It Isn't Forever

Several years ago my friend Mindy offered both of us a writing challenge.  The topic was making a mix-tape for a person one doesn’t know.  We both wrote fictional stories around this notion, and even though they were fictional, I believe the seeds of both stories contained nuggets of tragic truth.  I know mine did.  Creating mix tapes, especially during my teens and twenties was a passion for me.  They were important for personal use and for connecting with friends.  Plus, they are legendarily supposed to be some sort of powerful romantic audio love letter that can and will win the heart of a crush.  It makes for a magical idea, but I’m not so sure of its actual effectiveness.  It never stopped me from daydreaming about this possibility. 

Mix tapes (or the modern equivalent – CD, or more likely, streaming playlist) were always important to me.  I have always made them. It has been going on for even longer than I’ve been buying music. They used to come along fast and furious. I could and have cranked them out for myself to listen to in the car, or Walkman or to simply catalogue a moment in time.  In 1986, on a school night, for no apparent reason, I created a tape for my own enjoyment titled October 18, 1986 (the rainy evening it was born), and it included three songs named “Shame.”  This became an annual tradition for a few years – all containing at least one song titled “Shame” (that’s a lot of shame), and then was reborn as a CD series after receiving a kidney transplant on an October 18^th.  Mostly though, these mixes have been made for friends, co-workers, classmates, and relatives. I’m not sure why, other than my near psychotic need to share my love of music. What better way is there than sharing the actual music?  It’s much more effective than my efforts to write about it.  Perhaps all of this has been practice for the dream scenario mentioned above (and sadly rarely ever implemented) – the mix tape for a crush or a girlfriend.

During this Covid-19 pandemic home time, like so many, I’ve been purging junk that is taking up space around my place.  I’ve been browsing through a giant stack of old spiral notebooks, mostly dating back to 1991-93, full of writing - old record reviews, short stories, several drafts of a mission statement of sorts for the fledgling This Wreckage ‘zine, a disturbing number of lists of personal single and album rankings - my own strange version of Billboard countdowns, and a few sketched out song lists for potential mix tapes.  Unfortunately, there is no sign of a playlist for a particular mix tape that I made that has become legendary in my mind.  It’s a mix I made for a girl, where I laid everything bare.  A collection of songs that were able to break my heart and thrill me with shivers.  If only I could hear that collection again.  Sadly, I do not remember what exactly wound up on that Maxell cassette.  I have some ideas and some pretty sures, but with too much alone time on my hands, I have become obsessed with the notion of recreating this long forgotten mix.

Nineteen Ninety One was a really difficult year for me.  I had to drop out of college and move back home to the isolation of the Oregon coast, due to my mom’s serious health issues that would lead her down the road of undergoing long distance kidney dialysis (the closest clinic was at least an hour away from our home) and seriously declining health, leading to her unfortunate passing nine months later.  Plus I had my own related health problems (genetics!) that landed me in the hospital for about a month, due to a botched surgery.  Let’s just say that recovery was slow and painful.  It felt like the table my life resided on had been flipped over suddenly, leaving me blindly searching for some sort of solid ground to stand on.  So, I did what I had mostly done up to that point in life, I shoved all the pain, fear, and uncertainty down into my gut and tried to rebuild some sort of foundation to stand on.

The following year found me back at my High School-era job making pizzas, shuffling through life, creating a handful of Xeroxed ‘zines with Wil and trying to get them some exposure, and then eventually returning to a different school in Seattle that fall for three months.  Why three months?  Well, in December, I found out that I needed another surgery, so at the end of 1992 I packed everything up and moved back home, which honestly didn’t feel like much of a home anymore.

For much of my late teenage years and into my twenties, I battled depression.  I always chalked it up to the tumultuous times that young adults are always told about, you know, never fitting in, not cool enough, no love life, no taste for partying, spending most of my time alone, etc.  No big deal.  Swallow it down.  Rinse and repeat.  Hold onto my nature of being quiet and even keeled.  Yet, this time, after dealing with another major surgery, things were different.  I began to talk more, I began sharing my thoughts, and my insecurities.  I became an open book.  Once I returned to work at the old pizza joint, I remember being a 21-22 year old, working with a lot of 15-16 year olds, and I felt like a complete and utter failure.  Many of my friends were closing in on their college graduations and here I was in the local teenage hangout asking about the town gossip from a boy who was still a year away from shaving once a month.  That kid became a proxy therapist for me as I blabbered on and on about how life sucks and why.  I could no longer hide my depression - my total sense of loss.  Everything bubbled up to the surface. 

