Appreciations (Music reviews) (archive 2021-2022)

December 4, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm also not in general a huge fan of singer-songwriters.  The music of Boston native James Taylor, for example, mostly leaves me cold, as does most of the rest of the output in the genre.  I like Blue and select other songs by Joni Mitchell, Carole King's Tapestry, and much of Cat Stevens' Tea for the Tillerman.  The latter two were favorites of my first ex, and Jackson Browne's Running on Empty is another exception for a similar reason: it takes me back to my first crush at the end of my junior year of high school.  Ruth was a graduating senior and an art student, and for a few months I was smitten.  She loved Jackson Browne, so of course I did too, and I bought this LP around that time.  Our relationship prefigured my two marriages in its ratio of pain to pleasure (roughly 2:1) and my inability to recognize when it was time to let go and move on.  I was experiencing so much inner turmoil around my gender identity, and the heartache of the last two months with Ruth proved to be a sort of dry run for my future relationships.  That turmoil and heartache, and the sense of desolation that colored so much of my 20s, 30s, and 40s, is summoned in songs like "You Love the Thunder" and "Love Needs a Heart."  But the one month of sweetness, an innocent's joy in discovering what all the hoopla was about where kissing was concerned—I remember almost driving off the road once because she was licking my ear—and just the uncomplicated feeling that I was desirable is also in this LP.  It would be almost two decades before I felt anything like that way again.  Hearing Browne and his group segue into Maurice and the Zodiacs' "Stay" at the end of the LP tonight made me wish the same for my scant memories of that fleeting spring.

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September 14, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around the time I started hormone therapy nine-plus years ago, I also began doing vocal exercises, mainly in the shower, in quest for a more congruent speaking voice.  Thankfully, I grasped the distinction between head and chest voice pretty quickly, and soon found my natural range and inflections.  From there, it was simply ("simply") a matter of overcoming decades of internalized transphobia and becoming comfortable using my voice in public.

 

After mastering the mechanical exercises to relocate my voice's resonance in my face (which effectively involved humming and touching the bridge of my nose until I could feel it vibrating), I moved on to expressions of how this discovery felt, and how more generally I was experiencing coming out in my late 40s.  For the first time in my life, that is, I started singing in the shower.  A lot of the songs I was drawn to expressed the sadness I was feeling about my many, many lost years (as I then saw my past).  Some were favorites dating back to high school: the Byrds' "Feel a Whole Lot Better" and "The Bells of Rhymey," Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," Fairport Convention's lovely version of Joni Mitchell's "Eastern Rain."  Singing them felt like a way of reclaiming those years for myself.  Another song I loved was by a Norwegian folk-rock group called Folque, a version of a traditional ballad called "Harpa."  Since the lyrics were in Norwegian (though the song is apparently from the British Isles), I didn't know what it was about.  The song's minor key and the female vocalist's somber delivery communicated deep sadness, however, and each verse's repeated final line, "Fa lalala la la la la lala," which I sang instead of hummed, conveyed a sense of melancholy resignation to the way of things.  I've since learned that it's a murder ballad about a woman who drowns her sister so that she can marry the sister's fiancé.  As you would expect, it doesn't end well for the perpetrator.  (Another song with a similar chorus, "Donna Donna," aka "Dana Dana" or "Dos Kelbl" ("The Calf"), which was originally composed for a World War II-era Yiddish language play, appealed to me for similar reasons, though it didn't become a shower go-to.)

 

There was one notable outlier in my repertoire, though: a song by an old Danish group, Burnin Red Ivanhoe, called "Cucumber-Porcupine."  The song's affect is as hard to describe as its title suggests, though it's a simple enough tune.  It starts with eight bars of a basic sax-bass riff, followed by another eight bars augmented by guitar and drums.  A flute then enters and plays part of the song's main melody, and is joined after a bit by the sax, which plays the other part of the main melody in a woozy, half-drunken tone.  Once this section concludes, the band's vocalist enters and sings the song's two-line lyric (in English):

Yes, the cucumber-porcupine is going to have a friendly talk

Yes, the cucumber-porcupine is all intent to hear the way I walk

 

