#I remember both and recording music off the radio onto a cassette

[dg-outlaw]

Definitely not an original idea, but I figured I'd contribute b/c some days require a good soundtrack.

[omegaplus]

# 4,330

PERSONAL CASSETTE DUB ARCHIVE.

Erasing my dad’s Saturday Night Fever cassette on a now extremely-rare Conion V-121F was the very first tape memory I had. I didn’t know better. I don’t know where my dad got the Conion or why, but I remember it sitting on our dining room table. It had to be a Saturday or Sunday evening during summer recess where my dad invited his friends over to show off the family fire truck: a 1949 American LaFrance. That Conion would stay with us for a long time. The moment I hit that record button was the one my life-long relationship with cassettes and recorded media began. As an Eighties kid, I spent more time downstairs playing Atari, Nintendo, and watching WWF on weekend afternoons more than anything. Down there, I discovered another smaller, cheaper radio with a blank tape inside of it. It was one of those radios where it’d record off the FM while also recording natural sound via its built-in mic- at the same time.

The Christmas after starting middle-school, ma’ got me my own small red boombox from a petty electronics corner-store she worked at and three cassette tapes not worth mentioning. That boombox’s playback speed ran a little too fast and I knew something didn’t feel right. So she exchanged it for one that worked properly: a Sony CFS-213. Much better. I also received four matching Sony HF90 blanks and found whatever strays lying around in the house. It was that exact point in time I started getting into archiving and recording. My first-ever keeps didn’t happen until the following Summer when I moved on from Z100 to WBLS, a hip-hop / rap station found at the end of the dial. I caught that frequency when they had T-Money, Ed Lover, Dr. Dre, and King Saul on their line-up. The CFS would begin a years-long habit of creating a music diary of sorts; a timeline of who my friends were, where I was, and when - all written by the record button and onto tape.

I was young and immature once. I found every piece of low-brow humor funny and everything fascinated me. I was huge into In Living Color, Howard Stern and The Diceman. Guilty as charged. So I asked ma’ if she had some Walkmans. She’d given me a couple out-of-closet, and one happened to have a built-in mic-. The only way I could record favorite one-liners from cartoons, comedies, one-time only interviews, and late-night specials was to place it near the TV speaker, press ‘record’, and let it run. For years that was the only way I could capture NES and Genesis game soundtracks. Back then there wasn’t as much permanence as we have now. I felt every day was now or never. Occasionally the CFS would have a bad day and decide to eat one of my tapes. One-of-a-kind moments were just that, and they hung in the balance. Some tapes crinkled, and some even snapped. It was analog media, so I knew nothing was beyond repair. All I needed was a few inches of Scotch Tape to re-join the snapped ends and a boxcutter to trim it to width and I was back in business.

The CFS eventually went and ended its two-year run. Both ma’ and my dad upgraded my Sony to a CDF-50 for Christmas after middle school. With that came a ten-pack of Recoton XR90’s and Ice Cube’s The Predator, my first CD. Now I had another source to dub from and I could make better mixtapes out of them. Ma’ had a few more Walkmans lying around in the house which would play a memorable part of my life. Gramma’ was ailing with kidney failure, so every week ma’ and I drove out to visit her in Bensonhurst which was off Bay Parkway’s Exit 5. I couldn’t stand ma’s music, which was why I packed a tote with her Walkmans and already-made Recotons to stay occupied during those long hot Summer drives with an Arizona and a bag of cheddar-pretzel Combos by my side. Rides out to Staten Island became a thing when my uncle fully recovered from a terribly nasty drug addiction, allowing my family to become closer with him, my aunt, and their four hoodlum kids. Even better, my my bro- and I sat in the backseat as ma’ and dad drove to Harrah’s in Atlantic City, and once took the Orient Point ferry to Foxwoods up in Mashantucket. We were left behind at the video arcade while ma’ and dad gambled their salaries and disability checks away. Those Walkmans and Recotons were there with me the entire time.

I was still very much into hip-hop / rap, way before we now call it The Golden Era. WBLS had a format change so I switched to Hot 97 and their competitor Kiss FM. The boombox as we knew it was symbolic of hip-hop culture and made millions of us. From then until the end of the Brentwood era I would still compile that history. My friends usually failed me, but my Sony didn’t; always there faithfully waiting for me to come home. Every day, every night, every weekend when I struck out with plans I’d sit home to hit that record button once again. When my stock of Recotons finally ran out, I’d bike to the music store in the mall to purchase four- or five-packs of TDK D Series and Maxell UR tapes. Those two brands were a godsend to me as they continued to solidify my identity for years to come. Everything - the Walkmans and tapes - came with me to countless bus rides to-and-from Brentwood when my wrestling and volleyball teams traveled to rival schools, or even sitting in the rafters during all-day tournaments. Even I shared the wealth with my friends to borrow my tapes for the ride when they had nothing to listen to. I’m forever thanksful that they never pocketed them on me, not even once.

It wasn’t long until gramma’ died of kidney failure. It would be our very last ride to Bensonhurst my ma’ and I would take. Both of us had one final shot to take as much of gramma’ and poppy’s possessions with us. They didn’t have much of a music collection, if any at all. Pop- only had a small cache of old cassettes he kept over the decades - opaque amber shells with white labels and gold print. I took them all along with a few of his old gambling books and a pair of heavy binoculars. I got home and curiously listened to what were on his tapes, sacrificing them only if I happened to run out of blanks to record. The rest would stay untouched for years. Meanwhile, ma’ took gramma’s Lafayette LR-810 receiver. Lafayettes were common on the island as they originated there. She already had one tied up with the living room CD player, so she gave me it. Now we had two of them back home.

**********

The CDF only lasted through three-and-a-half years of high-school before I trashed it after senior year. I inherited one of dad’s Akais, this time a full tape deck rescued from the basement. He loved Akais. We had another receiver of theirs and an eight-track player he built into the kitchen wall connected with in-ceiling speakers (!). They were never used and we never owned one single eight-track at the old Brentwood home. Go figure. That Akai cassette deck was a literal octopus sound system for me. My Lafayette, (either) a Super Nintendo or a Playstation, and two pairs of speakers - one disconnected from the Conion - were all tied to it. It connected what my Panasonic system couldn’t but that was still reserved for radio dubs only. At this point, I shifted from radio hip-hop and bounced back and forth between Q104.3, K-Rock, and back to Z100. Again, the record button ran from end to end, letting the chips fall as they may. The tapes kept on accumulating and never gave up their mission as being reference points of my life.

Every now and then there’s a new piece of antiquity to be found in the basement. I don’t know where my ma’ and dad finds them or why they magically materialize. This time it was a small turntable and it opened up a new world for me to preserve. I started buying vinyl records through mail-order catalogues, public libraries, and even hardcore shows. The brunt of my 7” library came from Centereach’s None Of The Above, Long Island’s hardcore and punk haven. The basement turntable couldn’t play for its life, so for my birthday, my best friend gave me his father’s 1972 Panasonic and a limited-edition Autechre 12”. I was at first nervous about vinyl’s fragility and adversion to physical damage. That Panasonic connected to and played through my Akai which recorded my most essential 12” records and were used for playback until I got used to handling my records on a regular basis.

When the final Akai broke, I replaced it with something else. I don’t remember the manufacturer. Was it Sony, Aiwa, or Philips? Chances are it was a black Aiwa, another Christmas present. That was my first micro-system featuring an FM/AM radio, a three-CD changer, a five-band equalizer, and dual tape decks - a first for me. That meant I could fill up my remaining blanks (save one) with dubs, take my favorite songs, and consolidate them to one. It also had removable speakers which replaced the Conion’s when they finally went. Aiwa’s dual tape decks would play an all-important role in my life that would change the way I did things forever.

I was over Manzana’s house one Friday night. She was an Italian-Jewish girl I saw briefly in high-school. My best friend was now dating her and she had her other friends over. We were all joking around and acting like immature fools throwing couch cushions at each other. Right then and there in my mind I came up with the idea of ‘seasonal’ mixtapes. I already had a generous collection of tapes and numerous purchases of CD’s in my possession. Why not make a compilation to remind me of everything that happened in a calender season based on songs I found during that time? So I took everything I listened to from March, April, and May and put them all together on one Maxell UR120 using the Aiwa dual-tape deck. A new concept was born: the seasonal personal mixtape! I can write and keep a new personal diary every three months without using pen, paper, or words - only sounds! It’s a quarterly ritual which I’d made sure of myself to do religiously because it fit perfectly with my perception of time and would forever be the basis for my projects.

By then I was on a roll. I not only made mixtapes for my own personal satisfaction but for friends in good standing as well. I gave my friend The Greek Tragedy 120 minutes of Henry Rollins’ spoken work because he asked and I had them. On the other hand, I had plenty of friends who gave me theirs as well. I still have most of them. Those gifts were a great way of seeing what my friends were made of. I had two fellow writers from the Suffolk Compass who tossed me a couple themselves. One, a true Boston punk who turned me on to R.L. Burnside, Crass, AxCx, and Rudimentary Peni. Another writer was part of a local synthpop band who felt his (and only his) favorite artists were better than everyone else’s, so he gave me a synthpop mixtape of Yaz, Erasure, New Order, and more. I gave him credit for sticking with a genre of music that many people at that time deemed tacky.

Perhaps the most special and sentimental mix-cassettes I ever received from anyone was from a Polish girl from Ocean City whom I found online, before Facebook and Myspace even existed. We clicked almost instantly and progressed to where months later she’d send me a package of three mixtapes and some poems she written for me. Her purple tapes came in white slide-out cases which she scrawled personal messages on with black marker. It was a sweet, personal touch from a girl who was caring, charming, out-going, and was interested in meeting me…or so I thought.

She canceled our plans at the last moment. No reason given. It was only a matter of time before she bought herself a few moments before ghosting me. The hits kept on coming as I abandoned my job and my synthpop ‘friend’ who hired me from the pool supply store, all by the end of that June. My summer was all almost over before it started and I had nothing going on except for a Playstation, my bike and stereo system. I had no choice but to stay home and wait it out until community college started next Autumn.

All hope was lost at that point, but the turn of the millennium would give me an Ace card in the best way possible. By then I gave up all commercial radio and drew towards Stony Brook University’s station WUSB where they played everything the corporate or Top 40 stations wouldn’t. My recording game was constant and I did it every night for a few hours just to try and take the focus off of my latest losses. It was more than enough that I caught one of their resident hip-hop dee-jays play Lonnie Liston Smith (& The Cosmic Echoes) “Expansions” followed by a sampling set on their ones-and-twos. It was so out-of-this-world and not of this time. That’s when I started reaching back and re-connected with myself, and to think that the cassette would create another addiction for me for years to come: sample-searching. As if my life would change once already, there would be a second time before my stint at community-college era was finally over.

Our sober uncle gifted my family a new desktop computer for Christmas. That was a total surprise to me. But why did we get one? Because my dad wanted free music. Napster exploded into a worldwide phenomenom. My ma’ and dad spent countless nights for hours on end grabbing country, hippie rock, and the golden oldies left and right. So did I, staying up until 4AM in the morning finding every B-side, rarity, compilation, Japan-only and unreleased tracks from my favorite artists I could think of. Did I abandon my tapes for downloading? No way. I was still making radio dubs all night and every night without fail during my downloading free-for-all. Again: industrial, underground hip-hop, pop-punk, indie…and what they called “electronica” at the time. Sure.

**********

I never gave up on dubbing and cassettes. It continued on during my time off from study, my relationship with Yenny, three jobs, and into Stony Brook. What first started as a listener of WUSB now continued on as a selector and then program-director. I still have my old demos- and auditions on Maxell UR120’s from when I first joined, forever capturing a few cold Winter and nicer Spring days inside a dilapidated studio which was built in their AM days (the Sixties) and had never been renovated before being torn down for good. I was still doing double-duty downloading and dubbing, even after a former music-director who worked for Apple offered me to purchase my very first iPod Classic (30GB) which now took over my Walkman as the preferred player for all future night drives and train rides to New York City. That still wasn’t enough to replace my cassettes, and why would it? I still needed something to record and I still wasn’t over spending lots of time making them.

Eventually, all things had come to an end. Literally. I had enough of being stuck behind the register with no one to back me up, because those same people abandoned their post. So out of nowhere I decided to burn my bridges and walk out of my job. I didn’t wake up one morning to plan on having it happen but it did. I felt the entire weight on my shoulders collapse immediately, enough for me to break down. I stressed like no tomorrow to salvage whatever bank account I had left to avoid moving to The Carolinas. I was bustling and jumping from one job to another until I found something that was only enough for me to survive. I had no idea what I was getting into and turned out to be the worst mistake of my life. The toxic co-workers, asshole managers, and older down-on-their-luck has-beens who apexed in high-school were enough to wear me down even further. By then I became a former shell of myself. I had almost nothing that I once did that used to keep me alive. No radio show, no computer, no blogging…nothing. I was too busy learning to survive and stay mouth above water. Recording and archiving were the last things on my mind. But, I still had my Aiwa micro-system.

Those tapes my poppy had? I finally got around to hear them all. Literal relics from a long-gone classic and golden era that no longer exists. I never knew his music tastes up until that point: Barbara Streisand, Sammy Davis Jr., Neil Sadaka, Tom Jones, Wayne Newton. Late Sixties classics and early Seventies American standards - things I’d never be caught dead or alive listening to. His tapes had a mucky, distorted quality to them. They were in a severe state of tape rot and natural degradation imperative to being case-less and exposed to the elements for decades. Then I found a few more random discoveries from his small stash. There’s a thirty-second recording of him reciting Torah verses; the only artifact that will keep his voice alive for decades. And another tape…I can’t explain it, nor there’s any information about it, either. I called it the “rape tape”: vintage recordings and radio pornography of men fucking women and using explicit triple X-rated language. I don’t know when those recordings were made, where he got it from, when in his life he acquired it, or why he even had them. An unusual and peculiar swerve if I had to think of one.

By the Summer of ‘08, I dubbed the final radio session on tape, again a Maxell UR120. WCBS-FM just enlisted Joe Causi to replace Cousin Brucie for the legendary Saturday night slot (Brucie went to satellite radio), playing gold and platinum-selling hits of the Seventies. I still had a kick for the radio hits of that decade. Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me”, Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel”, and Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You” became three of the songs on that final radio recording I’d ever make.

I still made one more physical seasonal mixtape before the decade was done. I visited Amityville’s High Fidelity for the first time and purchased my usual Seventies jazz, fusion, and pop vinyl records. Roberta Flack, John Tropea, Les McCann, Roy Ayers Ubiquity, Karla Bonoff, Marvin Gaye, Parliament, Phil Upchurch; it goes on. I also bought some best-of compilations from the Mercury label. Like everything else, I piece-mealed it all together. With that, Autumn ‘09 became my final physical mixtape I’d ever make.

And that was it. The end of an era for me. It was the very last time I ever hit record.

There was no real reason for me to stop other than it being too cumbersome and time-consuming. I didn’t miss it, either. Graduating university meant the end of an almost two-decade hobby. Final count? At least 400+ tapes recorded from the beginning of the Brentwood era all the way to the end of Stony Brook. I saved enough money and two months later I eventually bought a Gateway NV laptop to return to downloading and burning discs - as my entire personal cassette archive sat to suffer in draws and shelves for another number of years.

***********

I decided it be fun to revisit the Nineties and the Oughts, one tape at a time.

Last year I wanted to do something about the cassette archive. I thought of digitizing it all. I knew it would be a huge undertaking and time-consuming. I didn’t do it during the nine months of in-home recovery from shoulder surgery, and I didn’t do it during the two months I was ordered to stay home on furlough during the pandemic. Why? Because I had other ongoing projects on the steady. But I finally had the chance to at least chop away at the hundreds of tapes I have stacked.

They say cassette media lasts for thirty years, give or take the thickness of the tape, the type of metal used, how often they’ve been played and how they’re stored properly. Even though my archive was still in great condition and I could put it off for another few years, I wanted to do it now than never. Either digitize and duplicate my memories and timeline into one huge time machine or have them disappear forever. No second chances.

My first attempt at digitizing the library was connecting a Jensen Walkman to my computer. Pop the tape in, hit record on the app-, and let it run its course. I played them back as soon as the recordings were completely converted to MP3 but noticed that the Jensen raised the pitch by 5%. No dice. So I went to the thrift store in Centereach and found a Yamaha KX-400U tape deck for $35.00 that perfectly matched the $85.00 Yamaha A-1000 stereo amplifier I got at High Fidelity during the pandemic summer. I wired the KX- to my desktop with a Roxio VHS-to DVD converter, set up Audacity to record, and hit play.

It all came back to me. One tape at a time.

Cassettes in bubble packaging hanging off the pharmacy’s peghooks. Limited-edition shells my bro- and I got from Happy Meals that I erased over. Anticipating that one song on the radio that’s about to play. Vinardo’s after school for Street Fighter. Chasing the blue-eyed blonde-haired Irish girl at the Eighth-grade picnic. A dance tape my sis- had that I recorded Kiss FM on. Abandoned tapes thrown out of passenger-side windows, encrusted in dirt and found on dirty sidewalks. Spending Thanksgiving weekend at home sick. Winter days and nights with a Super Nintendo. That Spanish girl with the glasses who wanted me to take her home from my friend’s backyard party. Early morning bike-rides to Brentwood. Sagat’s “Funk Dat” and Tucka Da’ Hunterman in the back of the bus. Reggie across the street dubbing me The Notorious B.I.G.’s and Wu-Tang Clan’s debut albums. My Rasta- friend attempting to run me over and apologized to me by giving me M. Doc & Stevio’s and Eazy-E as a peace offering. That D90 I left at my cousin Dorona’s house which she recorded her R&B favorites over my hip-hop. Cute girls from rival volleyball teams approaching me to sweeten the deal. My first time meeting Jewish girls in Plainview. Diamond and I sitting on the curb. Donna and I at Adventureland. Her friend Julie who erased over the Nine Inch Nails’ Broken and Fixed mixtape I made for her. Christmas with my cousin Dorona and the rest of the Staten Island family. My alternative circle of friends walking the snowy neighborhood streets at one in the morning. My brother and his hood friends from high-school recording themselves and acting like the animals that they were. Compilations from friends taped over with surviving track-listings. Endless downloading sessions. Making my dad a Shirelles mix. Indie hits playing while driving home through miserable snowstorms. J-Ro’s Antique Road Show while coding. The over-nighter I pulled creating blog-sites for cinema class. Cath- and I on our first date sitting across each other over Thursday dinner. Found answering messages from my Hampton uncle’s 50 year-old junkie girlfriend. Hopeless Summer days wondering in an era wondering where I would go in my life. Hand-made art and tracklists scribbled in blue pen on the back of J-cards. Every pop, fade out, snap, abrupt cut, distortion, XDR tone-burst, and Dolby calibration tone. It’s there. All of it, there.

