Handed down to me like some thoughtful blur

The Germs - No God

When Dave Van Ronk died in 2002, I read an obituary that discussed his early fascination with the U.K. folk ballad tradition. Dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these narrative, mostly unaccompanied songs were collected by Francis James Child in the late 1800s, preserving them at a time when younger generations had stopped learning to sing them from their grandparents. The eight LP collection of ballads sung by A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl brought the songs to life for Van Ronk in the 1950s, and he traveled to London to hear these folk songs firsthand. When he connected with the young English and Scottish singers continuing this tradition, they were thrilled to meet an American. "Tell us all about Woody Guthrie!" they asked. "Do you know Harry Smith? We love the American Anthology of Folk Music." If Van Ronk was stunned to learn that the new U.K. singers weren't so interested in their own musical inheritance, he was similarly surprised that they were more aware of American traditional music than he was. Their admiration for this, his local history, refocused him on the American work songs, protest music, and storytelling that became the core of his career. 

Around that time I was in touch with these kids in Oxford who did a label called Youth Club Tape Club and we traded records. At first it was stuff we'd put out, but then it turned into stuff we found around town. They would find cheap Raincoats or Liliput 7"s and I would send them back the Proletariat LP or the Contortions "Buy" with the corner punched. The undervalued UK records for the undervalued US records. We both thought it was really funny, and I kept thinking about that Dave Van Ronk story, wondering if I was part of the process of ignoring the records closest to me, of fixating on things from far away. In response, I mailordered a Wipers t-shirt from Greg Sage, wrote a fan letter to one of the members of Reversible Cords, and started finding new things to love about the Minutemen.

A couple of months ago, my friend Jeremy asked me to come on his radio show to play some songs and tell stories. He started a list of songs we could play and asked me to add some favorites. I put Bomber Jackets, Way Through, and Vital Idles. Honey Bane, Huggy Bear, Sara Goes Pop and Gareth Williams. He wrote back and was like, "hi let's see if we can open this up a little bit" and I laughed so hard at this reminder of my continued fixation on music from the U.K., I really thought it had passed. 

One of the new LPs I sent to Youth Club Tape Club was for a band I sang in, and I remember being anxious about the English kids listening to it. I figured they'd see through my mimicry of the singers I liked, dismiss it as a crummy American attempt at affecting a kind of British post-punk sound. A year or so after that band broke up, Dana and I were talking about why I didn't love how I sounded on it, and I had an epiphany. "Instead of listening to the Fall and Wire, I should've been listening to the Germs." I thought the detachment and enunciation of those British singers was the right model for voicing my discontent. Their choice to cram a bunch of words in each line, to signal tough feelings via breathlessness rather than volume, felt closest to my panic in those years, and to the way I thought I should resist. A lot of words, a lot of information. 

What I realized, what I was trying to say to Dana, is that instead of convincing, I should have been taunting. Ideas are great, but so is feeling. Darby Crash's lyrics are SO GOOD but he communicates so much more through a snarl, through repeated syllables and the sound of his tongue stopping up his throat. He starts "No God" with a rising buzz that sounds like a kid imitating a motorcycle driving by. The broken way he drops the word "worry" signifies more actual dread than the word itself. There's a part in that oral history book about the Germs where someone recalls how surprised all their friends were was when the "Lexicon Devil" 7" came out with the printed lyrics, and how thoughtful the lyrics were. They said something like, "I didn't really even know there were words!" But I wish there'd been a follow up quote where someone else said, "but no one was surprised at the content of the songs." Because no one should have to read the lyrics to unpack Darby's exasperation, his knowledge of the systems operating on him, his refusal to obey. Maybe if I'd come across Van Ronk's origin story a little earlier, I would've taken the lesson to pay attention more to my immediate surroundings and legacy, and probably would've done a better job of voicing my own indignation.

Channel changes so does your mind

[image source]

Universal Order of Armageddon - "Stepping Softly Into"

Ian told me a story about working the door at DC Space the summer of 1994. Places like that always intend to have a rubber stamp so they can mark people's hands as they paid, but somehow it's always missing, or too smudgy, or the ink pad ran dry. So Ian and the other volunteer used a marker instead, at first putting an X like we're all used to, but as they day went on and boredom grew they started drawing elaborate scenes up and down people's arms. The singer of Universal Order of Armageddon came in as the silliness reached a peak and very politely asked if they could refrain from drawing all over him, that he was worried about the chemicals in the marker ink. In they end, they offered to let him in without even the compulsory X, saying, "oh we can remember you." 

