about the people who really affected me musically, and who, as it turns out, would later go on to have successful careers in music—these people who either went on to “make it” in music, or were/are so good that it doesn’t matter because, well, they get to hear themselves play whenever they want (this is also “making it,” I realize now).

I can think of at least four or five such people I’ve played with who started or sped up a kind of traffic in me. People who rerouted my commute to the musical well. Whenever I pick up an instrument now, I basically channel something of their ethic, their tone, their reverence for the song, or their dedication to playing for playing’s sake. But why had I written so little about these people in real time, back then? Was it because these experiences were downright formative? Part of me thinks that to write ABOUT the sublime experience is to undercut its holiness. There are few words to serve that moment when your musical sensibility leaps forward. Yet another part of me wonders if I was, in those moments playing with those people, a little jealous. Or envious. Or both.

I read somewhere that jealousy is the feeling of being dispossessed. That it differs from envy. If envy is coveting what someone else has, jealousy is the feeling of wanting what someone else has and thinking it belongs to you. I’ve been both jealous and envious. But I think that, when you’re young and driven to express yourself through a craft, whatever it is, there are the masters, and then there are your contemporaries. The barometer of envy registers less against the masters, and more among your contemporaries. When you actually MEET and play with a musician whose genius is more realized than your own, it can be defining. Some people figure out, at this point, that they’re probably NOT going to have a career in music.  They sort of startle awake at that moment, realizing that they’ve been hypnotized by an adolescent myth. Others resolve to play harder. The art becomes work.

But discipline is the religion of the uninterested. One week in college I spent all my free time learning the first half of Blind Willie McTell’s Library of Congress recordings until the nightmares got so bad I had to quit. Most albums or songs I learned would give me nightmares for nearly a week. Play, pause, rewind, fumble, play, pause, rewind, fumble, replay. Play. The way you have to ruin the song for yourself, take it apart, before you actually own another person’s piece of music. A guy I played with had software that would slow down a solo for you so that you could learn it. Serious software.

I don’t remember, right off, how to play the Blind Willie McTell anymore. I think he’s tuned down very, very low, and playing a slightly out-of-tune 12-string. I do remember that, if you were to listen to the arc of his recordings, you’d see that the closer he got to death the lower he pitched his guitar.

I once resolved to only join bands with musicians who were better than me. Or, to be more honest, I somehow ended up in this situation and then realized it was a good idea. The kind of people who put in the time that perhaps I hadn’t yet put in, whose father’s were country music artists, whose mothers played the bass guitar. People whose uncles had written obscure books about studio recording. People who had spent the summers of their high school years in their basement with a Les Paul and a stack of CDs.

Recently I learned a good portion of Dave Davies’ lead guitar lines from the Kinks’ Give the People What They Want album, one of my favorites. I’ve learned a lot of Freddie King songs. A bunch of harmonica solos of the various players who accompanied Muddy Waters on his Chess Records albums (except a fair amount of those insurmountable Little Walter solos). Oh, and Blackberry Blossom on the banjo (beginner’s stuff).

I’ve played a lot of guitar. I estimate I’ve played about 7200 hours of guitar. Less banjo, less mandolin, less harmonica. But a lot of guitar, I think. Once I realized I had been playing guitar every day for four straight years. I broke the streak only when I went away to graduate school in Vermont. My priorities began to shift. Nowadays there are weeks that go by when I don’t play music. Probably there’s a month here or there, now, when I play nothing.

Go to any local library book sale and you’ll see a copy of Outliers. This is one of Malcom Gladwell’s bestselling books, many of which are about special moments, people, or phenomena viewed through the broad lens of pop sociology. A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the “10,000-Hour Rule,” based on a study by Anders Ericsson, who looked at classical violinists and found that, in every case, it had taken a regimen of 2-3 hours a day for 10 years to develop their abilities. Later research by Ericsson and others confirmed similar results in other fields. In Outliers, Gladwell uses The Beatles and Bill Gates as examples. The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time. Hence the 10,000 Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent. And in the case of Bill Gates, he met the 10,000 Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13 and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.

What’s most resonant to me about Gladwell’s idea isn’t the lame question of whether natural talent does or does not exist, but more so it’s the notion that practicing anything for a long time affords you an internalized sense of what you and others are capable of, what is conventional, and what is special. But even more importantly you come into direct contact with your limits on a regular basis. Somewhere around the 3000^th hour, for me, I was suddenly able to learn directly by listening and pausing albums. Somewhere around the 5000^th hour I realized I had hit a wall in my growth as a player, and that I didn’t have the energy or devotion anymore to push through it. I quit trying to be great. I just played whatever. And to the overly serious player, progress becomes addicting. You can always almost play the thing you want to (hear yourself) play.

Some of the musicians I knew ten years ago were playing like a 1000 hours a year, which is like 83 hours month, which is 2.7 hours a day, which is very possible for these people since they were playing before I met them. They played in the hours after I left their living rooms. They played in another band that night. They had another show across town. They played in their sleep. They played the next morning, first thing.

Name dropping is dumb. My disclaimer, right way, must be that I had nothing to do with the success of the people who most influenced my approach to music, nor am I really trying to associate my musicianship with theirs. In fact, my point is that they “made something” of their musicianship that I’m not sure I could ever make.

Scott Avett

I met Scott in Greenville, NC when he was still playing rock/metal but trying to get better at playing banjo. To do this, he would invite people to come by his place and accompany him on different tunes. He had a songbook of oldtime bluegrass classics like Shady Grove, I Saw The Light, Old Joe Clark, and Cripple Creek that we’d run through in the evenings in his living room. That year, The Avett Brothers opened for our band around town here and there. Before that time they were known as Nemo. Nemo played two sets, typically: one of oldtime music, and one of what I can only remember as Metal. It was funny to see them switch it up halfway through the show. Later they started something called, The Back Porch Project, and then, eventually, The Avett Brothers.

Benny

When I met Benny (“Eiden Thorr”) he was in four or five bands. He worked at a skate park during the day and practiced all night. He was obviously playing the odds that one of these bands would pan out. The homeless and schizophrenics would walk in and out of his house while we rehearsed. Sometimes they would sit in. Benny was our drummer for a while, and, as with all good drummers, you just assume they’ll keep drumming. Then one day I saw that he’d turned up in a band called Valient Thorr, which had become really popular on the Warped Tour. That, and he was now this crazy guitarist from outer space. Benny could play anything, really, because he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought. Being a musician was bigger than playing any one instrument.

Tuttle

When I met Chris Tuttle he wasn’t playing much piano. His dad sang and recorded Gospel Albums. His mom played the standup bass, I think. We formed a band, and his playing progressed quickly. I’ve never seen anyone practice like Chris. You’d show up at his apartment after the sun had just gone down and he’d have his keyboard rig (always!) set up in his living room, in lieu of standard furniture, and there he’d be sitting in the semi-dark behind his keyboard playing Pinetop Perkins solos over and over. One day a few years ago I tuned in to watch him play on a Late Night talk show (backing up Jewel), and I felt like I was suddenly privy to the whole journey. The real traditional Nashville route. I could see how all those hours could add up to one four-minute song. Chris had “made it.”

Lightnin’ Wells

Lightnin’ Wells is a folk-blues, country-blues, ragtime-blues legend in Eastern North Carolina.  A master historian and keeper of the old song. He is a life-long devotee of the pioneering performers in the piedmont blues tradition once thriving in the Carolinas, like Blind Boy Fuller, Rev. Gary Davis, and Blind Blake. I had never heard or seen anyone play a National (steel) guitar. Not in New Jersey, anyway. Of the few times I visited his farmhouse (surrounded by tobacco fields on three sides) we played only a few songs together. One late night/early morning after the downtown bars closed, my girlfriend and I found him without a ride and drove him back to his house in the country. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a wonderfully generous person. We played a few songs in his living room, with him playing banjo. Sitting on Top of the World was one. I realized the next day that he’d burned an enormous hole in my car’s upholstery after misfiring a cigarette out the backseat window.

Kris

I’ve never really told my best friend Kris how good a musician I think he is. How much better than me he is. I mean, we both know it, right? We don’t need to talk about it. We played in a band together for years. I spent a good 1000 of my 7200 hours, years ago, rehearsing and playing shows with him. There have been occasional moments when I’ve asked him to show me this or that run on the guitar. That’s an implicit compliment between musicians, I think.

I mean, to play with him is to be completely distracted by how right it sounds. Yeah, his guitars cost more than my first car, but it’s how he plays them, and his depth of stylistic power in almost ANY genre. He’s devoted to traditional music these days. But I’ve heard him on his Les Paul cranking out Glam Rock solos with other musicians we met along the way–guys who just happened to come from similar stock. That’s the kind of stuff only the 10,000-hour musician can pull out. I have little of that depth.

Last year Kris and I visited the Martin Guitar factory in Nazareth Pennsylvania. Our acoustic Mecca, basically. We met up in the room where Martin generously displays a number of their high-end guitars so that people can play them before and after the factory tour. My quick film was an impulse move: here’s my friend Kris at the Martin Guitar Factory, a place we’ve talked about visiting for years. But I also see something else in this video. I’m moving my camera around the wooded room, not resting on Kris for more than a few seconds at a time. What the hell?