It wasn’t as exhausting as I thought it’d be. I manage to digitize about 75 tapes for every two weeks off. They go by quick. They’re all saved in 128 KBPS MP3 quality and files are named after the brand and type of tape with any discerning aesthetic qualities on them. Then the auditing process. That was the hardest part. Keeping track of each and every tape that has and has yet been once-overed, and playing them again just to be sure nothing has been overlooked.

At the time of posting, 100% of my personal tape archive has now been digitized. I’ve taken care of my entire library to know they’ll survive at least another ten to twenty years more before noticeable fading of quality. Further backup and duplication means a good portion of my life will be salvaged way after I’ve said good-bye for all eternity. When that happens, my nephews will get it all. They can only imagine how I experienced the golden-era, the Nineties, and independent radio. They were born into the digital age and though physical media is still very much alive, the industry has and will push streaming and convenience over everything else. They won’t really grasp what it was like to salvage things themselves, to properly insert physical objects or press play. They won’t know what it’s like to slide a tape into a 25-pound boombox and hit the play button as they’re working on their car. They won’t experience coming over to a friend’s house to see Redman, Juliana Hatfield, The Cure, Stone Temple Pilots, and cracked Matthew Sweet tapes scattered all around someone’s disorganized bedroom as they’re playing video games through Summer nights, or to even discover a box of their mom’s old tapes somewhere hidden in a basement. She has no such thing. Sure, the vinyl resurgence is still taking place, but will it and physical media matter to them in the next twenty-five to thirty years? Highly unlikely as they face a world of here-today gone-tomorrow TV shows, movies, and hottest pop playlists at the mercy of steaming content providers and contractual obligations.

There’s still lots of work to be done. The CD- and DVD-R archive is the next massive undertaking followed by digitizing my entire VHS dub library, the largest-than-life behemoth of them all. That’s another battle for another year.

[from-the-dark-past]

Interview with Anders Ohlin in The Black Metal Murders: English translation

Translator’s note: Black metal-morden (English: The Black Metal Murders) is a radio documentary from 2017 produced by Radio Sweden (download). It’s about Mayhem and the Norwegian black metal scene in the ‘90s and contains interviews with Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud, Kjetil Manheim, Eirik “Messiah” Norheim and Anders Ohlin (Pelle Ohlin’s younger brother). 

Here, I’ve translated the parts where Anders Ohlin speaks into English (from Swedish). I’ve added time-stamps and short descriptions for the different sections of the interview. 

I am working on translating the interviews with Necrobutcher, Manheim and Messiah and will post them soon. 

1:51 - 6:35 [Talking about him and Pelle getting into extreme metal]

Anders: We’d started listening to hard rock and it was… We’d, like, worked through all of those… Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. 

Narrator: It’s the mid-1980s in Västerhaninge, a suburb of Stockholm. Pelle Ohlin lives here. He plays in the extreme metal band Morbid and his stage name is Dead. Pelle has introduced his five-years-younger brother to hard rock. Together, they’ve worked through all of the main bands. 

Anders: And you, like, hungered for this… This Other. 

Narrator: The ‘Other’ that younger brother Anders is talking about is extreme metal; music that is faster, darker and harder. A progression of hard rock. Music that isn’t easy to get your hands on at this time. Anders is in his early teens and has gotten his first girlfriend. 

Anders: It was my first relationship and it was super-exciting, and I was at her house, she lived in Jordbro, which is, like, the neighbouring suburb. 

Narrator: Anders’ girlfriend’s older sister has an LP that Anders simply must show his older brother Pelle. 

Anders: It was, like, you knew it was good music, and it was that Destruction record. 

Narrator: Anders sees the German death metal band Destruction’s cover and it’s enough for him to understand that this must be good music. [...] 

Anders: This. This here isn’t Judas Priest and it isn’t Iron Maiden; it’s something else. I’ve got show this fucking record to Pelle. 

Narrator: Anders nags [his girlfriend’s older sister] to borrow the LP. He’s allowed to, but only for the day, so he bikes home in the rain from Jordbro to Västerhaninge as quickly as he can. 

Anders: And it was like [excited noise], like a cartoon; the evil wolf, their eyes bulge out and we both ran -- because we hadn’t heard the LP, only seen the cover -- ran to the record player och then Mom walks up and is like: ‘Stop! You’re forbidden from using the gramophone.’ And it was like, fucking hell, is it going to die here and then we explained to Mom -- ‘This is an extreme record and we’ve borrowed it for the day and it’s going back tomorrow,’ -- and Mom was super-harsh and was like: ‘It doesn’t matter. [...]’ And then we started negotiating and agreed that we could record the LP onto cassette [because you don’t need volume for that]. So, it was on full-blast the entire night and we recorded it and stood bent over the record scratches and were like,‘Shit, this is good stuff’. 

Narrator: Pelles hard rock style stands out against the usual sweatpant-Bagheera-jacket [style], not least the music. 

Anders: The ideals that existed at that time were that you were supposed to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, which neither he nor I did [laughs]. You were supposed to be handsome and cool and have some fucking helipad on your head. 

Translator’s note: Anders is talking about a flat-top haircut commonly referred to as a ‘helikopterplattafrisyr’ -- helipad haircut -- in Sweden. Think H.R. Haldeman. I’m not sure what the English term for this haircut is. 

Narrator: Anders and Pelle are apart of a small subculture; extreme metal, with subgenres such as trash metal, death metal and black metal, which provokes with its satanic and morbid symbols. Pelle’s band Morbid pushes the limits of what music can sound like. With his stage-name Dead, Pelle sings on the demo December Moon. The new subculture is not embraced by the adult world. 

Anders: Like, we faced this fucking cultural oppression as hardrockers. It was that time-period… And especially if you wanted to do something that was worse than hard rock; it was completely judged. 

14:52 - 15:53 [Talking about Pelle being bullied] 

Anders: He was beaten at school and to such an extent that he actually died for a while, or however you put it. 

Narrator: There’s an explanation to Pelle’s obsession with death. At 13, he was bullied at school and once, he was beaten so badly that his spleen burst. Pelle’s brother Anders Ohlin tells the story.

Anders: He was beaten to death and had some near-death experience as he was laying in the hospital and he kept coming back to that all the time, and I think you can see that as some sort of theme in his songs too. Like, it’s always about the fact that he was actually there and touched something that he doesn’t know what it is, and that was the engine in all that. He was definitely [at the bottom of the pecking order] at school, precisely because he was a bit… He had his special... his special style and was, like, uncompromising, and that was what singled him out, I’d say, markedly from other teenagers. 

18:07 - 18:30 [Talking about Pelle’s depression]

Anders: He would neglect to eat, just to get a cassette tape out or arrange a gig somewhere. 

Narrator: Anders Ohlin, Pelle’s brother. 

Anders: To be a bit harsh, I think that the others gave up at some point. And that’s my personal interpretation. That he suddenly turns around and notices that he hasn’t got the gang with him. And I think that destroyed him. 

21:50 - 22:30 [Talking about Pelle’s suicide] 

Anders: At first, I was actually really pissed at him… Or, like, angry, enraged. I thought that he’d abandoned us -- which he has. That it was so shitty of him; to just take off and leave this big fucking abscess to the rest of us that just kept growing and growing as the years passed. 

Narrator: Christmases become especially painful for the Ohlin family, because that was the time Pelle usually came home. 

Anders: No one felt good on Christmas Eve. It was like a fucking ghost all Christmas. Brutal. So, I remember that I couldn’t celebrate Christmas at all for a very long time. 

1:06:39 - 1:09:31 [Talking about how he and Pelle’s Swedish friends remember him and his life today]

Anders: All of his Swedish friends see him as this exuberantly happy guy that spews ideas and is funny and has a sense of humor and stuff. Then, it’s like a line is drawn when he goes to Norway and they see him as introverted and mysterious and, like, difficult. And that’s two opposite images. 

Narrator: The Pelle Myth is associated with a lot of darkness and death but that’s not how his brother Anders and Pelle’s Swedish friends remember him.  

Anders: I think that’s been the devastating part, but it, like, helped him build… strengthen that myth. It’s hard being that funny dude and saying that you’re, like, Satan. It’s hard, it becomes, like, silly. 

Narrator: Anders is often reminded of Pelle. Usually because of happy memories but also because of that image that he is fighting to remove; the image that Øystein took of Pelle’s corpse which spread because it became the album cover of a Mayhem bootleg, Dawn of the Black Hearts. The image lives its own life on the internet. 

Anders: It’s difficult. It’s very difficult. 

Narrator: Pelle’s fans often want to become Facebook friends with Anders; he receives 3-5 friend requests per day. Sometimes, the people sending the friend requests have themselves shared the image on their social channels. 

Anders: You say you want to be my friend yet you have an image of my brother from when he’s just killed himself and like… body parts all over the wall. Would you think it was okay if I had an image of your brother like that? ‘What,’ they excuse themselves. ‘Oh, fuck, I’d forgotten that I had that image, that’s… Of course, I’ll remove it and I’m ashamed.’ 

Narrator: When Anders asks people to remove the image, most do. 

Anders: I’m terrified for when my children will start to Google those images… Øystein’s parents inherited the rights after Øystein died and [Øystein’s dad] has destroyed the images and I’ve received the rights, gotten to take over the rights from Øystein’s dad, so if anyone uses them in any form is printed media, I can sue the shit out of them. 

Narrator: It’s a small comfort every time one of Pelle’s fans tells Anders how much Pelle means. 

Anders: Most often, they have some story. They tell me how they’ve had a tough period in life and how they’ve, like, really been at a crossroads or something and feel that they received guidance from Pelle’s music. That warms -- That makes you happy. That really warms your heart. 

Narrator: Pelle’s grave is well-visited and every now and then, there’s a handwritten letter or a box of snus by it. 

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: His Name Is Alive

While Warren Defever’s name is perhaps less recognizable than that of his band His Name Is Alive, he’s also been connected with a seemingly endless array of other projects: Princess Dragon-Mom, Elvis Hitler, ESP Beetles, Control Panel, and far more. This doesn’t get into his recording and production credits for the likes of Michael Hurley, Iggy and the Stooges, and Mdou Moctar. Forever associated with Michigan’s weirdo-underground music scene, Defever has recently been issuing a series of long-buried recordings as His Name Is Alive. In February, the Disciples label released Hope Is a Candle, the third and final volume in the "Home Recordings" trilogy exploring Defever's teenage tape experimentation as well as A Silver Thread (Home Recordings 1979 - 1990), a four-volume collection of many of Defever’s solo home recordings prior to His Name Is Alive releasing their debut album Livonia on 4AD in 1990. In his review of A Silver Thread, Tim Clarke writes “For a collection of home recordings, what’s most striking about this music is how fully realized and carefully executed it sounds, comparable at times to contemporary artists such as Grouper, Benoît Pioulard and Tim Hecker. This is not the 1980s that I remember.”

Defever gives us his “What Else Is New” list, a set of personal snapshots, memories of a life spent in music, warning the reader that “the descriptions don’t always have an obvious correlation to the video, but welcome to my nightmare brain.”

In The Line of Fire

I started performing when I was five. My grandfather was a self-taught musician from Saskatchewan in Western Canada and he showed me and my brothers how to play banjo, guitar and fiddle. One of my earliest memories is having a full size 127 lb. accordion placed onto my lap and my grandmother voicing her disappointment when I refused to play. I did learn slide guitar from her later though. I have many, often terrible, memories of performing at square dances with his band and we would play old timey country music, folk songs, polkas and waltzes. There were also gigs at the trailer park, old folks homes and a convent. Although my grandfather believed that popular music died with Hank Williams in 1953, he still found room in his heart for Lawrence Welk and Slim Whitman.

Meet Me By The Water

By age ten I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brothers LP collection played at the wrong speeds. I recently found the cassette, Echo Lake (1983) which features waves crashing onto the beach on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair but it was recorded right after I got an echo pedal so it’s got a heavy dose of dreamy delay. Tape loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway would be repurposed a few years later as rhythm tracks on the first His Name Is Alive LP, Livonia (4AD, 1990). Detroit in the late 70s and early 80s had totally insane radio and one of the highlights was Met-Ezzthetics, a late night show on WDET hosted by Faruq Z. Bey who also played saxophone in Griot Galaxy. Shortly before his death he played with His Name is Alive and we had a chance to formalize our student-teacher relationship.

Search For Higher Energies

In high school I was studying Bach Chorale harmonization and counterpoint during the day but recording and touring with the band Elvis Hitler at night. The other guys in band were older but at 16 I was a familiar sight at shitty Detroit punk clubs and Hamtramck dive bars, the nerdy teenager reading a book or doing homework sitting at the bar waiting ’til midnight or 1am for our slot to play our hellbilly hits, “It’s A Long Way From Berlin To Memphis,” and “Hot Rod To Hell.” I was still trying to make sense of the post 1953 music scene and when I met the guy with a giant afro and shiny super hero outfit complete with shiny cape I had no idea he was Rob Tyner of the MC5. We released three records before I was twenty one and played shows and toured with Devo, the Dwarves, the Dead Milkmen, Reverend Horton Heat, the Beat Farmers, Helios Creed, Babes In Toyland, the Cro-Mags, Corrosion of Conformity, the Frogs, the Gories, Pussy Galore, the Unsane and way more I can’t remember I was just a kid. It was some kind of education.

You Don’t Have To Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here

When I signed with 4AD I thought I was a composer and they let me write my own bio, so I called His Name Is Alive the work of a “fucked up, irresponsible teenage composer.” I had only been writing music for three years. When I heard “Tom Violence” by Sonic Youth I thought for the first time in my life, “I think I could do that.” In 1988 I made a mixtape with Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, Leadbelly and some of Big Star’s third album and I tried to arrange it like it was an album, then I made my own album in that same shape, it was called I Had Sex With God and I sent it to 4AD. Our first album contained three of the first five pieces of music I had ever written. Within a few years I was playing festivals for contemporary classical composers and new age artists who were thirty or forty years older than me. His Name Is Alive played the Musicas Visuales Festival in Mexico with Harold Budd, Paul Horn and Jorge Reyes. The mayor of the city presented me with a guitar but then dramatically walked out of the theater during our performance realizing he had made a terrible mistake. I remember the surreal moment when from across the room Harold Budd walked in and greeted me as “Mr. Defever.” He had a cold and was sniffling during his set, the audience thought he was crying. I recorded his show and when I got back home to Livonia I added my own guitar to some of his songs and then edited the tapes, looping my favorite parts and editing out the parts I didn’t like, also adding additional layers of reverb and echo. More recently I did a concert in a five hundred year old temple in Japan where the unamplified meditation music never rose above a whisper and the monk had to turn off the furnace because the heat molecules were too loud. The show was recorded and released under the name Mountain Ocean Sun and features Ian Masters and Hitoko Sakai.

Energy Dealer

Both my parents were born in Canada, my mother in Saskatchewan, my father in Ontario. I have dual citizenship as my father was American and my mother had Canadian citizenship. I spent summers, holidays and weekends in a tiny cottage on Lake St. Clair that did not have a telephone and had curtains instead of doors separating the two rooms. Myrt Fortin who lived next door would receive phone calls for my mom, walk over to our place and yell into the window, “Hey wake up your ma, your dad’s on the phone.” My mom took a lot of naps, so she was always asleep when something important was happening. I remember always getting cut on broken glass while swimming in the lake or getting stabbed by one of the neighbors and having to go wake up my mom to take me to the hospital.

Lord I Don’t Believe You Exist

When I was ten my parents sat me down and told me it was time that I got a summer job. There were only two businesses in town, a gas station and a hardware store so I walked up to the hardware store and asked the owner for a job and immediately fell to the ground crying. Completely fell apart. He asked me why I wanted to work in hardware. I didn’t know what to say, I was only ten but I knew not to tell the owner that his store was stupid and I didn’t think he could handle the truth. It turned out he also owned the gas station so that didn’t really work out. Later that summer, I began working for the Pickseed Corporation as corn de-tasseling season was just beginning. All the moms would drop off their kids in the church parking lot in Tecumseh, just outside of Windsor, around 4:30am where an unmarked windowless cargo van was waiting that had cinderblocks and 2'x4' boards instead of benches so they could squeeze in the maximum amount of children. There were three job requirements to work in a cornfield, the child (it was only children, no adults) needed to show up with a baseball hat, a thermos with water and a large black plastic garbage bag. I think this was before sunglasses were invented. Upon arriving at the cornfield, we were separated into pickers and checkers, younger kids each taking a row of corn (a row could extend a mile or more) and a slightly older kid would organize and manage several of the younger kids. In the morning we were instructed to poke two arm holes and a head hole into our garbage bags and put it on like a raincoat because the corn was covered in dew and kids wearing wet clothes would walk slower than dry kids. So almost every day there was a point, usually around 11am when the dew would dry and we would be roasted alive from the summer sun coming down on our ridiculous shiny black plastic outfits. We worked from sun up until sun down. I received three dollars and thirty five cents an hour. For all you city folks, corn is planted in alternating rows of types of corn so that when the top part of the plant is removed, or “de-tasseled,” it can seed or cross-pollinate easily. It’s a terrible job with a high turnover rate and every day I would hear the sound of kids in nearby rows that had given up hope, sat down in the middle of the field and crying for hours. The following year, at age 11, I was promoted from picker to checker, and was put in charge of a group of about ten sixteen year old’s.

