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All Things to All People Vol. 16
Mark the date: April 2016 is the month that broke all of my systems.
I write this on a sunny Wednesday morning in May. There were thunderstorms all night and the internet has gone out, which is probably the only reason that I'm writing this right now. It's also the reason that I don't feel like someone is sitting on my chest for the first time in many, many weeks.
I dare say that Sorry State has acquired a reputation as an efficient enterprise full of hard-working people. This is definitely true, but as the person running the show I'd put more emphasis on the "efficient" part than the "hard-working" part. I don't know if it's always been the case, but over the past several years I've learned how to excel at setting up processes that don't require much thought. Things that seem to require a lot of effort to other people just seem to happen for me because I don't force myself to come up with that extra bit of force required to overcome the static friction that points you toward naps or Netflix or drinking or whatever it is that people do... getting things done is my habit. It's just what I do.
However, in April 2016 there was simply more to get done than I was able to do. Thanks mostly to Record Store Day, Sorry State's sales in April 2016 were roughly double what we do in a typical month. This is great, but it also means that there was twice as much work to do. I did get some outside help by hiring some additional temporary staff and letting Seth and Jeff pick up a few extra shifts here and there, but largely we completed (or are still in the process of completing, in some cases) double the amount of work with the same amount of staff and infrastructure. It's been exhausting, and while we've continued to fulfill our promise of 24-hour turnaround for nearly all orders, some other things have started to slip, namely the writing that I do for the web site and newsletter. This is a shame because the writing that I do for Sorry State is perhaps my favorite part of the job. It's invigorating... it makes me feel energetic and alive to think deeply about music and shape my thoughts into the little paragraph-long blurbs that you see on the web site and the newsletter. Without the rejuvenating nature of that task, Sorry State has sadly begun to feel a little bit more like work than it typically does.
However, things are looking up. I just turned in most of my grades for the term (annoyingly, several students took incompletes so their [and, consequently, my] work will drag on for a few more weeks), which means that I don't have to think too much about teaching for the next 3 months. Honestly, I don't really know what I'll do with myself. I've still been in catch-up mode mostly, working around the clock to try and clear the backlog of work that was generated during our very busy time. However, beyond that I'm not really sure what I'll do. One option is taking all of my energy and dumping it into Sorry State. We've done a lot of big used buys lately, so we have a whole lot of vinyl that hasn't been sold yet because it hasn't been processed, cleaned, and put on the floor. Another options would be just relaxing a little bit. I'm not very good at that, but I do want to get back to working out every day. I've always really enjoyed working out, but I let it slip somewhat during April.
Another goal is to join what I call the "punk jet set." Since there's so much work to do around the shop I've rarely gotten out of Raleigh since the store opened two and a half years ago. In the meantime, it seems like US punk culture has changed somewhat, with fewer bands going on lengthy tours and more people traveling to big regional and national festivals. Sometimes even just big single shows, like the recent Death Side gigs in New York. I wish I could have gone to those, but of course they fell on Record Store Day weekend so there was no way that I was making it. Anyway, if the bands aren't going to come to me I'm resolving to go to the bands, seeing more gigs and connecting with more of my out of town friends. So hopefully you'll see me at an out of town punk gig soon!
A few things I've been listening to lately:
I picked up a few Record Store Day releases for myself (despite what everyone else was saying, there were some good ones this year... though more on that later... I'm planning on writing my next blog post about Record Store Day), the most extravagant one being this Lush box set. Honestly, Lush is a band I never really paid much attention to in the past. While they were on my radar, I was a couple years too young to have really gotten into them. In fact, I was just a couple years too young for shoegaze in general. While I was old enough to have heard many of those bands, I was a teenager with raging hormones who just wanted music that was as loud and as fast as possible. So, I'd watch 120 Minutes religiously every Sunday, but really I was just sitting through all of the shoegaze, Britpop and college rock on the off chance that they'd play an old Black Flag video at 1:45 AM.
However, since Record Store Day I've probably listened to Lush more than any other band. I don't know what it is, but they're really scratching an itch right now. While I'd heard the band before, I think that my ears had to adjust to their slightly quirky sense of melody. When I checked them out before none of the songs really stood out, but now their best tracks feel like impossibly long strings of hooks.