I believed it, letting his sharp words rattle around my brain: "This your industry/I will not let inside me/NO." They made perfect sense coming from a person who'd be clear eyed about Xylene the same way he'd repel any other toxin in his atmosphere. I loved the song they were from, "Visible Distance," how it opened with unaccompanied drums. It was melodic, jarring and fearsome, it sounds like the hardest a snare had ever been hit. And then the guitar reached these alien frequencies, so much precision and dexterity, but also a prickling clamminess that I'd never really heard before. It's such a rager, so focused. But in a way, what it does best is set up a dynamic to be undermined by the last song on that side of the record, "Stepping Softly Into." 

That song's opening words were a refusal: "You broadcast/what it is to be a man." The line repeats five times in the song, and every repeat hits the same extreme of defiance. A couple times through he repeats the word "man" after pushing through the phrase, his distaste contagious. The rest of the band follows his energy, hammering twice, all at once, and then pulling all the way back into silence. The song is consistently dour, weighted so heavily, led by this seesaw two note guitar part. There are occasional moments of momentous rage but it's gone after mere seconds, shoving listeners back into that stark, two note clarity. You could imagine frustrated audiences, breathless as the restraint holds them hostage, finally unleashed as the whole band joins in, only to vanish after the count of five. Next to the propulsion of a song like "Visible Distance" it must feel a bullying. 

Ian and I saw Universal Order of Armageddon a few months after he told me that story. A friend's parent had moved and the old house was still vacant so we were sleeping on the floor of an empty, unheated Maryland home. It was November and in my memory I was sick all the time. I carried around an entire box of tissues for the entire of this show, snot and tears constantly pouring down my face. I remember laying down between bands. It was one of the most fun, impactful shows I can remember ever seeing.

I taped the show on a walkman with a microphone pinned to my shirt, and I've gone back to the tape regularly over the years. On the records, the songs are so distinct and crystalline, so I was struck how they threaded them all together live, the drums for "Visible Distance" starting immediately at the end of "Switch is Down." So much momentum and power! The  locomotive punch of "Benedict" is especially forceful here, played a touch faster than on the record, yet never losing control. But my strongest memories from that show aren't captured on the tape. One is the moment when Tonie Joy breaks his guitar and looks up to see if the other bands will lend him one. It felt like everyone just shrunk back into the crowd, all momentarily afraid to trust him with their instrument after seeing what he'd just done with his. The other is the singer's bearing, the way he twisted himself around the mic stand while the whole band stormed around him. Like a sailor clinging to the mast mid-squall. I never saw anyone look so frail and defiant at the same time.

You can see on the tape where I tried to write out the set list. Probably I only had "The Switch is Down" 12" at that point since I didn't recognize any of their other songs. You'll notice they didn't play "Stepping Softly Into." 

The second time I saw Universal Order of Armageddon was in 2010. There are some good photos from the show HERE. They did play "Stepping Softly Into" and it was great! But felt weird too. In the 16 years between the two shows, the singer of U.O.A. covered both his arms in tattoos, shaved his head, and got very visibly, physically strong. All the snarl remained, but I was uneasy at him shouting out, "what it is to be a man." He looked so much like a man, like an archetype of a man. I don't know anything about what he'd been up to in the intervening years (though I do really like that Uniform record) and it's unfair for me to make any guesses about where his head is at singing those lyrics. But the clenched fist of 2010 looked really different than the clenched fist of 1994, and I was wary of it. 

This difference troubled me for awhile. I got thinking about those 90s Morrissey records where he's obsessed with boxing, how it became a proxy for a kind of stoic masculinity ("Losing in front of your home crowd/You wish the ground would open up and take you down/And will time ever pass?/Will time/ever pass/for us"). What happened to the 19 year old Morrissey who wrote in a letter, "Society is sick and the world is in a mess thanks to men." It struck me that 16 years had passed for Morrissey between that observation and the release of the song "Boxers." What did this say about the inevitability of a turn towards masculinity for dudes that wouldn't have dreamed of it when they were younger?