Looking at it now, I see what is maybe a complicated discomfort there in the film’s shoddy production. How my focus strays from his playing. It’s like there’s something in that cedar-lined room I’m not comfortable facing. Is this my envy coming out, the way my camera’s eye avoids my friend, the room’s only moving, living thing? I’m a 7,200 looking at a 10,000. And here are the missing (2800) hours that I’d rather not face.

~~~

$

Probably the world was once deluxe. Every city worth seeing

at least once. Beside the bus stop an empty

purse is starting to fill with rain.

People are dressed as if everything is circulating

outside of their clothing. On the bus

a lady reaches into the pocket of her red smock,

retrieves a Scrabble piece.

Maybe the unused things have meaning.

We must be nearing Newark. Everything’s falling

into my heart. This is an effort, the poem is

an effort to sew a small band on the arm and wear it

on the last DeCamp bus to Port

Authority. No one else seeks this conceit and yet

here it is. My bus cuts through

a chill space of few imperatives. A scribble

above the seats reads, Occupy your mouth with my cock.

Christopher Salerno’s books of poems include Minimum Heroic, winner of the 2010 Mississippi Review Poetry Series Award, and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). A chapbook, ATM is available from Horse Less Press. Recent and future poems can be found in journals such as Fence, LIT, Salt Hill, InDigest, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Currently, he’s an Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University where manages the new journal, Map Literary.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints?
Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.

My companion for the trip from Minneapolis to Austin has questionable taste. Her music selection in the 15 hour car ride veered to the kind of overly-produced, top-40 Country that unabashedly and unironically explains why dogs are better than women, why trucks are better than cars, and why the U.S. is better than the rest of the world. I was wary of Poliça because Poliça was the band my companion was most excited to see.

So of course Poliça was my favorite find at SXSW. During the show, front-woman Channy Leaneagh grooved and rocked about broken relationships with a slightly auto-tuned voice over two drummers and the most happy, un-stereotypical bass player I have ever seen. A laptop played some background keyboards, horns and electronic bloops to create a soft, deconstructed ambience.

I immediately purchased their album Give You the Ghost and I’ve rocked-out to it since. The ambience is quiet and off-kilter like it was live, with keyboards, drums and bass loud in down-tempo danceability. The music is unsettling. Chord progressions do not resolve the way your brain intuitively expects. Leaneagh’s voice is so pretty, but often filtered and echoed into being uncanny. It’s  moody and desperate. The sounds on “The Maker” perfectly embody a lot the album’s spirit, but “Wandering Star” is a stand-out track, getting significant airplay on Minnesota’s 89.3 the Current.

Together, the album’s songs create a solid statement. You listen and live through the tension of the dark music for that growing sense of catharsis and resolution. The album’s finale, “Leading to Death” is the perfect closer, peaking far more loudly than anything before and violently tearing itself apart over the most fragile sparkles of keyboard melodies. And that pause near the end? You know that kid in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit to the Goon Squad who searches for perfect pauses in pop songs? This should be one of them.

It’s worth a serious listen.

—Sam Woodworth

These are five albums that have affected the way I write. I don’t feel that all of these albums are exceptional. I don’t listen to many of them anymore. I do not intend for them to represent my taste in music, although I’m sure they do in some way.

DJ Shadow Endtroducing

This is the first album I thought of when I imagined this list. I saw DJ Shadow’s video for “Midnight in a Perfect World” in 1996 on MTV’s 120 Minutes, when Matt Pinfield was host. I liked the song immediately because it was quiet and intense and simple. Later that year I bought Endtroducing, the album in London, while on a high school choir trip.

I love the way Endtroducing still sounds like it was made recently. It’s made of samples from an eclectic mix of genres, but it coheres in a single genre expanding album. Some of the elements in the album don’t have anything to do with Hip-Hop. It also has an overarching weirdness to it, which I love. This album was important to me during the time I wrote a book of poetry called Ghost Machine.

I remember watching an interview with DJ Shadow where he talks about the basement of a particular record store in Davis, CA where he used to go dig for rare records. In the interview he starts to cry while talking about the process of digging through milk crates full of esoteric vinyl. I remember feeling a sense of kinship with him and thinking something like “that’s how I feel when I write poems.”

Dr. Octagon Dr. Octagonecologyst

The first time I heard “Blue Flowers” was also on 120 Minutes. I remember thinking the video sucked. After seeing the video more than once, I began to like it. At the time I first encounter Dr. Octagon, I had only listened to west coast gangster rap, the Wu Tang Clan, Hieroglyphics, and old Tribe Called Quest, so the album seemed exotic and new.

I bought the album at the same time, in the same record store in London, as Endtroducing. I think the version I listened to is different from the version released in the US, which has a few more tracks and a different album cover. I haven’t listened to it very much since the period in my life when I first encountered it. I’ve heard other Kool Keith (Dr. Octagon’s real name) albums, but I was never into them as much as the Dr. Octagon album.

One of the things this album taught me was that you can say crazy shit as long as you give that crazy shit a context. More specifically, I learned that you don’t need to write something that is well manicured and controlled for it to be good and that you can draw material from anywhere. Also, I found the sense of humor in the album is dark and gross and captivating.

Pink Floyd Meddle

I can’t remember who introduced me to this album. I’ve listened to it probably less than 20 times in my life. I remember listening to it in college, alone in my room, when I didn’t want to go out and party.

The album is one continuous song that might be broken into tracks or sections, but I feel it’s supposed to be listened to in a single sitting, like The Wall or Darkside of the Moon. It’s not entirely easy to listen to, but ultimately rewarding. I love the way each “section” of the album contrasts with those that come before and after it. It seems like, due to the success of Pink Floyd’s later albums, that Meddle was probably a commercial failure (according to Wikipedia this was true in America, but not England).

One of the things that affected me most about this album is the way it blends melodic sections with cacophonous interludes and or strange sound samples. Listening to the album feels like you are undergoing a process or a journey. I love reading poems that give me permission to enter into their weird dimension. In a similar way, listening to Meddle feels like you are inhabiting an alternate reality.

Underworld Second Toughest in the Infants

I first heard “Born Slippy” by Underworld while watching Trainspotting or some Trainspotting related thing. I remember feeling moved by the song even though I’d never used heroine before or gone through any kind of detox from drugs. Later I bought the EP Pearl’s Girl at a local headshop/record store in Redding, CA. I don’t remember where I brought Second Toughest in the Infants.

Listening to this album feels like a computer with emotions is making music for you. I like the way many of the tracks incorporate repetitive language. Some of the tracks sound dated, almost like generic 90s drum and base. I still write to this album once in a while.

I’m not exactly sure how this album has affected my writing, but I feel that it has. I’ve always liked the tone, which is subdued but rigorous and emotional. I find that I consistently have emotional reactions to individual tracks on the album as well as to the album as a whole. I feel the construction of the album has a high level of integrity that appeals to me.

Tim Hecker Ravedeath, 1972

I had no idea who Tim Hecker was until my cousin Logan dumped An Imaginary Country and Harmony in Ultraviolet onto my computer a few years ago. Now he is one of my favorite musicians.

Sometimes I can’t write to Hecker’s music at all because it feels too consuming. At other times it induces an environment in which thinking and writing become inevitable. I’ve been listening to Ravedeath while writing on and off since it was released. Listening to this album make me acutely aware of my headspace. It also makes me fee like I am in the future. In another sense, it makes me feel like I am living inside it, not just listening to it on my headphones.

Ravedeath has been the most influential album in my writing recently. Many of the poems I’m working are about the idea of a page as a unit of space. They attempt to illicit a sense of the potentially infinite. I try to make the poems resistant to the crush of the symbolic space around them. I don’t know if that makes sense. I haven’t really tried to articulate the idea to anyone, except myself, in my head, alone at night.

~~~

Ben Mirov is the author of Hider Roser (Octopus Books, Summer 2012), Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) and the chapbooks Vortexts (SUPERMACHINE, 2011) I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010) and Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N, 2010). He grew up in Northern California and lives in Oakland.

CK:  High school: listened to “Carolyn’s Fingers” 152 times at least senior year. No one knows. No iPod to count the number of listens. In the car. On the way to school. On the city bus. Walking through leaves. Had stumbled on it, hunched over the VCR late one night and played that part of 120 Minutes over and over until a little line of static sizzled across the screen. College: I went to London my freshman year. Listened to the song in the dorm bunk-bed. At William Blake’s tomb. On the Tube. In St. Paul’s. Bright, frothy, sublime, ultimate, heady, careening: all the things you want in a song, all the time, as if there were no other song. A free, legal high. Und so weiter, forever.

I even had a bumper sticker for the Cocteau Twins. My only bumper sticker. Ever. How could I not love their tracks, fizzing and lilting and sounding like something utterly familiar but in tune with an eternal thing?

Then one day when I was in graduate school (second time), I posted a blog entry of several favorite items. Maybe an ad for a sandwich. Other stuff. Something about the dusk being really weird that day. And that my favorite song in the whole world was “Carolyn’s Fingers” by the Cocteau Twins. And then Ana Bozicevic commented, “Mine too.”

!

And then, a few years later, in conversation, I found out that it was also the favorite song of Sommer Browning. So here we all are.

*******

Translation is the third stage of protein biosynthesis. There are four phases of translation: activation, initiation, elongation and termination. These stages mimic life, they mimic youth, they mimic narrative, any of life’s microcosms really. Because protein biosynthesis produces genes, and because these stages produce protein strands which produce genes that determined my eye color, govern my metabolic rate, shaped my eardrums, so we too grow in this way, physically and psychically. It makes sense. It hurts my heart a bit to be so robotic about things, but it’s grounding, too. I’m going to use the four stages that grow protein strands to talk about what this music means to me.

Long before I listened to music, I lived in the world of hearing. I heard The Eagles, the Grease soundtrack, and Rick James like I heard the school bell. The strand was in discrete bits. I had the depth I would need for listening, certainly. I used this depth when I felt love, anger, shame, fear—is it biology that prevented me from feeling this in music? Does it take a certain physical evolution to derive emotion from outside of oneself? Mature means ripe, it’s a word from biology co-opted by Saved By the Bell, Aaron Spelling, Gidget. Now it means responsibility more often than it means the ability to reproduce. Years of Wednesday chapel, the ocean, the only time I ran away, the solace of computers, the Cold War, some formula of these things activated my listening.

Along with NIN and This Mortal Coil, my first boyfriend, Clarke, played me Cocteau Twins. Young, nail-biting love initiated me into their space, a kind of church, the thick adulterated tracks piled upon thick tracks building fibers of melody in an abyss of pedals—imagine jumping in and activating each you touched: distortion, overdrive, delay, all the reverb in the world. A hive echoing in space. Prosperity defines the wasteland because what is desolation but abject excess? Elizabeth Fraser’s voice electronically weaved to become a choir, and I’m the only one not singing. I listen better when silent, simultaneously enveloped and shunned.

The strand grows, elongates, album by album these strangers grow, develop, produce videos, appear on 120 Minutes, come through DC and I miss them, come through DC on the Four-Calendar Café tour and I go. I stand with other fans in love with Fender Jaguars and inverted chords and I’m there part poseur because I just love her dress, the fog, her spinning.

Ted, a friend, tells me when he first heard Cocteau Twins he thought Fraser was singing in angel language. Consciousness has this amazing quality to be infinite until it ends. In language, that reads as a paradox, but in practice it’s natural. Termination. This stage is the most important because endings never happen. The strand is finally built. Angel language would have to be indecipherable to mortals, eternally evolving as the angels experience new emotions, new parts of the universe, as they define divine neologisms to describe a new peculiarity in the ennui of immortality. Change is sacred and so inaccuracy is sacred. Translation, the phase, is complete. What I’m left with is how I translate the untranslatable. When I sing along to “Carolyn’s Fingers,” this is what I sing:

Lisa you said Laura chis and dance with menahas
Someday you seed him terror house

E-he frau how teak how you need me
Again gen gen gen now go

Cheek fed terror house who sew sew solid now
Leave leave leave me married now go

This part Lamar suffers baseball’s whining let me out out out
Be still listen to me be bald
E-he he he be softer to me now

Sublime Yassis atop top top free le chat chapeau
Again gen gen gen go chalk Choctaw
It splays it to me how how
Lessons to me chokehold (x 2)

*******

AB:  I’m thirteen. And so happy. I’m imagining my own funeral. The casket slides toward the incinerator (because, who wants to be buried? Gross.) – & then they play this song! This ultimate song that is fingertips tweaking the wavelengths of sunbeams. The casket burns & c(r)ackles with joy. Next minute, I picture my wedding – petals, doves and whatnot – and as I glide toward the altar, the same song plays. The same joy follows the casket & bride. A train of joy.

