And I play "couldn't-be-much-boreder"

Shudder to Think - Corner of My Eye



A couple of months ago this movie came out, called "Control" that was about the band Joy Division and specifically their singer, Ian Curtis. A few years ago, I read the book that "Control" is based on, called Touching From a Distance. It was written by Deborah Curtis, who was married to the singer. They even had a daughter. The book, um, debased me of a mythology that I had carried about Curtis since I was a teenager - that he committed suicide by hanging himself in an empty room, leaving a mystery for the authorities. They eventually figured out that he stood atop a block of ice to place the noose around his neck, which he knew would melt and leave no trace before they found his body. Anyway, it's not at all true, although it is true that they found a copy of Iggy Pop's The Idiot on the turntable beside him.

Beyond movies, the internet is doing a good job of removing all of these weird legends that we carry about our favorites - like how Debbie Harry wasn't actually almost abducted by Ted Bundy, or how Sinbad didn't die last year, or how Lars Ulrich isn't HIV-positive. But it sometimes feels like a fun robber.

Anyway, when I first heard Shudder to Think it was this song on a mixed tape, and the friend who made it for me said that the singer had trained for the opera before getting into punk, which is why he sang so uniquely. I resisted his voice for awhile; the leaps in pitch, the near-constant vibrato and smoothed-out vowels sounding so much like good posture and all the other stuff I joined punk to avoid. But I really liked the way he sang "and I just want to see my girlfriend, cause her hugs are the best I know", because his inflection actually adds to the emotion of the line, makes it believable and bright in a way that Blake Schwarzenbach or Billie Joe wouldn't have been able to. That scratch of ache that I felt so deeply when I first heard it and feel again on a night like tonight was enough to carry me through the song over and over and over again. I liked the poetry of his lyrics, it was sweetly teenaged and facile, full of images like "housefly hair" and alcohol described as "forgetting sauce", the types of conceits that never appeared in the underground where everyone simply said what they meant. "At least I can fucking think" and "if I started crying, would you start crying?" and "put your hand in my hand and look me in the eye when you're talking to me" are all potent, but they sometimes fade and stop registering with their directness. While I still think about Shudder to Think's "neurotic time" when I'm on the subway.

The song itself is another kind of magic, a take on the sound of their friends that's just skewed enough to sound unlike everything else. On the Dischord Records biography of Shudder to Think they describe the band as being "inspired by, but also independent from" the Dischord scene. I like the way they take the insistent, melodic guitars of Revolution Summer and slowed them down just a touch, releasing a bit of the tension but creating some kind of nobleness that matches the singer's tone. As the verse begins, there's a chugga-chugga guitar riff that would feel muscular and heavy-browed in another band's hands, but in "Corner of My Eye" feels pensive and wide-eyed in the way the lyrics feel.

The thing is that there are a million punk songs about feeling isolated in a crowd, about the weight of the mainstream, the pressure of their lifestyles. And there's something great about kicking out, and spitting and causing a scene like the songs do, but most of the time I just feel tense and so quiet and wishing I could shrink or vanish. And more than anything, I watch: the secret interactions of the people around me, the way they hold their bags, the way they care about other people's gazes or else the way they make a show of not caring. But I never found a song that said that until "Corner of My Eye." And I just spent an hour reading every bio I could of Shudder to Think's singer Craig Wedren and I can't find a single reference to him training for the opera. And I'm annoyed to have to let go of another amazing myth but I feel even better coming to terms with the brilliant cohesion of the entire band, with the way their every gesture reinforces this sense of movement surrounding me and forcing me more and more inward, wishing for faraway hugs and wondering about the lives of the people across me on the train.

A certain something asphyxiates my breathing

Hardcore has always felt the most potent to me when the music reaches the same kind of frantic violence as the world that it's responding to. The first song on the Necros LP. Crossed Out. Die Kreuzen. The entire second side of the Heroin LP. There's something so compelling to me about the balance, these short, super-tight songs where it feels like everything is at the breaking point. Drummers hitting every single surface in front of them, exploding bursts that cut and jab but always remain concise. Guitar and bass careening, like their strings are a staircase the players are falling down. Listening to "Jack of All Phobias", the first song on Phantom Tollbooth's 1986 self-titled EP, I sometimes can't believe there's only three people in the band.

I spent a lot of the 90s feeling breathless and aghast, and those years were thankfully escorted by hardcore records. When life felt hectic, instead of finding a song that could calm me, I looked for one that felt just as hectic. There was a few years there where it seemed like Born Against were clearly the most succinct expression of this feeling; the songs swarmed and kicked in a way that I wished I could. Their abrupt endings made the two seconds of silence before the next song feel like a new kind of violence, a sudden elimination of air.

Somewhere along the line I explained to someone how deeply I felt for Born Against, how original and telling their records were. In a very friendly, hey-check-this-out kind of way he suggested I look for a 7" by the band Mecht Mensch. A few weeks later I saw a copy in a record shop in Rochester and paid $50 for it unheard, begging my sister not to tell my parents how much I spent. I loved it. Ran around the living room stagedive off the loveseat unspeakably happy. It felt like fighting every person that's ever made me feel worthless, irrelevent, or unfit, and winning! It was everything I knew hardcore could be.

A while later my friend Isaac gave me the first 12" EP by Phantom Tollbooth, knowing my love for this kind of brutality. The first song, clocking at 1 minute, 52 seconds, feels like it has somehow lasted from the moment I put on the record until this moment, and will extend its savagery for the rest of my life.