Now that I had become an open wound, a raw nerve, I began to yearn for my life from two-plus years prior.  I missed the idea of possibility, potential, and hope.  I started to reach out to the few people I knew from school, which included a young woman who, during my dark years away, had become to mean the world to me.  I couldn’t get her out of my mind.  She became some sort of ideal who inspired me to become a better person.  I can see it in those This Wreckage mission statement rough drafts I tossed recently.  There was a desire to broaden my horizons, connect with people, and to offer a place for open expression.  It was about this time the mix-tape plan hatched in my head.  I would mail it to her and it would be a compilation that laid out the story of my scrambled emotions and yearning heart and to let her know how important she is.

 

This is where things get hazy.  I have a feeling that I opened the tape with the solo live rendition of Mark Eitzel’s “Firefly.”  I had been obsessed with that whole album (Songs of Love Live), and that song in particular for a nearly couple of years by that point.  Though, Eitzel’s sad sack “Thanks for coming” that opens the song, or the “I’m always fucking this part up” apology during his guitar bridge, have become repeated jokes over the years within the small circle of my friends.  It’s the warbles and imperfections of his soaring repeated howls over his loss (“Where did you go?”) of a loved one has made people I’ve shared it with laugh, albeit uncomfortably.  It’s a heart wrenching song that never fails to send debilitating shivers down my spine.  That temporary notion of fireflies was strong in those times, and I think I likely bookended things and closed the tape with the Magnetic Fields’ beautiful “100,000 Fireflies.”  Long before Stephin Merritt graced most of his songs with his droll baritone, and every album would be based on some sort of gimmick, his songs were sung by the folk-sounding Susan Anway, whose voice managed to infuse the words with a simple melancholy.  I purchased the 7” single for this song during the height of my love of loud, fast, abrasive music (industrial, hardcore, noise).  However, this quiet, fragile, unique sounding song about the bittersweet nature of love couldn’t have been a more perfect representation of my mindset.

“I went out to the forest and caught
A 100, 000 fireflies
As they ricochet 'round my room
They remind me of your starry eyes
Someone else's might not have made me so sad
But this is the worst night I ever had"

 

Elsewhere, I’d like to imagine that I put on something by the Field Mice whose plaintive uncomplicated songs are the type that no one is supposed to like, because it's too hard to admit their sheer vulnerability have such much emotional power. I’m afraid the spare plea for physical contact of “It Isn’t Forever” was the choice I may have made for this collection.  It’s a song that begs to be heard, while alone, late at night, when the last thing in the world you want is to be alone.  “It Isn’t Forever” alternates quiet verses of longing with loud abrasive instrumental passages that, like the title, display the all too often fleeting nature of intimacy.

 

I must have also put on the majestic and invigorating love song “Sunshine Smile” from Adorable, because it was this girl’s electric eyes that captured my initial attention, dropped my jaw, froze me in place, and placed about 100,000 fireflies ablaze in my stomach.  I cannot hear this song without thinking of her.  Speaking of which, I would’ve been remiss if I hadn’t have placed Ride’s crashing single “Taste” onto this tape.  Again, the chaotic burst of pure energy that drives the song, Laurence Colbert’s unbelievable rollicking attack on the drums, and the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ that come in about 30 seconds into the song make for the exact representation of what was going inside my mind and body every time I was anywhere near her presence, and for long after.  It doesn't hurt that "Taste" was released not long after that first time I was awestruck by her.  It became my constant adrenalized soundtrack to guide me through her presence.

 

There’s a chance I may have doubled down on the Mark Eitzel pain, when he moonlighted for a few songs as the vocalist for the creative instrumental band Toiling Midgets.  The turmoil and self-flagellation that he goes through in the searing “Golden Frog” can only end with a repeated conclusion to himself “you were weak.”  A feeling that I often felt of myself then and now.  The anthem of someone who is often too afraid to take chances in order not to disrupt whatever tiny fragments of comfort remain. 

A good balancing follow-up to that abasement could’ve been “Awesome Sky” from Boston punk rockers Moving Targets.  I'm about 87% certain that this amazing instrumental was near the end of side A of the mix.  Despite being absent lyrics, this song may have encapsulated my emotions better than all of the other soul-baring lyrical songs included.  Its restless energy, its earnest search for that glimpse of an 'awesome sky' that keeps getting momentarily obscured by something. Once we reach that triumphant sight (what a chorus!) the song reaches incredible heights like a stellar sunset poking out between clouds or over a magnificent horizon.  Yet like the sun disappearing, the song quietly runs out of steam and disappears.  Gone for good.  Leaving us astonished and inspired.

