Vinyl In Alphabetical

I saw the Thermals in 2010 (which was the second time I saw them; they come around Madison a lot), after their disappointing album Personal Life came out. My friend and I got to the bar they were playing at—this sketchy old performance venue the Annex—super early, and spent a bunch of time drinking at the bar.

At one point, my friend got up and went to the bathroom. When he was in there, Hutch Harris from the Thermals came in after him and proceeded to pee at the urinal next to him. My friend came out of the bathroom and said, “Dude, holy shit. I just peed next to Hutch Harris” and then Harris walked out a minute later. He walked up to one of the bouncers and told him something, and pointed at the bathroom. It turned out that the urinal Hutch was peeing in wasn’t functioning properly, and when he flushed it overflowed. And instead of just leaving it, like everybody else who peed there that night, he went and told someone. 

I feel like this is enough for me to respect Hutch Harris and the Thermals forever. This dude is not posing; he really cares about things more than the rest of us. 

1. The idea that Sub Pop, in 2012, would become a label that puts out jazzy, experimental hip-hop by Seattle women rappers is probably the most inconceivable thing that happened in music last year. The label that made money off the Shins and off Nirvana is now spending its time putting out records as inventive, earthy, and experimental as this. Sub Pop is maybe the greatest record label ever because it’s able change lanes and no one questions it. Could you even imagine Matador doing this?

2. I once defended this album on a podcast as my album of the month, and I feel like I probably “failed” at it. Sorry THEESatisfaction. Also I am going to fail defending them now. 

3. I saw them two months ago, and it was totally great. It turns out their vocals aren’t studio trickery in the least. They’re the real deal, and I can’t wait for their next album.  

Marquee Moon is a good bullshit detector record. Everyone who has ever bought it/downloaded it hasn’t heard a Television song, and all they know is that Television were, along with Talking Heads, Patti Smith and the Ramones, part of the first wave of NY Punk. And then you listen to the thing, and it turns out these guys are less the Ramones than they are the East Coast Grateful Dead, if the Dead’s music ever went anywhere and their guitar riffs locked into place like a subway on a track. Then you have to admit to yourself that this isn’t at all what you are looking for.

But then you realize that this is more tuneful than any Ramones album. And that what this lacks in the “authenticity” of someone like Richard Hell (who was in this band originally) it makes up for in actual musicianship. These guys could play the fuck out of guitars. Television are one of the best guitar bands of all time, and no one even realizes it. And sure, the Dictators had “fury” or whatever, but they never wrote one song that is as good as the title track off here.

So, for awhile, you live with the idea that this is an album that isn’t what you thought it’d be, then you realize that Television realized something before all the punks did. Anger and two-note riffs may get you the immediate respect of your peers, but 12 minute songs with 3 guitar solos live forever.  

BEST

CONCERT

MOVIE

EVER

I know it’s cliche now, because it’s been in every emotional movie trailer since 1993, and even people who generally don’t like the Talking Heads at least acknowledge its greatness, but it’s hard to not acknowledge “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” as the best Talking Heads song. It’s the Talking Heads song I’d want playing at my funeral, it’s the Talking Heads song I hear when I see a pretty girl, it’s the Talking Heads song I’d play to someone to tell them how it is on earth. And I know that seems so corny now, but that’s only because everyone realizes it’s great, and now it’s not unique to think that that song is the best Talking Heads song. 

Well, I’m not unique. I’m just a sad, cliched dude who once teared up when listening to this. 

With the exception of this reissued copy of Remain in Light, I got my other five Talking Heads albums from the same used records sale at my local store. They bought the inventory of some store in Illinois, and put out all the records in like 50 boxes on a Saturday morning. The first box I went to had every Talking Heads album ever released. It was crazy. It was one of the best scores I’ve ever had.

I got this record under different circumstances, and it’s my best friend Matt’s favorite story about me being a degenerate record collector.

In the summer of 2009, Matt and I were planning to move to Madison, WI, from St. Cloud, MN. I moved up to St. Cloud after I graduated the year earlier, because I wanted to get out of Oshkosh and the rent was cheap, and I assumed he wouldn’t flake out on paying rent since we had been friends for 15 years. So, we came in June to look for apartments to move into in September, and after we spent a whole day seeing some truly frightening shit holes, we went downtown with Matt’s girlfriend. 

I was astoundingly broke at this juncture in my life; my only means of income was being a music blogger, which meant I ate half a $2 frozen pizza for every meal. So we passed this record store, B-Side, and we go in for a minute, and I tell Matt and his girl that I needed to get out of there before I blew all my rent money.

So, I am sitting outside on the bench, people watching, when Matt comes out and says, “Dude, they have Talking Heads albums in there. On vinyl. Haven’t you been looking for that one with “Once in a Lifetime” for like three years?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they have that in there.”

So I say, “Oh, fuck.” And get up, and go spend $28 of the $340 in my checking account at the time, and immediately regret it.

But I don’t really. Because I found a copy of this, one of the original Ark of the Covenant records for my collection, one that I spent years and years looking for. If I had to take out money on a credit card to pay rent that month to buy this record, it was worth it.

So now anytime Matt and I go to a record store together, he always asks if there are any records there that would make me go “Oh fuck” anymore. And I tell him all of them do.   