It’s been twenty years, and this is still the song. What is its power? There are words, but not – more like suggestions, to be interpreted like musical hieroglyphics across the languages. At first, back in Croatia, the first two lines go: “Nisam blabla; Esterhazy sam ja.” (“I am not blah blah; Esterhazy am I.”) Now my Anglified imagination-organ hears something different. French platitudes plait themselves in somehow; and, of course, the longing – adolescent or midlife, all part and parcel – and the heavenly aspect. At the bottom of tongues, you are loved, but damned if you understand why, or how.

I read the YouTube testimonies to “Carolyn’s Fingers” by Cocteau Twins, as sung by Elizabeth Fraser, and the heaven-struck supplicants are in unison:

“Heaven linger tout simplement sublime et intemporel ethereal extraordinary from another planet Music of the gods and the voice of an archangel touching deep, deep in the heart and soul If this song doesn’t make your soul sing, then nothing will Obscenely Beautiful & Utterly Brilliant Angel. I used to imagine this album was a recital of forest nymphs—”

Alongside the heavenly aspect, something else keeps popping up in their testimonials: let’s call it first consciousness, of meaning- and self-formation. Sez Kartoffelbrain:

“its funny, this is one of the earliest songs i can remember hearing, and seeing…i can remember the colour of the carpet in the room, a deep grey, and even what the old television looked like in my ma and das.”

& “Elizabeth could have been cussing in the song and I wouldn’t care coz the way it’s done is just so beautiful. The best music is beautiful in all languages.”

& “It’s amazing that songs ‘without lyrics’ could be so emotive. The lyrics I read are good but I couldn’t care less about them. It’s like looking at a piece of art that just stuns you You don’t think about the brushstrokes, you think how wow it is. When I was a kid, I thought that the lyrics were Latin or some ‘scholarly’ language—”

Music critics are on the same page. One guy in the UK called her “the voice of God.” The castrati must have been swooned over with this sincerity the unbeliever thinks comical. Others term what Fraser does glossolalia, mouth music. The anthropologist Felicitas Goodman finds that the speech of glossolalists reflects patterns of their native language, while William Samarin argues that this resemblance is only on the surface – glossolalia is only “a façade of language.” A façade on what? Kartoffelbrain and Sommer & Sommer’s friend Ted & Cynthia & my own love- and death-minded beast-bride-brain know implicitly, and can tell you straight up: on the sublime, dummy, on John Dee’s ur-tongue of angels where each word brings a thing into being, the learned langue of the tower of Babel.

Fraser says she “goes with the sound and the joy,” and – “I can’t act. I can’t lie.” I start thinking about this self-abnegating author sticking to “truth,” the spatiality of time, Bergson’s “duration,” heaven & mu/nothingness, but within a few seconds of listening to Fraser, I just don’t give a fuck. I’m crying with joy. It’s beautiful and humbling to witness meaning being born, wed to & dying into non-meaning. Few artists have this access, have it to give. I listen and I’m the newborn seeing the kindly face and hearing the voice above me, indecipherable but immediately understood; I’m a dog being cussed at kindly, Keats listening to a nightingale. What does she say?

“Carolyn’s Fingers”

Niece, son, blah love–
chester hats look nice.
Tell me a synonym for Tejas:
hey high fraud! ye Vendler-handler me.

We intend, and then don’t go, child–
chaperones & chess unite.
Niente, intended; love child shuffle–
chap in time, sussurant.

Purr, i, oh. Yeah, and love.

Niece, cordone moll – c’est fou, que c’est drole –
be spas, while he putter down the hall.

Extend, son, to me, apple bow –
the point is truly lost – be swept in a hole.
Listen to me, child –
be swept within an apple.

Ah, i – baby – yeah, dot my i.

Simplement, Jesus c’est chachacha–
reshuffle my mind. Reshuffle my mind.

We intend and then don’t go, child–
(naughty, bother me!)
Niente, indented – man-child, chum-paw.
(naughty, fly!)
Existence, up to me? A faux pas–wish it could be droll.
(Nocti, blind my i!)
Listen, believe me – chill oak, yo –

dot my i.

*******

CK: I’m trying to follow through on Sommer’s suggestion that we write what we hear as the lyrics of “Carolyn’s Fingers.” It’s a struggle. How can we break this gold into something prosaic? To me, the words are really just as incomprehensible as any of their other lyrics (except maybe the words to “Pitch the Baby” – “I only want to love you.”) I was game. I made transcriptions of the first four lines:

Kneee sehm! Haahbla! Chee ho zed, ehsta hen sue neh.
So ee sehem, tehhes aneigh ho, neehah fran ho esta

Even even though
Nidin’t didn’t dee ho

So basically we don’t hear the same things. It’s like in the first grade where it dawns on you that the red you see isn’t like the red Matt Philpot sees. Some first inkling of philosophy. We live with what we can barely discern, what isn’t even representational and never tire of this song, nevertheless. I personally always sing along to the gibberish I hear and it’s always different or just out of intelligence’s reach.

This sentence represents a whole other article in which I plumb the depths of Ana and Sommer’s poems and even some of my own and note how and why our approach to narrative situation might predispose us to liking the Cocteau Twins and their organic sublime. But that’s not this article.

If you Google the lyrics to “Carolyn’s Fingers,” there are apparently “actual” lyrics. I already knew this decades ago and dumped the information out of my mind. I had always reverted to the default notion the lyrics are in Esperanto, anyway. But the band’s strangeness surprises me further: In this narrative moment, the he and the she are stuck in the mire of a messy love, the titular fingers are an outreached hand… a hand rejected. It’s actually kind of wry and sad, unlike the music itself. And so the “correct lyrics” — I don’t think any of the three of us would ever try to learn them.  Maybe that’s just a strand of what we work out in our own poems:

When he said, ‘You are full of love’
She fell down into this dirty mess
Some people see me laugh and tell us,
‘It’s wrong to make fun of me’

(Even they don’t give any more)
(Try, try to fall)
She fell down into this mess
(Even then they don’t give)
(Try, try to fall)
She fell down and he’s so sick of it all
And of me

This part not out of her saw fit to drop
Whispers might prove it all
(You’re just closer to me when you fall, but you broke)
This would prove it all
(You just closer to me, but you broke)
This would prove it all
Sleep now
You susur, try to talk
Reach out for that hand
Reach out for that hand
(And even they don’t give any more)
(Try, try to fall)
Even then they don’t give
(Try, try to fall)
You just closer to me at the fall
But you don’t want, want me hand
You’re just closer to me
But you don’t want, want my hand

~~~

Nova by Ana Božičević, Sommer Browning and Cindy King

All resting on a fabric, planets in plane–
I didn’t know that order could be revolution;
one fights in circles, the beginning of the beginning;

concentric and widening, eggshell anvil, liquid fist, till
what’s born is some kind of earth out of starry sky:
Who can resist, that blue-white weaving
infant auroras beneath me.

This isn’t air
but thoughts, solid and trimmed to universe;
stardust in our bones
in our lungs, but a new kind of
hour, beating against the white towers.

This isn’t rock
but an idea, galaxy far, the sun blazing its eye
down through ours.

London, 1992

Cynthia Arrieu-King is native of Louisville, Kentucky, a former Kundiman fellow and currently serves as an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus Books, 2010), a collaborative chapbook with Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis–By a Year Lousy with Meteors (Dream Horse Press 2012) and Manifest (Switchback, 2013). She hosts a radio show The Last Word about writers in South Jersey and the Tri-State, their writing and the music they love: You can listen in wlfr.fm at 11AM on Sundays. Recently in a blind iPod experiment of all new music, she favored everything now produced by 4AD.

1987

Sommer Browning is the author of Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC; 2011), a collection of poetry and drawings, and three chapbooks, most recently THE BOWLING (Greying Ghost, 2010) with Brandon Shimoda. Her work will appear in EOAGH, The Denver Quarterly, and EVENT. In 2008, she founded the hand-bound chapbook publisher, Flying Guillotine Press, with Tony Mancus. She lives in Denver where she and Julia Cohen curate The Bad Shadow Affair, a reading series.

1993, Ana on the right

Ana Božičević is the author of Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009) and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently War on a Lunchbreak (Belladonna*, 2011). With Željko Mitić, she is the editor of The Day Lady Gaga Died: an Anthology of NYC Poetry of the 21st Century (in Serbian, Peti talas/The Fifth Wave, 2011). Her translation-in-progress of Zvonko Karanović’s It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire recently received a PEN American Center/NYSCA grant. With Amy King, Ana co-edits esque, and works and studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Being from Nashville, I accepted that music could be conceptual. I didn’t try out for high school football (not on principle, more of a foregone conclusion kind of situation), but I could believe that if someone did try out and didn’t make the team, the absolutely best response would be to start a band.  A marching band of one’s own.

The creation story of Olivia Tremor Control, though set in the north Louisiana town of Ruston, could easily have taken place where I grew up in Ames, Iowa.  Or not. Point being, I was in high school, my body was a terrifying disappointment, the bodies of everyone I knew were terrifying disappointments (with occasional miraculous exceptions), and it seemed likely that this would be permanent.

If I had known about them then (I didn’t; I liked Counting Crows), I would have been heartened because Olivia Tremor Control make happy psychedelic pop music that is, according to Robert Christgau, “full of shit,” a description that sounds damning but given that being full of shit is one of the primary daily disappointments (with no miraculous exceptions I know of), there’s a way in which such an insult is a compliment: full of shit music suggests that disappointment, permanence, and foregone conclusions can be ignored in favor of listening to one’s body, and, if one has such a thing, soul.

Listening to the shit of the soul: that about sums up Athens, Georgia in the late ’90s.  Not to brag, but we had Neutral Milk Hotel, Drive-By-Truckers, Vic Chesnutt, Of Montreal, Danger Mouse, Macha, Hayride, The Glands, The Possibilities, Elf Power, Azure Ray, Jack Logan, Japancakes, Music Tapes, and, of course, Olivia Tremor Control, all fighting over the same Salvation Army cardigan.

Some of these bands were better than the others, but the most vexing were the Olivias.  I wanted them to be something slightly other than they were, and I wanted their music to be slightly different than it is.  The dippy psychedelia, the unapologetic derivativeness, the sugary and the twee—this was never going to be my favorite record or my favorite band.  And yet I found pleasure and creative permission in the space between what I wanted the music to be and what it was.

[Interlude: When the baby howls, the microchip howls.  When the parallel microchip becomes fussy and more, fussy static ruins the parallel baby and so then fields.  When the fields fuss.  Throughout intervals of static the wind fusses in fits of solemn fuchsia. I always feel milky.  You always are staring.  Why don’t I feel.  Vinegar now, in my hands everything seems tender.  Baby and me and Olivia mouths parallel.  Fits and fits and fuck fits.  Everything will mouth what I spray.  Don’t touch my mouth unless you use me four times.  Mouth my mind.  Mouth my mouth.  How else could we be understood so like our words should?  Not by my grainy speakers. Revenue isn’t what is speaking now.  Revenant is not what is.  Cars combust.  Combustion composes particles into fits.]

In the last third of Dusk at Cubist Castle, in a track titled “Green Typewriters VIII,” all of the hazy pop and toy piano blinkerings that make up much of the album shed away for a ten-minute interlude of low, reverby fuzz and dull notes that you come to realize are underpainted by recordings of dripping water and what seems to be a field near a highway where cars pass just often enough to be totally meditative; in the last minute and a half, all the sounds drop out except the field, and when a car and a helicopter pass, the sound travels from the left speaker to the right and then gradually fades as the vocals of Bill Doss and/or Will Cullen Hart remarkably reappear, singing, “How much longer can I wait?”, ushering in a resolution in drums and a guitar solo straight from Apple Studios, none of which ever felt so refreshing.

In an as-yet-unpublished interview I did back in the Athens ’90s with Jeff Mangum—who is better known as the gaping wound at the center of Neutral Milk Hotel but also served as a drummer for Olivia Tremor Control (which a friend once compared to watching John Lennon play drums in Ringo’s All Starr Band)—Mangum told me that when the earth becomes uninhabitable, chances are that the authorities will only allow the beautiful and the popular onto the escaping spaceships.  So I guess it will just be us left here with all the other broken, imperfect things. Not the worst outcome, and anyway my guess is that it was the popular and the beautiful that made the planet uninhabitable in the first place, and that without them, everything will be ugly and will last forever.