Sleep It Off

Mostly I like to record – His Name is Alive has over a hundred releases and I’ve done another fifty records under various names, Control Panel, Warren Michael Defever, ESP BEETLES, ESP SUMMER, Forest People, Infinity People, Jeepers Creepers, Layla al-Akhyaliyya, Mirror Dream, Princess Dragon-Mom, the Dirt Eaters, the Fishcats, the Whales, plus way more I can’t remember probably because the names were so dumb. I’ve recorded about four hundred records for other bands at my house or other studios. I’ve worked on records with Danny Kroha, Ida, Fred Thomas, Elizabeth Mitchell, Wild Belle, Michael Hurley, and when I was a teenager I helped record the first Gories album which was especially unique as I was the junior assistant engineer who helped move their equipment into the dirt floor garage next to the studio where it was decided the acoustics would be way worse. Also, I helped collage about a hundred Destroy All Monsters tapes from the 70s for a couple of their releases which led to remastering a bunch of tapes from the John Sinclair White Panther Party archives. I’ve done remixes for Thurston Moore and Yoko Ono and when Iggy and The Stooges started touring again I got a phone call from Ron Asheton seeing if I would help them record demos for their reunion album with Mike Watt on bass. They wrote the songs together while they were recording in Niagara’s basement sort of simultaneously. Iggy didn’t have a notebook with all his lyric ideas, instead he just sang about whatever happened that day – one song was about the airline losing his luggage, one about ATM machines and another was about reading in a newspaper that Ray Davies of the Kinks had been shot in New Orleans. In the end they weren’t terribly excited by my suggested song titles including “No Shirt” (you know because it’s like “No Fun” plus you know Iggy never wears a shirt) and they didn’t seem to love the mixes that I did that sounded kind of like those crappy Raw Power bootlegs.

Cost Of Living

Two summers ago I recorded an incredible concert by Mdou Moctar live at Third Man Records in Detroit. They’re wild hypnotic Hendrix style jammers who live in the desert. The band didn’t speak much english but I think I was able to communicate to them how excited I was about their amazing fingerpicking and hot guitar solos after the show by screaming and replaying the best solos over and over again and then screaming the word fuzz and pointing at their fingers. It’s insane and having seen them a few times since then with a different drummer and the addition of a bass player, I’m convinced it’s their best album. It’s wild but it’s still not Tchin-tabaraden wedding wild.

Licked By Lions

Jonathan Richman walks into Ethan and Gretchen's studio and asks if I can remove all the rugs, take the acoustic treatments off the walls and strike the baffles which normally separate the instruments, drums and amps, so the room will have the most echo possible, he has also invited about ten friends including Johnny Bee Badanjek the drummer from Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Mary Cobra from the Detroit Cobras to dance, sing and play percussion in the studio while he records. He has two vocal microphones set up at either end of the room and has brought his own microphones for the drums along with his own desired placement for them. He notices a tamboura near the control room and asks if I know how to play it or if I know how to tune it. Within seconds he’s tuned it and proceeds to sing Indian classical music accompanying himself on tamboura drone for about thirty five minutes. It’s beautiful and very surprising. He asks me if I recorded it, I lie and say no. Later he asks me not to play it for anyone. We record for hours. Some songs are quite long – ten and fifteen minutes, some are medleys of oldies or soft rock hits from the seventies segueing into new songs of his. It’s a confusing session as it’s not clear when songs are starting and ending and he often plays guitar and sings nowhere near a microphone. The distance between him and the microphone seems to have some meaning, there’s some formula to when he chooses to walk away in the middle of a verse but I am unable to determine the secret code. At the end of the session three or four songs are deemed usable, edited and mixed, although, sadly, an attempt at a completely insane and unexpected fuzz guitar solo is left unreleased. (The Harold Budd piece is at the opposite end of this spectrum.)

Calling All Believers

Shortly after Tecuciztecatl was released, I received an email from Dr. James Beacham at CERN inviting us to perform at a series of concerts that would combine experimental music with experimental science at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He didn’t contact our booking agent, which would be how we generally receive offers for gigs, instead he sent an email to me, which would be how we generally receive crazy messages from our completely insane fans (murderous, delusional, poetic, threatening messages usually). I assumed the invitation was fake or a prank and replied that we would prefer to wait until they had successfully opened a pathway to interspatial dimensions and we’d play on the other side or that if that was unlikely to happen at a convenient time then perhaps we could set up our equipment right on the edge of a mini-black hole and perform as the Earth is being destroyed so we could release the concert film “Live At The End Of The World.” After a few messages back and forth, it was clear that he was legit and I apologized for being such a jerk. Soon I discovered poetry within the language of particle physics as well as a certain beauty in the idea that these scientists have devoted their lives to dreaming, searching and discovering basic principles that connect all things in existence. The song “Calling All Believers” refers to this devotion. “Energy Acceleration” compares the scientists to monastic life in medieval times and mystics trying to find and define the line between this world and the next and at the same time invoking the incredible amounts of energy needed to create the collisions experiments. The Patterns of Light LP was released in 2016 on London London Records and is about interpreting visions of light, trying to find universal truth with whatever tools available, it’s about the search for how everything works, why it works and how it got that way but also about being inspired on a basic level by the way a thing looks and how all your senses take in a thing. A thousand years ago Hildegard Von Bingen was writing about this same thing in letters, songs, medical texts, and had even developed her own language to use in her mystical writings, similar to Magma drummer Christian Vander using his own language for their concept albums or French black metalists Brenoritvrezorkre and Moëvöt.

The Light Inside You

We get a lot of letters from fans, mostly weirdos though. I think it started when we released Song of Schizophrenia, that sort of connected us to a certain demographic I suspect. Here’s a recent typical message we received. “Growing up in Panama City, Mouth By Mouth and Livonia were like passages to other realms. I drank a ton of cough syrup at the time but those albums helped make life more livable. I was about to go to art school for sculpture and graphic design and the textures I heard on those records had actual shapes to them. Most music I knew at that time was flat or linear. I got them on cassette via mail-order from an ad placed in a bmx magazine. Mouth By Mouth arrived just before going to work at the amusement park and I was able to listen to it twice on the way thanks to the never-ending beach traffic. As luck would have it, I worked on “The Abominable Snowman” ride, basically a tilt-a-whirl inside a dome with lots of fog machine action, blue lights, mirrors, and lots of air conditioning. It took about 10 listens that day before it wasn’t as weird as when I first put it on. Maybe it was my bubblegum flavor/robitussin combo slushie on top of no-doz that pulled it all together, but it was probably a weird ride for a lot of vacationing beach tourists and townies when all they really wanted to hear was “Naughty by Nature” by O.P.P. I had no business running those rides at the age of 17 but I really loved how disorienting that ride could be with all the mirrors, the fog, the cold and for the final 90 seconds the ride would go in reverse. I had a buddy named Kevin that did acid at work and would repeatedly run the mini-train off the tracks and all the riders had to walk back through the woods for about a half mile that summer.”

[bikkinibottom]

Can’t Walk Without You

Here’s a little something I wrote to celebrate 100 followers! I got the idea based off of this post here.

This is my first time writing fanfic so I’d love for some feedback! Hope you all enjoy it!

Summary: It’s the 90’s and Percy makes mixtapes for Annabeth. She listens to them when she misses him.

She took it with her everywhere now, constantly listening to whichever song that played through the Walkman. It got to the point where even if she was having a conversation or in a meeting, the headphones rested around her neck playing music just loud enough for her to still hear and whoever happened to be right next to her. Some may call it rude, but people knew to never question Annabeth, especially with everything going on now.

Annabeth remembers the first mixtape Percy had made for her when they were fourteen. It was not too long after the battle on Mount Othrys where Percy and the group had rescued her and the goddess Artemis from Luke’s imprisonment. She smiles fondly too herself as she remembers the encounter with Percy:

Christmas was just around the corner and Annabeth begrudgingly decided to spend the holiday with her family in San Francisco. Percy and she had agreed to meet up to exchange gifts at Half-Blood Hill before she left. She stood near the Big House, which was adorned in colorful holiday lights, waiting for him. Behind her led to where the cabins were, the hearth at the center of the U-shaped formation seemed to glow brighter than ever, warm and inviting just like a fireplace at Christmas-time should be. The sky was clear save for a few clouds, the constellations piercing and bright. Fresh snow lay all over camp, some of the year-rounders just beginning to take advantage of the fresh snowfall. She looked up to see Percy approaching her, his ears looked pink without a hat on from what she could tell in the dim light.

‘Seaweed Brain’ she thought, thinking of the winter hat she knit him for his gift. It was a simple beanie that was baby blue, with one black stripe cutting across.

“Took you long enough. I got a flight to catch tomorrow, Seaweed Brain,” she jokingly said to him.

Clearly something else was occupying his mind because the scowl he attempted to make wasn’t sincere and looked more like fond exasperation. Annabeth tried not to look too into it.

He stopped walking and begun to turn around dramatically.

“Well if you’re gonna have that attitude about it I’ll just be on my-” but Annabeth cut him off with a laugh and shoved his arm.

“Come on, Percy. I’ve been waiting for this,” she told him with a bit of mock irritation in her voice.

“You have?” the boy before her asked timidly. And for the first time that night, Annabeth noticed Percy actually looked anxious for whichever reason she could not figure out yet. His eyes looked more of a golden from the reflection of the Christmas lights shining off the Big House.

Annabeth looked away from his eyes as she casually said, “Duh, we’re exchanging gifts. It’s like the best part of the holiday season,” though she wasn’t too sure of her response seeing the gloomy expression take over his face.

Percy looked away as he let out a simple, “Right.”

Not wishing to dampen the mood on what was supposed to be a pleasant occasion, Annabeth quickly asks, “Do you want to go first?”

“Uh, I- no. You go first,” he responded quickly as well.

Annabeth presented him with his gift bag filled with sea-green tissue paper and he dug around in it until he pulled out the gift card she had gotten him. He flipped it over to see what it was for and he smiled appreciatively.

“That’s the skate store you go to a lot right? The one by your apartment?” she asked just to double-check and make sure.

“Yeah! I- Thanks Annabeth,” he told her genuinely then paused. “Uh, how much is on it?”

“A hundred dollars,” she replied.

His eyes seemed to pop out of his head before he stuttered for the next few seconds. Annabeth just looked at him with a confused but amused smile on her face.

“This- this is more than enough for a whole new skateboard. I- I don’t think I can accept this,” he blurted out in shock.

“Skateboards are expensive. I thought that was a good amount,” she said matter-of-factly. Annabeth had briefly forgotten that Percy and his mom didn’t have a whole lot, meanwhile, her family was more than well off and Annabeth could afford to splurge on her friends.

“There’s another gift in the bag,” she pointed out.

He gave her an incredulous look before digging around in the bag. He pulled out the beanie wrapped in a layer of tissue paper and unwrapped it. He held out the hat in front of him with a neutral expression.

“You hardly ever wear a hat, let alone own a proper winter one so I figured you could use a nice one. I made it myself,” she said, her voice laced with pride. It had taken her a couple of tries to knit a hat before she managed to perfect it. Athena wasn’t the goddess of crafts for nothing. Annabeth was proud of her handiwork.

“You made this?” he asked softly. The tender look in his eyes made Annabeth’s face a little warm but she nodded genuinely.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Annabeth said. “It’s your turn.”

“O- oh. Right.” Percy cleared his throat and placed the gift bag on the snowy ground with his presents inside. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a card with a smaller rectangular box attached to it. Annabeth didn’t know what the box could be seeing as it was wrapped but she opened the card and read it to herself first.

The card itself didn’t have many words and with the low-lighting, she couldn’t exactly make it out with her dyslexia. But underneath the message of the card, she noticed Percy’s chicken scratch hand-writing where he wrote out in Ancient Greek, ‘Hope you have a good new year. Merry Christmas, Wise Girl. Your friend, Percy’.

She smiled up at him and gave him a sweet thank you.

“Um, the uh, the gift. I made it myself. I don’t know if you’ll like it but um, if you give it back I understand. It’s kind of lame, actually-” Percy stammered out, and she could tell the red on his face wasn’t coming from the Christmas lights. With a roll of her eyes, she tore open the wrapping and was presented with a cassette player. Written on one side in Percy’s hand-writing it said: ‘Songs I Think You’ll Like (vol. 1)’.

“It’s a mixtape,” Percy blurted out, “I was thinking about how we’ve barely ever talked about music so I put a bunch of songs I figured you’d like. You can listen to it whenever you want.”

Annabeth was at a loss for words. Picturing Percy in his room toiling with the radio on, waiting for hours for the right song to come on to record, or maybe using some of Sally’s old records to record music from... It was a little too much for Annabeth.

Impulsively she jumped towards Percy, wrapping her arms around his neck in a quick hug. Backing away she looked him in the eyes.

“Thank you, I love it,” she told him. At that point, she didn’t need a mirror to know that both their faces were red now.

“Really?” he asked, relief in his voice and body language.

“Yes, I can’t wait to listen to it,” she answered genuinely.

A goofy smile broke out onto his face and Annabeth felt herself smiling as well. After talking for a bit more, they eventually said their goodbyes and parted ways.

As Annabeth boarded the plane the next morning, she had a brand new Walkman stuffed in her pocket that she had bought as soon as she left the campgrounds last night. She couldn’t wait to listen to it on the plane.

Recalling the memory brought a melancholy smile to her face, but it was very dim. Annabeth remembers how nearly every month after that she received a mixtape from Percy in the mail, each with a different purpose but all equally good. When they had started dating, the music became a lot more romantic and he would gift her one at each monthly anniversary. She would’ve received a new mixtape soon for their five-month anniversary, but now he was missing and Annabeth wasn’t sure if she’d ever get to hear it. The thought made her chest ache painfully, and she blinked back tears.

Rolling onto her back in her bunk, Annabeth thought back to the events of the day and let out a frustrated sigh. Just when she finally had some type of lead to where her boyfriend might be, she was met with three demigods at the Grand Canyon with more questions than answers. Not to mention her least favorite goddess seemed to be involved in all of this somehow. Realizing she needed to get actual sleep tonight if she was going to leave early in the morning to search for Percy, the daughter of Athena put on her invisibility cap, grabbed her Walkman, and snuck out of Cabin 6 to head over to Cabin 3.

Inhaling the ocean scent that Poseidon’s cabin had, Annabeth made her way over to Percy’s dresser, where he always kept extra clothes. Grabbing one of his hoodies, she put it on and laid down in Percy’s bunk. It wasn’t the biggest secret amongst her siblings that she would often sneak out to his cabin at night but since he went missing she made it her new unassigned sleeping quarters.

If the bed weren’t cold, Annabeth could almost imagine Percy there with her. Surrounding herself in his ocean breeze scent helped put her to sleep but there was some dull ache lingering inside her tonight. It was as if there was nothing inside her; her heart, her lungs, everything just- gone. Instead, a dark void seemed to eat at her from the inside out, and all of her senses felt numb.

Putting on her headphones and pressing play on the Walkman, her favorite cassette plays out. Once they’d started dating, Percy gave her this one and told her the songs sounded a bit like the one they had danced to on Olympus all those years ago. She recalls Percy telling her that to him the song sounded a bit sad, but a little hopeful too.

Annabeth cries herself to sleep that night.

[red-stick-rambler]

Remembering Billy Joe Shaver.

Billy Joe Shaver was 81 years old when he died at the end of October 2020. It was a year with so much loss, particularly of great musicians- John Prine, Justin Townes Earle, Charley Pride, Little Richard, Kenny Rogers, and others. There were many obituaries written for Billy Joe after his passing that detail the rich stories of his life and reflect on his influence on music. (Suggested obit reading: Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, New York Times) I can’t do justice to his legacy but do wish to share some of the reasons why he was important to me.

Shaver’s music, often raucous, sometimes sweet, struck me with the right chords. I grew up listening to country music, mostly Willie and Waylon. By my teenage years I felt country music didn’t fit my persona of a die-hard skateboarder who listened to punk rock. When I moved to Kansas City to attend college I’d pretty much left the country, both musically and geographically. Discovering Billy Joe Shaver in the following years brought me back - to country music and to an appreciation for the rural surroundings of central Kansas where I was raised. He had a rock n’ roll attitude but the lyrics of poet, a honky tonk Hemmingway. In 1968, the way an artist, feeling in full possession of their powers, wants to be seen by their idols and proclaim their talents to the gatekeepers (Kris Kristofferson taking a military helicopter and landing it at Johnny Cash’s home to deliver songs hoping to meet the legend and have him record his material / Bruce Springsteen hopping the gates of Graceland to see Elvis while on his Born to Run tour shortly after he was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek) Billy Joe road a motorcycle onto the front porch of legendary songwriter Harlan Howard to announce himself as the greatest songwriter who ever lived. A few years later in 1973 Waylon Jennings recorded an album with all but one song written by Billy, “Honky-Tonk Heroes”. It was the beginning of a new sound in country music. The album remains one of my favorite records of all time. Finally, Billy Joe was on his way. Others recorded his songs too, a whose who of great artists that includes Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash who said Billy Joe was his favorite song writer. Billy could sing and play too. A 2003 article from Texas Monthly captured his spirit in a profile before his death without the reverence an obituary demands.