At this point, we're two minutes into the song.  The subsequent three-plus minutes are given over to the repeated one-line chorus, Da da dadadada da da dadadada da, over the same bass-drum riff, with the sax and flute frolicking over and around them, and (in the case of the sax) getting pretty raucous towards the end, before the song slowly fades out—a sort of very left-field take on the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”  I didn't question why I loved this song so much at the time, I just knew that it made me irrationally happy, and singing it in the shower always lifted my spirits.  Reflecting on it now, I think what spoke to me was my sense that the musicians had created it out of next to nothing and gifted it to the world for the simple reason that it too made them happy; and this resonated with me as an analogue for my situation: emerging from a half-century of darkness and celebrating the moments I was living in because I was now me, and because I could—and why wouldn't I?

 

Da da dadadada da da dadadada da

Da da dadadada da da dadadada da

Da da dadadada da da dadadada da

Da da dadadada da da dadadada da...

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September 2, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 I'm not a big fan of R&B and soul with lush string arrangements, which long kept me from fully appreciating Marvin Gaye's epochal "What's Going on?" A live recording I recently saw on YouTube from the early '70s (the song was released in 1971) featuring a stripped down ensemble changed that. The song's deep melancholy really comes out in this version during a long instrumental break in the middle, when Gaye plaintively brushes his piano's keys over the conga player's hushed pulse.  It's simultaneously sad and consoling, and the shots of the audience make the performance feel like a collective act of grieving and commiseration. In part I think it's the headspace I'm in right now, but I find this very moving.

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July 13, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was introduced to Charles Aznavour by my second ex's mother, and soon came to like his music.  One really striking song that remains a favorite is "Comme ils disent" ("As they say" or "So they say").  This 1972 recording is about a "travesti," an older word that is typically translated as "cross dresser" (or the outdated term "transvestite") or "drag queen," but whose signification could also encompass trans women.  That latter ambivalence is one that Aznavour explores in a manner both dramatic and remarkably sensitive.  Here, for example, are some of my favorite verses from the song, when the speaker first reveals her "vrai métier," with my more or less literal translation on the right:

Mais mon vrai métier                                  But my true calling
C'est la nuit                                                   Is the nights
Que je l'exerce travesti                                 When I perform in drag
Je suis artiste                                                 I am an artist

J'ai un numéro très spécial                          I have one very special number
Qui finit en nu intégral                                Which ends with me completely nude
Après strip-tease                                           After a strip tease
Et dans la salle je vois que                           And in the room I see that
Les mâles n'en croient pas leurs yeux        The men don't believe their eyes
Je suis un homme, oh                                   I am male, oh
Comme ils disent                                          So they say

 

  *** The distinction between "mâle" and "homme," as far as my limited French can discern, is that the former emphasizes the biological aspects of maleness, whereas the latter is a more encompassing term.  I've communicated this distinction by drawing on contemporary anti-trans trolling—trans women are "really" men because we're "biologically male"—which ironically, and as such fittingly, inverts the conventional translations of the two French words.

The song was released as a single on the French Barclay label.  I'd been looking for an affordable copy for some months, and recently found one in Britain, with a low shipping rate (international shipping has become crazy expensive).  Its arrival a few days back made me very happy.

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July 8, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two nights ago, I got to see someone in concert who was a hero of sorts for me when I was in high school: Roger Waters, the former bassist and chief songwriter of Pink Floyd. The Wall came out my sophomore year, and for the next few years I was a devotee of the group, ultimately buying almost all of their albums (I still have many of them). I had some reservations about attending this show, though, despite the generous offer of a free ticket, as I wondered how good someone as far past his prime as Waters is (he's 76 years old now) would be? As it turned out, having tempered expectations allowed me to be pleasantly surprised by the intensity of the show. Waters has indeed lost a few steps—he shuffled across the stage like an old man—but his passion was still there, his politics, if kinda strident, were bracing, and the technical aspects of the show were, as expected, eye popping. I was also, inevitably, overcome from time to time by nostalgia, as I know many in attendance were (I remembered the lyrics to an embarrassing number of songs, though I refrained from singing along with the crowd), and I left feeling thankful for the opportunity. I'll add that seeing a concert in an arena seasonally devoted to professional hockey was sorta surreal.