~~~

Travis Nichols is the author of See Me Improving (Copper Canyon Press), Iowa (Letter Machine Editions), and Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Coffee House Press).  He lives in Chicago.

Experiment

I drew
a circle
on the wall,
pressed
myself flat
against it,
and tried
to tune
the particles
in my body
to align
with the empty
spaces between
the particles
of the wall
and vice
versa, so
that the wall
and I
would become
an integrated
mesh as
I pressed
into and
eventually
through it
entirely.
The problem
was not
a lack of
gaps–
so much
of everything
is gaps,
and neither
the wall
nor my
body are
really even
all that
dense–but
ordering
the open
space that
leavens
our density
seemed to
require more
than flat
mental activity,
for me,
anyway.

Paul Killebrew is the author of Inspector vs. Evader (Ugly Duckling Presse), and Flowers (Canarium Books).  He lives in New Orleans.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.

Metallica was formed in September of 1981.  This month we celebrate their 30 years of music making with a collection of essays.  For some, Metallica will always be a part of the big 4 in thrash along with Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer. For others, Metallica will always be remembered for their ongoing fights with former Metallica member Dave Mustaine (of Megadeth) or for their iconic bass player, Cliff Burton (R.I.P. February 10, 1962 – September 27, 1986). Maybe Metallica meant headbangers and cigarettes. Maybe Metallica meant “dude rock,” as less than a quarter of female poets responded to the essay call.  But Metallica doesn’t care. Metallica cut their hair, reinvented themselves as hard rock, riffed on, and made a mark in the revolutionary debate on artists’ rights and digital music downloads by going after Napster. Whether it’s early Metallica or “new” Metallica (which is The Black Album and everything after) few bands have had the longevity in the music world or have managed to capture the imagination like Metallica have.

***

“For Whom The Bell Tolls”

***

Mathias Svalina

When I think of those three years when Metallica was colossally important to me I think of all the boys I wished I was, all the boys with the sleeves ripped off their jean jackets, whose parents had let them cut the sleeves from their jean jackets, whose parents didn’t care, didn’t notice if the sleeves were cut from their jean jackets. They were a churning of feral sweat & Marlboro smoke. Like Brad Shebargo who got sent home for wearing the Metallica Metal Up Your Ass T-shirt. Who would run full-tilt, head-first into walls, knocking himself unconscious, in a display of… of what? Is it definable? Perhaps disregard, a recklessness, a perversely performative insanity. It seemed somehow an antidote to the precise failure of the suburban experience; the only way to find authenticity was through failure, through flaw. One time he opened his eyes after hitting his head & they were only whites.

When I think of them now I don’t see them as office workers rocking out the old cds over the grill on Saturday afternoons, or as construction workers driving home with a thick rim of concrete on the cuffs of their jeans. I see them eternally as kids, five-foot-tall gods of righteous, spastic energy, banging their heads, waving their metal-horn hands with dervishes of cigarette smoke surrounding them, running headfirst into every wall & floating in the anesthetized swell & fury of the eternal chorus, chorus, chorus.

***

Noah Eli Gordon

A Poetics of Appropriation

I cut holes in the lining of a coat so without removing my hands from the pockets, without attracting attention, I can grab whatever’s within reach, wander a little around the store, and then walk out. I steal a cassette single by Metallica. I take piles of candy, a pack of lighters, lift a pen, a keychain, nail clippers and a bottle of honey barbeque sauce. I put a foot-long flashlight in my sleeve, a pair of dice in my mouth, a paperback on the history of torture in my pants. I tell my stepfather I have no idea what happened to the money he kept in his dresser. I learn to attach strips of Scotch Tape to a dollar bill, send it into the vending machine, then pull it back out; I drink lots of soda. Odd, unnatural bulges accompany me out of store after store.

I want you to take this, fold it up, hide it in your wallet, and forget about it, my mother says, handing me a twenty dollar bill, which she then calls my only in an emergency money. I take, fold it, and two months from now have completely forgotten about it. After school, my friends and I drive to the mall, walk into a department store where I take a shirt off the racks, tie it in the fitting room around my waist, attempt to leave, am abandoned by my friends, stopped by security, taken into a back room, photographed, scolded half-heartedly, handed off later to the police, who drive me to the station where I’m booked and told that bail comes to exactly twenty-five dollars. I open my wallet. There’s a five and two singles. My mother is furious when I call, furious when she picks me up at the station, furious during the long car ride home, when, suddenly, I remember the twenty dollar bill.

At some point, I construct an ethics, a code, a flimsy rational: steal only from those whose actions amount to a theft of my own sense of self; anything corporate is fair game; anything privately held has to include some act of personal transgression. When my boss belittles me at work, I figure out how to recalibrate the cash register. When the eye doctor rushes me through an appointment, I search the drawers in his office while waiting for him to return. I’m not proud of this history, and I’ll admit, it isn’t exactly over. But the one thing I really want to steal, the thing I’ve all this time been working up to but can’t quite see though, the thing above all else that would make for the ultimate theft, is this, this sentence by Anne Carson: “No, it is not a mirage, this stupendous humming hulk of gold that stands as if run aground upon the plaza at the center of the city of Santiago.” It’s a perfect sentence, perfect in its scope and movement, its rhythmic music and transformative imagery. The problem is I wouldn’t know where to put it.

***

Molly Gaudry

I will forever associate Metallica with the late summer/early fall of 1998. I’d just turned 17, I’d had this crazy summer fling with someone who gave me Metallica as a parting gift for my drive back to school, saying, particularly, that I should listen to “Nothing Else Matters.” I listened to that song, and then the album on repeat, while I drove away, away from Cleveland, away from my parents, away from it all, and felt oddly nostalgic and reminiscent about how I was soon to be a senior, about how, in only one year’s time, I would finally be going away to college and looking back on high school, on the summer I turned 17, as nothing more than my stupid past. I hated high school, had no desire to return. I hated Cleveland even more, but going away to school beat living at home where I had to spend my summers. It was a weird, sad drive, but that album kept me company. It’s nice, 13 years later, to be able to remember it.

***

Jeff T. Johnson

Old Metallica

Metal belonged to metal dudes in junior high. I’m not sure I even thought about the music they listened to. For me, metal was a style of mean kid who looked too old to be in middle school, and Metallica was his favorite shirt.

Years later, thanks to the social leveling of college dorm life, I made a discovery: Most American metal heads are Metal Nerds, if not straight-up Nerds. Of course, Nerds Who Love Metal are distinct from Metal Nerds, and cannot peacefully share a niche. Their encounters end in tears and cigarette burns.

As any teenage ethnographer knows, mutual intolerance between Metal Nerds and Punk Nerds is amplified, but more complex: a sneering, spitting, beer-can-throwing antipathy abetted by a Cold War of the words via Sharpie: METAL SUX! etc. Historically speaking, mutual disco resistance was a detente between these rivals (DISCO SUX!).

If only I’d discovered these subspecies earlier, I could have been a freak-of-nature Nerd Who Loves Metal & Punk.

But then I would have been a Metallica fan—Master of Puppets tugs at my vestigial white adolescent tail while my Punk Nerd roots twitch along to Ride the Lightning. And if I was a Metallica Fan for Life, I would have been devastated, instead of disgusted and amused, when Metallica sued its fans for sharing their favorite music.

Fuck those guys, but long may Master of Puppets Ride the Lightning.

***

“Battery”

***

Niina Pollari

Metallica did not figure heavily into my life, except one time when I had spent the evening drinking rosé wine and watching Lost in Translation with my boyfriend’s roommate. We had also made canned lentils, with extra carrots and celery chopped in, because I think we were dieting at the time so eating healthy drunk food made us feel pretty OK about drinking rosé wine all night.

Because he had a great radio voice for mid-2000s Florida, my boyfriend was an intern for the local rock station, and he had received two free tickets to see the world’s greatest metal band play the amphitheatre. He brought along as his plus-one the metallest friend he had (who still wasn’t very metal and I think this friend would agree with me). Late in the evening, after we homebodies had finished our lentils and booze, those two got back and told us an incredible tall tale about hanging out backstage with Metallica, the world’s greatest metal band, and drinking Cristal with Metallica and having a great time with them. About fifteen minutes later they cracked up a lot and said it never happened and that they just got stoned in the car right before they came inside. And I think then we all went to sleep.

