All I ever wanted…

The Record Daily is on vacation! This means no new posts until after September 5. In better news, the frequency of posts will be more … frequent after that. Have fun, kids. Listen to lots of records and tell me all about them….
-Manjula

The Band

Capitol Records, 1969

A few things I know about The Band:

1. They’re Canadian, mostly. Just like fellow great rocker Neil Young.

2. It was this band the vaulted and honorable Bob Dylan chose to help him become electric, to turn folk into rock, to play Judas to the quiet strumming of the 60s and step right out towards the 70s, 80s, future, end.

4. These boys on this album cover look like any boys on Valencia Street now, when I hit the corner from my apartment and trip on them standing by the fancy sandwich deli/corner store – always in groups of threes and fives, walking in tight clusters or standing next to piles of bicycles, wearing beards like fathers and rough plaid coats that summon the spirits of working class men most likely last embodied by their fathers’ fathers’ generations, before boys all left for the city and realized that new urban poverty was easier, in a way, less work and more girls, and before tiny drugged out angry boys in Seattle ever existed and wore these shirts, too. I can see the boys on this album cover playing to the Monday night crowd at Amnesia, except of course nowadays there would be less instruments and more electronics, and the music would somehow still be rock and roll despite its country acoutrements. And I would really like it but feel like it’s academic in a way: studied. Feel like it lacks some sort of genuine.

5. But the musicianship is impeccable and the songs are still catchy as heck. I like these early contained years, 1969 or so, best. Honest, I wasn’t ever a Last Waltz girl, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

6. I have been having sing-a-longs with my friends lately. Two, sometimes three guitars, strummed with bar chords and the simplest of rhythms, favorites of the rock and pop and blues genres across decades sung to chords we looked up on the Internet. We are usually full from some awesome dinner, smiles and lyrics and melodies projected and sung into each other’s sated and shadowed faces in dim living room light or dark garage hang-outs. Sometimes I have mixed feelings about sing-a-longs, am a bit reluctant, and I’m not sure why. Is it because we’re not very “good”? Is it my youthful stage fright rising again, a fear that magically only visits me when music is involved? Is it because I miss earlier sing-a-longs, with punker guitar players in smaller apartments in harder cities when I was younger and hungrier?

Max has an American folk song he’s learning on the mandolin called “Cripple Creek,” and before my friends and I play the traditional version of the song in Kevin’s garage in Oakland while we drink away the week with homebrewed beer on old couches, Pete and I are bound to go off for a bar or two of The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek” and I’m bound to wonder internally how these pretty kids from Canada ever got into American traditional music and decided it spoke for them. Or how we did, for that matter. Kevin tells us there was an influential miner’s strike at Cripple Creek, Colorado (there’s also a Cripple Creek in Virginia), and I tell Pete that next time we’re just figure out the chords and play The Band’s version.

The traditional song Cripple Creek is dirty, the lyrics filled with ribald metaphors and dudes gettin’ some from loose ladies and a songsongy chorus that echoes out of Kevin’s garage and down the MacArthur Boulevard hill in the early night and bounces over Lake Merritt like a memory long after our group attempts at playing it. Once a visiting friend-of-a-friend played this song along with us, a real solo from an actual trained and practicing musician, using the mandolin like a violin and plucking out the melody below her fair chin. That’s how I hear it now, always, and also I hear myself singin’ The Band’s version with a fake musical Southern accent and I hear how far away we are from wherever Cripple Creek really is, wherever it was in 1969 and 1869 and I wonder how close The Band thought they were really getting to it. They weren’t stupid, no doubt. They saw it and waded in it and also knew it wasn’t theirs. But somehow in doing so it became theirs, too. Perhaps that’s how those boys on Valencia feel about their plaid jackets, or how us amateurs in the garage feel about our ripped guitar tabs. We’re doing this. And so, it’s ours.

The Rumpus Daily: Time (The Revelator)

I wrote a feature for the Rumpus series “Albums of Our Lives” and it’s live on the interwebs today! The topic: Time (The Revelator), by the great Gillian Welch. Also some stuff in there about my life and Santa Cruz and earthquakes and old cars. Here’s a snippet:

There is a feeling you have at a pivotal moment — a big, almost spiritual, tilt-a-whirl feeling — that your next phase is lying in wait close by. Whether it pounces isn’t up to you; you’ve put something in motion and now you’ll reap whatever time chooses to do with it. I heard this song and I swore right there, on I-5, in the old car with the bad radiator smoking its way over the mountains that connects California to its greenest of neighbors:

I’ll go back to Cali / Where I can sleep out every night
Watch the waves and move the fader / Time’s the revelator.

Now get thee on over to The Rumpus and read the rest. And don’t forget to comment – the internet loves it when you comment on it.

-Manjula

Here Come the Warm Jets

E.G. Editions, 1973

I come home from dance class around 8pm and it’s already dark. It hasn’t been lately, but tonight the fog helped accelerate the official pending end of long summer days. I stash my bike in the back area behind my building and walk up the narrow wooden steps to my apartment and I can see the neighbors through their rear kitchen window.

My next-door neighbors are millionaires, mildly famous notables in the educational reality television world, and the kitchen of the much-bought-and-renovated house they live in is all silvery steel and marble and sparkle. There’s one of those big steel hose attachments in the sink, like the one that spouted water so hot it burned my hands when I washed dishes as a young busser in a restaurant in the Marina a couple decades ago. Through the small square window above the neighbors’ sink I see a woman with brown hair and an indiscernable face manipulating the hose like a snake tamer would, dancing with plateware in the light of the shine from a polished countertop espresso machine. She speaks to someone unseen and her mouth moving is part of her dance.