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May 20, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Along with the Velvet Underground, British group the Soft Machine was one of my first introductions to avant garde music (in a rock context).  Their 1970 double LP Third, which I purchased in high school, really broadened my musical palette with its melding of jazz and rock with some modern classical elements, and side-long collages of different pieces.  During my freshman year in college, I purchased their first two LPs, The Soft Machine and Vol. 2, at a used record store near my college.  The debut is somewhat more rock oriented in terms of song structures and lyrics ("Hope for Happiness," "Save Yourself," "Lullabye [sic] Letter"), while Vol. 2 sees the group playing sidelong suites of songs similar to, though not quite as ambitious as those on Third.  I played all three of these records a lot at the time, and remain very fond of them; and like other music that has challenged me, theirs has colored the structures and rhythms of my writing.

Coda: When I once again started buying records a couple of years ago, one of my first purchases was a copy of the debut with its original moving parts cover, pictured above.  I'd always wanted one, but hadn't been able to score a copy back in the day.  I've ordered many more records since, but that purchase remains the most expensive I've made to date.  (The most expensive record I own, appropriately, is The Velvet Underground & Nico.)

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March 3, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The '70s...

I turned six at the start of 1970, and entered my junior year of high school in September 1979, so this was arguably my most formative decade.  But growing up where I did, that formation was centered on learning to hate, and hide, a core part of myself.  As such, the decade quickly became, and until very recently remained, something of a mine field of repressed memories and trauma.  Over the past few years, though, as I've grown more and more comfortable in my own skin, I've started pressing past the trauma to embrace the good parts of those years.  And just as music served as a refuge, and a repository for parts of myself in the past, the music of those years, in particular the songs I used to hear on the radio, have served as a sort of portal back to that time.  I might cringe when I remember the high school dances in my school's "cafetorium," but Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," which was one of the regular dance closers, transports me into their midst.  I have very mixed emotions about the bus rides to away games the three years I played on the (boys') soccer team, but hearing Aerosmith's version of "Walkin' the Dog," which was the team song my freshman year, summons the bus's stiff backed seats upholstered in army green vinyl, the upper classmen lording over the bus' back half (even as a senior, I sat near the front), and the laconic old driver Luther Springer, who took pride in shepherding the teams (girls' as well as boys', as I recall) out of town.  My dad used to love to exaggerate a story he said he heard from Mr. Springer about my one moment of glory as a soccer player during my final game as a senior.  Then there are the songs I shared with others.  My brother Bill and I used to honk away to the horn lines on KC & the Sunshine Band's 1975 LP on our living room sofa in middle school, and later I came to like Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic from the cassette copy he'd obtained through the Columbia Record House.  ELO reminds me of my oldest friend Joe, who was a fan in high school, and some of whose singles I liked.  Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody was the first rock record I ever owned when a cousin gifted it to me in middle school, though it was too much for me then, and with my mom's blessing, I got rid of it soon after. 

Despite that early misstep, Queen has played a more important role subsequently, as have artists like David Bowie, Elton John, and others, as a means of reclaiming the queer '70s, an aspect of the period that was mostly invisible to me at the time (and to the extent that it was visible, I shunned it).  That effort gained a substantial boost last year when I read trans feminist pioneer Beth Elliott's memoir, Mirrors, about her experiences coming out in the Bay Area at the end of the 1960s and transitioning over the course of the subsequent decade.  Elliott's account revealed to me the degree to which trans folks, far from being simply closeted or erased, managed to get by, and in some places even thrive during those years.  Just knowing that gave me a sort of imaginative license to occupy that part of my life as myself; and queer artists and feminist icons like Carole King, whose Tapestry was a favorite of the first love of my life, Hilary, when we met a few years later in college, are part of the revisionist soundtrack I've adopted for the young Anastasia.