It’s difficult to know how I filled all 90 minutes of this tape.  Could I have gone for it and crammed it entirely with spirit shredding content?  Was I that willing to be exposed?  Perhaps I threw on something such as Concrete Blonde’s delectable wizened cover of Leonard Cohen’s remarkable “Everybody Knows,” to keep the thread alive but not so damn direct, or the surprisingly groovy and tender love song to planet Earth: “Living in the Rose,” from the normally political and intense New Model Army – a song that would’ve been brand new at that time.  I had to have included something from the Sundays too.  They were and are one of my all-time favorites who wrote a ton of the types of songs to fill this brand of mix-tape.  I imagine that I would’ve snuck the stunningly beautiful and brief b-side “Noise,” an ode to silence and solitude on there as a tasty set up for their second album highlight “Goodbye.”  The first single to follow up their flawless debut is indescribably pretty as it builds to a satisfying and dramatic climax, before ending with the inevitable cold send off to her now former lover.  A dose of reality crashes into the dreams of heaven.  That was it.  A goodbye wasn’t needed in this case.  It was over before it had a chance to begin.

 

These songs I’ve mentioned are merely educated guesses as to what made it onto that tape.  I remember dubbing it on a lazy music filled sunny spring afternoon.  I distinctly remember being abuzz from the emotional impact the lovelorn songs had over me after completion.  I remember feeling completely despondent, yet alive with an unidentifiable sense of accomplishment.  This recorded cry for attention was likely a terrible mistake, but I knew I had to do something.  I was bursting with love to give and utterly incapable of believing the notion that I could ever receive that kind of love in return.  I could not and still cannot imagine it, so the whole thing was an exercise in futility. 

 

By the time autumn of that year came around, I had gone back to bottling everything up.  I nearly stopped speaking entirely.  An overwhelming sense of loss and emptiness swallowed me.  A callus formed around me creating a numbness that still encompasses me to this day.  I have been smashing frustrations, disappointments, sadness, and illness into my gut for so long that there is no room for anything else.  The bubbling over anxiousness, excitement, passion, and most important, anticipation that filled that mix tape and the reason behind it stand as a symbol for everything I feel I’m missing.  I think the idea of recreating that grouping of particular songs, despite the sorrow attached to them, is a tiny spark of life buried deep within my clouded mind fighting to get out.

I’m not sure it can.

Out of the Garden

Tancred

Out of the Garden

(Polyvinyl)

Holy 1994!!  This is all I could think of when I first heard “Control Me” from Out of the Garden, Tancred’s third album.  This was my introduction to Tancred, Jess Abbott’s apparent side project.  Who is Jess Abbott?  Well, all I know is that she plays (or played?) guitar for Now, Now, whose 2012 album Threads was my #10 pick of that year (see here).  However, this does not sound like a side project.  Instead it sounds like a well-rehearsed and seasoned rock trio who were raised on a heavy dose of “alternative rock” radio.  The best music is able to transport one’s mind to another place or time or emotion and this album transports me directly to the early to mid-90s – the time after Nirvana’s big breakthrough and major record labels (remember those?) were signing any band who employed loud guitars and pop hooks to huge contracts.  This is not a slight, as Tancred have captured the best of those times with genuine energy, direct coming of age lyrics, and fantastically abrasive guitars.

Tancred utilize the loud/quiet/loud approach that Nirvana used so well, but then if you throw in the buzzing and bright melodies of bands such as Veruca Salt, The Breeders, Julianna Hatfield, and the under-appreciated That Dog (whose Anna Waronker co-produced this album) it all comes alive and sounds as vibrant and exciting as ever.  Abbott is an amazing and versatile guitarist and this trio sound like they are having fun with these songs, which is contagious. 

The three-minute pop numbers like the opening trio of “Bed Case,” the drum overloaded in-the-red bursts of “Joey,” and “Control Me” all sound FM radio ready and are as endlessly catchy as anything of its kind and fun as hell.  But it’s the more complex and darker tunes like “Not Likely” and the guitar only “Hang Me” that give this album some balance and variety.  There is an abundance of sexual euphemisms, disgust, work angst, and a newly discovered confidence all over Abbott’s lyrics and this is all best encapsulated in the explosive “Pens”, whose off-kilter verses careen into the oddball chorus of “I’m incredibly healthy in my head / It’s crazy how stable I am.” 

The album fully blossoms for me on the second side.  The quietly angry and confused “Hang Me” melds seamlessly into the album’s fastest and catchiest song “Sell My Head.”  Then comes the dark humor of “Poise,” with a chorus to die for, or kill for, in this case.  The closing “Pretty Girls” is both a deep album ender and a teaser that leaves us wanting more.  What else can one ask for? 