“BILLY JOE SHAVER ACTS MORE like a Baptist preacher than a man in need of salvation. Performing at Austin’s KUT-FM studios, he waves his arms around as if he were trying to explain something. He pounds his chest and kicks his leg out. He clasps his hands like a minister, throws punches like a fighter. One minute he’s standing still, slightly tilted to the left, hands in his pockets, eyes slammed shut as he sings, deep worry lines between his brows. The next minute he’s so riled up his face burns bright red. He stretches out his long arms as wide as they can go, revealing that the index and middle fingers on his right hand are stubs and the ring finger is missing a joint. He can’t hold a pick, and when he plucks his guitar, he uses his thumb and pinkie. Billy Joe, who is 64, is wearing blue jeans, a blue denim shirt, brown boots, and a brown cowboy hat, which, when he takes it off to wave in the air, sets his longish gray hair loose.” - https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-ballad-of-billy-joe-shaver/

I’d seen him play a number of times and this description is just how I remember him. Billy was a man of the people, and though he always possessed a wild streak, he was humble by the time I first saw him play. His song writing and his stage presence exercised the depth of the human condition; he was joyful and melancholia, tough and tender, devilish and devout, often ending shows on one knee in praise, head bowed down. Following concerts he often mingled with fans. (The photograph with me is from a 2005 show in New York City.) He exchanged phone numbers with a friend of mine from Texas and his girlfriend and occasionally, out of the blue, Billy would call them up.

Billy wrote songs from his personal experience and unlike most artists, lived like the songs he wrote. His grandma raised him, and when she died he went to live with his mom who was working in a honky-tonk called Green Gables. As a young boy, he would sing at the bar. He married two women, five times between them. His son Eddie, who he played and toured with, died of a drug overdose on New Years Eve, 2000. Billy Joe outlived the people he loved then nearly died of a heart attack on stage at Gruene Hall, the oldest honky-tonk in Texas. In 2007 I was looking forward to seeing him play at Chelsea’s in Baton Rouge but a few days prior to the show Billy was arrested for shooting a man outside of a bar in Waco, TX. I never learned the facts of the case though I heard them interpreted by several musicians in the years that followed, most notably by Dale Watson who wrote the song, “Where Do You Want It?” The man lived, Shaver was found not guilty in a Texas courthouse, and I had several more opportunities to hear him play in the years that followed.    

You can hear Billy Joe talk about his life in two interviews with Terry Gross he recorded for Fresh Air – though I kind of get the feeling he would have been more comfortable talking at a bar over beers than over the NPR radio waves. There was a documentary made with him, A Portrait of Billy Joe. It’s more than Billy Joe’s songs that have influenced me, it’s his presence. In the winter of 2004 I was camping at Joshua Tree in the California desert. One night Billy came to me in a vivid dream as a hillbilly angel / father figure. It was a visceral experience in which he offered me guidance during a particularly difficult time in my life. When I woke up, I felt his presence and had a better understanding of what I needed to do. At a shop the following day I found a brown leather belt with a brass ring for a buckle similar to the one I’d always seen Billy wear. He wore the same thing every time I saw him play in concert and in every photograph I’d seen him in for 50 years, a denim western pearl snap shirt and faded blue jeans with that brown leather belt with an oversized brass ring. The leather of his belt doubled-backed further across his chest in later years when his health declined and he became thinner.

I bought the belt that day in California and wear it regularly still. Billy’s songs, that I have listened to on vinyl, cassette tape, and digital files, remain in regular rotation on my stereo where he’ll live forever.

“Just like the songs I leave behind me I'm gonna live forever now” – Live Forever, Billy Joe Shaver

Photo of Billy Joe in Chicago, 1980 (top) by Kirk West.

[bomberqueen17]

Aran jumpers

So I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of music, not the way other people do, with pop songs and such. Our radio was tuned to the local classical-music affiliate of NPR, and so I casually absorbed a lot of Tchaikovsky and Bach and such without really ever knowing much about it. We owned a hi-fi system with a tape deck, and a record player, but the record player broke when I was about 6 and I forgot how to use it. We only ever owned a few LPs, including a Disney one of patriotic songs. Dad had some Irish folk music LPs but we didn’t listen to them often. Well-meaning relatives gave me tapes sometimes, like Debbie Gibson’s “Electric Youth”, but I never really understood them.

It wasn’t until I was in high school that I realized you could move the dial on the radio, and I was finally given my own tape deck. 

In high school I met my BFF, who’s the one I go to visit in Rochester pretty often. She’d grown up listening to some of the same Irish folk music LPs as me, and right away gave me a pair of mix tapes that she taped off of her dad’s Clancy Brothers LPs. CDs started to be a thing, then, and my dad bought a few of the albums he remembered on CD, and i stole them and devoured them. [Lots of the Chieftains. many re-issues of Clancy Brothers stuff. most of what he’d bought in the 60s had wound up in his brother’s possession and he hadn’t replaced them.]

Around that time I taught myself to sing folk songs; doing horse-related chores, I liked to sing, initially to keep the horses from hearing the metal can we kept the feed in (they’d crowd you at the gate if they heard it), but then I’d just keep singing, the whole time I was out there. I developed most of the vocal techniques I use still out there, and memorized a lot of the songs I still know for that purpose. (It wasn’t possible to muck out stalls with a lyric sheet in your hand.) (I took proper singing lessons from a voice coach my senior year, and the year after, but I never really shook the habits I learned in the pasture on my own.)

So BFF and I would sing Clancy Brothers songs together, up and down the hallways of school, as obnoxiously as possible. She’s not a gifted vocalist; she’s got a strong enough voice but her range is limited, and while she’s not tone-deaf, she has trouble finding the framework of where the notes really are, so she misses the mark more often than not. Fine to sing along with, but not great on her own. 

Anyway, it only just occurred to me that I could probably easily enough learn any number of those songs on the banjo, and that would likely delight BFF a great deal. Part of the trouble of singing along with the cassette tape is that of course Liam Clancy is a baritone and it’s hard for a pair of teenaged girls to on-the-fly transpose that to something they can sing. If I could play them, I could also slide the key around until we could both hit the notes.

At any rate-- it only just struck me that I’ve carefully taught myself a lot about the music of the last few decades through painstaking research and glomming onto people with superior cultural awareness, and streaming services and just plain old YouTube have made that so much easier this last decade or so-- but I have never ever in my life attempted to put the Clancy Brothers, specifically, into any kind of context. 

So I just read the Wikipedia page, and have begun to attempt to figure out which albums BFF’s dad owned on LP. (Tommy Makem & Liam Clancy, for 100% sure, which my dad did not own.) And I’m just trying to get them in some kind of context. It’s always been a sort of hokey guilty-pleasure of mine, because I mean... are they good? They’re so... dated. Is that a thing? Having a really powerful contralto voice and being able to sing their songs really well largely staves off critique in the moment, but I’ve always been faintly worried that people would think I wasn’t a real musician if they noticed that mostly what I knew was this dated, hokey shit that I learned from a tape, and not like, from sitting at the knee of some ancient sage or whatever. I still have no idea about context for any of that shit, how does someone know they’re really a musician???

Anyway. One of the things i knew was that they always wore these hokey matching sweaters, right? 

Well. Mom Clancy sent her sons those sweaters (including one for their friend Tommy Makem) because she’d read that the weather in New York was very snowy that year and she was concerned for them, and they all wore the sweaters without really thinking about it because she was right, it was cold and they were glad to have such nice sweaters. And someone else was like “that’s it! that’s your Look!” and they rolled with it, but somehow I don’t know if it’s better or worse that they literally showed up to a folk show in matching sweaters their mom had sent them in a care package. 

According to Wikipedia, which did cite a source there. 

So I’m trying to narrow down which song to ask my teacher to help me learn, and I think it’s gotta be The Shoals of Herring, which, for your patience and indulgence in reading this, I’ll link to Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis performing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWJz_-hseJQ].

I don’t have a punchline, though.

[totaltozier]

Everything I Couldn’t Say - Richie x Eddie

notes: I wrote this last night while being wide awake at 2 am! that being said I hope you all enjoy it! thank you to my lovely Jana @alwaysmebeforeyou for being the best beta ever!!!

words: 2365

summary: Richie is shit with his words so he has to come up with a different way to tell Eddie how he feels. Luckily Beverly Marsh is a genius.

READ ON AO3 // LISTEN TO RICHIE’S MIXTAPE HERE

Richie had known Eddie for most of their lives. After being put in the same class in third grade and assigned seats next to each other, the pair were quick to become best friends. Countless playdates and nights of Richie sneaking into Eddie’s room after curfew lead the two becoming the closest pair of friends, despite their almost opposite personalities. Somehow the two just worked.

Almost nine years later, the two boys were still best friends although a fuzzy feeling in Richie’s chest lead him to think differently. Richie had been completely infatuated with Eddie ever since they met, thinking he was cute, cute, cute the second he first laid eyes on him but now Eddie was all grown up and it was a different kind of cute, cute, cute. It was more of a holy shit you’re fucking beautiful every time he looked at him.

Richie knew he was in love with Eddie, that much he was sure of, but he had no idea how to tell him or if he could even tell him at all.

“He probably doesn’t even like me back, I mean, come on why would he?” Richie said to Beverly as he exhaled the smoke from his cigarette. The two were sitting on her fire escape after school, their feet dangling off the edge as they passed a smoke back and forth.

“Don’t say that, you’re quite the catch mister.” Beverly comforted as she stole the cigarette back from him. She lifted it to her mouth to take a drag. “He’s got no reason not to like you back.”

Richie let out a small laugh. “I make jokes about fucking his mom more than not, I think that’s a valid reason not to like me.”

“He knows you’re joking around.” She took another drag. “Have you thought about just telling him how you feel instead of just dancing around the subject?”

“Now that’s a joke if I ever did hear one!” Richie took the smoke from her once again. She raised an eyebrow at him quizzically. “Of course, I’ve thought about it, but you and I both know that I’m shit at saying the right thing. I’d probably screw things up.”

“I can’t disagree with that one, sorry honey.” Beverly apologized. Richie just shrugged and the two sat in silence, letting the smoke float amongst them. Richie began to hum a tune softly to fill the silence, creating a spark in Beverly’s mind. “I have an idea.” She looked at Richie with a grin.

“Is it a good one this time?” Richie pushed.

She gave him a gentle nudge with her shoulder. “All my ideas are good ones! This one is brilliant though.” Richie raised an eyebrow skeptically but didn’t say anything, giving her the go away to explain herself. “Since you’re shit at words but great with music, just make Eddie a mixtape explaining how you feel.”

Richie blinked at the red headed genius in front of him. How could he not have thought of the idea himself? He was always sitting at his desk making pointless mixtapes for himself and the other losers to enjoy.

“Eddie doesn’t like anything I listen to though. I mean there’s a few songs he’d like but what if he hates it all?” Richie worried.

“Then put a few songs he’d like on there.” Beverly said obviously. “Just as long as you get your point across, it doesn’t really matter who sings what, Richie.”

Richie let the idea sit in his mind for a moment. This idea could either be perfect or completely stupid, but it was worth the try. “Beverly Marsh, my girl you are brilliant!” Richie said as he stood up to climb down from the fire escape. “I’m going to do it,” he hopped down onto the grass below. “But if it doesn’t work, then I’m blaming it all on you!” He called up at her. He watched as she shook her head at him despite the smile on her face before mounting his bike and pedaling away towards home.

Richie rushed up to his room, dismissing the calls from his parents asking how his day at school was and shouting back that he’d tell them about it later. He threw his door closed and headed straight for his desk, pulling out the chair and plopping himself down. His boom box already sat in front of him next to a stack of cassettes. He grabbed an empty one carefully pulling it out of its clear plastic case and popped it into the radio. He picked up the little white card that went along with it and held it in his hands.

“What the fuck am I supposed to put on here?” He mumbled to himself.

The idea of making a mixtape to confess his feelings to Eddie made perfect sense to him but knowing which songs to put on it did not. Was he supposed to choose sappy love songs? Songs about confessing your undying love? Songs that made you want to slow dance in the rain? Songs about heartbreak? No that wasn’t right.

Richie started shuffling through his stack of tapes, even going as far as looking through a few records for song inspiration. He pulled open his desk drawer and retrieved an old notepad from inside. He started to make a list of possible songs, scratching out ones that didn’t seem to fit or that Richie felt Eddie wouldn’t enjoy listening to. Eventually he was able to get the list down to twelve carefully selected songs.

“God, I hope this works.” Richie said out loud. He reached for the first tape, placing it into the stereo to copy onto the empty one for Eddie.

An hour later, Richie had a complete mixtape for Eddie. He had written all of the songs on the white note card and on the opposite side he had printed For Eds in red marker as neat as he could with his sloppy handwriting.

Richie grabbed his backpack and unzipped the front pocket, slipping the tape inside before zipping it shut to keep the cassette safe and secure until the next day. He then proceeded to take out his school books to get a start on his homework for the night.

-

Richie couldn’t remember exactly when he had removed the tape from his backpack but he was currently fiddling with it in the front pouch of his hoodie, his fingers running back and forth over the bumpy side of its case. He had been trying to workv up the courage to give Eddie the tape all day, originally planning on giving it to him at lunch. It was now final period and it still sat close within his grasp.

“Just give it to him after the final bell.” Beverly whispered to Richie while the teacher had her back turned towards the class. “You two always walk home together anyways.”

Richie nodded his head. “Yeah, okay.” He swallowed while his hand gripped the tape tightly.

The final bell rang, and Richie practically ran to his locker where he and Eddie always met after school. He quickly stored away the books he didn’t need for the night and slammed his locker shut.

“Hey stranger!” Richie practically jumped when Eddie greeted him, his mind somewhere else.

“Hey Eds!” He replied. “Ready to go?”

Eddie nodded. “Don’t call me that you loser.” He teased, and Richie bumped him slightly with his elbow. The two fell into step beside each other, heading towards the doors that lead outside.

The two walked home like normal, making conversation about anything and everything like they always did. Eddie only had to scold Richie twice for saying something stupid (one comment about his mother and another about Stan and Bill). The walk went by fast and before he knew it, Richie was standing at the end of Eddie’s driveway looking down at the smaller boy in front of him.

“You didn’t come by last night.” Eddie said in a small voice, changing the tone of their conversation entirely.

Richie nodded. His hand still resided in the pocket of his hoodie, firmly grasping the mixtape. Now was the best opportunity as ever to give it Eddie.

“I know, I uh… I was working on this.” Richie pulled his hand out of his sweater and presented the tape to Eddie.

Eddie eyed the tape in Richie’s hand. He slowly reached out and took it from him. “What is it?”

“It’s a tape. A mixtape for you that I made last night.” Richie explained. Eddie went to open it up, but Richie reached out to stop him. “Just give it a listen and then maybe listen to it again just to be sure okay?” Eddie didn’t understand what he had to be sure of, but he nodded anyways. “I’ll come by tonight okay? I want to know what you think.” And with that Richie headed off down Eddie’s street and towards his own.

Eddie stood at the end of his driveway and watched as Richie walked away. Once he was no longer in sight, he looked down at the tape in his hand and flipped it over. For Eds the white note card read. The nickname made Eddie smile as he headed inside his house straight for his room.

He pulled out his Walkman and tossed out the tape inside to replace it with the one Richie had given him. He untangled his headphones and placed them over his ears as he flopped down onto his bed. Eddie pressed play and closed his eyes as he let the music start.

He recognized a few songs from other tapes that Richie had played for him and the other losers while hanging out but hearing them again they sounded different, as if they had a whole new meaning now because he had given them to him. They were songs of romance, lovers and soulmates of sorts. Eddie listened to the lyrics of each song carefully, trying to understand what Richie meant when telling him to be sure of the songs. The songs fit into each other despite not all being the same and Eddie smiled as a song by The Cure faded into one by Cyndi Lauper knowing that Richie put that one on there just for him.

Before he knew it, the tape came to an end with a soft click and Eddie frowned wishing that there was more. He picked up the case, removing the notecard to read over the song list that Richie had scribbled inside. His eyes scanned the words, noticing a theme within them. They were all love songs, love songs that Richie had picked for Eddie.

Eddie sat up in his bed and removed his headphones. Thoughts were spinning around in his head, questions flying around his brain.

“Richie likes me.” He whispered softly as if he was telling himself a secret. Richie loves you echoed in his mind and the idea didn’t seem so far-fetched. “Richie likes me.” Eddie repeated again as a smile crept onto his face.

He put his headphones on once more and rewound the tape to listen to it again.

-

It was around ten fifteen when Richie climbed through Eddie’s bedroom window with a soft thud. Eddie was sitting on his bed holding the Richie’s mixtape in his hands, spinning it around with his fingers.

“Evening, Eddie Spaghetti!” Richie greeted as he removed his shoes and padded over towards Eddie.

Eddie let the ridiculous nickname slide, he had better things he wanted to talk about. He held up the tape. “I listened to it like you said to.” Eddie stated. “Twice and then a third time just to be sure.”

Richie’s eyes were wide behind his thick glasses. He nodded his head slowly at Eddie. “What are you sure of?” He asked cautiously.

“That you love me.” Eddie answered. He paused for a moment and took a deep breath. “And that I love you too, I guess.”

“You guess?” Richie questioned with a confused face.

Eddie inhaled sharply, worried that he had said the wrong thing. “I mean, only if that’s what you wanted me to be sure of, but if I was wrong then completely disregard the second half of the statement.” Eddie stammered. He could feel his heart beat get faster and almost reached for his inhaler before remembering that he didn’t actually have asthma.

Richie stared at Eddie for a few seconds before a smile took over his face and he reached out to grab Eddie’s hand to hold in his. “Don’t worry, you are right.”

“I am?” Eddie asked with hope.

Richie nodded exuberantly. “Yeah you are, I love you.” He smiled as he noticed a smile light up on Eddie’s face as well.

“That’s a relief,” Eddie exhaled. “You had me worried that I was listening to a bromance mixtape.” Eddie giggled pulling a laugh out of Richie. “You really had to make me a tape to confess your feelings for me? That’s like twice the work, Rich!” Eddie explained.