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February 22, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few weeks ago, I had an unexpected most-of-the-day off, and was in the mood for folk music while I cooked, so I pulled out Pete Seeger's We Shall Overcome, a concert recording from 1963 when the Civil Rights Movement was in high gear.  This was one of the first folk records I bought back when I was in my 20s, and one that I've held on to.  I hadn't heard it in a long time, but as it played, I was surprised how much of it I remembered, and was reminded of the qualities that made it stick with me: Seeger's passion and warmth.  The limits of his voice sometimes compromise the passion somewhat: his vocals in Bob Dylan's "Who Killed Davey Moore?" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," for example, can be charitably described as strained.  His warmth, though, rescues these moments and elevates others.  It often emerges in his humor, whether in his anecdote about Dr. King and his fellow protestors ("I Ain't Scared of Your Jail"), his satirical phrasing in Tom Paxton's "What Did You Learn in School Today?," or his lighthearted take on Woody Guthrie's "Mail Myself to You."  But this quality also surfaces in his more passionate songs, as when he acknowledges in the LP's title song that he and his audience "have been afraid," but that they can still stand together and declare, "We are not afraid.  We are not afraid."  Perhaps the most surprising thing to me about the record was how timely some of its songs remain six decades later.   Songs like "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," "Oh, Freedom!," and "We Shall Overcome" resonate with our continuing efforts to achieve a racial reckoning in the U.S.  But "What Did You Learn in School Today?," which targets post-McCarthy era conformism, could with a few tweaks in its subject matter speak directly to the present-day rabid absurdity on the far right about "CRT," its efforts to ban books from school libraries and curricula, and its cynical, hateful efforts to erase queer kids.  This revelation was admittedly somewhat depressing, but it made me glad that records like this one exist.

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December 11, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wicked Good Band made a splash in my home state back in the mid-1980s with a record called Dare to Be Wicked Good. My folks had it on cassette, and I remember thinking it was pretty stupid. Welp, four decades and a lot less angst later, I revisited it and have to say it's really good. Though a lot of the humor draws on Maine in-jokes (and a native Mainer's perspective), I think much of it will translate to those who were, ahem, not fortunate enough to be born and raised there. One of my favorite tracks from the LP, the mock-advert "Katadhin Jeans," will give a sense of what the band was up to. Over a samba background with a chorus of women cooing the title/product name over and over (there was one gal in the band at the time), the lead vocalist dons a comic French accent—half Pepe Le Pew, half Inspector Clouseau—for the character of fashion designer Pierre Katadhin (accent on the last syllable, Kah-tah-DIH, so that it loosely rhymes with Cardin).  Katadhin extols the virtues of his line of jeans for Maine people, touching on a number of silly stereotypes, and gratuitously says "skidoo" multiple times in his Clouseau voice (accent on the first, i.e., wrong syllable: SKIH-deuh).  The juxtaposition is not only inspired in its absurdity, it also plays obliquely on the tensions between Mainers' insularity and their need for tourist dollars from people "from away," and perhaps also on the proximity of francophone Quebec, from which a lot of people at least used to visit every summer. Other highlights on the LP include the group's similarly inspired rewriting of "The Banana Boat Song" to be about both the fall potato harvest and the iconic downeast word "ayuh"; the sparkling invention in spoken word routines like "So You Think You Know Maine" and "Scratch 'n' Sniff" (yeah, they went there); and the song/mock advert "Old Lewiston Beer," which includes some actual French, "vous êtes ma maison," translated in-song by one of the band members as "you are my house."  In a word, bloody brilliant. Okay, two words.

The record's songs are currently available on YouTube: Dare to Be Wicked Good.

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November 27, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just purchased a copy of Jimmy Dean's 1962 hit single "Big Bad John" for a couple of dollars.  It's a song I used to hear a lot on the radio when I was young, and it stuck with me.  Dean's song tells the story of a drifter who is presumed to be bad because of his shadowy past—it's rumored that he'd killed a man in New Orleans over a woman—and his physical appearance (he's well over six feet tall).  The first half of the song lays out these details, and the second half describes a mine collapse during which John sacrifices himself to save his co-workers.  Dean speaks the song's lyrics in a laconic baritone; the musical accompaniment is sparse (think Peggy Lee's "Fever"), and background singers enter only for the brief choruses: "Big John, Big Joh-hon..."  The prevalence of the song on my hometown's radio station made it one of the early models of manhood that I was made to understand I should try to emulate.  But that's not why it stuck with me.  Rather, I was drawn to the tale of the quiet, misunderstood outsider who was misjudged based on his appearance and mannerisms, a situation with obvious similarities to my own at the time.  Though Dean was not as distinctive a vocalist as Johnny Cash, the song's bleak subject and spare sound affected me similarly to how Cash's version of "Long Black Veil" did when I heard it later in my childhood.