Pitchfork: You wrote about how you didn’t know who Al Green was when you heard “Take Me To the River”, but then “tucked a throb of embarrassment under a rapidly constructed tinfoil hat of knowingness.” That speaks to anyone who writes about music, for sure.

JL: I’m a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas. Maybe I think it’s some kind of important ethical gesture, like, “I loved this when I was totally full of shit about it, and I might still be full of shit about it— I certainly didn’t have all these weird facts that I’m flinging at you to construct my authority.” I made it very much my business to be able to bore any other teenager on the subject of who Brian Eno was within a few months of hearing Fear of Music, but in fact I had no idea at all when I first laid eyes on his name.

This quote is from an interview with Jonathan Lethem about his book about the next Talking Heads album, Fear of Music. It applies here, because I see a lot of myself in the attitude Lethem mentions.

I feel like that book that Lethem wrote about the album captures perfectly what it’s like to be a teenager listening to an album, and at the same time, being an adult that can see how much bullshit the teenager carried around with them, ready to foist their own shit onto someone else, even if that shit is minutiae about Talking Heads albums. I’d like to think I’m past the point where I just fact dump on people to try to determine my self-worth, but I guess I’m really not. Because what’s this Tumblr other than an opportunity for me to try to prove to people that I know things, and that I am some kind of “expert?”

***

I think one of the fundamental problems with writing anything of seriously significant substance re: the Talking Heads is that they have drawn some of the best music writing, because they’re a band that drew in smart, nerdy dudes, which, then, as is the case now, is generally music writers. 

So, can I add much to the Fear of Music scholarship? Probably not. I know that it’s the second best Heads album, but that it’s maybe the best Heads album for listening to when you are mad bummed out. Go read Lethem’s book. It’s the best thing written about this album. 

“But since death is inevitable we don’t have to deal with it (it’ll deal with us when it decides to). What we do have to deal with is the psychic, physical, and fusion diseases wrought during our so-called lives as byproducts of the elemental clash. In other words we’re all terminally psychotic and no doctor, hospital, pill, needle, book or guru holds the cure. Because the disease is called life and there is no cure for that but death and death’s just part of the set-up designed to keep you terrified and thus in bondage from the cradle to the crypt so ha ha the joke’s on you except there’s no punch line and the comedian forgot you ever existed as even a comma.

David Byrne knows all these things, he has stared wide-eyed and steady of leg and hand into this endless abyss which is the only thing anywhere worthy of being called reality, and his songs are certainly not advertised as cure as I’m sure he’d be the first to not only admit but insist; what they are is little maps, diagrams of various topographical outcroppings of the disease with sly asides on what curious permutations the latest hybrids take formwise (the content essentially boils down to the same thing for Byrne and all the rest of us everyone everywhere, as delineated above) and the reassurance implicit in the fact that the very appearance of these rarefied phobias and tactile dyslexias on record means that you are not the only self-enclammed screwball suffering from such arcane angstwiches. But you should follow David’s example and be a little more observant so as who knows maybe even not catch the next popfly virus as it comes whizzing by (ha, fat chance): “Some people don’t know shit about…the…AIR…”— Lester Bangs

Quarterly reminder that Lester Bangs can write circles around everyone. This massive article he wrote on the Heads is one of my favorites. He talks about how the Heads are making music that highlights the separation of society, the information deluge, and the possibility that we are all fucked. Read the whole thing over here. 

I’ve been sort of dreading reaching this end of my record collection. For at least the last seven years, when anyone asks me— as they inevitably do, when they find out I write about music—who my favorite band of all time is, I always settle with Talking Heads. If I got asked that question in 2005, it was probably Led Zeppelin, by default.

At some point, that answer became Talking Heads, and I’m not sure I can properly explain why that is. I love that they’re bookish, nervous, and concerned with the end of the world. I love that they make songs about serial killers, and about how all we really want out of life is to feel some kind of happiness, and that doesn’t always come easy or at all. I love that they had to break up because David Byrne treated everyone like shit, because it proves that no matter how enlightened and respected as an artist you are, you can still fuck up your interpersonal relationships. I love that they are perennially underrated, that everyone fails to include them in the best band of the ’80s talk, that they are often scrubbed from the history of ’70s punk because idealists like Legs McNeil never liked them. I love that their concert movies are oblique and weird. And also, their first five albums are basically flawless. They are maybe the only rock band since the Beatles/Dylan to totally nail five LPs in a row. 

But, do I have it in me to write about how much I like the Talking Heads across six full posts? Probably not. Which is why I know I’m going to flake and do an image post, and feel like I am letting myself down somehow. I want to be able to make you FEEL like I FEEL about the Talking Heads, and I am already ceding defeat. But that’s sort of the point, I guess. Saying something is “your favorite” is sort of the point. I can’t explain it more than that.

I am posting this from work, so please excuse the tiny image.

Anyway, I got this record in the mail this week and it’s already my album of the year. I reviewed it for Potholes in My Blog this week, so I don’t know if I have much to say about it other than that it totally rules.

I guess I’d also like to use this opportunity to thank you for reading this blog, and also to hoist some more of my writing on you. I wrote this short story commemorating the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell and I am proud of it. Read it at Consequence of Sound.

“We’re up all night to get lucky”—Pharrell Heidegger Williams