When I open the back door to my apartment, sound leaks through. Max is already here, waiting for me after work to eat dinner and watch a movie. He’s put a record on, choosing one from the large stack next to the stereo I keep lined up for future writing fodder and cranking it up louder than I usually do. Overhead the music is murky with complexity: funny sounds, guitar lines made with electronic assistance, and low, singsong vocals.

Max and I enter into a chorus of “Hello?” “Hello!” echoing down my long hallway from the living room where he is to the back of the kitchen, where I am. Unused to the acoustics of my apartment, Max isn’t able to determine where the sound of my voice is originating in the mix beneath the blaring stereo. I see him silhouetted in the frame of the hallways doors: beneath the soft yellow light from the lamp by the couch he looks solid, and his white shirt glows orange like his hair. He goes to the bay window in the living room on the streetside of the apartment, opens the window to the quiet blue night, and looks outside. “Hello?”

For two seconds I am in this moment between windows. The neighbor dances with the silver stainless steel and my sweetheart in yellow warmth searches for me on the street below and I am watching everyone and hearing, over everything, the sonic space-time wonk of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp and some of their buddies playing in the dress-up box and declaring: I’ll take your wall of sound, your riches and your lovesongs and your occasional keyboard, and I’ll put ‘em front and center. Shine your spotlight on sound and have some fun with us, baby.

I’m not going to “review” Here Come the Warm Jets today. It’s famous, it’s on a zillion Best Albums Ever lists, and people who like rock music either like Eno or are not interested in Eno or reference Eno in order to appear to be more record-geeky than they really are or not. Find this album in your local record store or your online music sharing thingy, keep your preconceptions to a minimum, and listen to it at a very, very high volume.

I’m going to finish my coffee and think about the small moments, the minutes when albums and songs push into your life in unexpected, desired ways. The sight of my living room windows from the street below them as I approach my apartment, the lights on and yellow in the blue night fog and the window blinds turned open by the person waiting for me inside and the stereo, loud and warm.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor — F# A# ∞

Constellation Records, 1997

The skyline was beautiful on fire all twisted metal stretching upwards …
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it like a daydream or a fever

Then the guitars come in.

Slow-builds are the currency these children of northern landscapes favor. Maybe it’s to do with the skies norther and bigger, or the nights colder, or the capability of cultures even ever so slightly different than American to take a teeny bit more time with their climaxes. Whatever the reason for their capability to build and rise and fall musically, it is “F-sharp A-sharp Infinity”, this album, live and smoking, that Godspeed You! Black Emperor will be playing when our cities burn and it is this band, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who will still echo through canyons when we are no longer bound by squares and steel.

Or at least that’s how it felt two days ago, when I wasn’t in urban canyons and instead was in real ones. GY!BE albums are always a soundtrack to something, but most often when I hear them or choose to put them on the stereo it is because I want to accompany the epic ups and downs of cities, car trips, rush hours, the sunset behind the façade of the apartment building across the street, the scary sense when the night is nothing but sirens that this could be the end of us. Their songs are mostly wordless and feature a lot of different melodies – guitars thin and phat, distorted and chorusy and unplugged, fast and slow. The drone of the slow rise to a cohesive melody that just builds and builds and then explodes into crystalline clarity, washing clean the mishmash ruin of all that screams around us in these daily urban lives. They make noise that is pretty and varied and always, even in its jokiest or rough moments, always epic. I don’t listen to them often anymore, and when I do I listen for the symphony of my daily life.

But two days ago I wasn’t here and I wasn’t listening to anything. I was in the mountains, teetering on hungry lungs at 10,000 feet up, and the sky around me was so thin it conducted sound faster than down here in town, it amplified space in new ways, it was quiet but every thing I did felt loud. My friends and I, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra, talking and joking and crunch crunch crunching our blistered feet across rocks of every hue, between slides of snow and shale, above and inside and perched on the lip of a lake drowned between mountains, reflecting us up at ourselves over every pass. Yeah, no city here.

I want to write all the things people always like to write about being in “nature” and how it is different than not being in nature. About how coming back it takes a day or two for all the walls we live by to seem regular again — the way everything is enclosed and squared off in towns, the noise having so much to bounce against and the way in which the sounds and grinds of the city are my accustomed spacial soundtracks.

At night everything was blue, but first it was the color of fish jumping up rivers, and then it was the color of slate tumbling down after you step on it, and then it was blue. Stars bigger than the continents from which we run to them. Violins couldn’t do better than this.

We woke up one morning and fell a little bit more down.

In the morning on the lake the world was light and new-gray before the sun rose over the pass. Everything around felt both thin and immovable, granite strewn like children’s toys across the valley displaying the whim and violence of eras. Once the sun came, announcing its arrival with a rapid rollback of shadows that swept across the basin like a wave, there was nothing to do but join in. Rise, sleepy, wash in snow’s drippings, shiver and laugh and hear your daily routine bounce down the river and away.

To return from silence, from physical intimacy involving only elements, from the pause-button simultaneity of this natural landscape: simple/majestic; cold/hot; up/down; quiet, loud, quiet. To return feels messy and imperfectly composed. To return to cracked sidewalks not cracked boulders, to brakes squeaking not bats squeaking, to the messy crude beauty of the cities we’ve built seems callous. Everything seems callous. I want to hear the rocks fall.

So I put on this record in the morning before work, trying to sound-track my way back into the life I’ve chosen, into the locked groove, in this destructive and ridiculous and ugly city I’ve helped build. This destructive and ridiculous and ugly city I also love. And I listen for the composition, the sound, the arrangements that illustrate what guitars and amplifiers think it sounds like when a skyline falls. When it’s gone, maybe we will all hear better. Maybe we’ll be blue again.

I open my wallet and it’s full of blood.