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November 5, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I noted in an earlier post, when I started collecting records in high school, I focused on LPs that received high marks in the Rolling Stone Record Guide.  This was partly a financial consideration: I didn't have a job, so I wanted to get the most from my limited means.  But I was also temperamentally inclined to follow authorities I respected, a trait that the conservative ethos of my little hometown and my fear and loathing of my gender identity reinforced.  While I wasn't straitlaced by any means, in other words, I worried that straying too far outside the lines of what I perceived to be acceptable thought and action in anything would put me on an inexorable path to marginalization, despair, death—a view squarely in keeping with my middle class upbringing.  One of the few times I remember swinging out as a collector when I was in high school was during a visit to a record store in Bangor, the nearest city of any size to my hometown (pop. c. 40,000 at the time, as I recall).  I rummaged through the store's bin of used 45s, and purchased a few that looked enticing.  Financially, this was a very modest gambit, as I think the records cost me 25-50 cents apiece.  What was more significant was my discovery of a mid-'60s song in a style I loved by a group the Guide made no mention of: "Wayfaring Stranger" by H.P. Lovecraft.  I didn't learn until college about the writer after whom the group named themselves, and it would be many more years before I found out that "Wayfaring Stranger" had been the signature song of folk singer/actor Burl Ives.  (At the time, I knew Ives principally as the voice of the snowman in the Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)  But I didn't need any of that meta-information to be drawn to the minor key, folk-inflected psychedelic rock of H.P. Lovecraft's version, or to its chorus, "I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger/Looking for a brighter day," which neatly encapsulated my isolation and sense that I was biding my time until I could leave for what I hoped would be more congenial climes.  What I also immediately recognized from this discovery, modest enough on its face, was that there were things on the shadowy paths I was shunning that I wanted and needed to discover.  As outré as the Velvet Underground's debut seemed to me then, it had received the Guide's seal of approval.  My gender identity was (to my mind at that time) similarly outré, but it was evident to me that its, my, worth would receive no such validation from any authority I then knew of.  H.P. Lovecraft, I later learned, scored a modest hit with "Wayfaring Stranger" and released a couple of LPs in the mid-late '60s; yet the fact that both song and group had faded away made the discovery of this record in a little store in eastern Maine an analogue for self-affirmation, and a harbinger of the long, painful journey of self-discovery I would commence in earnest in college.

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September 24, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Psychedelic Furs were probably my favorite band my first year or two in college.  Indeed, I saw them twice in a week late in the spring semester of my freshman year.  The sources of their appeal for me were twofold: they fused my love of '60s rock from my high school years with an updated sensibility that spoke to my own angst as a deeply closeted queer woman, and they appealed to my anglophilia (which would find its fullest expression my junior year, which I spent at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland).  Their second LP, Talk Talk Talk, was their breakthrough record in the States, and while it was my favorite, I was almost as fond of their 1980 debut because of its first two songs, "India" and "Sister Europe." The former remains the most extraordinary thing the group ever did, to my ear: a slow, quiet intro exploding into an extended locomotive drone that's equal parts krautrock-inspired '70s punk à la the Buzzcocks or Alternative TV and the Velvet's "Sister Ray." Like their debut single, "We Love You" (no, you don't), the song's title is surely an ironic nod to the group's '60s influences—as singer/wordsman Richard Butler's lyrics made clear, there would be no pilgrimage to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for these fellas. "Sister Europe," the group's second single, is a slowed down drone with more plaintive sax, but equally biting, surreal lyrics from Butler, who manages to drop a reference to the French singer Charles Aznavour ("stupid it plays Aznavour so out of key") that I always heard as "stupid it plays as before"—which I suppose makes as good sense. Talk Talk Talk was definitely a more melodic and consistent effort, though, ranging from the piledriver "Mr. Jones" (my favorite song by the group) to the period classic "Pretty in Pink" to "She Is Mine," a folk-rock tune given the group's distinctive '80s British post-punk spin by Butler's dour lyrics.

