The Other Side of the Fence

 

I’ll never forget, years ago, one time, my long-time friend Wil and I were in a café one morning, during a work break.  We were hanging out.  He had ordered a deli sandwich and I was too cheap to do so, so I just sat across the table and fidgeted.  He took a massive bite from the sandwich, and was kind of struggling to take it in.  After he gained control of it, but still had a mouth full, he asked “How do normal people eat these?”  Of course, we both laughed and have added it to our ongoing we are monsters chronicles (hint: he and I are the Monsters).  At any rate, I find myself asking that type of question a lot.  For example, I’ve always wondered how ‘normal’ people consume new music.  I have a seriously unhealthy need for new music.  There are people who take it much much further, but it doesn’t change the fact that I still think about these things.  When I hear a new song, I have to own it.  I do believe in trying to pay for the joy the artist(s) is/are providing me in a small gesture of support.  In addition to owning a copy of the song, I generally have to investigate further.  Is there earlier material?  An album? A hard to find split vinyl single? 

What has it got me?  I have CDs and records in boxes all over my apartment that I have lugged around for several moves, stubbed my toes on multiple times, and at one time, a serious credit card debt!  I want to know what a healthy relationship to music is!  When I was a poor college student living in downtown Seattle in 1992, I remember spending my last $10 on a ticket to see Bob Mould’s band Sugar in place of saving it for the groceries I needed for the next week or so.  Did the same thing a few weeks later when I spotted the unexpected UK CD single for The Sundays’ “Goodbye” in a record shop window.  I was so stoked that they had new music coming out that I couldn’t stop thinking about it until the shop opened the next day.  Luckily, it hasn’t got me jail time, though at the time, a smash and grab seemed a possibility.

I was probably born with some sort of specific addictive thing.  I find myself being especially drawn into things through others’ enthusiasm.  When I was a little kid, my friend Vinton, introduced me to comic books.  He had a serious love of these things, and has continued on as an adult – getting into the industry through his art!  Once he hooked me, I found myself going to the local bookstore (the Book End) every week on comic book delivery day to get my favorite titles.  It wasn’t until Marvel started doing crossover stories like Secret Wars, where one had to buy all the comics to get the full story, that I had to bow out due to the limitations of my allowance and patience.  However, I almost immediately filled the comic collecting void with record collecting once I got my first paying job at 14.

Don’t get me wrong, my love of/obsession for music has been a huge positive for my life.  I have had amazing adventures going to see live music that I likely wouldn’t have experienced otherwise, met lots of great and interesting people, or, in other words, despite the isolating nature of listening to music, my love and need for it has pulled me out of my shell.  Heck, I even have a social media friend from Australia (hi Alex!) who I met through MySpace due to our shared love of the Go-Betweens!  There’s also Chris, a pen pal of 30 years who contacted me initially because she and her husband saw my collection in my old bedroom when they toured my childhood family home when it was put up for sale.  Music has educated me, or led me to learn about things, given me incredible highs, and is tied with almost any memory I can conjure.  Still there’s a part of me that wants to give it up.  If I hear a new song that I like, I kind of wish I could be content to enjoy it when I might happen to encounter it again, or look it up on YouTube or Spotify and make a playlist.  I have been trying to ween myself of the need to be a completist.  Just because I love a new song by so and so, does not mean I have to own every album or every single they ever released!  Perhaps it’s that I have a need/desire to not have stuff.  I like having as few possessions as possible.  Things make me feel trapped, and yet I have all of things heavy boxes of records everywhere!  What the hell?!  When I start feeling especially unhealthy, I tend to start thinning things down as an end of life necessity, once I begin to realize how meaningless my prized Independent Project Records’ Archive Series limited edition 10” records would be for whoever is lucky enough to clean up after me.

