Laser-Etched History Never Repeats

I remember the scar.

I wake up in the middle of the night. Burning with memory of texture, the feel, the way the years softened the color.

It takes a few minutes to realize I'm here and now, not there and then. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


In the darkness, I remember.

It was just below her knee. She never explained it, never told me the childhood injury that caused it. It was just there. And whenever I'd touch it or kiss it, she'd pull back. So willing in other ways, so shy about the scar.

And if the scar was protected, the cause of the scar was walled-in, completely off-limits. And therefore endlessly fascinating.

She'd been to New Zealand. At a time when people just didn't go to New Zealand. And she loved Split Enz, whom she'd seen in New Zealand.

And she loved her copy of True Colors, the album that had images etched onto the vinyl with lasers. As a result, when light hit the spinning record, laser images of different shapes danced around the room. So we'd listen to the album at night, watch the shapes on the walls, and talk about everything.

Except the scar.

Years later, the CD still sounds good. The perfect pop songs are there. But there's no laser-etched shapes to dance around the room.

And she's gone, too. Took the scar and her secrets and went far away.

But late at night, when the moon reflects off something shiny, I watch colored shapes dance around the room. And I remember the record, remember her.

And, most of all, I remember the scar.

Dandelion

A Quick Reminder:

Brandon Schott's Dandelion album (which I wrote about here) is available tomorrow now from all your favorite online music sources.

Brandon's website has also been redesigned and spiffed up, check it out here.

And here's a video of "Fire Season" from the new album:

Viva Sea-Tac

And also the Swedes.

I was in Seattle, for about 12 hours.

No time to sing the "Space Noodle" song.

No time to get cheese curds at the Public Market.

No time to marvel at the rotating elephant.

Just enough time to sing "Viva Sea-Tac" by Robyn Hitchcock (from Jewels for Sophia:

Viva Seattle-Tacoma
Viva, viva Sea-Tac
Viva viva viva viva viva Sea-Tac
They got the best computers and coffee and smack.

Sliced through 50-degree darkness at 4am to return an SUV considered an economy car.

Cut through the thickest fog I've ever seen at LAX until the runway was visible two seconds before the wheels touched down.

Anyway, since YouTube is not the boss of me, you can still hear the song here.

You Know What They Said? Well, Some of it Was True

Three Quick Springsteen Stories:


Jackie was from Revere and she had the thickest Boston accent I'd ever heard in my life. She was also a Springsteen fanatic (we listened to three sides of The River together in the fall of 1980) and a Roman Catholic with interesting religious views. She was (theoretically) opposed to pre-marital sex, but felt that things happen and as long as you confess, everything's cool.

The one exception she made was for Springsteen. If she ever had the chance, she told me, she'd do Bruce Springsteen. "And even the Pope would understand" she said. Best of all, she wouldn't have to confess because her love for Bruce was pure. In fact, she told me, Heaven is a place where a bunch of people hang out, partying, and listening to Bruce Springsteen.

Which sounds pretty good to me.

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Because Bruce Springsteen tours with the E Street Band (a group with 17 guitarists), it's easy to forget that he's a pretty great guitar player.

When Warren Zevon was dying, he publicly announced that he wanted to record one last album. Springsteen flew to Los Angeles in the middle of a tour, walked into the recording studio, plugged in and played the guitar solo that appears in the song "Disorder in the House" in one take. It blazes. Afterwards, Zevon looked up and said "You really are him." (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


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After Joe Strummer died, Bruce Springsteen (along with Steve Van Zandt, Dave Grohl, and Elvis Costello) sang a great version of "London Calling" on the 2003 Grammy Awards show.

This summer, Springsteen performed in London at Hyde Park and again sang "London Calling," his voice is hoarse, but he channels Joe Strummer (and plays a great guitar solo that makes you forget the other 16 guitarists onstage).


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And remember, the crowd's not booing, they're yelling "Happy Birthday"!

Songs About Bands Singing Those Songs

Before the Internet, it was harder to figure out what songs meant.

I've always been a sucker for songs with bizarre and complex lyrics.

In the pre-Internet days, I spent way too much time listening to Don McLean's "American Pie" and trying to dissect the various references. These days, all you'd have to do is go online.

But I've also always been a sucker for autobiographical songs, especially songs about how bands formed. Probably the best example is "Creeque Alley" by the Mamas and Papas, which namechecks various members of the Lovin' Spoonful, a club in the Virgin Islands, Roger McGuinn, Barry McGuire, and the various crushes between the various Mamas and Papas. (John Phillips, having turned down Cass Elliot's advances, was cruel enough to write a song where the overweight Elliot had to sing the line "no one's getting fat except Mama Cass.") These days, there's no need to learn the history or figure out the references when a quick Google search exposes you to the wisdom of a thousand obsessives who've poured over the song for you. (Embedding is disabled, so click here for the video.)

But my favorite rock song about a band's history is "Rock and Roll Band" by Boston. It tells the story of a scrappy band that toured up and down New England, building an audience one crappy gig at a time before getting signed to a big record company contract by a man smoking a big cigar at one of their shows.

The best part of the song? It's all made up. None of it happened -- at least not to the band Boston.

Instead, Boston was the brainchild of Tom Scholz, who worked as an engineer at Polaroid, built one of the first home studios in his basement (12 tracks of analog wonderousness), then wrote all the songs, recorded them himself (playing nearly all the instruments), and brought in singer Brad Delp to hit all those seemingly impossible high notes. The "band" got a deal with Epic Records based on Scholz's demos without once performing live. Epic added a few small overdubs, but the first Boston album was basically what Scholz and Delp recorded in Scholz's basement -- and arguably Scholz invented Arena Rock with that record (long before the "band" every played an arena).