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September 13, 2o21

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first rock song I have any memory of hearing is Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water," their epochal hit single off the 1972 LP Machine Head (though the song was released as a single the year after, when I was nine years old).  I don't remember the first time I heard it; what I do remember is that the opening solo guitar line stuck in my head such that when I later heard the song, I knew I had come across it before.  My brother picked up a copy on cassette when we were in high school, and I dubbed a copy for myself.  I didn't own my own (vinyl) copy until many years later.  I sold that copy, with some hesitation, a few years ago, then replaced it recently, at rather greater expense, with a comparable copy.

As a rule, I am not that fond of this kind of music.  It's not that I don't like loud, hard rock and roll: I still listen to the best of the late '70s-early '80s punk and post-punk records I first embraced in college, for example, and consider myself something of an adrenalin junkie.  But righteous political anger and personal angst are different kinds of things from the sort of groin-centered workouts that typical "classic" hard rock serves up.  There are exceptions, though, and this LP is one.  Partly I think it's because most of its songs aren't about shagging birds, and even the songs that do celebrate the hedonistic cars-'n-girls-'n-party ethos of the '70s ("Highway Star," "Space Truckin'," the aforementioned "Smoke on the Water") are played with such compelling speed and power that you forget about their core dumbness and just surrender to them.  Another thing that sold me on Deep Purple is that they'd been around since the late '60s, and while their strong suit had always been heavy rock (viz. their debut hit, a 1968 cover of '60s singer-songwriter Joe South's "Hush"), they also had a thoughtful side, even if it more than occasionally led them into Spinal Tap-style pretentiousness ("April," "Child in Time," Concerto for Group and Orchestra with the Royal Philharmonic).  So while Machine Head is hard rock, it has some smarts behind it.  In the end, though, the record's appeal is simple: the virtuosity and sheer power of the group's playing, which is more than enough to make me look past one of the things I dislike most intensely about a lot of stuff in this genre—the falsetto screeches of singer Ian Gillan.

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August 22, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I first heard the Fall in spring 1985, at the tail end of my junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh.  Their single "Rollin' Dany," a cover of a Gene Vincent song with altered spelling, had just been released, and the DJ on whichever of the British radio networks I was listening to crowed about it.  I liked the song, and after I returned to the States, I began exploring the group's music.  Soon I became something of a fanatical fan, and ultimately picked up every one of their long players from 1979's Live at the Witch Trials through their late '80s-early '90s releases, as well as a bunch of their singles.  (I've kept eight of the former and all of the latter.)  I've only recently reflected on what it was about the group that attracted me.  At first, I know the provocative obscurity of singer Mark E. Smith's lyrics sucked me in, but I continued to be a fan well after I gave up trying to decipher what he was on about.  Ultimately, I think what drew me to the group were some more gut-level things.  First, there was the music's strong sense of rhythm.  As in the works of the Modernist poets I then loved, I liked how it could shift unpredictably but with a logic drawn from the internal dynamics of the particular song.  (The group's origins in a Manchester "poetry-style collective" (quoting the Discogs site) make this association less far-fetched than it might at first seem.)  Second, there was the way Smith was able to coax so much out of the very limited instrument of his voice.  People who didn't like the Fall often singled out Smith's vocals as a primary reason, and truth be told, he could make Bob Dylan sound like Bing Crosby.  As with the music's lurching, insistent rhythms, though, Smith's various vocal tricks are integral to the overall impact of the group's songs.  The resulting whole is challenging, bracing, sometimes strident, even irritating, but more than occasionally exhilarating, and there was something about the relentless momentum of many of the songs that spoke to my yankee upbringing, with its emphasis on self-reliance and refusal to slump into self-pity—a need I then felt to press ahead, regardless.  Moreover, the way that Smith and co. could weave unpleasant and engaging elements together in such a compelling way served as a sort of aesthetic template for me as I began to explore, if tentatively for so many years, how I might communicate the pain and beauty of the life it was mine to live.