***

Tommy Jacobi

A few months ago I was driving from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to see my dad. I had run out of CDs to listen to—burnt out on Red House Painters and Yo La Tengo and other sad highway-type bands—so I put in Ride the Lightning as a joke. During “Fight Fire with Fire” I kind of just sang along in my loud mocking Hetfield voice, punching the air. The standard way to listen to Metallica. I kept doing this through the beginning of “Ride the Lightning,” until, during the second solo, I said “man, this is pretty sick, I have to say,” out loud, as though somebody invisible was disagreeing with me. I actually did this. When “Fade to Black” came, I remembered my friend Ross’s middle-school screenname—Fade2Black88. I’d spent the weekend at his house once, in the woods. Real good guy. He had this cool skylight built into his living room. Then three songs later, I was punching the roof of my Camry, swerving to the beat of “Creeping Death,” and by the middle of Dave Mustaine’s solo in “Call of Ktulu” I was crying slightly, just saying, “aw shit, man, aw shit” over and over.

***

“One”

***

Justin Marks

Scaring Mom

Metallica was the first band I listened to whose lyrics my mom demanded to read. I was 13, and had been into metal since the fourth grade when my best friend introduced me to Twisted Sister and Mötley Crüe because, as he put it, the Duran Duran, Culture Club, Michael Jackson and other pop of the day I had been listening to was “for queers.”

This was a small town in the 80s and statements like that were common. So was the belief that metal bands were devil worshippers and their songs contained subliminal messages that hailed Satan and urged listeners to kill themselves and/or babies and virgins.

But mom wasn’t like that. She and dad were ex-hippies who moved to the country to pursue some quasi-idea of a blissed out hippie utopia. Mainly, they wanted to be left alone, smoke weed and raise their kids.

Album and song titles like Shout at the Devil, “Burn in Hell,” and The Number of the Beast had long been staples of my ever-growing cassette collection. So why, all the sudden, did my mom want to read the lyrics of this band Metallica whose album Master of Puppets I’d just bought?

Because, she said, their songs were about killing your mother. I reluctantly gave her the lyric sheet. She read them, and though some lines concerned her (“cannot kill the family / battery is found in me”) she deemed the tape acceptable for my young, impressionable ears.

But the moment was not lost on me: This was music that actually scared my liberal, open-minded, ex-hippie mother, and that was enormously cool.

***

Angela Veronica Wong

We had a ritual, my hockey-crazed high school girlfriends and I.  Driving the fat Texas highways from North Dallas suburbia to Reunion Arena in downtown Dallas, there were songs that we had to listen to in the car.  Had to.  They included hockey favorites like “Black Betty;” songs with a personal hockey meaning like “Last Dance With Mary Jane;” and songs that transcended any categorization, like anything off Appetite for Destruction.  They included Metallica, usually “Enter Sandman,” though often supplemented with other Metallica songs.  And so Metallica will always bring a smile to my face, reminding me of riding in compact cars with girlfriends, of Central Expressway and the Dallas North Tollway, of rolling the windows down to scream and sing with no shame because how wonderful those expansive Texas nights when you are sixteen, and headed to a hockey game.

***

Steven Karl

Breakfast Club

My parents are Jehovah Witnesses. This made my life as a teen-age metal-head one filled with desperate deceits. I kept a jean jacket in my locker & adorned it with pins by Testament, Overkill, Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, Megadeth, D.R.I, Suicidal Tendencies & of course, Metallica.  My friends & I would spend countless lunches consuming slurpees & soft-pretzels arguing over the merits of Cliff Burton & whether Slayer were really Nazis or just trying to be “shocking.”

I would go to the grocery store with my mother then drift over to the magazines to read up on all the bands. Knowing “everything” about thrash metal was my purpose as a teenager.

1991, we were all psyched for Metallica’s newest record (The Black Album).  It came out on a Tuesday, some of us cut class, drove to Strawberries, bought it, hated it, I mean really hated it, then got caught trying to sneak back into school.

Later, sitting in Saturday detention, thinking life was pretty lame & scribbling “Metallica Sucks” over & over again.  So long 1991.

I still love “Anesthesia” & think of Rich, Dave, Bill, Drake, & Jason.  I hated life & hated my “teen years,” but those guys were pretty rad. If I were to make a film of an awkward, angry teen in the late 80s to early 90s, that teen would be me & Metallica would be the soundtrack.  Sit back, turn-up the volume. I hope it hurts. (At least a little bit).

***

Sommer Browning

Everyday I strive to be someone who calls Metallica, ‘tallica.

***

“Enter Sandman”

***

OPEN LETTER TO TODD HASAK-LOWY CONCERNING THE FAILED ESSAY CALLED ‘FRESH EARS’ WHICH ENDS WITH A CLOSE READING OF LOVIN’ TOUCHIN’ SQUEEZIN’ BY JOURNEY

November 4, 2011

Dear Todd:

I’m writing you about this essay I was supposed to do for Coldfront. I know you saw an early version of it and I really appreciate your looking at that. Also I think you pointed out something both really true and also interesting: it didn’t sound like me. Which is weird, right? since I wrote it. But that’s something maybe for another essay – how or why we can sound “like ourselves” in one genre and not another. Probably that’s why I gravitated to poetry in college writing classes – remember I was going to be a fiction writer when I got to Michigan. Or at least a science fiction writer. Maybe it’s that there’s a mode of writing that is best suited for each of us and if we are lucky enough to find it then we can go forward. I sure remember the day you sent me that first story you wrote that had “your voice” going on—the TV ROOM maybe it was called? And now you’re you!

But anyway, this essay I wrote was called FRESH EARS as you know, and really it was a great idea. Opening with this scene of me in my late 20s riding in the backseat of a car out to the lighthouse at Montauk one night, listening to a song I’d heard a million times and always dismissed. But then this night suddenly having to sit there passively in the back, in the dark, listening, I really HEARD it. And realized how great it was. Not just that, but also actually listened it, how it goes together, how the parts connect to each other—all those things you hear in other songs that you actually care about. And the song was COME ON EILEEN by Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

And yes, I was high as a kite. But I don’t think that takes away anything from this revelation I had about the song. I mean, it gave me these Fresh Ears I’m talking about, but the feeling stayed. The next day, and the next day. Anytime I hear that song now, and my kids love it so they put it on a lot, and I remember that moment of hearing it as if for the first time. So there’s another reason to end the drug war.

I know you’re interested in this because of your next novel. I have to say, every time I tell people about your new book they instantly love the idea. They know the feeling exactly. That’s kind of why I wanted to write this essay – to talk a little about that thing you describe in your book, where they figure out a way to erase but only temporarily your knowledge of an album so that you can rush home and hear it for the “first” time. I think you told me you came up with this idea hearing Strawberry Fields while sitting in a dentist’s chair, right? I guess you can’t answer that question right now. I’m going to assume that’s true, because I’ve had that experience with the Beatles myself, and I’m sure others have too. They’re a band we’ve heard so much it’s almost like we aren’t hearing the music – we’re hearing our memories of hearing them, we’re hearing all the years we lived with those songs on in car radios, in our parents’ living rooms, etc. And then suddenly, for some reason, and it certainly doesn’t have to be drugs, you can find yourself hearing it with fresh ears, breaking through the accreted crust of years and years of preconceived ideas about a song to find that the song, beneath all of those layers of dismissal and neglect, is really amazing, maybe even despite some serious shortcoming, and speaks directly to you though you never noticed it before.

I was also thinking that that explains so many of those tribute albums – I feel like they were huge in the 90s but maybe I’m just not paying as much attention now. But there’s the great one I WISH I WERE A CARPENTER where all these 90s alternative bands do covers of Carpenters songs. And it’s amazing! And what you find out as you listen is that those songs that we grew up with in the 70s and now can’t really hear clearly because the music is so drowned out by our knowledge of Karen Carpenter’s sad death and all the bright shiny creepiness that went along with it all, is that actually when you strip away all of that stuff from the music it’s brilliant. Brilliant song craft. Catchy chord progressions. That’s a whole other essay I’d love to write, or probably read actually – what it is scientifically that makes a song “catchy”, or makes a song have “hooks”. I have a theory it has to do with unresolved chords resolving themselves but I’d have to talk to my brother in law about all the technical stuff, and really, who has time to keep writing these essays?

I remember trying to get my uncles to listen to some of the covers from I WISH I WERE A CARPENTER and they just couldn’t hear it. They were too mired down in all the stuff surrounding those songs and couldn’t find a way to hear them for what they really are. Though to be fair they had to live through it the first time. I think the Cracker version of Rainy Days and Mondays is the best song on there by far.

You know I love David Lowery but it’s not just his voice (which I think is the best in rock and roll). It’s that he takes that song and strips everything away except very minimal drums, a slow guitar strum, and his voice recorded way up front in the mix. There’s nothing in the way of how the song moves. So that’s another way you can get fresh ears, is having the song so removed from its original context that you almost can’t help but hear it anew.

David Lowery also did another great service to America when he (in Camper Van Beethoven) recorded all of TUSK by Fleetwood Mac. And it’s weird, because it’s definitely tongue-in-cheek and not really a clear act of homage, but I think also you don’t undertake to cover a double-album and emerge from that without having come to some kind of understanding with it. If it were purely malicious you’d just run out of steam. Even Weird Al Jankovic doesn’t go that far.

And the story behind that is great too – Camper Van Beethoven was going to record their 3rd album (the one with Good Guys and Bad Guys) at some mountain cottage and on the 2nd day their drummer broke his leg skiing. So they had all their equipment up there and couldn’t record. And one of their girlfriends suggested they do this cover of Tusk with the rest of the band taking turns on drums.

And anyway, they do the whole thing and they manage to find the greatness in a lot of the songs. They also end up making fun of a bunch of them too. But there are a couple songs on there – Walk A Thin Line, That’s All For Everyone, Think About Me – that come out the other end of their mangling sounding like they really should: catchy, emotional, great songs. When all of the over-large Fleetwood Mac personalities are stripped away and you don’t have to think about Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and see them in your mind, you can hear the songs as if for the first time and they’re unbelievably catchy. I mean, there’s a reason Fleetwood Mac was so huge. They could write songs.

And so all of that thinking about fresh ears was a lead-in to the point of the essay, which I still haven’t gotten to in this letter either, which was to try to rehabilitate a particular song that I never really took seriously, and I imagine a bunch or most of the readers of Coldfront also don’t take seriously. Which is Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’ by Journey.

I did kind of like the interlude section of the essay which I called A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY RELATIONSHIP WITH THE BAND JOURNEY because, well, I just think that’s a great section title, and also I thought that was important because I wanted everyone to know that I’m absolutely by no means a Journey fan. And I remember quite clearly how on the radio in Oklahoma (Rock 100 “The KATT”) for months in 1983 they built up to the Journey concert and then how they sold out the Lloyd Noble arena for 3 nights in a row, and how much I hated Journey and every time they mentioned this on the radio it made me scowl. At the time I was heavily into Adam and the Ants.

