For decades, newspaper companies managed to subvert child labor laws by inveigling young adolescents into hauling their very heavy product from door to door. Young nitwits bought the papers from the publisher then sold and delivered them to their neighbors at a markup. As such they could be said to be operating a “business,” not just slaving at the dying remnant of a nineteenth-century distribution model.
In 1986-87, at the age of 12, I was one of those nitwits, working for The Pittsburgh Press. My “business” came complete with a goonish supervisor who would regularly forget to drop off my papers — leaving me to fend off phone calls from angry geriatric shut-ins demanding their box scores — and occasionally try to extort extra cash from me by disputing my accounting practices.1 It also came with surprisingly backbreaking labor. Pittsburgh’s a hilly town, so my house was at the bottom of a steep incline that was in turn at the bottom of two steeper inclines. And because I was in the last house on the block, all my customers were above me. On Sundays my paper bag was so heavy that I had to run shuttle: carry a bagful of papers to the top of the first hill, drop it off, deliver papers to half of the next hill, get more papers from the bag, deliver papers to the other half, go home and get another bagful, repeat. It took hours.
More precisely, it took three hours. To make those three hours bearable, I bought a TDK 180-minute blank cassette and made myself a mix tape for my Walkdude.2 For some reason I was suddenly reminded of that tape yesterday, and I decided to try and recreate the playlist. I used Spotify to do it, so sign up for a free account and you can listen along and relive the memories I’ve repressed.
See the playlist…
----
Note: You can learn the point of this series in
part one.
#5: “Dead Into West Virginia” by Nonfiction
In 1994, a CD arrived in my WNYU mailbox from an unknown label and accompanied by nothing but its cheap, padded envelope. It was called Confidence, Man by a guy named Stephen Yerkey, and I quickly became obsessed with it. One of my most vivid memories of my mid-nineties years in New York is listening to that CD on a late-fall night at 2am in a deserted Staten Island ferry floating halfway across the harbor. It seemed to me then and now that those are the precise circumstances in which Yerkey had intended his album to be heard.
Listen to song #5 >>
(Updated Jan. 8, 2011) Note: You can learn the point of this series in
part one.
#4: “When I Turn Ninety-Nine” by Devin Davis
The only things I know about Devin Davis are a few sentences on Wikipedia and the bio page of his web site (the new version of which is supposed to launch promptly three years ago). Basically all of the above amounts to this: he’s from Chicago and 2005′s Lonely People of the World, Unite! is his first and only album.
You can learn much more about Devin listening to the lyrics of his record, which are all about loneliness, fantasy, loneliness, desperation, hope, and loneliness. That said, Lonely People of the World, Unite! is one of the least sad albums you’ll ever hear. It’s 35 minutes of perfect power-pop energy, and a masterpiece. Yes, I’m dropping the M bomb. It’s a masterpiece that Devin wrote, performed, produced, and recorded entirely by himself, in isolation.
Listen to Song #4 >>
Note: You can learn the point of this series in
part one.
#3: “Hometown Again” by Jason Eklund
I struggled a bit trying to pick song number three, the only one of the five that I wasn’t sure of. Ultimately I discarded several that I love, or that are really important to me, because I thought that too many people might know them. I might do a part six with a few of the songs that didn’t make the cut.
Listen to Song #3 >>
Note: You can learn the point of this series in
part one.
#2: “Who Put the Handles on the Can?” by Stan Freberg
I love radio. And when I say “radio,” I don’t mean “radio.” I mean radio. Narrative radio. And not a dude from Park Slope telling a story about how one time on a road trip he met some uneducated people who taught him about how much better than them he really is. I mean real narrative radio, with scripts and characters and sounds that all put together can do more to tell a story than any other medium.
I was a writer/producer in radio for a while and was lucky enough to get to make some of that kind of thing. And in fact my secret plan is that after I become such a massive success in teevee writing that execs are inventing Gears-of-War-style weaponry for the sole purpose of firing huge amounts of cash at me, I’ll gather up some of the money and use it to create hilarious scripted radio shows which, by the unmitigated gravitational force of my massive respect in the creative industry, will lead to a genre rebirth of Wrath-of-Khanian proportions.
Listen to Song #2 >>
I try to avoid writing about music. Partly because I’m not very good at it, but mostly because I’m such a dilettante that my writing about it makes about as much sense as my heading up a research study on phenylketonuria.1 I’m always afraid some real music critic will come along to the rec shed and tell me that I’m really good at playing Donkey-Kong Jr. and pretend to like me just so her dumbass boyfriend can laugh and punch me in the back of the head.
But I can avoid that a little bit with these five songs, because I’m fairly certain that no one who reads this blog will have ever heard them before and so will have to delay they’re eye-rolling puh-LEEZEing at least until they’ve gotten to the end of the MP3s.
Also sometimes great music and/or Klonopin overcomes fear. Good music you want to keep for yourself and hate anyone else who likes it because you heard it first and they just don’t understand it like you do can’t you tell just by the way they’re dressed? But great music is different. Great music you want to share with everyone you know, so you they can maybe grab a little bit of the joy you feel when you hear it.
So over the next five days I’m sharing the joy of five songs that are completely new to you, but that are a part of my life and formed a part of who I am, and thus maybe even are partly responsible for my knowing you or at least for you choosing my blog for this particular moment of procrastination. Enjoy.
(And If you don’t like these songs, I’m sure Pitchfork or The AV Club or someone else who is not me will be very happy to hear about it.)
Listen to Song #1 >>
----
Look what I just found on my phone: a 35-second mp3 of the Pixies rehearsing “Here Comes Your Man” that I recorded in a back alley behind the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. My first bootleg!
As I’m absolutely certain you remember from this year-old post, Sophie and I wandered up a lane in Dublin one afternoon and heard “Debaser” blaring through a wall next to us. We quickly figured out that it was being played live by the band, then stood there and listened to the entirety of Doolittle rehearsed in sequence. Here’s my recording, which sounds exactly like it was captured on an iPhone in an alley in Dublin through 12 inches of concrete by a drunk American still coping with the fact that he only has three pairs of underwear to last nine months:
REMINDER: The Meaningless Hand Gesture contest ends in just about 24 hours. This is your last chance to win one of three priceless pieces of Americana which will serve as your passport into the beguiling world of show business/pot luck dinners.
Here’s my first local music discovery of the trip: Admiral Freebee from Belgium, whom I heard on the stereo in a pub in Ghent. In truth, I doubt any of the kids are listening to this, but one bartender in his late thirties who selected every track that went over the sound system himself, one at a time, is. (For those who wish to judge his taste, other tracks he played included Dinosaur Jr., Radiohead, and that one good song from The Division Bell.)
Anyway, Admiral Freebee’s number “Living for the Weekend” caught my ear, and I’ve liked the further stuff I tracked down on the Internet last night. Click the album cover to go to his MySpace page. ”Living for the Weekend” is the second track in the player.