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 August 21, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I was in high school, I bought a copy of Rolling Stone magazine's record guide, which quickly became my collector's bible.  Since I was at that time enamored of the 1960s, I started picking up copies of records from that era that received the guide's highest (four- and five-star) ratings: the Byrds' first two LPs, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow and Volunteers, Love's Forever Changes, Buffalo Springfield's second album (Again), records by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, best ofs by the Animals and Hollies, and many others.  One of the most striking LPs I purchased in high school was the debut LP by the Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico.  Its sound was unlike that of any other record I'd then heard, and spoke to my inner turmoil around my gender identity.  I liked it so much that my first semester of college, I splurged $35 (the most I'd paid to date) for an original copy with the Andy Warhol designed peeling banana on the front cover.  The record became my gateway to punk and post-punk, which I turned on to in college.  It also served as my introduction to the countercultural and avant garde art scene of NYC, a more aggressive, and more highbrow, one than Haight-Ashbury.  I was further drawn to the LP, and the New York scene, when I learned in college of the prominent place trans folks occupied in Warhol's circle: Candy Darling most notably, as well as actress Holly Woodlawn and playwright Jackie Curtis.  Even with its seediness and sadness, that brief period seemed at the time like a little golden age that passed before I was old enough to have even fantasized about experiencing it.

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July 19, 2021

 

 

 

 

Some of my most vivid early memories are of songs I heard on the radio as a young child.  I don't mean to say that I remember specific times when I was in a room listening to them on the radio.  Rather, I know that I heard the songs because I remember their melodies and the emotional imprints they left on me.  Since I grew up in a conservative small town in eastern Maine, the local radio station wasn't playing the countercultural heavyweights of the day, but rather what is today referred to as "easy listening" or simply "pop."  The artists whose music stuck with me most were Dionne Warwick, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, and Glen Campbell.  I've been revisiting their music recently, and what impresses me about songs like "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," "Wichita Lineman," and Mendes' arrangements of the Beatles' "Fool on the Hill" and Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning" is what I think spoke to me then: their sophistication and whiff of melancholy.  These qualities give me a hint of the kind of young woman I would have been had I not grown up in a time when my identity was driven into the deepest recesses of my psyche: dreamy, thoughtful, a little aloof.

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June 29, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a queer kid growing up in the pre-cable-and-internet outback, Sesame Street was a magical window on a diverse, accepting otherworld. As I watched it, I imagined what it would be like living on a city block with other kids of different backgrounds, growing into tolerance together. My life after I left Maine for college would in a sense be an ongoing search for this sense of community. The first thing I remember seeing by Jim Henson and his creative team outside of Sesame Street was an hour long TV special in 1971, an adaptation of an old folk tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm called The Frog Prince. Like Sesame Street, the cast included a mix of muppets and actors both in costume and in propria persona. The audio from it was soon after released on an album, with added narration of the visual stuff that didn't translate to vinyl, and since these were also the pre-VHS/DVD/YouTube/Netflix/etc. days, our folks bought us the record, and we played it into the ground. The TV special with its mix of comedy and menace was also shrouded in magic, and that feeling only grew as the audio version took its place and morphed it into a piece of theater of the mind. (We outgrew it soon after, of course, and started getting into cool grown up stuff like KC and the Sunshine Band.) One of my fond memories from my doctoral program was hosting a watch party of the special: my sister sent me a dubbed VHS copy and I invited friends who I thought might enjoy it. I was in tears watching it! Thinking back on that experience now, I recognize it as a partial realization of my childhood dream of like-minded, tolerant community, and a harbinger of the chosen family I would find in Pittsburgh and elsewhere after I came out. I bought a copy of the record in summer 2021 for old time’s sake, and playing it, I was surprised and a bit embarrassed by how much of it I remembered.