But again this conjecture isn't helpful or reasonable, and blurs the questions I really want to answer. I got thinking again about that show in 1994, the kids who saw my box of tissue and asked for a few so they could plug their ears after Brooks Headley sat down at his drums and banged through the toms. They could guess how loud this band was going to be. But also that they knew I would say yes, that we'd have a shared moment that would resonate again when the band was done playing and we stood there, ears ringing, shaking our heads. I remembered the guy selling records ("7"s are $3 each or 2 for $5") suggesting I go get Ethiopian food after the show, that spicy food would clean up my congestion and there were a ton of vegan options right around the corner. I thought about the kids working the door offering to remember someone's face so they didn't have to get marker on their hand. In that context, there was endless opportunity to ask a singer what they meant by "What it is to be a man." It would've been ordinary, and would've also been easy. The 2010 show was at a D.I.Y. space in Brooklyn, so not such a different context, but the "event-ness" of this reunion show, the pent-up anticipation meant the band wasn't going to be at hand in the same way, and the dynamics between people had shifted. I am willing to concede I am romanticizing. But the more I think about it, it wasn't the lyric or the delivery that was different between those two shows, 16 years apart. What was different was the depth of opacity and the potential for scratching away at it. And I think it could've been there, but I know that community is something you have to build, and you can't just recall from some other moment when it was there in your life. Even if it was all you had at that time.

Anyway, I've digitized the U.O.A. tape I made, now 25 years old. If you're interested, you can download it HERE

Not a cure at all

Flesh World - Not A Soul


This song has the most urgent guitar lead I can think of. There's no startle reflex, no door kicked down or sudden violence, it's just there. It rises like panic, perfectly mirrors the alertness described in the lyrics: "Not a soul, not a tear at all/See a kid/Or so it seems/See a sight/Untied/Not a soul." 

All through my childhood we visited my cousins in northern New York. I think their closest neighbor was four miles away. As teenagers we would head up the road a bit until the lights of their house were no longer visible, so we could watch for shooting stars. One time I freaked out and demanded we head back to their house. I felt the absence of people around us, tkept pleading, "what if something happens to us???" knowing that no one would ever hear us call for help. Jessica laughed and said, "what could possibly happen to us!" She grew up in that quiet and knew its safety, but for me it was agitating. "Agitating" feels clumsy and not exactly right, I tried to think of another word for it but "unease" and "dread" are too slow moving. Those feelings sink, they cool, they obscure. This was the opposite: a rattle, an alertness. It's the sound of five or six notes snapped out of a guitar, each one chiseled and gravid, but also nimble enough to skip along on the heels of its predecessor. 

I first heard Flesh World mentioned in that shorthand way we talk about bands when we talk about bands too much: "oh, Jess from Brilliant Colors has a new peace punk band." I love peace punk! Right around that time I was asking friends for recommendations of a band that would make me feel like Zounds. A song like "Demystification" which obviously comes from a place of intense emotion but is sung with a numbness. I don't mean it's tuneless or flat, just a sense of overload. I felt that a lot in 2013, and since I couldn't really articulate it I wanted to hear someone else manifest it. Many friends gave it thought but very few had suggestions! It is how I heard that first Rank/Xerox record, which was close, but I could still feel that rattle, that rising/clenching feeling and was desperate to know someone else had felt it. So I was excited about the possibility I felt in Flesh World. 

Their first 12" was good. "I Lost My Heart In Transit Through the Post" felt like Talulah Gosh playing two blocks away, thoughtful and clever and directed, yet also out of grasp in this really compelling way. But a lot of the guitar parts on the record felt too muscular to me, burly in that way that punk records often feel, those ringing chords filling too much of the air. I was not strong enough to be overwhelmed in that way. 

It was the second record, the 7" for "A Line in Wet Grass" that answered all my hopes. The cobwebs and tight grip of the 12" are cast off in favor of glass-shard feedback and a skittering approach to notes. The drums are way louder. If the first record has a head-hung-low, downcast posture, this one stares you in the eyes, unblinking. "A Line in Wet Grass" has such an incredible momentum, and then lurches in the end, unwinding and losing speed with a very intentional damage. But it was the B side, "Not a Soul," that just destroyed me with its perfection. It conjures these disorienting moments I never could describe, it shoves and shoves but also holds fast in a way that keeps me on my feet. It speaks with the clarity and inevitability of a witness. It is what I imagine peace punk could be - bold and honest, demanding and unflinching. Overloaded yet moving forward.

Their subsequent records are excellent, Wild Animals In My Life in particular a bright and moving development of "Not a Soul," with all shadows cleared and even more breath around the notes. A line in the press release for their 2017 LP, Into the Shroud (that title! what a contradiction of the narrative I've claimed here) mentioned that they "took their name from an XXX magazine," which led me to the image above. Flesh World (as far as I can tell) wasn't a skin mag that existed on newsstands, but instead was created for the first season of Twin Peaks. The website Twin Peaks Props shared an image of an interior spread, and noted that the pictures are all of crew members and their friends. It's a cute bit of trivia. But it also got me thinking about the band Flesh World, and their insight. The potential irresponsibility of making a "peace punk" band in 2013, a moment when a lot of punk bands sound/look like they're participating in historical reenactment, exacting replicas of Detroit in 1982, or Tokyo in 1984. A similar issue was raised on twitter recently by Students of Decay, who noted, "it's a shame that experimental music has more or less ceded its long-standing aim to make work that is new/confrontational/surprising in order to focus on the less admirable goal of making work that sounds correct/expected/true to genre." 