“Yeah it kind of was, but we both know I’m shit with words.” Richie said. “I’m glad you understood what I was trying to say though. Did you like the songs?” He asked.

Eddie nodded. “Yeah, I did, especially the Cyndi Lauper one!”

“I knew you’d like that one!” Richie teased, and he gave Eddie’s hand a slight squeeze.

“I loved it.” Eddie said fondly while looking into Richie’s eyes. “And I love you too, even if you are super extra.”

Richie laughed but there was a warm feeling in his heart nonetheless. “Only for you, Eds.” He said before leaning forward to place a shy kiss on Eddie’s lips. When he felt Eddie lean into the kiss too he ran his hands up to his face, lightly cupping his cheeks.

“I told you to quit calling me that.” Eddie smiled as he pulled away from Richie.

Richie let out a small laugh, a smile plastered on his face. “Just kiss me, Eddie.” He said before pulling him back in and he smiled into the kiss as he felt Eddie place his hands in his hair curls, bringing him even closer.

[untiltheribbonbreaks]

HEART OF THE MATTER

 A statement of intent by P . L . Winfield

“Everything potentially always, all is forgiven” - Petrichor

Something occurred to me today: our name has taken on a new meaning. As a child, I would tape the radio onto cassette, fanatically watch VHS tapes the adults left out, and play both ‘until the ribbon broke,’ cementing a life-long obsession with the marriage of sound and image. Our first record was a genuine attempt to capture the sense of wonder in first discovering that magic. An exercise in atmosphere, texture and nostalgia.

When left in the sun too long - when unpreserved and unattended to - cassette ribbon begins to unravel and warp, often trying to escape the safety of its own plastic housing. And in the months and years following our first release, and to a large extent whilst promoting it, I most certainly unraveled. Spilling, unspooled, my life eventually became unmanageable. The crippling anxiety that I had spent so many years masking had finally succumbed to the influence of its most tyrannical friends: Alcohol and Benzodiazepines.

To some degree, I think a large part of surviving the uncertain and chaotic experience that is the human one, is the ability to lie to oneself; pathologically and convincingly. At any cost. In bright white rooms before we walked onto stage, I would stand, gently trembling, tsunami approaching and whisper gently to myself:

“One. More. Drink. No. More. Fear.”

A drink before one stands, vulnerable, in front of a large room of people is, in isolation, a perfectly reasonable reaction to an understandable level of anxiety. In moderation. Just one. Early night. Early start.

But the difference for someone like me, is fundamental. To an alcoholic these words are impossible theory. A brick by brick instruction manual for the Wall of China. There is no moderation, only the promise of oblivion and for me, the temporary quieting of a loud, pervasive and almost constant voice of anxiety.

“Anxiety, I’m pulling down the blinds” - Black and White

Every day and night I tried to quieten that voice. Pushing it away, trying to starve it, bury it, drown it out. Every day it came back harder, louder, more and more vicious. I poured fuel on that particular fire until I couldn’t fight it anymore. In the end, I no longer knew if I was drinking because I was anxious, or anxious because I was drinking.

I couldn’t leave the house without drinking vodka straight from the bottle and worse, I had accepted it. I had lost the fundamental belief that anything of any worth was on the other side of the door. Congratulations! I had, knowingly, torn down every aspect of my life, spitefully, on purpose.

“No more courage in the bottle, I’ve got people I can’t let down” - Meru

In September of last year, I had reached the end of my rope. I could no longer hide from myself, or those still around me. I will be forever grateful to the two people who sat down with me one fateful afternoon and helped me devise my escape route from madness. The start of a journey that was to define my recovery and the very reason that there is even a body of work to speak of.

“The only way out is through” (Alcoholics Anonymous)

Far from the environment that had enabled my addiction, I began treatment, treatment that would change my life forever and help me to reconnect with another voice. A voice I had long forgotten. For three months, I worked. A daily routine of physical and spiritual practise, shedding old skin, changing old stories, reconnecting the dots. Finding a way back.

There are of course names for what we did, there are words for the practices rooted in various schools of thought and belief. Practices that have existed in both the East and the West for hundreds of years. But I find the language of such things needlessly flowery and over-complicated. In layman’s terms however, which have always sat better with me, I believe that any crisis of the soul is a detachment from your true self, the part of you that patiently sits behind all of the worry, all of the pain and discomfort and waits quietly for your return.

So that was our aim, that’s what we set off to find. Some peace of mind, the same peace of mind we all start life with, in my case, long buried under the old, dead weight of fear, shame, and clear, strong liquor.

“C’mon now kiddo, we’ll be alright” - Count the lightening

I had my daily practice, I had my mentor and I had the ocean. As I started, day by day, to feel better, I could feel a kind of shift creatively. I could feel something start to come into focus. Words, sounds, images. Gradually filling up the spaces in my mind, previously occupied by grey, a light was coming on. I set up a makeshift studio in my cabin and went to work filling the spaces on a record that I had previously thought was finished, with a sense of wonder and love for writing, that I had all but lost. But here it was, words and sounds, in my every grateful, waking thought.

It is worth mentioning at this juncture, that whilst in the midst of madness and my subsequent recovery, Elliot had been patiently waiting, wondering if his oldest friend and band member was ever coming back to some kind of normalcy, let alone to music. Never one to sit on his hands, my best mate, also navigating his own turbulence (his story to tell)  took it upon himself to learn how to produce and engineer, creating a studio of his own at home on the west side of LA, making loops, ideas and creating fundamental additions to a slowly, surely forming, completed album.

Once back together and with an incredible amount of renewed energy in making music and being a band again, we finished the record, creativity and friendship, two hugely underrated aspects of recovery, I think, from anything.

So here we are today. I find myself writing this with trepidation. I can feel that old knot in my gut forming and my heart rate start to quicken a little. Anxiety of course, is incurable. We need it to survive - it is after all only trying to protect us - but it’s not a perfect mechanism. Much like us.

It’s been 8 months, 243 days since I last had a drink. My life is, by design, more simple now. I go to A.A meetings, I cycle along the seafront, and I make things. I paint, I make music, take photographs and edit film. These are now the things that quiet that negative, critical voice in my head. It’s still there of course, chattering away, but crucially I now have distance from it. I know what it is now.

I think sobriety can mean many things to many people. In my mind, you can get sober from anything that is a negative force of energy in your life. It’s not about alcohol; that was just a symptom, a temporary and ultimately flawed solution. The only real way out for me, in the end, was to look long and hard in the mirror and pull it all apart.

Nothing is coincidental if you look hard enough. You just have to allow a little light in, accept a little serendipity. Be open to a power greater than yourself and submit control. These are the lessons I have learnt in the last few years. These are the simple practices that keep me open, honest and vulnerable. There is no solution to the pains of simply being. There is no quick fix, only radical acceptance, compassion and empathy of what really is: of who you really are.

And yes, cassette ribbon can unravel, but it can be saved (if you are old enough to remember) by lodging a pencil into the reel hole and winding the ribbon back. This, I believe, is why this collection of songs in particular - this record - is self-titled. It’s time to give something its name, to take responsibility for it, to hold up a sometimes trembling hand and say, “I’m Pete, I’m an alcoholic and I’m grateful to be alive, thank you for listening to my story, until we meet again, until the ribbon breaks”

[onestowatch]

22 Rising Artists on the First Record They Ever Bought

Crinkly reverbs, satisfying vibrations, and blissful tenderness are all essential to the intoxicating experience of playing a vinyl record. Even just watching the spiral groove spin around the needle is utterly gratifying, and it’s a tradition we here at Ones To Watch think should be kept alive. 

In honor of Record Store Day, we asked 22 rising artists to tell us about the first record they ever bought and their answers are definitely taking us back to the days when vinyl was the talk of the town. Keep reading for responses from FINNEAS, grandson, Olivia O’Brien, and many more!

Ashe - John Mayer’s Continuum (LP 2006) or Carole King’s Tapestry (LP 1971)

“It was either John Mayer’s ‘Continuum’ or Carole King’s ‘Tapestry.’ Both those albums feel like coming home.”

AUGUST 08 - Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (LP 2010)

“First Fridays before the album dropped, they put out a bunch of songs leading up to the album.”

Cautious Clay - Lenny Kravitz’s Greatest Hits (LP 2000)

"The first album I bought was a Lenny Kravitz’ greatest hits album. I remember listening to it on repeat and loving the sax solo on the record ‘Let Love Rule.’ The melodic and chordal structure around this song felt perfect as well."

Dennis Lloyd - Linkin Park’s Meteora (LP 2003)

“It is still one of my all time favorite albums and was a massive part of my childhood.”

DUCKWRTH - Ludacris’ Word of Mouf (LP 2001)

“Going to my first public school. Wearing uniform (dark blue dickies, white button up). The little homie was selling bootleg CDs with legitimate printed covers. I still wasn’t allowed to listen to rap, so this was my chance to gain entry to hip hop. I copped it, threw it on my CD player, and I remember hearing the phrase, ‘The royal penis is clean, your highness,’ and started dying laughing.”

Ella Vos - TLC’s CrazySexyCool (LP 1994)

“The first record I bought… was TLC’s ‘CrazySexyCool’ on TAPE! I remember feeling so cool that I owned my own music and that it was not my parents’ music! My cousin came over not long after I’d gotten it and we drew “crazy sexy cool” on our underwear, sagged our jeans, and danced in front of the mirror to the whole album front to back.”

FINNEAS - Leon Bridges’ Coming Home (LP 2015)

“First vinyl I ever bought was ‘Coming Home’ by Leon Bridges. To me, that album sounds like it was made to be played on vinyl.”

grandson - James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James (LP 1970)

“I found a used copy of James Taylor’s first album, ‘Sweet Baby James,’ in Amoeba on Sunset Boulevard. I had just moved to Los Angeles and was getting into sampling old records so I bought myself a terrible Crosley record player with a janky built-in speaker and started digging. I grew up with James Taylor and older folk music around me, so it connected me to home and to my father in some way. I had been digging for old soul and jazz records for a while and finding that record reminded me why I’m doing this in the first place. Connection, family.”

Greyson Chance - Coldplay’s Parachutes (LP 2000)

“The first album I ever bought was Coldplay’s ‘Parachutes.’ I remember my older brother driving me to the record store to get it after I had expressed a strong liking to ‘Yellow.’ I have distinct memories of my brother and I blasting that song anytime it came on the radio when we were in the car. I remember thinking that Chris Martin was an actual God after listening to the album a few weeks after buying it. Even at a young age (I think I was eight or nine at the time), there was something mesmerizing about his lyrics and the piano lines on that album. Favorite tracks include ‘Shiver,’ ‘Sparks,’ and ‘Don’t Panic.’”

HONNE - Radiohead’s OK Computer (LP 1997)

“The first record I ever bought was ‘OK Computer’ by Radiohead--which I still believe, to this day, is one of the best albums ever made. I have so many memories of putting it on and just sitting and taking it all in. No other distractions, no phones, eyes closed, wondering how they made everything sound like it did.”

Jasmine Thompson - The Ting Tings’ We Started Nothing (LP 2008)

“The first record I ever bought was The Ting Tings’ ‘We Started Nothing.’ I remember singing loudly to each song with my brother in a car for hours as we traveled from London to the Lake District. I knew all the lyrics!”

KALLITECHNIS - Sade’s The Best of Sade (LP 1994)

“The first record I ever bought was Sade’s ‘The Best of Sade.’ My dad had been playing her music my entire childhood, and buying this particular record felt like a musical torch had been passed onto me. It marked the start of my own musical identity--with Sade’s unmatched soulfulness being the foundation.”

Kodie Shane - Ashanti’s Ashanti (LP 2002)

“The first record I purchased was Ashanti’s self-titled. ‘Ashanti…’ my strongest memory is that I was only five years old and I asked my mom and dad for it. We purchased the album in cassette form and a Walkman. And that became the background music of my little pre-K life and on… (I loved Ashanti and JaRule. Lowkey, I still do.) When I think about it, I miss the feeling of anticipating a record you really want and having to wait to get it, the pleasure you feel at the counter paying for the music of the artist you support, excitedly unwrapping the packaging popping it in and pressing play!”

Olivia O’Brien - Miley Cyrus’ Breakout (LP 2008)

“I remember playing it in this white bulky CD player that my mom gave me… I had drawn all over it with Sharpie and colored the speakers with green and pink highlighter markers. I would sit in my room and play it over and over.”

Phony Ppl - *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached (LP 2000)

“My first album that I ever bought with my own money for my eighth birthday was *NSYNC’s ‘No Strings Attached.’ I remember buying it with a couple other albums at the time because my dad wanted me to pick some music for my birthday party, but that was definitely the first one I went for and in 2019, I gotta say it still slaps stupidly. I actually just heard Ariana Grande sample one of their songs on the radio the other day.” - Elijah Rawk

Pink Sweat$ - Mario’s Mario (LP 2002)

“No particular memories come to mind - other than my mom loving it and buying it for me.”

Role Model - The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death (LP 1997)

“I honestly don’t remember if I’ve ever bought a record in my life, but I used to go through my brother’s car and steal shit when he wasn’t home. And I remember the first CD I ever had was ‘Life After Death’ because I took it from his car. I think hearing that album at such a young age made me hit puberty instantly and I became a big boy. I learned all my bad words that day.”

slenderbodies - Aaron Carter’s Aaron’s Party (LP 2000)

“The only story I can offer is actually based on a CD that I bought at Tower Records, so not technically a record itself. When I was young, for my fourth or fifth birthday I was given a small Walkman-style blue CD player. My mom had tons of CDs so The Beatles and Paul Simon were covered. The first record I remember picking out and buying was Aaron Carter’s ‘Aaron’s Party’ purely off of seeing ads for it on TV. This was the first pop record I ever bought and I listened to it pretty religiously. I took out the inside insert and unfolded it and hung it on my wall as a makeshift poster--a habit I’d continue well into being a teenager. In a strange way, I think buying that record and wanting to listen through all of it because I had bought the whole album inspired a persevering kind of attachment to appreciating albums as whole pieces of work.” - Benji Cormack

SWMRS - *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached (LP 2000)

“*NSYNC - ‘No Strings Attached.’ Was my first concert. And it changed my life.” - Max Becker

UMI - Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life (LP 1976)

“First vinyl I got was Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life!’ I found it at the thrift store and bought it before I even had a record player because I knew future Umi would be happy to have it. Now I have a record player and it’s one of my favorite records to play in the morning.”

Valentina - Kanye West’s Late Registration (LP 2005)

“The first record I bought was ‘Late Registration,’ and I’m 100% sure that every single time I cried in high school I listened to that album. It was the soundtrack to all my happy and sad moments, and still is.”

Yoke Lore - Green Day’s Dookie (LP 1994)

“My first album was ‘Dookie’ by Green Day. And it changed my life. The first song I learned with my middle school band was ‘When I Come Around,’ and I learned to play drums listening to Tré Cool.”

[boredout305]

George D. Henderson (The Puddle) Interview, Part One

And Band, 1980. Photo by Stuart Page.

George D. Henderson is a venerable New Zealand musician whose career stretches back to the mid-1970s.

           Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, Henderson moved to Invercargill, New Zealand, as a child in 1966. It was in Invercargill where he formed his first band, Crazy Ole and the Panthers, with his brother Ian Henderson and friend Lindsay Maitland in the mid-‘70s. Henderson moved to Dunedin in 1977, just as the city’s punk scene was beginning to foment. The following year he left for Wellington and formed The Spies. Alongside Shoes This High, the Wallsockets and the Ambitious Vegetables, The Spies were an early contributor to the nascent Wellington DIY scene. The Spies never released material during their lifetime; fortunately, their 1979 recordings were preserved by Siltbreeze with the posthumous release of The Battle of Bosworth Terrace in 2014. The Spies morphed into the And Band after a move to Christchurch where they met kindred spirits, The Perfect Strangers. The And Band and Perfect Strangers released an incredibly rare split 7” EP in 1982 before folding.    

           Dormant after the demise of the And Band, George became galvanized by the sounds of the Chills on local Dunedin radio and formed his best-known group, The Puddle, in 1983. The Puddle was a vehicle for George’s songwriting, buttressed early on by a formidable lineup of Lesley Paris and Norma O’Malley (both of Look Blue Go Purple), Peter Gutteridge (Clean, Great Unwashed and Snapper), Ross Jackson and long-time friend Lindsay Maitland. The Puddle released a few excellent, lo-fi records on Flying Nun. By the time The Puddle was set to release polished-yet-excellent pop albums in the early ‘90s, Flying Nun stuttered. Personal setbacks derailed Henderson throughout the late ‘90s, but by the early 2000s he began to get excited about music again. George reformed The Puddle, releasing records on his brother Ian Henderson’s imprint, Fishrider. George is currently living in Auckland and playing with his new band, The New Existentialists, as well as the Puddle.

Interview by Ryan Leach

Ryan Leach: Tell me a little bit about growing up. You were born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and transplanted to New Zealand in 1966 when you were really young.

George D. Henderson: My father got a job here (in Invercargill). He was an agricultural engineer. He was looking for more opportunities, so he got onto this scheme where they’d pay his ticket if he agreed to work in New Zealand for a year. I remember a lot of stuff about Scotland. I remember going to school there and going to town in Edinburgh. I recall the voyage to New Zealand. We left on a ship. Invercargill is a very isolated place. It’s a large city, but isolated. Luckily, I fell in with a crowd who had access to new records. My best friend worked at a record shop. I got to listen to really great music quite early on that not many other people in New Zealand did.

Ryan: Right. I read an interview with you from 1986 where you mentioned that, although you were living in Invercargill, you were exposed to music like the Velvet Underground and Can in the mid-‘70s.