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May 23, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I purchased copies of both LPs by the Tom Robinson Band back in the day, but their music didn't really grab me.  One reason was stylistic.  Though the band was a contemporary of groups like the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers, and tackled political and social issues with similar passion, their music drew on pub rock, one of punk's precursors, as well as '70s glam rock and even cabaret—not genres I was interested in at the time.  I was also more drawn to songs focused on personal concerns, which I found expressed compellingly by groups like Joy Division, the Cure, the Comsat Angels, and the Bronski Beat, whose "Smalltown Boy" spoke strongly to me.  Finally, though an openly gay group like the Bronski Beat after them, TRB's affect was more overtly masculine, notably in songs like "2-4-6-8 Motorway" and "Grey Cortina," which was something I found a bit putoffish, though curiously it didn't bother me as much where their straight counterparts were concerned.  Decades later, I'm several years out and more political, and now appreciate what TRB accomplished with their debut LP, Power in the Darkness, and early singles like "Right on Sister," a feminist anthem, and the live EP track "Glad to Be Gay," a cabaret-style singalong with lyrics like

Raiding our pubs for no reason at all
Lining the customers up by the wall
Picking out people and knocking them down
Resisting arrest as they're kicked on the ground

The in-your-face grittiness of this and many of their other songs really strikes me now, as do their feminist and anti-racist stances and their courage to be out and proud at a time when few were.  But they were also a tight, fiery musical combo capable of reaching real heights, as in "Right on Sister" and "Power in the Darkness."  As I've sold my record collection, I've made decisions about which records I want to keep, and this and other records by queer groups (the Bronski Beat's Age of Consent, a Wayne County and the Electric Chairs LP I'd forgotten I had, the Culture Club 45s I bought in high school and college) have all made the cut.

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April 29, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was not a fan of country music growing up. To me, it was godawful rhinestone-cowboy suits and the hokum of Hee-Haw, which was on in our home every Saturday night. I was waaay TF too deep for such stuff; and on a more serious note, though I was deeply closeted at the time, I sensed that these people would want nothing to do with people like me. I made an exception for Johnny Cash, though, and in particular for his Live at Folsom Prison LP, a copy of which was in our home. Part of Cash's appeal was that he wasn't tight with the Nashville establishment, though at the time he made this record, he was newly married to June Carter of Carter Family royalty. Part of the appeal of this record was that it was recorded in a prison, and shows Cash and Carter (who joins him on a few songs on side 2) establishing a sincere rapport with the inmates in the audience. That simple display of humanity spoke strongly to me as I struggled with feelings of being an outcast. But another reason I liked the record was that I really liked the music. The high-energy numbers like "Folsom Prison Blues," "Cocaine Blues," and "25 Minutes to Go," which counts down, minute by minute, the last moments of a condemned man before he's hung—the last line of the song is "And now I'm swingin' and here I go-wo-wo-wo..."—were obvious attention grabbers. The songs that stuck with me even more, though, were the more somber ones featuring just Cash accompanying himself on guitar. His deep voice could communicate emotional desolation in a way no other artist I knew at the time could: "Dark as a Dungeon," about coal mining; "The Wall," about an inmate who dies trying to break out of prison (the song's last line: "But I know it was suicide"); and especially "The Long Black Veil," the speaker in which allows himself to be executed for a murder he didn't commit because his alibi was his best friend's wife. The experiences described in these songs were foreign to me, but the suffering wasn't, and just hearing suffering portrayed so beautifully was somehow consoling. Anyway, I thought I had a copy of this record at one point, but if so, it found legs a while back, so I found a good copy online recently and ordered it. It arrived earlier this week. I've communed with my younger self, and with my dad, while playing each side.

June 2 addendum: In mulling over afterwards a question that came up during the recording of a Pride month episode of the Adobe and Teardrops podcast about how to queer up "Long Black Veil," I realized that the song can be read as an analogue for the split/closeted trans psyche.  The man who lets himself be executed is like the male persona the trans woman presents to the world, and perhaps "he" commits suicide so as not to bring shame on "his" family and/or community (I moved far away from home instead), while the veiled woman is the trans woman's spirit who continues to haunt the place where "he" died.  Alternatively, and more positively, the male persona is shed when she comes out, and she in a sense continues to be haunted by "him"—that part of her past.