I think this is a key to understanding why Flesh World make such apt, urgent music. If they are looking backwards at all, they are instead looking into a fiction of the past, an uncanny and disorienting world. Nothing glib like, "what if Laura Palmer owned Let The Tribe Increase?" but a strength taken from the secret languages of past subcultures. Hanky codes and band logos, the subtext in personal ads or the books you carry around with you. What if these were shifted just enough that they were no longer direct correspondences with history and all its cemented tyranny, but instead drawn from a recognizable, similarly terrible world where the main difference is all the strangeness is visible and drawn to the surface. Those are the hopes I feel, the panic I engage, the threads that ground me when I hear the song "Not a Soul."

Who the king piece in the chess game?

Slick Rick - Underwear is Wet


Today is my sister's birthday. Happy birthday Jordana. A little while ago she wrote a top ten of 2007 list for me that was at least half rap music which was, of course, no surprise to me since we share an apartment, and I heard her listening to these songs for months, some of them for years. A few years ago she lived in a Philly apartment crowded out with all of my records. She made the best of it, running through piles of 12"s and assembling genius mixtapes. When I showed up to the fort she had made out of cardboard sleeves and dirty clothes we spent weeks laughing and freaking out over songs. Barely letting two verses of Biggie songs play out before we shoved Foster Sylvers onto the turntable, followed quickly by "If I Had No Loot." It had been a minute since we had seen each other, and the themes that emerged in her hasty playbacks nudged me to ask if she had discovered the Slick Rick white label in the shelves with the B-side "Underwear is Wet", claiming that it was the exact sort of misogyny that she appreciated.

In the late 90s I lived in Portland Oregon and there were so few stores to buy rap records that I ended up figuring out the internet so that I could keep up. It turned out a good thing, because between sandboxautomatic.com and hiphopsite.com I found a ton of weird stuff that barely made it to stores beyond midtown Manhattan and Los Angeles. When Slick Rick was released from prison in 1998, I obsessively fantasized about how great his comeback record would be. I think it must've been in 1999 when this 12" came out, listed on one of those sites as "I Sparkle" b/w "Underwear is Wet" which is funny since the 12" only says "I Sparkle (clean version)" on one side and "I Sparkle (dirty version)" on the other. "Sparkle" is a Large Professor produced cut that's confident, easygoing and steady graciousness, the kind of thing that Jay-Z's grown man rap music should've aspired to. But "Underwear" was the real winner, a fearsome battle track with him twisting and turning over a ridiculously simple beat that basically flips the "there's a place in france where the naked ladies dance" theme.

The song is full of quoteables, nearly every line hits with that hurt-your-feelings sharpness, but Rick sounds nonchalant and grinning the whole time, so clearly in control of the situation. I think it was that era where everyone started describing MCs as sounding "hungry" and it was a sound I was very compelled by but on "Underwear is Wet" Slick Rick outdid the hunger of Shabaam Sahdeeq or Ill Bill or whatever it was by sounding well fed but a gourmand, like he was just eating for the taste of it. Appreciating the flavor of demolished MCs. Quick favorite punchlines:

"my record will be barking all through your broke project" "if a rapper wants to eat he better never cry battle" "put you and your family on welfare"

And then of course the chorus, which features the eye-widening, nudge-your-friend-in-disbelief line which made me think my sister would love the song so much: "no period and still have to put a pad on." Always with the grin on his face, I can't think of another rapper who you can so clearly hear his smile while he's rapping.

Jordana and I have secretly fought over this 12" for years. I have no count of how many times it's changed hands over the years. Always without a word or discussion. It's just suddenly gone one day, and then the next time I see her I sneak it into the bag with whatever I just bought. I think we've both looked for extra copies on the internet but never with any luck, the fact that it doesn't say "Underwear is Wet" anywhere on the record doesn't help. A year or so ago Cocaine Blunts aka the gold standard of talking about rap records on the internet ran an entry on Slick Rick rarities that had some gems but both of these songs were absent. "I Sparkle", by the way, did surface on the "Wild Wild West" soundtrack but as far as I know "Underwear is Wet" has been hidden forever. Anyway, it's now here and on her computer so no matter what happens to the 12" we can always hear a favorite.

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

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.