But Journey’s position in the music world at that time needs to be considered a little, I think. They were a rock band, no question. I mean, they were formed by ex-members of Santana, which really doesn’t help anyone like them more. But still. Neil Schon played blazing guitar solos and their drummer was solid and they had rock hits like Stone In Love. So it wasn’t that they were “gay” – forgive me, but as you know that was the parlance of the times. But there was something about them that wasn’t quite right. They also weren’t REALLY a rock band. They sang ballads. They were too clean, too shiny. Steve Perry was scary to look at. None of this helped. Ultimately I think, and I know this sounds like I’m only saying this now, but even as a 13 year old, I think I felt it in my bones that they were mediocre. They were an incredibly mediocre band. Which explains their massive success. They were ubiquitous. I mean, there was this:

I never understood why anyone would want to play that game when there was Dragon’s Lair in the same arcade. And I’ve always been that kind of annoying person who resists a little when something is ubiquitous like that. I mean, I didn’t buy Nevermind until Kurt Cobain killed himself. I just get bored of everyone screaming about stuff and insisting you like it. And Nevermind is great, and I guess I wish I’d had it a few years earlier, but sometimes when something’s everywhere you just want to exercise your right to opt out of mass hysteria. Which is definitely how you’d have to describe middle America in 1983 when it came to Journey.

The one part of the essay I was happy with was the close reading of Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’ – where I tried to do to the song what we do to poems in class: really look closely at how it’s put together, and what all the parts are adding to the whole. Maybe that part of the essay worked best because that was the part where I really did imagine I was sitting in a room with someone (you?) playing them the song and talking feverishly about every little aspect of it. Which is something I’ve done since I was a little kid. I guess I should have figured I’d grow up to teach because I used to love, even in 3rd grade, to have friends over and sit around listening to ELO forcing them to listen to some part of the song that I felt was important. Meanwhile my little friends couldn’t have cared less and just wanted to get back to the Millenium Falcon.

And the impulse to do a close reading of a song (like I’m about to) or of a poem in a classroom is really just asking people to step up and take responsibility for what they bring to a work of art. As you pointed out, fresh ears in some ways has nothing to do with the song; it is we who make the songs what they are to some great extent. No art has a chance in hell if there aren’t sympathetic people out there who will bring their quiet attentions to it. I mean, HAMLET wasn’t really taken that seriously until Coleridge’s essay on its psychological powers (did you know he was the first to use the term “psychoanalytical”?).

So that’s how I imagined the close reading of Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’ – you and I are sitting in my living room at night, the lights are dim, we’ve just realized after several years that the whole iPod dock thing was a conspiracy to make us buy shitty new products at the expense of really hearing music so we’ve brought the stereo receiver and big speakers back out. And the song begins.

• The opening drums are like a heartbeat. They’re the tell-tale heart of this song. The love that beats through this song about broken hearts.

• And the song is in 6/8 time; this gives it a swing. It’s a faux blues verse with faux-blues turn-around [0:26], and a 50s chorus. I wonder if this was influenced by Grease? The song came out a year or so afterwards. I’m sure they all went to see Grease, just like every single other person in America.

• And the song is a malediction. The ending is an emotional release, and it’s triumphant while also being the schoolyard taunt, with that same nyah nyah nyah intonation and attitude.

• The drum fill between the verse and chorus both times [1:06 and 1:54] makes great use of the 6/8 time; it provides an off-beat transition between these two sections. At the very least, the drum fills could be much more pedestrian. The drumming is, after Steve Perry’s voice, the next best thing going on in this song.

• But overall the guitar is not providing much help – it’s either over-processed and compressed in the background during the verse [0:43 through 0:48 for instance] and chorus, or it’s whining away in opening licks [0:06 through 0:16] that are adolescent and about as far from blues as one can get while playing blues on guitar. This guitar lacks duende. To say the least. Neil Schon’s guitar playing remains completely or nearly irrelevant throughout, like a 13 year old shredding in the background along with his favorite song, and ruining it.

• The diction of Steve Perry’s vocals is worth paying closer attention to. The 6/8 time makes the singing swing like the rest of the song, but in particular the vocals have an off-beat swinging-ness that’s extremely catchy. Or effortless.

• And “touchin’ is said so intimately in the first verse [0:32], cut off as he speaks it the first time, almost choked off. The 2nd time he says “touchin’” [0:59] he bends that one word up—gently, he teases that word.

• Going up an octave for the last chorus [1:32] has never sounded more appropriate; his voice opens up, he gets angry but also a little vicious– the way he lingers over “lover” in the last verse making it a 5 syllable word! [1:38] He’s savoring the bitterness of that word in his mouth.

• And the pinnacle—the very last word he sings – is the way he says “Cry” right at the end [2:17] : the way it’s pronounced sort of like “CRWY” – [listen to it again: 2:17] impossible to fully note its rich range of tones and vocalizations. He’s almost crying himself – it’s the opening of the lid and what comes next is the release.

• The sheer length of this ending [2:18 -3:55 – almost half of the song]
is what makes it truly transcend and become something utterly beautiful. There are several points at which a different band would have ended the ending. But it keeps going. And getting bigger. It gets literally bigger because it progresses in that classic studio way, building up layers and layers of tracks at the end until the sound is pummeling you:

The first 4 bars [2:18] are the same texture as the song: there’s Steve Perry singing and the regular instruments behind him.

But then in the next 4 bars [2:32] they add some harmony vocals.

In next 4 [2:46] they add an octave harmony and the drums begin accenting down beats with the cymbals. These 4 bars end with a subtle syncopation [2:55- mostly the bass drum] that the drums and piano do that plays off the vocal rhythm, which doesn’t change, but together creates a little rhythmic ripple.

In the next 4 [2:59] Neil brings out the slide and they add that layer. Now it’s a lot bigger.

In the next 4 [3:12] Neil continues the slide and adds blues bends. The guitar is up front now – this might be the end of the layering but not the ratcheting up of the intensity. The song continues to build 20 bars into the ending. The guitar licks are a little more convincing here [3:20]. But really, Neil Schon is basically a cipher when it comes to guitar gods. He could walk down the middle of Broadway right now and people would only honk at him; no one would stare in awe.

In the next 4 bars [3:26] drums begin accenting nearly everything, both cymbals and kick drum. Weirdly the guitar is less prominent here; the individual notes are less clear and it’s just sheer noise and texture at this point . Aggression.

In the last 4 [3:39] the drums are just going to town, and the guitar keeps chugging away – and everything cuts off abruptly – too abruptly and cleanly to have been done by the musicians —those tracks are simply cut out so that all that’s left is the 5 or 6 layers of vocal harmonies. And now it’s suddenly too breathy and intimate. It’s some creep breathing down your neck. Or a gang of creeps, very intimate creeps.