It was only after the record came out that Scholz put together a band to go out on the road and play the songs. (Scholz would later invent a must-have small electric guitar amp that made him millions, which let him take a long time finishing future Boston albums and gave him the luxury of dragging out his various court battles with record companies for years and years.)

It's still a great song, but the lines "playing all the bars, sleeping in our cars," "playing for a week in Rhode Island," and "dancing in the streets of Hyannis" were all made up -- maybe because they sounded better than "spending months in the evenings in the basement after working at my day job."

And since the history in the song is all made up, who am I to say that the music wasn't really made by stop-action clay figures with guitars and a Lego drum riser?


(Note: Oops... as Kinky Paprika pointed out in the comments, it's Tom Scholz, not Tom Schultz. Clicks and Pops regrets the error.)

Thursday Night and Friday Will Be on Tuesday Night Instead

The clocks will all run backwards, all the sheep will have 2 heads.

We met on the 4th of July. On the Esplanade in Boston. We'd gone to school together, but didn't know each other; she'd come with a mutual friend.

An entire gang of us spent the afternoon playing Trivial Pursuit, a game I loved (except for Geography) and she hated (including Geography).

Over the course of that summer, I spent more and more time with her, but quickly realized that everything she said was wrong. She was wrong about the time of day, about the number of moons rotating around the Earth, about how many states there are, about what the capitol of South Dakota is, about who sang lead in Paul Revere & the Raiders, about which side Italy fought on in WWII, about whether Max Yasgur ever played bass with the Grateful Dead, about what color her car was, and about too many other things to mention. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


But, while she was almost always wrong, she was never uncertain. And it was exhausting after a while responding to her pronouncements (CDs will never replace vinyl, Alice Cooper was going to replace John Lennon in a reunited version of the Beatles and tickets for the Shea Stadium show went on sale Monday at 4:15am, no baseball players would be crazy enough to take steroids, etc.).

The one thing she was right about was that World Party was a great band. At first I didn't believe her (just because she was so often wrong), but when I listened, I had to agree. Although maybe she was partially wrong, because Karl Wallinger (formerly of the Waterboys during their brief synth period) played almost everything on the first World Party album (and even went so far as to invent aliases so other "musicians" would be credited on the sleeve).

A couple years later, she became convinced that she had a brain tumor. So she spent tens of thousands of dollars on tests, spent weeks visiting dozens of doctors, and never believed anyone who said she was healthy.

We broke up because she was too wrong, too crazy (and maybe always had been. A few days before World Party played in Boston, she had a friend of hers call and give me a supposed new phone number for her in California. She called back herself the next day and apologized for her friend, but wanted to make sure I had the number in California. By then, World Party was a real band and her crazy wrongness was no longer as attractive as it seemed with several hundred thousand people, alcohol, Trivial Pursuit, fireworks, and the Boston Pops. So I threw away the California phone number (which, probably was wrong anyway), and went to see World Party with my new girlfriend.

Flea Market of Memories

Flee, Market of Memories!

A reader emailed me a few days ago and asked what the first record was that I ever bought.

And I had to think long and hard about it. The first record I bought -- not the first record I asked my parents to buy me or the first record I remember playing. The first one I actually bought.

And of course, the temptation to make up some lie about the hippest, most underground, most amazing record I could think of is very strong. But here's the truth.

When I was around 7, there was a big flea market in the center of our little town. (There might also have been a carnival there at the same time, I'm not positive.) And I had 40 or 50 cents saved up in allowance.

The market had the usual artsy crap (poorly made leather wallets, crocheted bags with lame designs, etc.), but I made a beeline for a covered tent area with stacks and stacks of books and a small crate of records. I decided that I needed to buy a record. With my own money. It seemed like the most grownup thing in the world.

I immediately went for the 45s (thinking I could get more bang for not-even-a-buck) and hunted through them. Now, I was only 7, so I didn't know what to buy and didn't recognize any of the names on the labels.

I guess I could've asked someone, but I didn't want people to think I wasn't cool (even though, at age 7, I can guarantee I was the polar opposite of cool), so I bought something at random: "Kind of a Drag" by the Buckinghams. (I may even have thought that they sounded English and everything English was cool). The woman took pity on me and threw in a pseudo-hip hat that fell apart almost immediately.

But the 45... that was made to last. Now, it was already in bad shape -- major clicks and pops throughout the song, surface noise that made the record sound even muddier than the garage rock (with horns) the band was aiming for. This was clearly a record that had been well loved and well-played by the first owner (and maybe also by a second or third owner) before it got to me.

I had a crappy record player for kids (one step up from a Close & Play) and a few records from my parents (including "Peter and the Wolf," part of a failed attempt to steer me away from rock & roll), but this was the first record I'd selected and the first 45 I'd ever seen. I played it over and over, examining the label for clues (like a pre-teen Kremlinologist). I even played the flip side (and would wonder every time why the A-side was so much better). And although I loved the music, the ultra-hip detachment of the lyrics bothered me... even at age 7. If someone doesn't love you, isn't that a bigger deal than just an offhanded "kind of a drag"? If that's what it meant to be a grown-up, maybe it wasn't something I wanted after all.

I know now that "Kind of a Drag" was the first single the Buckinghams released, that it went to #1 in 1967 (beating out records by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones), and that they weren't English, but were from Chicago.

Sadly, I lost that 45 over the years, but thanks to the magic of YouTube, here is the first record I ever bought (free pseudo-hip hat that falls apart not included):


By the way, this is video features an extraordinarily bad fake performance: no microphones, guitars plugged in, and no horn players. But my favorite thing is the drummer, who seems to be pounding on a footstool standing in front of a bass drum, then playing snare and cymbal rides and on cymbals and snare drums that aren't there.