(https://tancred.bandcamp.com/)

Tancred "Bed Case"

Love and other Demons

When I first bought UK band Strangelove’s debut album Time for the Rest of Your Life in the spring of 1994, I found it to be an endlessly long, overdramatic, bombastic collection of songs that I listened to constantly. Patrick Duff’s vocals are so overblown that it could easily be a deal breaker. He seems to do his best at channeling the special vocalizations of William Shatner (which were making a comeback during that time, come to think of it, as his Transformed Man had been released on CD for the first time on a hip indie label) if he could actually sing. Okay, maybe his vocals reminded more of Shatner’s nuanced acting. Whatever the case, it was a bit much, but somehow worked. Whenever I hear the piano ballad “Low-Life” on that album, I imagine a packed Wembley Stadium (or whatever) swaying together, with lighters held aloft and burning bright, all chanting along while choking back their burgeoning emotions. Really, it was sickening then, and still is now, yet, I found myself listening to that album a lot during 1994. I first learned of the band in 1993, when I was a subscriber to the Rough Trade singles club. I sure miss those old singles clubs. I was a long-time subscriber to the Sub Pop and Rough Trade clubs as well as the unbelievably cool Archive Series on Independent Project Records. Anyway, the 7” A-Side was named “Zoo’d Out” and I pretty much ignored it. The song somehow stuck with me enough that I took a chance on their debut CD at an extreme import price, when I happened upon it at Ozone Records nearly a year later (none of their records were released in the US). In the long run, it’s always been Strangelove’s second (of three) long player that has been the go to selection when I decide I need an injection of their overdriven melodrama, so out comes the appropriately titled Love and Other Demons.




The first of the material I heard after the debut arrived in 1996, when I ran across the double CD single “Beautiful Alone.” Before I go on about this fantastic three minute pop-nugget, I must complain about that era of “double singles.” These things were the curse of collector obsessive’s like me. Labels took advantage of us by releasing an artist’s non-LP B-sides across two separately sold CD singles, forcing us to buy two copies of the same single. This act supposedly boosted the chart status and sales of a single and it got out of control in the mid-90s, when some singles were released with separate non-LP B-sides across every format (2 CDs, 10” & 7” vinyl, etc). It was truly an evil practice. Anyway, where was I? Oh right, “Beautiful Alone” is pop music at its lush finest. It’s more upbeat, to the point, and downright catchy than anything on their debut. A soft string arrangement and an acoustic strum are carried along by a driving bass surge, chiming guitar fills and perfectly timed cymbal crashes. During the summer of 1996, ask anyone, I could not get enough of this addictive piece of narcotic bliss. I remember driving around with Wil, Liz and Midori one cloudy Saturday afternoon in Vancouver of all places listening to this song over and over on our way to a small party at a stranger’s home. The warm glow of the song forced me to buy a used and cheap silk shirt for the occasion and was a perfect soundtrack to a fun day and evening.

After hearing this song a million times, the album became a much sought after item, despite yet again having to delve into the realm of high import prices and unreliability of sources to track this stuff down. In this case, I turned to the Bay Area music shop Mod Lang. I phoned them up, asked if they had it in stock and then promptly placed my order. I cannot reiterate enough how much work went into finding my music of choice back then! Again, the effort was worth it, as this album became one of my favorites of that year. Strangelove had trimmed back the fat of their debut considerably, but not enough to lose the flavor. The opening song (and eventually the third single) “Living with the Human Machines” kicks things off with their most aggressive and explosive track. Its pounding beat and siren guitars urge on the still over the top vocals of Patrick Duff. The upfront message of this song is like a slap in the face - a warning to wake up and notice the isolated direction that our society is heading. “20th Century Cold” (back then I never thought about living in the 21st century) continues this theme with some sharp lyrics: “I see myself reflected in the television screen / somewhere far away / I can hear myself scream.” Even better is the angry, lullaby-like “Spiders and Flies,” which asks us to “meet the new world nobody can find.” The world wide web never sounded so ominous as it does throughout this album (“it’s a spider’s web just above your head”), which makes it even more interesting to listen to today, because much of its message is still relevant today. The closest they come to love songs are the ones completely based from a perspective of loneliness. “She’s Everywhere” encapsulates brilliantly the longing for a lost loved one. Similarly, in “Elin’s Photograph,” the narrator’s thoughts are dominated by a picture, much like The Cure’s “Pictures of You” (“take away this photograph so I can live again”). Meanwhile, the string-laced ballad “Sway,” is resigned to simply give everything up and drink life away. Lastly, the epic closer, “The Sea of Black,” truly spells out a finale for the character we’ve followed through this sad paranoid journey (“hear no voice / see no smile / feel no love / by my side”). This is a touching, thoughtful and emotional rollercoaster of an album filled with hummable melodies with enough of an edge to drive its meaning straight down one’s throat. Oh, and yes, it’s way out of control. It predates the big Radiohead landmark OK Computer by a year with its very direct message of isolation by way of technology and it is a sprawling mess that seemed to go underappreciated at the time. Strangelove seemed to get lost behind the big battle for dominance between Oasis, Blur and Suede at that time, but of those bands, they are the one I still listen to every so often.