I guess it’s who I am.  Just the other day, I was driving in to downtown Portland listening to a random mixed CD made up of new songs that I’ve procured from listening to several stellar shows on streaming station DKFM (decayfm.com) such as Krissy Vanderwoude’s Drowned in a Sea of Sound, Paul Lopez’s The Shoegaze Collective, and especially Amber Crain’s When the Sun Hits.  My mind drifted through several questions, one of which is why did I select these chosen few songs of the many amazing tracks they share?  What is it that draws me in?  Songs take their time cramming their way into my thick skull these days, plus I can honestly say that the vast majority of what I hear is familiar – stuff that reminds me of music already in my possession.  So what is it?  What is the appeal?  I don’t know!  I just know that when I hear certain things, and those things evolve over time, that I get so excited and inspired.  Depending on the mood of the song, my mind electrifies and wants to be creative, wants to analyze, wants to experience genuine emotions.  Perhaps that’s the key.  Music wakes my mind up from the day to day regression it seems to be going through with the daily grind.  I remember a couple of years ago the time Amber Crain played on her show Weathering’s “Changing Colors.”  Yes, I fed off of the super power chords, but it was the vocals, the words, the phrasing and the voice all combined to make me a bit overwhelmed with emotion.  The song yanked out all kinds of stored up feelings that have built up over time – the kind that are difficult to explain or even understand.  This happened again within the last few week’s with the song “Ceiling Lines” by the Real Sea, when Krissy played it on her show.  Yes, I love the music.  The dissonant guitars of the intro lay down a familiar and comfortable pathway for my ears, but Sharon Mok’s voice is all kinds of amazing!  Just hearing that song puts a giant lump in my throat.  I suppose that’s it.  New music makes me feel alive!  I guess the need to search for it comes from the need to feel.  Seems like I’m stuck with it.  Now if only I can give up this senseless need to ramble on endlessly about nothing.

This Is Our Emergency

“When you've finally thrown up your hands
Poured your heart out, yet nothing stands
It seems our efforts are wasted
But yet it hasn't been in vain”


1991 was a terrible year. It started out with a three week intensive college course named “The Holocaust,” which was worse than it sounds. Then I had to drop out of school, because my mom’s horrific medical issues meant I was needed at home to help. Unfortunately, instead I spent nearly two months in the hospital after a surgery went poorly. The bulk of the year was spent working part time and driving my mom to and from her dialysis treatments out of town. It was all too late to help her though, because by September, she was gone. My friend, Wil, wasn’t having a great time of it either. He had been hospitalized for extended stretches and when home, found that he was so heavily medicated that about all he could do was sleep. Yet, out of all this darkness, something sparked between the two of us and we found a way to create something that helped inspire us and brought us closer together as friends. It was a little over 20 years ago we began a small ‘zine named This Wreckage. A project, which in many ways, got me through that terrible time and the reason why I still make half-hearted attempts at writing today via this site.

For those unfamiliar with ‘zines, they were in some sense a precursor to so many of the millions of blogs out there on the web now, but instead we used paper, typewriters, scissors, paste and photocopiers to get our message to an audience. The term ‘zine, which we hated with a passion, came from “fanzine.” Fanzines were homemade, self-published tomes, generally about one particular subject. We named our ‘zine after the 1980 Gary Numan song and produced seven issues over about a two year span. Along the way, we destroyed Mike’s photocopier (Mike, the owner of Driftwood Mac, Lincoln City’s record store, in a sense, was our benefactor), gave L.M. Tomiself a place to seemingly incite fury in anyone who read his writings, we wrote about the L.A riots, religion, and music, and Wil’s demented cartoons always adorned several pages. At one point, a naïve culture paper named Perpetua, published in Seal Rock, gave us a page in their much bigger paper (they had ads and a staff!) for a couple of months. We bit that hand by publishing a rant about the hypocrisy of hippies at a Kenny Loggins environmental rally, featured a questionable cartoon about Somalia and wrote negative reviews of all the promo CDs Perpetua wanted us to write about. That relationship ended after we were chased down by security at the Galleria for leaving Perpetua all over the mall without permission. It all ended in the fall of 1993 with an issue printed on newsprint instead of a photocopier (the pinnacle of ‘zinedom!). Unfortunately, by this point, we had become discouraged by the lack of real response from anyone, besides a few of our friends who submitted art and writing along the way. Plus the expense of printing it entirely out of our pockets became frivolous, because we now had rent and food to cover. The ultimate slap in the face came months after we printed that final issue, when another ‘zine that reviewed ‘zines gave us a glowing review for content, but in the end gave us poor marks, because there was no price included on our cover (it was always free), so the writer assumed that it would be too expensive to recommend to his readers.