George: My friend Bob Sutton had a lot of Lou Reed’s personal record collection at one stage. Lou was touring New Zealand; he had bought all of these records in Japan and he had to leave them here, so all of these Japanese pressings of Velvet Underground and Roxy Music records, Bob got a hold of them. It’s just an example of being at the right place at the right time in Invercargill, against all the odds.  

Ryan: Your brother Ian Henderson has posted tracks of your mid-‘70s band, Crazy Ole and the Panthers. Not only was Ian in the band, but future Puddle member Lindsay Maitland was in the group as well.

George: In Invercargill, there was this great band called Watchdog. My friend Bob (Sutton) was their roadie at one stage. I saw them when I was quite young at the town hall for some end-of-the-year, mixed-entertainment event. I must have been thirteen. They were doing glam covers. I thought, “I want to do this. I could learn to play guitar and look as great as that.” I wanted to have that kind of impact. I got a really cheap guitar—really rubbish. I hardly learned how to play it, but I did write some really basic things on it. I was already listening to the Velvets and the Stooges. We knew the music didn’t have to be too complicated. All the other stuff we couldn’t play. I also bought a tape recorder. It was a really old valve, mono, reel-to-reel tape recorder, but you could do all kinds of things with it. I must have had some book on tape recorders that told you how to do experimental recordings. I knew to cover up one of the heads so it would make loops and things like that. I was interested in all the odd things you could do with it.

Ryan: Tape manipulation-type stuff.  

George: Yeah. We recorded a lot of stuff on cassette, but quickly moved to reel-to-reel. It opened up an opportunity to make reasonably good-quality recordings of everything we were doing. We’d experiment with different things. We couldn’t do sound-on-sound, but we could do tape loops and record our jams. We’d speed them up and slow them down.

Ryan: Did Crazy Ole and the Panthers perform live?  

George: We got a couple of gigs, but we got chucked off stage. We weren’t very good, and we were never the kind of band an audience would want to watch in those days. We would have been filed under “noise music” by most people, although we did have songs. We did a lot of improvising. We listened to Can, Amon Duul II, Captain Beefheart, and the Velvet Underground. A lot of our best stuff happened spontaneously, but at the same time I was writing songs. I had a piano and I was learning how to write songs.

Ryan: That’s really precocious. MOR songs were really popular then.

George: It was glam that got me into it. Glam was relatively experimental. There were a couple of New Zealand bands I was into at the time. Watchdog started writing their own prog-rock stuff as time went on and that was really inspiring. They were doing their own material. Split Enz, in their earliest manifestation, they were quite psychedelic and experimental, especially on their first album. It was encouraging. It had the kind of theatricality that New Zealand music still has, at least to my ear. They were experimenting with sonic textures.

Ryan: You moved to Dunedin in 1977. Did you attend the University of Otago?

George: Yes, I went to the university but I didn’t actually study. I just went to live with the students and expand my mind. I wanted to get away from home. In that year in Dunedin, not much happened musically. Lindsay Maitland did turn up at the end of the year and we did jam a bit. We actually jammed with some of the guys who later joined Toy Love. It might have just been on one occasion. We were around, but we didn’t notice anything happening. The only thing I noticed in Dunedin was that people had horrible taste in music. No one had heard of Can. No one wanted to listen to the Velvet Underground. That would all change in a year. But people in Dunedin were listening to the latest Grateful Dead record, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones and Little Feat. That style of music didn’t really interest me then and it still doesn’t. It was a weird time. All the prog-rock bands had kind of gone funky and they were all really bad at it. People started listening to Steely Dan. I like Steely Dan, but when rock musicians start listening to Steely Dan it has a terrible effect on them. Only Steely Dan should sound like that. It should have never been a template for prog rock or hard-rock groups. That was happening in the mid-‘70s. Rock music was getting technical and funky, but nobody wanted to dance to it. It was a form of showing off and it left me cold, anyway. Punk came out in 1977. I left Dunedin to go fruit picking to see the country and make a bit of money. While I was fruit picking, I was watching television and I saw the Radio with Pictures documentary where Dylan Taite went and spoke with the Sex Pistols, and they showed a few clips of the punk bands. I got that: here’s the new revolution. I knew that I wanted to play music like early Pink Floyd. I wanted to be psychedelic. Punk was something else. But the psychedelic thing was dead and gone when I started learning how to play music. The chance of being part of some sort of counter-cultural revolution in music reappeared with punk. People kind of made punk into what they wanted it to be. For me, it was not about the aggressive, snotty-nosed ethos of it. Although I was young and had a little of that, it was the DIY part of it that appealed to me. It’s what the Rough Trade acts would pick up on a year or two later. They’d revive rawness and experimentation.

Ryan: I like the Scavengers, but listening to the Spies it’s clear you had eclectic tastes.  

George: Yeah. We weren’t so self-conscious that we wanted to bury our knowledge of music to be more “authentic.” The Auckland bands, they might have been as musically aware as us, but they suppressed that. Any kind of musical ability they had was suppressed to appear authentic in front of their peers. For some reason, we didn’t end up doing that. We weren’t under pressure to do it because we didn’t have a healthy scene (in Wellington).

Ryan: There was a general suspicion of the Auckland bands, especially in the South Island, correct?  

George: I was in Wellington then, but there was a suspicion that the Auckland bands were concerned with image. Image came first, music came second.  

Ryan: Digressing back a little bit, it was in Dunedin that you met Susan Ellis who’d become one of your musical collaborators and later wife.

George: That’s right. I met Susan in Dunedin. We didn’t really collaborate much in Dunedin. There have been a few times in my life where I haven’t been really focused on music or recorded anything, and that year in Dunedin was one of those times. Susan and I met up again in Wellington the following year and I included her in the band (The Spies) that we were forming. I had joined up with these different groups in Wellington. It gets a little complicated; Lindsay (Maitland) was around again in Wellington. I can’t really recall how I met my friends. It’s like they just showed up in my life one day.  

Ryan: You had a band in Wellington with Kevin Hawkins from Shoes This High called Jellyfish.

George: Joining Jellyfish happened when I first moved to Wellington and met Kevin. He already had an interesting band, The Amps, that had gigs. One of the members left, so they had room for another musician. The Amps did punk, mostly covers with a little bit of psychedelia and reggae. They were all high-energy covers. As people left the band and the lineup shifted, we came up with more original material and named ourselves the Jellyfish. We then kind of split into two bands. My band became the Spies; Kevin’s band became Shoes This High.

Ryan: Tell me about the Spies. Did you have trouble finding shows in Wellington like you did later on in Christchurch with the And Band?

George: We formed the Spies in Wellington. The band consisted of me, Susan Ellis, Richard Sedger and Chris Plummer on drums who’s not on the album (The Battle of Bosworth Terrace) much. We did do some gigs (in Wellington). We kind of went about it professionally. We wrote some songs and recorded them on a cassette. We took the cassette to the manager of a bar called Willy’s Wine Cellar. We did do some gigs there, but we got chucked out and weren’t invited back. There were too many young kids there, possibly some kids taking drugs. There was no real trouble, but likely too much trouble for the bar owners. But we had a weekend residency there. Our friend Mark Thomas, who was kind of on the fringes of the band and would play with us sometimes—he’d be in the And Band later—he and some members of the Wallsockets approached the Wellington City Council. They wanted access to this stage that had been set up in downtown at one of the malls, and got permission to use it on the weekends and started setting up free concerts, so we had a place to play regularly. We supported Toy Love at one stage when they came through. We had our opportunities to play. But we didn’t have access to recording. Recording in those days was very expensive and you had to work with engineers who had no interest in what you were doing. We saw this Revox reel-to-reel recorder downtown at a music shop. We really liked that. It was expensive. This wasn’t my idea—I wasn’t nearly brave enough—but as a group we ended up stealing the Revox and a few microphones and other things we needed from the shop. When we thought the heat had died down, we got all the recording equipment out of hiding and began using it. Within a couple of days, we got busted; the story is in the liner notes (to The Battle of Bosworth Terrace). We got punished for it, but we got the tape back. The police handed it back to us. That was discovered years later. The Spies actually managed to get an album out of that stuff.

Ryan: Posthumously, decades later.

George: It’s more experimental than our live set would have been. Our live set would have consisted of three-minute songs. The And Band was the same way. Live, the focus would have been on concise, communicable musical ideas. The recordings came out more experimental.

Ryan: You mentioned Toy Love earlier. Prior to the success of Flying Nun, Toy Love seemed to be light years ahead of almost everyone in New Zealand at the time.

George: Absolutely. I saw the Enemy, the band that became Toy Love, and they really impressed me. They were full of energy and musical ideas. It wasn’t just kind of punk—basic, repetitive ideas. They had melodic ideas and great lyrics. They were excellent musicians, too.

Ryan: Paul Kean was already a great bass player back then.

George: Mike Dooley (who later drummed for Snapper) was an amazing drummer. He was one of the guys I jammed with back in Dunedin. I thought, “Man, this guy sounds like Drumbo.” He’d play these amazing rolling drum patterns that I hadn’t heard before. Toy Love was very inspiring.

Mark Thomas, 1980. Photo by Stuart Page. 

Ryan: Besides Lindsay Maitland, another figure who appeared to have a big impact on you was Mark Thomas (Perfect Strangers).

George: Lindsay and I met Mark in Wellington. I have no idea how we met him; Mark just came into our lives. Mark was coming from a different place. He was adopted and although he had a good home, he’d spent some time on the streets. He had a really good voice and an aptitude as an entertainer. He could make up funny songs that’d entertain you. He could write political songs—something I never did at that stage. Mark had great wordplay. I realized that a lot of these people that I surrounded myself with were masters of wordplay: Mark, Susan (Ellis), Bill Vosburgh and Lindsay Maitland. I wasn’t particularly confident in my lyric writing. I think a lot of my ability I picked up from being around these people.

           I taught Mark how to play guitar. We would jam and record together. We bought a tape recorder. It was a really common thing that’d happen in my history: we’d buy a reel-to-reel and make some tapes and that’s where the music would solidify. Mark and I would sit up all night with an acoustic guitar, an organ, and some bongos and write some songs, record some tracks.      

[spearywritesstuff]

Mix Tape Fic

I’m reblogging this old thing bc of the mix tape feels.

On Ao3 here.

The adrenaline rush of a hunt gone right still filled the air in the car. The electric charge of the moment would spark out around them for a few more miles. They sat in near silence. The only sound to punctuate the moment came from the asphalt under the tires, the low grumble of the engine, and the drum of Dean's heartbeat in his ears. Dean's fingers drummed at the steering wheel as they roared down the road. There was no music to accompany the motion, it was all just him letting the energy out.

Cas looked at him as they drove. It was a familiar moment, the two of them together like this. Soon, there would be sound, and song. Soon there would be the familiar sight of a town that they had rolled through before. As if sensing that the moment was right, Cas reached out to the stereo and switched it on. The crackle of static filled the space. He twisted the dial, coming to a country station which elicited a grimace from Dean. He kept turning the dial, coming to a talk radio station, the speaker angry at something. Cas turned the dial, more static.

Dean knew what would come next, so he reached under the seat and pulled out the box of cassette tapes, setting them on the seat between them. Cas reached out to it and pretended to consider the many options present there. He wasn't really considering anything. He already knew what tape he would choose. It was a mix tape of songs that he and Dean had made for their hunting trips.

They had sat in Dean's room on the floor shuffling through his records. Dean would pop an album on and they would listen. Each of them would get to vote on each addition, no questions asked. All of the songs on the tape had to get a unanimous vote. They didn't let Sam have a vote; this was not his tape. This was their tape. These were their songs.

Now, Dean did not have some of the songs that were on this tape in his collection. On the second night that they were making the tape, Cas brought in four more albums that he had picked up from the thrift store in downtown Lebanon. One of the albums was old school hip hop. In fact, it may have been more aptly called ancient hip hop. Dean grimaced at first when the music played, and Cas made a face that said, I let you have "Appetite for Destruction." Dean gave him a begrudging thumbs up, and Cas smiled.

The next album was chosen for a piece by a composer named Shostakovich. Cas had said that they needed something in the mix that was much more classical than AC/DC or Iron Maiden. Dean accepted it without question. The piece had an epic quality to it and it appealed to his hard rock sensibilities. They let a few more pieces play out, but in the end, only the piece by Shostakovich made the cut.

Dean lifted the next album from the pile and walked up to the record player. He changed out the album to Diana Ross. Cas had picked up the album on a whim, not knowing what it would be. He liked her hair though, so she made it into the purchase pile. Dean looked at the cover while he stood next to the player and then at Cas, then back at the cover again. "Really, Cas?"

"No. I just liked her look."

"So, that's your type?"

"She is aesthetically pleasing, but she is not my type." Dean laughed at Cas' response.

"You have a funny way of saying things sometimes, Cas."

"I know. Let's listen to the next one." Dean got up and changed the album. Cas had purchased an album by John Lennon. Dean didn't own this one. He had a bunch of songs from the Beatles, but not Lennon's solo stuff. The Beatles he had because of his mom. He didn't have the same attachment to the individual singers.

He set the record on the player and set the needle. He came back to Cas' side and they looked at the cover together, leaning toward each other as they did so. "Why'd you pick this one?"

"For the irony." Dean laughed at this response too.

"Really? Explain." Dean flipped the jacket over and read through the song titles.

"'Imagine.' I thought that it would be a good post hunt song. You know, for the irony." Cas smiled at Dean's look of confusion. "Just listen to the lyrics and vote it into the rotation." They listened to the song and Dean's lips slowly curled up into a grin.

"Okay, that one is in, no questions." And like that they had their songs all selected.

Cas pushed the tape into the deck and hit the rewind button. Sometimes they would just let it play from where they left off, but today felt different. Today felt like a day of beginnings. They took care of the simple haunting, an old fashioned salt and burn. It was nice to have a simple case for once. Dean was proud of Cas' efforts. There was one moment of panic where Cas was tossed back through a window. His injuries were minor though, a few cuts, nothing a stitch or two wouldn't fix up once they got back to the motel.

Dean remembered how different it was before, when Cas could just heal them both. He gave up his grace, became human. It still puzzled him, all these years later that Cas had sacrificed so much for humanity, for Dean. Sometimes he thought that he understood it, and other times he felt that there were things that would only make sense in the mind of the former angel. He could ask, but instead he let that question sit in his mind collecting dust.

So much had changed in the years since the Mark and the almost apocalypse. He had grown more comfortable with his life, his feelings. Yes, he kept most of his thoughts to himself. He was not quick to initiate a chat on his inner demons. However, he was comfortable in his own skin. Consequently, he was also comfortable with Sam and Cas. He had grown so comfortable, in fact, that sometimes Sam would go off for weeks on his own, and Dean would not feel the strange crawling that use to take over his insides. He use to live in a constant state of worry, as if at any moment, being alone would lead to too much self-reflection and internal judgement. There was much to feel guilty over, and Sam's presence use to keep those demons at bay. There was also the desire to keep his brother safe, and safety only seemed to be attainable when said brother was easily locatable. It only took dying a few times to achieve this new found level of freedom.

Now, he could be on his own and not fall into a slow madness. He wasn't often alone, but he had tested the theory over a few times. Cas was usually there, just a few steps down the hall. They would change their routines when Sam was gone. Sometimes they would stay up late and marathon some movies together, and if they fell asleep like that, no one else had to be the wiser. They were comfortable enough with each other that they didn't even talk about it. It was not awkward or strange. It was just comfortable waking up in each other's company. Some days Dean would wake Cas up with a quick ruffling of his hair. Others, Cas would wake Dean up with intense staring.

It was more than friendship, but Dean did not dwell on it too much. He let the thoughts warm him like a toasty cabin on a cold winter's night. His world may be filled with darkness and a past best not revisited, but he had found something here that made it bearable, more than bearable, actually good. He glanced at Cas now as he reached back to the tape deck to push the play button. The rewinding had apparently finished. Cas looked back at him and smiled.

He took the box of tapes from between them and slid them back beneath the seat and scooted closer to Dean. "Imagine" began playing. The familiar notes from the piano whirled out around them as the dark road grumbled beneath them. The world was dark, but they cut through it, the Impala's bright moonlight beams made a path to rest. They would reach the motel by the end of the song if Dean had calculated correctly. Cas began singing in his low growl of a voice.

"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try." Dean always smiled through that part for some reason, because seriously, a former angel was singing those lines.

Cas leaned into his shoulder a little to encourage him to join in. Dean sang the next line with him, "No Hell below us, above us only sky." He stopped singing along, for the next couple of lines because he liked how Cas' voice sounded as he increased his own volume.

"Imagine all the people, living for today." He looked at Dean in a way that seemed to say something. "Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do."

Dean joined him again. "Nothing to kill or die for." And this was where Cas always took a different lyrical path. Dean sang the new words with him.

"Already done enough of that for you." They laughed with the next words.

Cas seemed to be singing to him, his eyes locked onto Dean, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." Dean let him sing the chorus alone until he felt Cas' hand on his face. The stroke of a thumb running over a day's growth of stubble. He leaned into the touch a little. It was another thing that he was comfortable with. "Finish the song with me."

Dean complied. They pulled into the spot outside of the room that they had booked the night before. Dean did not shut off the engine. They had one more chorus to sing. "You may say I'm a dreamer…" Dean turned to Cas who had not released his cheek. He sang right back at him. Their voices blended up nicely together. Dean thought that his voice wasn't much on its own, but mixed up with Cas' it was something pleasant. The final notes of the piano played out, and Cas let his hand drop from Dean's cheek to his shoulder. He reached out with his other hand and stopped the tape. The next song was one of the harsh discordant ones that Dean had selected.

Dean shut the engine off, and silence reigned supreme again. They got out of the car and went directly into the room. Dean cast off his jacket, Cas picked it up off of the floor. "Oh, sorry." Dean looked back at him as Cas set it carefully on the back of the chair by the window.

"Imagine putting your clothes where they go, it's easy if you try." Cas sang as he walked over to Dean.