Over the past few months we've slowly acquired the largest part of a friend's really stellar record collection. Among said collection was pretty much every single Killing Joke record. Consequently, Jeff, Seth, and I have all been listening to more than our fair share of old Killing Joke records. Honestly, I'd never really checked out their later stuff too closely. I heard the first album sometime in the late 90s and of course I absolutely loved it. However, I picked up a copy of their second album, What's This For shortly thereafter and wasn't too impressed. Well, it turns out that I deprived myself of some absolutely killer music. In particular, their 1985 album Night Time has been in constant rotation, particularly the brilliant single "Eighties," which even had a video:
"Eighties" is probably most famous as the song from which Nirvana "borrowed" the riff for "Come As You Are," but I think it's a brilliant song in its own right. As you can see, the sleeve on my copy is damaged, but I'm not too worried. The vinyl is fine and if I decide I want a nicer copy it doesn't look like they're too expensive.
Also in that same collection was a heap of Virgin Prunes records. They're a band I hadn't really checked out at all before, but I brought home most of them and gave them at least a listen or two. Much of it was too abstract for my tastes (A New Form of Beauty Parts 1-4 was a particularly tough listen, reminding me of very early Cabaret Voltaire), but man, "Baby Turns Blue!" What a track! I don't know if I could stand a full album of tracks this hot, but I do wish there was more in their catalog as exhilarating as this. Oh, and if you're intrigued by this group you should definitely check out some of their truly bizarre live vids on YouTube.
This was a very cool walk-in to the shop: Inferno's Tod & Wahnsinn LP, original pressing on Mülleimer Records. Inferno is a band I have a long history with... in fact, my old band Cross Laws used to cover "Escape from Society" (you can even hear a recording of it here). Honestly, I much prefer their Hibakusha LP, but this LP does have its charms, particularly given that this original pressing sounds quite a bit punchier than any version I've owned before. However, it's also kind of shitty in a lot of ways, with crummy drumming and sometimes really obvious, boring songwriting. I suppose the adjective I'd reach for to describe this is "charming," and while that sounds condescending I really do love this record.
Finally, my absolute favorite take-home from the shop in recent memory: Kuro's Who the Helpless 8". I'm so glad that Sorry State has developed the kind of reputation that prompts people to come to us when they want to sell their treasured rare records, because having things like this randomly come across my path is one of my favorite parts of having the store. As is the case with Lush, Kuro is a band I've certainly heard plenty of times in my life, but never really grabbed me in the same way that a lot of other Japanese bands did. I'm not sure if the context is just right at the moment or if it's just that this original pressing sounds so fucking powerful (and indeed it does), but I can't get this record off of my turntable. The noisier Japanese bands from the 80s were so ahead of their time. While Who the Helpless came out in 1984, it seems like they're exploring a lot of the same ideas that D-Clone would be working with on their Creation and Destroy LP some 30 years later. Basically, Kuro were taking the focus on sonic texture from noise and musique concrete and grafting it onto a frame of furious hardcore. While D-Clone (at least on that record) have a brittle, processed sound that's very much engaged with current possibilities of digital sound (re-) production, Who the Helpless is all analog warmth. I can't think of a single better distorted vocal sound in the history of punk.
OK, I think that's enough for now... I want to get this online because I haven't posted one of these in ages. Hopefully I'll be much more regular with the blog now that my life has calmed down somewhat!
All Things to All People Vol. 8
I mentioned in my last blog post that Terminal Escape wrote about Blackball, and then whattayaknow, a week or so later they actually write about one of my old bands, Infección. Reading other people's reviews / assessments of your work is always weird, but Robert's description of Infección probably jibes least with my perspective as a member of the band than anything I've ever read about one of my musical projects. Usually when I read reviews of my bands it's clear that the writer has listened to it at most once or twice and consequently it's easy to dismiss whatever they say, but I don't know if that's the case here. Of course I'm honored that my guitar would be described as D. Boon-ish... actually one of my big goals with Infección was to play with minimal distortion and have a brighter, trebly-er guitar sound that made much more substantial use of the lighter strings. However, I have to take issue with the fact that he describes us as so weird. Maybe the recording came out weird (I did it myself and I have basically no knowledge of home recording), but I feel like Infección is probably the most straightforward, pop-oriented band I've ever been in.