What was going on in New York in 1986 when this record came out? The history books seem to think there was just the Cro-Mags "Age of Quarrel" and Youth of Today's "Break Down the Walls", leaving no room for this kind of storm. The art-damage of D.N.A. was far enough in the past that it wouldn't even signify, and the band's reliance on sheer noise as a foundation seems to distance it from any of the midwest hardcore acts that reached their levels of aggression. Their thank you list includes Sonic Youth, Das Damen and Yo La Tengo, which suggests the company they were keeping. But if I try to imagine going to see Sonic Youth, even in their feedback-swirl mid-80s mode, and hearing this, I can only think of it like waiting for the train and suddenly getting stabbed in the ribcage with a screwdriver.

The track begins with an evil squall, which fades just enough to introduce the bassline before the drums and vocals kick down the door. Their initial impact is one of the harshest openings I can think of. The song rages forward with a wild-eyed fury, the drumming running so many fills that it seems like he recorded three different takes. It's a paranoia-inspiring flurry, makes me feel surrounded and harried. Just at the moment that you could become acclimated to the pace, the song stops with a neck-grabbing precision, which isn't at all showy but does make you realize that everything is carefully placed. Then they leap back into the fight.

This is where the song almost derails, with a dis-ease and drama that only heightens the sense of paranoia and harassment, with the bass peaking into this Minutemen-ish high-end speed, while the guitar restrains itself to tight, sparse chords. The drums almost manage a typical 4/4 beat. Then the noise swells up underneath while the vocals maniacally repeat "laugh, laugh and survive." It's harrowing, but clearly encouraging.

The other five songs on the 12" are good, they don't kill me the way "Jack" does but there is some gleeful dement on it, the lines "blood on the stairs/still mine" from "More Paranoia" or the haunted nonsense of "Little green girls with little green tails are telling tales, they're telling tales/about me" in "Sweat Blood." The thing that does kill me is how much this record means to me and how little it's entered any kind of hardcore canon. These days Phantom Tollbooth is best known for the remake of their 1988 LP "Power Toy" by Bob Pollard and by the bands they went on to form/join. Apparently the $50 I paid for the Mecht Mensch 7" is nothing compared to what it's fetching today, but you can buy a sealed copy of the Phantom Tollbooth 12" for $9. Really. It's on ebay right now. And when I can't breathe, and there are enemies on every side, it's impossible to say that one record signifies more than the other. And the Phantom Tollbooth has a better cover.

I'm looking for amusement, please believe me

Roy Harper - Mr. Stationmaster




Something's that's been discussed before is that amazing process where you learn about things in isolation. Reading Maximum RocknRoll and noticing that every third band in the review section gets compared to Green Day so you buy a Green Day record. Green Day thanks Crimpshrine on that record so you get one of theirs. They're both on Lookout Records, so you start checking for other records on that label.

Or a roommate played Nick Drake for me and I absolutely flipped. It was the best! Like the music my parents played around the house when I was a kid, but more ghostlike, closer to my ear. And then I found a biography where the author claimed that there's nothing special about Drake's guitar playing, he just knocked off Bert Jansch. So go buy one of his. Bert Jansch was famous for his cover of "Angie", written by Davy Graham. Davy Graham made a record with Shirley Collins. Their version of "Nottamun Town" is on the boxed set "Electric Muse: The Story of Folk into Rock" which has this one perfect, precious love song. "Forever" by Roy Harper.

Everyone likes Roy Harper. Led Zeppelin made a song about him called "Hats off to Harper." Pink Floyd had him sing "Have a Cigar" on one of their records. Kate Bush traded duets with him on her record, then his. This past September, Joanna Newsom called on him to play a show with her in London. But when I heard him sing that song, the weight of his reputation, really the whole world, just fell away. It was me, cross legged on the floor with headphones on, like a teenager on TV, and Harper, playing this perfect, fingerpicked guitar that felt like warm water, that certain softness, roundness maybe, of bathwater, the weight of it on your body when you lay all the way back. His voice is clear, with one haunted touch of roughness. It sounds like he wandered in the forest for days or weeks, sleepless and alone, only emerging after finding the right words to tell someone how dearly he loved them.

So then go after the record the song is from: Sophisticated Beggar, released in 1967 and rereleased as Return of the Sophisticated Beggar in 1970. The record is full of the same beautifully rich, dancing guitar work as the song "Forever", and that same gentle, modest voice. And this magic little surprise, "Mr. Stationmaster" with no guitar at all and its jaunty organ marching along like some perfect night in a yellow-lit pub, dark wood everywhere and crooked-teeth smiles inviting you to new friendships.

Honestly I don't know enough about the condition of the English railways circa 1967 to understand why Harper needed to write a song where he declares, "oh Mr. Stationmaster, you're a national distaster" and I think he's mostly trying to make a listener laugh. But I don't really even hear the actual comedy, all I can hear is the laughter behind his voice, the steady skip of the drums and that merry organ bending its elbows and swinging its wrists in some smiling, marching dance. And it makes me so ridiculously happy.

So, new year, old song. I like having the reminder that a song can just be a cheerful pump of organ chords, steady drums, and an insolent but good-natured voice singing out snapshot images and almost-jokes. And listening to it reminds me also that I'm much more drawn to that simple joy than all the careful programming, sophisticated song structures, or accomplished musicianship that I normally fret over.