Sometimes that same feeling of discouragement overcomes me when I post entries onto this new single minded version of This Wreckage. There’s a need inside anyone who creates art of any type for an audience. When there’s little or no sign of an audience, that artist inevitably questions the point of creating in the first place. It’s only natural. Don’t get me wrong, I am not calling what I’m doing here “art,” but I do find myself wondering why I bother to share these things, because there’s no audience for it. I wonder where the motivation comes from.

“Unfulfillment is killing you
Seems like no one shares the same view

We may have never met but

It might you who pulls me through”

Music has always been my motivation. My love of music and inherent need to share the new music I love with my friends has always been a part of who I am. It is undeniable, so I just go with it. When Wil and I first started doing This Wreckage a little over 20 years ago, music was the driving force for me. It was never featured particularly (every issue ended with music reviews), but it was always there. To be frank, I was hoping to get a bunch of demos and promos for free, so I wouldn’t have to keep spending all of my money on new music. Looking back now, after all these years, what I realize is that the importance of the work we did then was not what we thought we were seeking (an audience, free music, new friends and contacts, and in our most grandiose moments, a dream of earning a living by doing cool stuff and revolution!), instead it was the work itself. Rarely have I felt so inspired and driven as I did when we put those old ‘zines together, plus I don’t think Wil and I were ever closer as friends then when we were collaborating. We had so much fun making those issues that we still talk about recreating it in some form to this day, mainly so we have an excuse to hang out with a purpose and recruit our other friends to join us.

“Don't forget that when you doubt

That anyone will care about

A thing you do and when you're lost

Someone else is always found”

This Wreckage’s final issue may have gotten screwed by a misinformed review back in the day, but its epitaph came along nearly a year after it had been distributed. A small trickle of letters started to appear in the PO Box from mostly High School and college kids who liked what they saw and wanted to let us know that our work impacted and inspired them. We received our first paid advertisement (which was reluctantly returned rather than making a new issue simply because we finally had an ad), and along the way, we met some really cool people who have become long time friends. We met people we may not have otherwise (like when I found myself asking advice from Tsunami’s Jenny Toomey over the phone!), and we did indeed receive some pretty cool demos along the way from various bands such as Versus, Tugboat Annie, and 17 Relics.

Speaking of which, my recent posting of 2011’s best music shockingly has garnered some new music from a band looking for a feature on this very blog. This is the sort of thing I daydreamed about when we started the ‘zine, and now I’m not sure what to do, so I’ll review it and continue to enjoy the process of writing and communicating, no matter who is or isn’t paying attention.

Tremor Low
Kingmaker EP
(self-released)

Here we have a 5 track EP that harkens back to the goth-tinged romance bands of the early 80s like The Cure. This Bay Area four piece has tapped into some nice energy here. An early 80s post-punk vibe is clearly a touchstone here, as the first track is named “Peter Murphy’s Dead” and musically fires on all upbeat raincoat rock cylinders. Actually, their sound reminds me of a nice matching of L.A. band The Autumns and the UK’s Ray (see their Death in Fiction from a few years back). It’s amazing how these sorts of sounds make their way back into the consciousness of each new generation, since so much of this was under heard at the time. But, if the sound is done right and with passion, it is always welcome in my book. The driving title track “Kingmaker” is the highlight here with it’s sing along “Who are you?” chorus, delicate chiming guitars and splashy drumming make for a nice listen. The other big favorite is the closing “2003,” which evokes the aforementioned Peter Murphy’s dreamy solo work. This is a very consistent and enjoyable collection of songs. If any of the touchstones I mentioned are of interest, chances are you will find something to like here.
(facebook.com/tremorlow)




lyrics and title from Pretty Girls Makes Graves