I can’t even remember why I returned to this song after so many years and suddenly really heard it. I sort of remember sitting at a little tiny table with my daughter drawing pictures of dogs and hearing this song in my head. I don’t know why it took me over again after all these years, or why I chose to come to it for the first time only recently with the kind of generosity that it takes to meet a song half-way. I guess that was what the whole failed essay about Fresh Ears was for, to get people to stop thinking all these things about songs and pause for a moment, and actually hear them.

~~~

Poem for Edna St. Vincent Millay

The next thing I am going to say
is a secret. In World War II
they told Edna St. Vincent Millay
about all the invasions
so she could write a poem
for each one, a poem
like a bottle of champagne
to be smashed against
a ship before it sails
and everyone sat and listened
to the poem
on the radio and imagined
things in their minds
that the words weren’t really saying
rocking back and forth
in a chair, steam
rising from dinner
she spread all her poems
out across New England
acres of them, dreadful, she said
everyone has their own
version of a lonely life
the temperature drops
20 degrees the kids
are in bed a wind
blows through all the windows
at once knocking the hanging pots
and pans together
like a gentle quake
we hear what we want
to hear the invasion
has been called off
the invasion is too expensive
the invasion is working backwards
they’re coming for us
the pots and pans ding
gently in the kitchen
the invasion is what
we want it to be
this is a poem
you can smash against it
before it sails
then finish your dinner
it is not one
of the saddest poems
ever written Edna
St. Vincent Millay
wrote that it’s called LAMENT
only one person dies in it
a poem where thousands
of people die
just isn’t as sad

Matthew Rohrer is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Destroyer and Preserver, published by Wave Books. One of this tattoos has been featured in two different books of literary tattoos. He lives in Brooklyn.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.

I heard the call much too late, and so I’ve always been in the position of returning. The first time I heard the riff it was incessant and torqued. Crawling over that riff was a voice screaming even further outward, far past me. I listened, a bit fearful, and after some time, wanted more, not sure why. I don’t know that I would initially call it “like” but there was some lurid fascination, the sheer abandon in The Stooges Funhouse shook me…“Caaawwlin’ frum thuh funhouse, baaaaabay…!” And it took some time to realize that it is that unnerving defamiliarizing fire in our mental house, where an anxious lust (for life) usually begins to smolder.

There were many bands stretching, and in some cases, ripping the envelope in the late sixties and early seventies, yet for me, there is an uncanny aural and physical feralness to the performance of The Stooges on the album Funhouse that invites me to keep luvin’ its unstable meeting of disdain and abandon, after all these years. “Invites” may sound odd if you’ve heard the album, but after listening to it repeatedly there is an invitation, though it’s sealed with a wipe of sweaty chest glue! But it’s more than just melancholic nostalgia for the fact that the original Stooges came and went immediately before I was born (so close!). There’s an attractive and politically viable risk in this abandon, a risk that The Stooges fully and raucously embody and perform. A risk that many critics used to rip the LP’s release, ignoring the effort taken to record the complexities of a “live” album.  The enigmatic instability of this risk isn’t reducible to the drugs, simplicity, aggression, wartime tension or ambivalent sexuality of the album. Iggy claims, “I want a lot out of life, and I want a lot out of an audience,” and there is a resonance at the far edge of Funhouse’s sonic horizon, some collective enfolding, that yearns to reach us with the reflective fingertips of those silver gloves.

I’ll skip harping on the antics usually associated with the band (general insanity and drug use) since the timeline of substance abuse is fuzzy—some arguing that it coincided with, or began shortly after, Funhouse—since these stories overshadow their incredible revision of the blues. I return because I love to hear the raw limits that these antics in some ways concealed: the indelible musical forces stretching and overextending not only the recording equipment of the time, but the performative body itself, stammering a disjointed commentary on the rampant commodification of every aspect of music, and to a larger degree the utopic dreams dismantled by the war machine of Vietnam. In fierce opposition, the album becomes an aural limit that lengthens the moment between exhaustion and collapse, and in some sense suggests a communal experience. In other words, I’d like to sketch what keeps us (or perhaps just me!) returning to that silver-gloved-hot-peanut-butter-smearing-across-sweaty-chest-pointing. For me, it’s the visceral quality of disdain.

The Stooges’ disdain for genre norms seems evident on first listen. Blues is mixed with noise, screaming and grunting with intelligible words, and all this flows over a punchy bass line that momentarily collects, revises and releases these influences. There are even mixtures of James Brown, as MacKay’s Avant jazz licks rip apart funkified motifs. The announcer at the beginning of the video below, where The Stooges perform “T.V. Eye,” understates it wonderfully. His description is impressively innocent in its estimation of their live performance, “They do not go about this in a show business way…the kids don’t mind this at all.” One of the best parts of this video is that the audience doesn’t know what to do with them either. The lethargic crowds many of us have stood in, here appear dismayed, but strangely welcoming, even supportive (literally, as when Iggy is hoisted above the crowd around 4:00 in the following video). There is even a woman sketching the event (1:45). What I would give to get my hands on that sketch! What an amazing confrontation of mediums!

Long before Lady Gaga’s hypersexual code (and outfit) switching, and distinct from the heightened androgyny of David Bowie, Iggy accomplished something uniquely transgressive, through a much different mode of dissidence. Recalling Caroline Schneemann’s “experiential erotic body,” he performatively (and in later years physically) abused the body itself, stripped it down to breathtakingly tight leather pants (making him an excellent candidate for Frank O’Hara’s “Personism”), baring a chest as smooth and chiseled as a superhero’s, in the process supporting her defense, “If I am a token, I’ll be a token to be reckoned with,”[1] Later on he began cutting himself, and other on-stage abuse, distorting his influences (Morrison and Jagger) and adding an element he seems unable to articulate even now, “From Morrison, it was the same way but with the elements of surprise. Here you have surprise, you have poetry and you have a further violation, [emphasis mine] a little different take on this sort of thing.”[2] On first listen the music and video seems to affirm these trumped up hyper-male sexualities, thrusting its way through all sorts of “manly” abuse, rock riffs and such. Yet, if this were where Funhouse stopped, it would have disappeared like many other albums of that period. What The Stooges’ music makes visible, and what Iggy’s stage presence amplifies, is a disdain for this normative macho embodiment. Though his body appears classically proportioned, his movements violate a masculinity cut from these postures. There remains something incredibly sexual about his presence on the stage, yet the gestures and movements of his arms, legs and torso don’t contribute to the guitar/brain-between-the-legs rock or watered down “anarchist” punk that followed. Instead, there is something scarecrow-like (as Spicer might say, “The scarecrow nevertheless, quite naturally resents the confidences.”), something loosely connecting the pivotal 7^th chords of the guitar with the joints of his body. Songs like “L.A. Blues” force us to re-cognize rhythm, not as nominal repetition but as exhaustive reiteration of difference. Sexual, yes. Auto-erotic, absolutely. But phallocentric . . . more difficult to say.

Either way, The Stooges’ Funhouse performs and embodies the contradictory but affirmative frontier between disdain and love, which I find inextricably intertwined in the imaginary of Derrida’s auto-affection. His concept describes the necessary auditory and visual separation from self that spaces and “bodies” oneself and the Other—the experience of the same (myself) is also and at once, being the experience of the other. To some this theory shuts out the world, but it seems to me that the sheer force in Iggy’s auto-affection, must manifest in an outside. If so, this suggests a social relationship: the self is not content with only imagining another but must correspond with this outside in a different way. The relationship draws into relief, it questions resolution in exclusively imaginary acts extended into the real, in this case through Funhouse’s various embodied questions: are you happy with spectatorship…do you recognize your body?…notice, it is not like mine…who are you touching in this crowd…what touch is this…which touch is someone…do you feel it when you touch me…is there someone, or just touching? Arguably then, auto-affection is relational and in the citations Iggy performs, love is shared as insufficiency-made-visible. It is a transgressive disdain for the real/virtual and self/other divide. One that requires an audience to participate, one that relies on another to respond, though this response may be silence, or drawing! And yet, its effacement is not a sacrifice, but through Iggy’s invitation, it instead becomes a shared violation of exclusionary individuality, an ecstatic and gritty exposure that blurs boundaries of audience and performer. With what sounds like an inhaled kiss, the addition of drums and the slow crawl of the bass accompany the lyric’s from “Dirt” exhuming this relationship:

Ooh, I been dirt

And I don’t care

Ooh, I been dirt

And I don’t care

Cause I’m burning inside

I’m just a yearning inside

And I’m the fire o’ life…

…And do you feel it?

Said do you feel it when you touch me?

In Iggy’s wild gesticulations, his double-jointed pirouettes, disdain emerges as this exposed fire, as this burning room in a city. There is a flummoxing abandon (or love?) of the corporeal, and it is a corporeal ambivalently sexed due to its repeated refusal to don suggestively normative shapes. A citation of gender that distorts a simplistic phallocentric image. Though argued to be proto-punk, the event between Iggy and his audience clearly differentiates Funhouse from later bands like The Sex Pistols, whose nihilism lacks the possibility for constructive transgression. I am caught up by this difference in The Stooges’ music, fascinated by the battered relation of masculinity and sexuality, the rhythm given to materiality, to dirt and dirtiness. I find myself in unique awe, in large part due to the refraction of the music through Iggy’s body. What is the connection? Obviously there is one, refreshingly, it is never what I predict. It breaks my learned senses of movement, of limb shape and of my capacity to remain only a spectator. At the same time, it bodies forth a paradoxical and incredibly erotic attraction to the viscerality of abandon, and the dance of raw matter.

As you can hear in the recording of the self-titled song “Funhouse” below, disdain also occurs in The Stooges recording techniques—augmenting and further distorting contemporary musical norms—through their willingness to overextend current recording technology. Funhouse was recorded with very few overdubs, but take after take after take … in some cases more than one hundred. The intent was to capture the group’s live intensity and interplay.  The sessions were arranged as if onstage, avoiding headphones and baffles, instead bringing in P.A. speakers, short stacks and having Iggy abuse a hand-held microphone. This caused an incredible amount of sonic bleed across the recording spectrum. Iggy used the microphone exactly as he did in live performances, distorting its amplification by practically swallowing it. Every song was recorded communally, and complete. This creates what I’ll call controlled ravaging, a meticulous tearing apart of something already laid bare. Like Iggy’s chest, the instruments sound raw, chiseling into each other’s sonic flesh, folding their disdain back upon themselves forging the limitations of the mixing board and microphones into instruments. Ravaging requires a certain (self?) lust and implies brutishness, and these qualities are a large part of the albums appeal for me. The Stooges take it upon themselves to brutishly disdain a climate: the bitter war in Vietnam and the rapidly growing shopping list of recipes for cultural repression taking hold in the 70’s. The album flails at the despair blooming in the culture wars, and the bewildering technological globalization. Following the logic from the aforementioned self-titled song, Funhouse the album responds both to and with “li[f]e in division in a shifting scene.”

Controlled ravaging requires abandon, and the album is soaked in it: a flinging outward of every manner, guitar riff, arm, torso, drumstick, gender norm, fashion norm, lyric, and the list goes on. A flinging somehow channeled through the microphone, through the inadequate audio equipment, as if the speaker cones had flipped inside out and the perfect storm pushed that cone into new waters. The concern is not so much with what will be hit, but that something out there needs to be hit, needs to be jarred into response. It resonates with The Stooges’ struggle to stand in as recorder of the limits of disfunctionality. Though the vocals are poorly synced, this video shows the initial lure of that short bass phrase, Iggy’s mysterious movements, and the very first proto-human call, from “Down On the Street:”

Yes, definitely there are elements of a word there in those first seconds, but it contends with a sharp squeal whose dual purpose is immediately mimicked, then transformed by the bass and guitar. Each instrument overextends itself, and more importantly its recording technology, mimicking the cameraman desperately trying to frame the flashing hieroglyphs of Iggy’s body as he almost disappears from view both onstage and in the crowd. At the same time, you can watch a certain element of engagement with the audience. That of a reaching, not entirely in a specific direction, but a reaching nonetheless; perhaps a reaching without grasping, an evasive foundation vibrated from the bass line? As Iggy asks in Dirt “Do you feel it when you touch me?” It seems that they do.

This “singing-of-the-electric-body-overextension” is what each musician touches on Funhouse. It’s the clash of encroaching tech upon squirming life we’re invited to hear and participate in. It’s a cataclysm of noises: Iggy’s shouts distort upon meeting the microphone; Steve McKay’s sax squalls as it slaps the mic; Ron Asheton (guitars) saws like a whip through the tangled cords across the floor unable to precisely align itself with the other shifting rhythms; Scott Asheton (drums) pounds the skins and Dave Alexander precisely hammers minimal bass lines, tattooing the phrase across any exposed body. The audience is particularly tattooed, begged to join in the event, as Iggy rolls across the floor where they are sitting, and in the above video of “T.V. Eye,” is lifted above the crowd momentarily, pointing toward the future. The musical field in which they call and respond to each other is turbulent, fluidity abutting fluidity, and the hand points anywhere: out, out there, targeting anticipation, arching its back, bending a bow, its crumpled silver glove shaking. This multifaceted abandon weaves a community from disdain, weaves a collective response to the overwhelming loss caused by the ongoing war machine called Vietnam. You can see it in the crowd in the first video above, as Iggy weaves his way, not looking for a path and disappearing for long periods and then… the spectacle has changed, he seems to be saying, “It’s out there and only our collective abandon will take us there.”

So there are political, physical, social, and a host of other bodies responding in this Funhouse, and within these mirrors the limits of musical reproduction echo their loss. The scream of “Looooooooooooooooord!” that opens “T.V. Eye,” is a plea, which upon close listening carries another voice on its back, a passenger of sorts.

It’s another extended guttural sound, stretching to become a reflection of the human, a voicing of the question, “What are bodies capable of?” Though the song below doesn’t come until years later, the band begins to formulate responses to this question with Funhouse, carrying a limp Iggy toward the incapable microphone. As the video continues the body disdains its initial collapse, pirouetting around 3:00 minutes in.

So, rather a long way of saying that I return because Funhouse is delicately poised: poised in vibrant disdain, in hot exhaustion, in the strained cusp of a rung out decade; poised against the Janus-like tension of cultural flailing, and in defiance to the reifying juggernaut of recording techniques and autotuners to come. I find myself at the end of this album, shouting out, “I feel awl-right, I feel awl-right, I feel awl-right” aware that “alright” has changed, that “awlright,” now is a passage, beginning with particular disdain and leading through abandon. Not to some transcendent moment, but to a paradoxical “failing better.” I think of it as a recording of the irrecordable, an arm that stretches from the confining dark circle of the record, or the silver reflection of ourselves in CDs or ipod screens, “to stick it deep inside.” A recording suspended in/as crackling air, a moment before the needles dropped…

~~~

From Johnny Cash at Folsom

“…

right

sound

proves

elusive

…”

Consider the amplification needed for a mess hall. First, you must shove the sound far enough into the room that those in the back hear. Second, those in front must be able to withstand the decibels that those in the back, are comfortable with. Third, you must remember that most of these men are prisoners and so should be treated as such. You might have moral dilemmas that cause you to attempt to find the frequency that, if you’re in the front row, will damage your eardrums, and if you’re in the back, would rattle the tin mixing bowls in a highly irritating manner. Of course, both these ideas are rather subtle. You could just make it so the scum in the back couldn’t hear anyway since it was they, them who caused the…

“This is part of your punishment,” you joke.