Infección had two main inspirations: the Shitty Limits and Sudor. After driving the Shitty Limits on their final US tour I had a moment of realization that the personal and musical issues that hampered the band I was playing in at the time, Devour, weren't a necessary part of being in a band, so when I got back from that tour I left Devour with the idea of starting a new band that was a lot more fun. Bobby Michaud was obviously my #1 pick for drummer (and he remains my favorite punk drummer), and I had spoken briefly with David about him singing in a Spanish-language band a few months earlier so I hit him up with the idea. If memory serves, Rich from Whatever Brains either heard some of my home-recorded songs or heard us practice and offered to join on bass, which infinitely more melodic sophistication to my simple, straightforward punk songs.
I remember when we played our first house show there was already a buzz about us. Aside from maybe Crossed Eyes, there hadn't been a Raleigh band that came from the hardcore scene but had melodic elements. I think that people were already growing sick of the retro hardcore thing and we got an immediate positive response, and people continued to react really positively every time we played. While the recording on the tape certainly could have been better, I felt like that initial batch of songs pretty much accomplished the goal I set out for, which was to merge the riff-y, straightforward, classic punk style of Shitty Limits with the energy and urgency of Sudor's early releases.
Unfortunately the band didn't really progress much beyond that. We wrote two additional songs that didn't appear on the demo, and each served to expand our palette. One song was a short, blisteringly fast song built around a slightly discordant series of notes delivered in rapid-fire triplets. The second was a mid-paced, new-wave-influenced song that was, by far, the most pop thing we did. Once I figured out that Rich would add richly melodic basslines to whatever I did, I pushed myself to write even simpler guitar parts, making the guitar hold down the rhythm (which is usually what the bass does) and freeing up the bass to carry the big melodies. It's a strategy employed by a lot of my all-time favorite bands (most importantly, Wire), and I was really pleased to be (an admittedly small) part of a song I thought was really great. However, as we were doing a new recording session with Will from Whatever Brains (with an eye toward possible release as a 7" or 12"), Bobby announced that he was moving to Atlanta, and unfortunately Infección never practiced or played live again. As a matter of fact, we didn't even finish mixing that session.
I might have mentioned this in some respect before, but lately I've been having a lot of meta-type thoughts about punk. Here in Raleigh we're in the midst of a bit of a venue crisis. There are a couple of bars that are supportive of the punk scene, and I am eternally grateful to them for letting punk happen in their respective establishments. However, to me bars simply are not punk, particularly since nearly every bar in this area (with the only exception, I believe, being the Nightlight in Chapel Hill) is either unwilling or unable to do all ages shows.
When I started the record store I hoped that it would be a shot in the arm that would take the punk scene in Raleigh (and, more broadly, in North Carolina) to a new level, but that hasn't really happened. In fact, nearly the opposite has been the case; while there are still a ton of great bands in the area, there have been barely any DIY punk shows to speak of in the past year or more. Touring punk bands now routinely hit up Greensboro before Raleigh, and I think we've pretty much lost our reputation for the wild explosions of energy that shows here were doing the mid- to late-00s. I think that part of the reason the store hasn't sparked some kind of NC punk renaissance is that, particularly in the era of downloadable music, a record store really only services a small corner of the punk scene.
It's always been the case that people are attracted to punk for different reasons, and the different priorities and values of these camps causes a lot of the conflict in punk. Some people are attracted to punk because of fashion; people on the outside of this group might call them poseurs, while people inside this group wonder why everyone else doesn't dress punk. Some people are attracted to punk because of its association with radical politics, and they grow frustrated at other punks' political apathy and/or inertia. And then there are the record nerds, which I realize, retrospectively, is the group I identify with. We are the keepers of the flame, the ones who curate and preserve the artifactual evidence of punk's existence. it's a noble pursuit in the abstract and my little group often grows frustrated with people who don't "support the scene" by buying stuff. However, the flip side of this perspective / attitude is that punk can become just another market, another set of goods and services to buy. When I opened the store I thought it would be a meeting / hangout space for the punks, but really it's just that for a certain kind of punk: the kind who both likes and is able to buy stuff. I certainly don't want that to be the case, but when a space is billed primarily as a store I can see how it would seem weird to go there without the intention of buying something.
So, in light of all this thought I've been trying to wrap my mind around how a DIY venue might be possible. Would this be the mythical meeting place that brings the punk scene together? Would it be something else for people to complain about, take advantage of, and eventually take for granted? Would it be more trouble than its worth? Would it spell my final and complete financial ruin? I have no answers to any of these questions... in fact, they strike me as the kinds of questions you can't answer without the requisite experience.