"No former angels sassing me, before me just some guy." Dean smirked and got a smile out of Cas with his quick lyrics, despite the fact that they made very little sense. Cas kept approaching him, and Dean wondered what was on his mind. His hand came out and rested on Dean's shoulder, moving up into the crook between that space and his neck. "Do you need me to stitch you up?"

"No. I'm good." Cas moved his other hand up to Dean's other shoulder a mirror of the first. Dean just stood there. Cas sang another altered lyric. "I hope someday you'll join me." He glanced over at the bed raising an eyebrow as he did so. "And the two of us can be as one." Dean pulled him closer, hands wrapped around his waist.

"I'm gonna pretend that wasn't cheesy and just kiss you now." Dean leaned into the kiss and Cas hummed out the tune of the song into his mouth. Dean let more of his clothing hit the floor. Cas did not pick any of it up.

The bed welcomed them, and Cas kept breaking free of Dean's lips to sing more altered lyrics. Some were sprinkled with terms of endearment. Some were directions, "Imagine if you put your hand there, it's not hard to do." They laughed at that one. Dean followed up with some lyrics of his own, but he felt that Cas was better at the game.

"You may say that I am in love, but I'm not the only one." Cas cupped Dean's face in his hands and sang this down at him, their bodies pressed against one another, skin slick with sweat.

"Imagine that I love you, because it's all true." Dean smiled through the words, they came out easy now. It was funny to think that something like this had ever been difficult. The melody swam about in his head as he tried to think of more new lyrics to add to the song, more words to convey to Cas all that he thought of him, all that he meant. But Cas already knew. He always knew deep down, Dean thought. And the night crawled on, and they carried on like this until the dawn.

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Adam Tanaka of Life and Limb Printing, a brand that sells screen printing and merch production.Some stats:Product: Screen printing and merch production.Revenue/mo: $80,000Started: May 2010Location: NashvilleFounders: 1Employees: 8Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hello! My name is Adam Tanaka and I own a company called Life and Limb Printing. We are a screen printing and full-service merch company that specializes in merch production for breweries, outdoor clothing companies, and restaurants with a little bit of everything else sprinkled in.In 2016, we became automated bringing on our first auto screen printing press which changed our output drastically. We went from printing about 120 pieces an hour on a manual press to hitting anywhere from 500 to 800 pieces an hour.Since officially launching the business in 2010, we had our best month last year in October 2018 at $80,000 and now we are set to hit 1M by the end of 2019.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I was all over the place with what I wanted to do with my life - anywhere from a radio DJ, to creating zines, then going to college for biology, dropping out, all the while playing music and touring in bands since I was 14.The music I listened to in the 90’s played a major role in what I ended up doing as my career. I remember stuffing cash into an envelope and sending it to some of my favorite bands' addresses and within 2 to 4 weeks, I'd get a shirt in the mail. After opening the package, I would immediately feel the print and it was a mystery to me of how that print got on a shirt.In the early 2000’s, I got a job here in Nashville with a merch company that did almost everything in house. I started out scrubbing the floors and cleaning the shop making $6.25/hr. It was a large enough company that they were busy year round and a small enough company that the owners were there most of the time. From scrubbing those floors to working in their eCommerce department, I learned the inner workings of the production side of the business and knew I was ready to figure out how to launch my own company in merch.I was working part-time at an art store, trying to play music and in 2008 at the age of 26, started printing small one-off jobs here and there for myself and for friends. I put music on the back burner to try and work my way to manager of the art store so that I could make more money to save up and spend towards my new venture. Somehow still being over $300 overdrawn in my bank account with more bills coming in and not enough being made, I still started a business.My first real customer was a Nashville brewery, who still prints with us today. I cold-called them making my company sound much bigger than it was. The name was a song from a favorite band of mine, Fugazi called Life and Limb. It was the first bit of text I saw when my customer asked me what my company name was and it just ended up sticking. I started printing on the floor of my apartment and curing shirts on a cookie sheet in the oven. Below is the first shirt I printed for Yazoo Brewery and a cassette tape insert of the Fugazi record The Argument that has the track Life and Limb.imageimageEven multiple-color jobs, I had to wipe down each screen every single time to align with the print and used a heat gun so the inks wouldn’t stick to the screen. This was brutal and I don’t know what I was thinking. Eventually, I moved into a 600 square foot garage, then shared the back of a building with another company, and a few years later landed our current space. All I knew was that I wanted to give my customers the best product ever, and something they could wear around and be proud of.About 6 years into the business, I hired my first employee and now have a solid team of 8 people.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Once the sale is made and the order is defined, we will take artwork either from the customer or create it for them and begin setting it up for screen printing. Any good graphic designer can take a concept and make it a reality, but not every graphic designer knows how to set the design up for screen printing.Once this is ready to go, we start by printing each layer onto films, going to a dark room, and “burning” the design onto screens. Then we are ready for setup on press and production. Our “blanks” are ordered through our suppliers and once received in, we’ll cart them and place them in our production queue.There are so many variables here and anything can go wrong, so being able to get ahead of the issues before the order gets on press is ideal. The biggest challenges happen when there is a lack of communication and attention to detail. When I was doing everything by myself and running each part of the business, things could easily become lost in translation. Now having a team in place, a whole new set of issues can happen if the details are lost.Startup costs for this industry can vary greatly depending on your output or what you want to accomplish with your business plan. When starting out, if I didn’t have the equipment, I would go onto a shirt forum and figure out how to build a temporary version of what I eventually wanted.I think one of the last things a business owner thinks about is getting your business set up legally with all of the proper forms in place with the state and federally because the focus is on growth and next steps. This was one of my biggest hurdles - keeping up with taxes, business license, and so on… But once you find a good accountant and a good lawyer, let them take care of this so you can focus on building your company. That was one of the few things I wish I had in place from the beginning, even when I wasn’t making any money.imageimageimageDescribe the process of launching the business.I wasn’t even thinking about getting a website up and going or having any online presence at all when I started. I was calling, emailing, and going out every day and visiting businesses and asking if they need printing. After being asked several times about a site they could visit, I knew it was long overdue and quickly built a site through WordPress using a template with basic information and a contact. Also, that phone number is a non-working number now.imageI didn’t have any source of financing or borrowing at all for the first 7 years of business. I’ve never had partners or investors and still don’t to this day. If there was equipment or supplies I needed in order to function, I would work a part time or full time job and save money. Once I had what I needed, I would pay cash for it. I got my first business credit card and financed my first bit of equipment the 7th year when I brought on my first auto press and larger dryer.After launching the business, I didn’t start seeing a big customer base for the first 3 years. I had no more than 10 customers at a time. With little to no overhead, I was able to get away with a small customer base, but I wasn’t satisfied with the progress I was making at all.Once I moved into a small garage that was separate from an apartment, I had more confidence and didn’t feel as embarrassed having customers stop by for consultations on what type of merch they wanted for their business. It was in my 4th year that I started seeing substantial growth to where over the next 2 to 3 years, boxes of shirts were spilling out of my garage into the yard and driveway.Again, having little overhead was huge but I knew it was time to crunch some numbers and see if it made sense to get an actual space that wasn’t part of my house, which was terrifying. I kept asking myself “what if the business failed because I moved too early, what if I move into the wrong space, what if I think I can afford it but really can’t” and tons of other anxiety inducing questions.Nothing went as planned with launching the business. I didn’t have the systems set from beginning to end and it was all over the place. I was jumping back and forth between emails, to printing, to figuring out how to price an order, and there was no structure whatsoever. I was letting these failures get the best of me and had to step back to see why I was doing this in the first place.Realizing that connecting with the customer, building that relationship, and being there for them every step of the way was the most important thing and that became my foundation.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?One of the biggest first moves I made was hiring a printer, stepping out from behind the press, and focusing on sales. It was really hard for me to hand over that control and hope that the quality and output was the best it could be. Every time I would go out to do face to face sales or meetings, I would constantly have to drive back to the garage or call my printer to make sure everything was ok. I was always worried and stressed about not being there overseeing the production side, especially with this being my first time having an employee. I learned so many things within that year, that it felt like 10 years had already gone by. It became apparent that when deciding to bring on an employee, there would have to be clear expectations and processes in place. This seems like a no-brainer, but I was in the dark on how to do this. Without having the proper expectations set, this in turn sets your employee up for potential disaster.The second biggest move I made was bringing on an actual salesperson. That was a life-changer. I met my first sales guy and his family by chance at a photo shoot for a baby/kids clothing and supply company of mine. After a quick conversation, we both realized he worked for an existing customer of mine. I knew he was the right person when we had a phone call and he threw out several ideas for growth and next steps without knowing the entire process of what we did. I took about a week before jumping right in and talking with him a few more times, and finally offered him the position at a base rate plus commission salary.We get together the first of the month to discuss that month’s goals and then another meeting mid-month to see where we are at and how to finish the month strong. As mentioned earlier, we make the connection and build that relationship. If we are a good fit for their brand or company, we will not only help build on their ideas but offer up merchandise consulting and product development if needed.Two days a week, my sales team is in the office building lists for leads, emailing, and making calls. The remainder of the week, they are out getting face time with current customers and potential leads. I now have an account manager who is there to answer phones, take care of any walk-ins, and close the sale that our Sales Development Rep brought in. I have found that doing this allows for sales to keep selling while those potential leads turn into customer orders.Being a service-based company, we don’t utilize Amazon, Facebook, or Shopify for sales. Instead of trying to go out and print for as many people as possible, we close in on what we are good at and what industries we want to work with and go for it.We try and run a monthly promo/campaign or a monthly newsletter for discounts on their orders for specific events, holidays, special days, or just as a thank you for returning customers.As part of our face to face sales efforts, we have a small booklet with photos of what we have worked on and a brief rundown of what we do along with a free shirt to give out as well. Inside the neck of the shirt where the size tag would be, this is where we print our company info and size of the shirt. They might throw away the booklet, but not many people throw away a shirt.We try our best to keep our Instagram page up-to-date with various projects we are working on or highlighting a customer we have been working with. We also have a referral program set up where anyone can refer us and in turn, they will get paid a percentage of the job they referred over to us.To help ensure a returning customer, give them incentive and treat them as part of the team. Check in on them every once in a while, or have a cookie cake delivered to their workplace and written with the icing it says “Thank you!” Something to show that their loyalty to you means more than anything because they can go anywhere else at any time.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?The first year of being in an actual building, we lost a lot of money.Although I planned as best I could with a small cushion to fall back on financially, it was still difficult to gauge all of the other bits and pieces such as almost tripling in cost of utilities, our new auto press going down, other equipment issues, and a few other random things. We turned it around quickly and by the end of 2016/early 2017, we were in the black! Each year since, we have grown more than 60% and doubled our square footage in May of this year.Not having the systems in place from the beginning was a struggle especially when bringing on employees. There was a lot of trial and error and forming good habits, but we have clear processes and systems in place and smarter about where things go around the office and the shop, making everything much more efficient. Daily production meetings are a must and end of day reporting helps foresee any problems that could arise in the future.imageThrough starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Having had the business for 10 years and being in the printing and merch industry for over 15 years, I feel more than confident in what I do and I still love it. But I have made and still make some very poor decisions and some whopping mistakes.And even still, I feel like I’m faking my way through it most of the time. Early on, I kept hearing people say that failure is not an option and to keep pressing through it. I say right on, but also failure is an option and failing over and over again is what has allowed me to have just as many, if not more, successes.Early on in the business, I printed a very large quantity of shirts with a specific ink color that had to be matched with a Pantone. I eye-balled it and ran the job, the whole time saying out loud that I hope the customer is ok with it. It was a rush order and I felt like I didn’t have the time to re-mix the ink (it would have taken a whole 10 more minutes to do so). They didn’t like what I chose of course, and I had to redo the entire order, on my dime, loads of money out the door.Finding the right employees has been the most challenging. It is difficult to find someone with a solid work ethic ready to hit the ground running and is there to support your vision as the owner. That’s just rare. If you don’t have a system in place for setting up interviews, onboarding/training, and how their first day will go, it will more than likely fail. I have had this happen more times than I can count.I have learned a bit in the last 10 years and am still learning. Not giving up has been key for me. The simple words just keep going don’t seem so simple when problems arise. It sounds easier to just get a day job, come home, and not have to worry about work anymore once you’re off the clock. Learning to take each thing, whether good or bad, and handling it with a level head will make a big impact on your business and your staff. At the end of the day, employees will look to you to either fix it or make it better, but as an owner, being able to delegate tasks in order to focus on large scale growth is essential.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Printavo is by far my favorite tool we use. It’s a cloud based solution that manages every part of the shop. All of my employees have a login and can see workflow from quote form all the way to order completion.Everyone knows what’s going on at all times and each department of the business manages certain parts of Printavo. Even my production team can see all of the numbers so they know how the business is doing. If there are setbacks with production, the printers know what they need to do to hit their goals.Everything that is done within the system is documented and is somewhat of an accountability tool as well. They also have countless blog posts covering ways to better your shop, the departments, and overall business in this specific industry which is very helpful.I forget about this sometimes as it seems it isn’t as important, but I am all about Google. We use Gsuite for our email platform, and everything else Google has to offer. Simply writing an email where I mention having an attachment but forget, I get an auto-response asking me if I meant to attach something. This has saved me more times than not. Like most businesses, we utilize Google drive every day.For any fulfillment services we do, Shipstation is the way to go for us. Their customer service is next to none and always responsive. Integration is easy and they make inventory management a breeze. We love it.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Built To Sell was a good one for me. It tells a good story about steps you can take to prepare your business to run where you can step away and bring more value to the company and eventually sell it and be profitable.Smarter Faster Better was motivating and gave me a whole new outlook on productivity. There are so many different industries mentioned throughout the book and how the person in charge handled specific situations. No matter the business, we all go through the same stuff and knowing what decisions to make that will allow us to work smart.I love the podcast How I Built This. My favorite episode was the interview with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia. This one was very inspiring for me and after the episode ended, I felt even more passionate about what I do and how I do it.He mentioned how the company was growing too fast, so he decided to scale back…..the opposite of what you would assume a business owner would do. I agree to work like everyone is out to get you, because they are for the most part. But I also agree with the phrase, slow and steady wins the race.There is no race to be won in business, but there are goals, and rushing those goals could be detrimental to the well being of the business. Check it out here.Another shout out to the How I Built This podcast is the episode with Andrew Casalena who is the founder of Squarespace, which is the web platform we use for our site. This hit home for me because he briefly discusses his bout with anxiety during the beginning phases of his company. Generalized Anxiety Disorder and social anxiety has been one of the biggest hurdles for me even before starting the business. I felt like I was alone, dealing with the intense symptoms almost every day, but then you hear other people such as Andrew talk about the exact same thing and feel somewhat comforted and know it’s going to be ok. Having constant interactions with my staff, customers, and trying to sell to strangers is part of the job and it is sometimes the hardest thing to do in hopes I don’t have a panic attack out of nowhere.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Focus on the solutions and not the problems.Wait as long as you can before bringing on your first employee and when you get to that point, interview as many as you can until you find the best for what you are needing and pay them well.Make sure you have clearly defined systems and processes in place early on. Don’t obsess over your pricing structure.Obsess over bringing value to your customer and everything else will fall into place. And whether you are good at math or not, go ahead and find a good accountant that cares about what you are doing and lock them in.Set the business up from the beginning to where it could eventually run like a machine, on its own, so that you can get to where you want to be faster. You will be able to clearly define your goals and your 2 year/5 year/10 year plans can already be set in motion.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?We’re not currently looking to fill any positions at the moment, but welcome resumes from anyone who has experience in the industry to hold onto for the future.Where can we go to learn more?Website: lifeandlimbprinting.comFacebook: lifeandlimbprintingInstagram: lifeandlimbprintingEmail: adam@lifeandlimbprinting.comIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON TO MINNEAPOLIS: SUMMER 1997

When I got my hands on that Oldsmobile at the age of sixteen, I wanted nothing more than to drive. I drove all the time, out past the high school and out through the hills just south and west of Morrison, out past the Cross Creek Country Club and then up to Garden Plain Road that would take me back to Highway 30 and back into town. Once Mom and Don were confident enough in my driving skills to let me take longer trips, I started heading east, where I’d cut around Chicago and blow up the coast of Lake Michigan to the Warren Dunes State Park. I’d sit up there on the sand dunes and get sun burnt and smoke weed and people watch. There were some crazy fuckers from rural Indiana and Michigan who went to those dunes, just to hang out. Get a little nature in the big-nature-deprived Middle West.

One warm summer weekend, I talked Mom and Don into letting me drive all the way up to Minneapolis to visit Jim.

I woke up before dawn on the morning of my departure, got dressed, ate a bowl of cereal, and went out to the Oldsmobile. It was still dark outside, and I remember feeling a little nuts as I sat in the Olds and pulled the door shut softly behind me, trying not to wake up the parents who were still sleeping soundly inside. My backpack was in the backseat, packed with some toiletries, a few t-shirts, socks and underwear, a bag of weed and a pipe, and an extra pair of pants. I had a shoebox full of cassette tapes in the front passenger seat. I put on a Bob Dylan tape—Highway 61 Revisited—and smoked a bowl. Then I took off. I crossed the Wisconsin border before the sun even came up, and made it to Minneapolis by noon.

Jim’s place in Minneapolis was pretty sweet. It was a big old house, and though it was right in the middle of a busy neighborhood with a lot of shit going on all around it, it was set back from the street a little bit, and blocked from view by some big trees and dense bushes.

I parked the Olds in the beat up and overgrown eight-car parking lot next to Jim’s house, then walked around to the front and hopped up the stairs to the huge front porch. I knocked on the screen door.

“Jim?” I yelled. “Jim, it’s Dan!”