James Belflower is the author of Commuter (Instance Press), which was voted 2009’s “Best Book Length Long Poem/Sequence by Cold Front Magazine; Bird Leaves the Cornice, winner of the 2011 Spring Gun Press Chapbook Prize; and And Also a Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez. His work appears, or is forthcoming in: New American Writing, 1913, EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Apostrophe Cast, & Greatcoat among others. He is pursuing a PhD in Contemporary Poetics at SUNY Albany and cocurates the Yes! Reading Series in Albany NY.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.

Some music is lonely. Solo voices, solo lead instruments are lonely. Trumpets push everyone away. Piano virtuosos are lonely figures. On television, singers are often isolated from the band that is backing them. What the lonely artist gives us is sympathy, a sense of other lonely people and how they survive. One can only bear so much of it, before reaching for some party music, or packing a tent and going to a festival.

For my fortieth birthday, I am returning to the bluegrass festival where I first learned to play the traditional repertoire with the shifting ensembles of jam sessions, gathered around charred campfires at noon and under streetlights at 3am, returning after a decade’s absence, my last long drive there from New Orleans, where I lived then, in the weird week after September 11, passed Wal-Mart parking lots in Texas and Oklahoma with marching bands and elaborate unfocused displays of grief and rage. I’ve bought my ticket, leaving Seattle, where I live now, at 8 am on September 11. I’ve bought a new case for my banjo so I can check it with the luggage rather than try to carry it on-board.

A few years ago, I tried to learn the fiddle, and traveled through airports carrying the instrument in its smart, civilized case, enjoying the approval of strangers rather than the suspicion and comedy that my banjo case usually engenders. Lately I have come to terms with myself as a needy character, driven and derided by vanity, with a history of “attention-seeking behavior.” Was I driven to the banjo because of its oddness rather than attracted to its intricate percussive rhythms and mysterious overtone? At seventeen, probably so. I stayed with it, however, because of seeing Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys in Manhattan, Kansas after spending a long psychedelic day on the Konza prairie; because I sat in the front row; because/despite Monroe, the patriarch of the style, directly asked my girlfriend for a date right in front of me and was not joking; because I shivered to the frisson of the finest and most complex art I had ever experienced, full blast. I was annihilated.

Rural, archaic musics have been persistently popular, rediscovered by every generation and newly imagined. In thirty years of following music obsessively, I’ve seen the rise and fall of musicians and movements, revivals and retirement, promising debuts, slow disappearances. I have spent a lot of time in the country, in small towns of Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, California, Washington, Oregon, Oklahoma, Alaska, Virginia, New York, Mississippi, and Alabama. I have only heard “rural music” and its fans in big cities and college towns. In the small towns, the soundtrack is more hip-hop than hillbilly, which is magnificent for them, but reminds me that folk, country, and bluegrass music are just a fantasy.

Music is fantasy. The more authentic I perceive a song to be, the more extreme the fantasy becomes upon reflection and investigation. Banjo twang is a signal of rural truth; hip-hop has its signals. New Orleans was the center of rap while I lived there, and I heard it everywhere. I was playing poker at four in the morning when news came over Q93 that Soulja Slim had died. We stopped playing for a few minutes. I lived for six years in the Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans, seven blocks away from Lil Wayne, the microphone controller who is “Hollygrove to the heart, Hollygrove from the start,” the same neighborhood that he names in “Zoo”: “Hollygrove ain’t no motherfucking Melrose/ Hollywood ain’t no motherfucking Hollygrove/ They could find your ass Monday in your Friday clothes.” Sure, it was a violent neighborhood, an ultraviolence that saved our hides, prompting us to leave New Orleans after a particularly awful weekend, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina. Afterward my neighbors said it was precisely those knuckleheads who dragged boats up and down the flooded streets in genuine, heartbreaking, courageous rescue, ferrying their fellow citizens to safety.

My writing-desk soundtrack since leaving has been a collection of New Orleans bounce from the 90s—DJ Jubilee, Hotboy Ronald, Katey Red, 5th Ward Weebie. Yet every Monday night I take my banjo over to Al’s Tavern for an informal jam session with a bunch of white people I don’t know very well and run through the bluegrass repertoire. The two musics don’t sound far different from bluegrass to me, overdriven, manic, repetitive, mad music rooted in complaint and pure expression of joy and body. The gulf between them is enormous and rigidly enforced. Bluegrass, bounce, skronk: these the adding machine part of my mind, riddled with dissonance, uneasiness, pain, with internal rules that seem at their extreme hokey, corny, Southern and they up my head with their driven stress.

Poetry is a fantasy, too. I am almost forty, don’t have a real job, no kids, my cat just died, the cat my wife acquired when we were in graduate school for writing, which was the first time she was in graduate school, and now she’s about to become a pharmacist, which is very sensible of her. Most of the writers I knew at twenty have given up. The most talented writers I’ve known have given up, and some are happy, some are miserable. The most valuable advice I heard in graduate school was from writers who lived in Missoula but were not on the faculty. “Be more vulnerable,” said one. Another: “Writers don’t fail, they give up. If you stick with it long enough, it works out. That might not happen until you’re forty, or sixty.” I published my first book of poems at thirty-seven, which seems old. Looking back I wouldn’t have liked my earlier work— imitative, uncertain, undecided, lazy, drunk and sanctimonious trials—to have been published, although I was very desperate to be published, a pathetic and unnecessary desperation that made me suspicious of my better tendencies, wary of really stretching out; a despair that made me turn against my mind, I think, for awhile. Only a fantasy as strong and true as music or poetry could be responsible for this state of affairs.

It’s very hard for people to admit that anything is sad. Maybe it’s an American or Midwestern thing. Simple and important, sadness is violently redirected. The past decade is a fantasy, now, like music and poetry. The sadness has been washed away in Old English-style warmongering, with the Department of Defense recently relabeling soldiers warfighters. A few weeks ago, a tornado destroyed a small town, Reading, Kansas, near my hometown of Topeka. It is sad. But the coverage from the Topeka Capital-Journal insists that it was not sad, it was an occasion for courage, a chance to reflect on traditions, an occasion for fundraisers with “attractions that included food, live music, games, a display of military vehicles and an evening fireworks show.” Sorrow can be reversed with consumer goods: “A Kansas Air National Guardsman whose home was destroyed by the May 21 Reading tornado will receive a free car Wednesday from a not-for-profit organization that provides free basic transportation to disadvantaged individuals and veterans. The group, Cars 4 Heroes…” Nothing is allowed to pierce our armor. It is as though our military heroes, a debased category in our imagination that extends to anyone in a uniform, will fight our sadness. We feel the sadness, feel great buckets of it pouring over us, but are not permitted to use the language of sadness. The last decade made me very sad. It made many people sad. It’s okay and enough to say it: sad. Sad. Old English has the word unrot for sad, the opposite of rot, “glad”, so “unglad,” while saed, ancestor of our modern sadness, merely meant “sated,” full, the heaviness of a good meal, that kind of weary pleasure.

“And I confess I find it hard/ speaking to people/ who are fond of outer space,” wrote the poet Stephen Dunn in “Turning Forty.” In the brief moment of reflection and confession that turning forty allows, I want to say something simple about sadness, without seeking the kind of attention that a silly hat or a faked broken arm elicits, the kind of attention that a song attracts, the kind that doesn’t ask for an answer. What I have to say about it I don’t know how to say in prose like this, but know how to approach in poetry, though I also know that poetry can’t quite name it either.

What happens in “Billy In the Lowground” comes closest to it. As you can hear and see in the videos, the song shifts from a major to a minor chord, in a song like “Billy in the Lowground,” which is an instrumental, can shift back and forth, G major to E minor, G to Em, establishing a pattern that pierces the heart, that says in the fantasy of music something akin to “I’m sad” or “They were sad” or “How sad,” and then in the chorus go from G to C, major and not minor, alluding to the promise of a fully harmonic resolution, not only to the notes but to the feeling the notes are pulling from the listener. The chorus backslides, gravity pulls it down to the minor. I don’t know who Billy is. I have seen enough of lowground not to wish anyone in it. It is my favorite instrumental to play because I learned a good break for it, a solo that uses a melodic method and spans the fretboard, allows for some improvisation, speeds up just enough to, when I play it right, catch the attention of someone in the crowd who had not perhaps been listening closely. I hunger for that moment of catching someone’s ear. I see what it does to the body. It is like hearing someone call for you with a forgotten name.

~~~

Massachusetts

Remember how quiet underwater

easy and infinite either
when they are discovered

or when we touch the frozen
ground and think how deep
that coldness must go on

either until the center of the earth

which is hotter than anything
but is never a human heat

or if pierce globe and go on
I cannot abide it
a frozen pond

John Sassamon was Massachusett

attended Harvard in 1653
spoke the language of the invaders

the frozen pond he was thrown in
probably by Puritans though
three Pokanoket were convicted

and died four thousand in the tension

between those truths
remember how ice breaks either

cleanly if particularly
thick or jagged
the way day would fragment

if thin the thinness

either when weather
turn or after a long cold

how cold the past
either is or isn’t
I was only in Hadley for an afternoon

read poems at the American Legion Hall

there was a dj we had a fine pasta
I bought a Scotch and soda in the basement

the next day I drove to Worcester thinking
maybe Jill and I would move there
years passed I have not returned

but in the legend of the angel of Hadley

two jurors who sentenced beheading
for King Charles the First and fled

here when monarchy was restored
America really was part of England huh
I read Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet

feel only the recognition I glimmer

for strangers wandered into a reunion
made Hadley their secret home hidden

decades by the local minister
beheading was still popular in Hadley
the one that had been done

hiding in rural towns that part which

wanted it done and keeps keen
a thing like a sword

legend is certainly legend as the town
never was attacked in any war
legend which feeds the migrant hunger

for a long hidden word from home

that can both be silent and heard
not to be the invader not to be cruel

I’ve been having good dreams lately
have not left the cat food open on the floor
though I have not returned to Massachusetts

not even the American Legion Hall in Hadley
with many lovely friends around and cold windows

Ed Skoog is the author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and the forthcoming Rough Day. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The New Republic and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.