There was some rustling around inside, and then my big brother appeared in the doorway. I hadn’t seen Jim in a long time. He still had his glasses, but he had shoulder length hair and he wore some cut-off shorts and a flannel shirt. He looked like a grunge type, and he was doing a better job of it than I was. “Hey brother!” he said, pushing open the creaky door. “Come on in.”

The house was spacious inside. All wood floors and white walls. A spider plant hanging in one corner. The front living room area had a large couch, an old black trunk for a coffee table, a shelf of books and records, a tweed chair, and a television on a little stand. The room opened up into a similarly-sized dining room, with a large dining table surrounded with chairs. An espresso-stained buffet with a mirror above it was built into the far wall.

Jim handed me a record jacket—brand new—on which was a sepia-toned picture of young man sitting in a wooden chair with his back to a large mirror that was covered with graffiti. The man had a smug look on his face—a sort of half-smirk, and he was smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a Heli-Jet trucker cap on his head of black hair, and a tight, short-sleeved t-shirt on which was a caricature of a man in a cowboy hat. He had a tattoo of some sort of animal on his bicep—a bull, possibly, or a horse, which was standing on a circle of grass, its head over a daisy. The back of the record jacket was simply a photograph of a chandelier, all in white on a black background, and in white type in the font of an American typewriter it said either/or on the top center, above the chandelier. In the bottom right corner was the track listing, and in the bottom left corner it said “Kill Rock Stars,” with an actual star replacing the word “Star,” and the address: “120 NE State Ave. No. 418, Olympia, WA 98501.” 

“Have you heard of Elliott Smith?” Jim asked me. I shook my head. “This album is great,” he said. “Lo-fi, recorded mostly in people’s houses on four-track tape recorders, and Elliott plays all the instruments himself.” He put the record on, then sat in the tweed chair, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette with a match. “Do you smoke?” he asked, offering me the pack.

“No, no. I’m good,” I said. He put the pack in his shirt pocket.

We listened to the whole first side of the record without speaking. It was sad folk music, but so beautiful. So honest. It really was good, and I told Jim I thought so.

“I know, right?” he said. He stood and flipped the record. “What time is it? Do you want a beer?” He laughed, as if the idea of having a beer with his little brother just killed him. I hadn’t really been drinking all that much beer around that time, especially not in the middle of the day. I really just smoked a lot of weed. But I of course said yes, and Jim got me a Killian’s Irish Red out of the fridge. Then he asked me if I liked brats with grilled onions, and said he was firing up the grill out on the back porch. We drank our beer and listened to the rest of the record, then went out on the porch with some brats and sliced onions. Jim turned on a little battery-powered radio on the porch. There was a baseball game on.

“What’s going on in Morrison?” he asked, putting the food on the grill.

“Not much,” I said. “My band’s basically broken up, but I brought you some tapes that we made.”

“No shit?” Jim said. “Why are you breaking up?”

“We got the apartment taken away.”

Jim laughed. “How the hell did you do that?”

“Smoking weed. Drinking beers. Throwing parties.”

“Oh, yeah. Same thing we did. How’d Don take it?”

“Pretty well, considering. I just got yelled at and grounded for a while. And of course he won’t let us ever go back up into that place again.”

“What’s he going to do? Rent it out?”

“I don’t know. He should. But there’ll have to be some serious cleaning up if he does. The entire back room is full of graffiti. The front room reeks of cigarette smoke and stale beer. And after he locked us out of the place, one of the windows we broke and replaced with fiberglass blew out during a thunderstorm, and a bunch of pigeons got in and shit everywhere.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. It’s bad.”

“What else is going on?”

“Not much. My girlfriend broke up with me. She dumped me for my friend’s little brother, who she says she’s going to marry.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Jim said, smiling. “Plenty of girls out there.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Jim pushed the onions around with some tongs. “How’s Adam?”

“He’s good. Playing the saxophone like a motherfucker. Too bad he’ll never get the apartment.” We both laughed at that—the misfortune of the youngest. Jim flipped the brats on the grill and they sizzled. Something happened in the baseball game that sent up a big cheer.

I loved that Jim talked to me like I was just a buddy or something, and not his little brother. It made me feel pretty damned good about our relationship. Pretty damned good about him as a person, as well. After our lunch and a couple more beers, we walked around a bit before he had to go in to work. He was just making pizzas at the time, but he said he was getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to do it. He laughed about that, too. We walked around his neighborhood, and stopped in to a corner coffee shop to grab a cup. Jim pointed at the circle of couches in the middle of the room—huge, comfortable fuckers with pillows and everything, surrounded by dim lamps and thick wooden tables engraved with the initials of a thousand forgotten souls.

“Pretty sweet place to while away an afternoon,” he said. He told me he sat there pretty much every day and read for a few hours before work.

“You’ll have to write down some books for me to read,” I said. “I’ve been getting into a bunch of new shit lately.”

“I’ll definitely do that,” Jim said. He handed me a cup of coffee. “But right now, I’ve got to go make pizzas.”

So Jim went to work and I went back to his house and listened to his records and drank coffee and got stoned. When he finally got home, long after midnight, he had a bottle of whiskey with him and we had some drinks. I have this pretty vivid memory of sitting on his couch, and him lying on the floor in front of me, bathed in the light of the television. We were watching M*A*S*H, and I asked him if he wanted to smoke a bowl with me. He said he didn’t smoke any more, and explained that after smoking pot for the better part of a decade, it had started making him freak out.

“I’ll be in a room with some of my closest friends, and I’ll all of a sudden be thinking that I’m doing something wrong, or that they’re all out to get me,” he said.

“Weird,” I said, lighting my pipe. I had never heard of that happening before. The weed was really dry and not very good, and it sizzled and crackled, and the cherry lit up my face as I drew in the smoke. Jim sat up and watched me intently, then said, “Well, what the fuck,” and reached out for the pipe, which I gladly handed to him. He leaned back against the tweed chair and took a small puff, then handed the pipe back to me and reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He smoked the cigarette and watched me while I finished the pipe. Afterwards, he just kind of laid there on the floor in silence for the rest of the night, watching television and sipping on whiskey.

The following morning, I awoke on the couch to the sounds of Jim’s roommate, Barry, making breakfast in the kitchen. I smelled coffee and toast, and heard the radio playing softly—a soothing baritone saying something about rain. I rolled over onto my side and grabbed a hardcover book from the coffee table. The book was On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I had heard of it before, but only through its influence on other cultural icons that were more familiar to me as a teenager: Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Jim Morrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Johnny Depp.

Jim had either checked out or stolen the book from the Minneapolis Public Library—it had that thin plastic lamination around the cover that most library books have, and a typed number on a little piece of white paper stuck to the binding. Under that lamination, there were two handsome men with dark hair and strong jawlines, their meaty arms draped over one another’s shoulders, one of them in a dirty sweatshirt and khakis, the other in a casual button-up tucked into black jeans. Neither of them were smiling, but both of them were quite obviously in love with one another.

I cracked the book open to page one:

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life that you could call my life on the road.”

I didn’t stop reading until Jim came out of his bedroom hours later, his greasy brown hair twisted and standing on end, his eyes cupped by dark circles. He put on his glasses, coughed, flopped in the tweed chair, and smiled at me.

“That’s a great book,” he said.

“I can’t really believe it,” I replied. “I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s so fucking good. I can’t put it down.”

“It’s timeless,” Jim said. “The exact same shit happening in that book in the 1950s is happening today.” He smoothed back his hair with the palm of his hand, then lit a cigarette. “Want a cup of coffee?”

[markwatkinsconsumerguide]

Consumer Guide / No.55 / WFUV DJ Darren DeVivo with Mark Watkins.

MW : Do you consider yourself to be (foremost) a broadcaster? a presenter? a DJ ?

DD : I usually refer to myself as either a DJ , an On-Air radio Host, or maybe an Air Personality.

Disc jockey is sort of a passé term because the vinyl record, which was the ‘disc’, hasn’t been used in broadcasting for decades. These days, even CDs are being used less and less. In addition, DJ was a term coined decades ago to describe a music radio host, back when the host, as a person and personality, was almost as important to a broadcast as the music itself. It’s not like that anymore, unfortunately. But, DJ still has connotations to music radio hosting.

On-air radio Host is a more accurate description, but, then again, it could also be referring to various types of broadcasting (e.g., talk/news/sports radio, music radio, etc.).

It’s all splitting hairs, so any of the three or some combination of the three is okay!

MW : You debuted on WFUV on February 26th, 1984 - what do you remember about that first show?

DD : I do remember that morning! Some of it is fuzzy, but some is crystal clear. Back in those days, when WFUV was a college radio station (see the answer to the next question), rookie DJs who were newly approved to be on the air were given test runs on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 6-8 a.m.

So, on Sunday, February 26, 1984, at 6 a.m until 8 a.m I hosted my first air shift. The first song I played was the “Venus And Mars” and “Rock Show” combination from Wings’ Venus And Mars album. The glaring lowlight of that first show was leaving my microphone on while playing Traffic’s “Empty Pages”. A friend of mine unexpectedly showed up at the station to hang out with me during my first show. I was distracted by his appearance and forgot to shut off the mic! Our ridiculous conversation could be heard beneath the song until my girlfriend called me on the phone to tell me my mic was still on. You can actually hear me answer the phone, say hello to her and then, the chatter stops. I noticed that the mic was on and quickly turned it off.

By chance, I ended up back on the air for my second show that next Saturday, March 3, 6-8 a.m again. I opened that second show with “The Road To Utopia” from Utopia (Todd Rundgren’s old band), off the Adventures In Utopia album. I also sampled the soon to be released second solo album from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. He was about to release About Face and in the days between my first two shows, WFUV received an advance promotional copy of the album. I played three songs from it over the two hours. I still have the airchecks, on cassette, of my first two shows. Listening back to those tapes today, it is hysterical to hear how thick my urban New York City/Bronx accent was!

After those first two shows, I was on the air very regularly, and soon, I started getting my own semi-permanent airshifts.

MW : How has WFUVs station sound changed / evolved over the years?

DD : WFUV has made many significant changes over the 34 years since I first walked through the station’s doors. WFUV, which signed on for the first time in 1947 (we just passed our 70th anniversary), was a full blown college radio station when I joined. I went to Fordham University and attended classes at their Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, which was only several miles from where I lived. WFUV is owned by Fordham University and our studios and offices were, and still are, on the Rose Hill campus.

In the early to mid-1980’s, WFUV was almost entirely student run. It had been that way for many years. The only paid professionals on the staff were the General Manager and the Chief Engineer, who were both employees of Fordham. I joined the staff as an incoming freshman in September 1983 and started taking the required classes necessary to be on the air as a DJ in the music department. You also had to be an FCC licensed engineer, so engineering classes were required, too. I completed the required classes/workshops for announcing and engineering by December. I then submitted a demo tape of a mock broadcast to the Program Director (who was also a student) around February 1984. I was immediately approved and was assigned my first air shift – I debuted on the air on Sunday, February 26, 1984, from 6-8 a.m. I was back for my second show that next Saturday, March 3, 1984, again from 6-8 a.m. It wasn’t until that summer, or early fall, that I received my FCC license.

When I started, WFUV featured a block programming schedule. The most prominent part of the week was our rock music programs, which were all hosted by students. Our rock format encompassed a mix of mainstream AOR (album oriented rock), indie and alternative rock and a few other genres, like blues, jazz and reggae. The rock programs were both formatted - during weekday drive times, and free form - during late nights and overnights. Many specialty programs were scattered through the week, as well. Shows ranged from classical, opera, ethnic (Irish, Latin, French, Italian, Indian, Middle Eastern, polka), sports talk, news and public affairs, country, jazz and big band swing, early rock and roll and vocal group R&B, religious music, astronomy, and more. All of these shows were hosted by volunteers, some of whom were Fordham/WFUV alumni. WFUV was required to broadcast Fordham sports – mainly the Fordham college basketball and football games - and Sunday mass from the University chapel.

Over a few years in the second half of the ‘80s, Fordham’s administration started to lay the groundwork to make WFUV a professionally run, non-commercial public radio station. Students would still make up the largest percentage of the staff, but each department would be helmed by professionals hired by Fordham University. It was during this period, mainly 1988-1990, that the station made its gradual transformation. During that two year span of time, I remained on staff as a part-time volunteer, even though I had graduated Fordham in 1987. Under normal circumstances, staff members usually left the station upon graduation, but as an alumnus, I was asked to remain and fill in here and there whenever necessary. I even ended up with another regular air shift once again (Friday night/Saturday morning from 11 p.m-2 a.m).

It appeared the end of the line had finally come for me in June 1990, but within several months, I was once again being offered fill in slots both on-air and behind the scenes. Then, I was hired as a permanent On-Air Host in January 1991. My first airshift as a professional was the weekday afternoon drive slot (approximately 2-6 p.m). With all of the pieces now in place for WFUV to thrive as a professionally run non-commercial public station, the “present day” WFUV began to slowly evolve. Our contemporary music mix (which was concentrated to weekdays), was a potpourri of styles - adult rock, contemporary folk, blues, bluegrass, Celtic and world music. Only a handful of the specialty programs survived the transformation and a handful remain today. That said, the majority of them were gradually canceled during the early 1990s. Over the next decade, WFUV continued to grow and fine tune its programming.

For me personally, upon getting hired at WFUV as a professional in January 1991, I was assigned to the afternoon drive shift, from 2-6 p.m approximately. Exactly a year later, in January 1992, I was made the morning drive host, from 6-10 a.m approximately. I remained on mornings for nine years. In January 2001, I was made the midday host, from 10 a.m-2 p.m. That was my favorite shift and it was mine for over twelve years. In the spring of 2013, I was moved to evenings, from 6-10 p.m Monday through Thursday. Finally, in the summer of 2015, I was moved to my current airshift – late nights, from 10 p.m -2 a.m Monday through Thursday and midnight until 2 a.m Monday mornings. I am also one of the voices on our weekend, or secondary (HD2), channel, called “FUV Music. I’ve been hosting there since either 2008, or 2009.

MW : How has WFUV's record library changed over the years, and how is it maintained?

DD : It has drastically changed, and, unfortunately not for the better. In the 1980s, our library was very deep, but there were the occasional holes. Unfortunately, as a college station, we didn’t have the budget to invest financially into the library. But, record companies (and sometimes the artists, too) kept a semi-constant flow of free promotional records coming our way. We had virtually all the current releases, both relevant and irrelevant, and sometimes, we could obtain replacement titles and artist catalogs when necessary. CDs began to move in around 1987.

By the early 1990s, vinyl was on the back-burner and CDs were virtually all we played. During the ‘90s, the vinyl library was scaled back drastically, with albums deemed irrelevant to the “new” WFUV sound removed and either sold, or given away. Thefts in the late 80s also damaged the record library.

Today, only a disorganized collection of a thousand or so misfit records have survived the years and collect dust on the shelves. Our CD library grew nicely for many years, but with radio transitioning to digital and computers taking over for physical formats, the emphasis on physical CDs has decreased. As a result, our library has fallen into some degree of disarray, with only a portion of the air staff relying on CDs. Technically speaking, 85% of the music heard on WFUV today, maybe more, is coming from the computer hard drive. We have transferred a sizeable portion of the CD library onto the hard drive and continue to do so as needed. We do continue to accumulate many necessary new releases, but not all.

No one person, or persons, manages the library. It sort of manages itself. Unfortunately, it has fallen into a small state of disarray.

MW : Do you request / receive individual promo, or does it all come through the radio station? Tell me also about your relationship with record labels...

DD : The music industry has changed a lot over the past twenty-five years. Many years ago, I usually received my own mail service from many major, and a number of smaller, independent, record labels. Record companies were more generous and financially able to make sure all key radio station personnel received product, if they wanted it. Even if I wasn’t on a permanent mailing list, I would be able to get promotional copies of many titles by simply requesting them.

As time passed, record companies started tightening their belts and promotional product was scaled back. Today, I only receive a fraction of what was sent out years ago. Sometimes, I can still contact a label representative or promo person if I want a certain title, but that has decreased considerably.

Since the emergence of the download, many labels will now only offer audio files. This goes for both airplay copies and copies for individual station personnel. The physical product may be sent when (or if!) it becomes available. In some cases, physical CDs (or vinyl) won’t be sent out unless they’re requested

When it comes to airplay and reporting airplay to labels, promo companies, trade magazines, etcetera - that is something the Music Director is in charge of. Label reps and promo folks work with the station’s Music Director, or an assistant, to try to promote an artist, song or album and, hopefully, gain airplay. Ultimately, it is the Music Director, with input from the Program Director, who decides what is going to get our attention. I have no input into those decisions. If I get any inquiries, I direct them to the music department.

MW : How do you usually prepare for your radio shows, and how much input do you have on the music played?

DD : I am fortunate to have a pretty detailed knowledge of music, especially when it comes to what WFUV is playing. So, I could, if need be, go on the air occasionally and host a show with just the information that I have in my head. But, I prefer to prepare for virtually every show and I do this by reviewing the entire playlist, looking up facts about the songs, albums and/or artists, fact checking what I already know and gathering a sampling of upcoming concert dates and record release dates. We all have access to computers during our air shifts, so, if there’s a bit of info we want to clarify or verify on the spot, we can. As for personal anecdotes, stories, recollections, etcetera; those usually pop up as I go. I do want a certain amount of looseness and spontaneity in my shows. I’d rather not be too rigid. Sometimes, a concrete plan is good, but other times benefit from spontaneity.

Unfortunately, I no longer have much input into what gets played during my shows. Some time ago, each DJ was required to create their own daily playlists, but, here and there, over time, things have changed. I have a set playlist I am expected to follow, but there are still some freedoms that are allowed…within reason. It really depends on the situation. For example, I will add a handful of songs to the playlist to pay tribute to an artist that might have just died. Or, the Music Director may ask me to play some songs to honor an artist, but leave the selection of songs up to me. Really, it’s both rigid and fluid at the same time!

MW : What are "presenters" meetings usually like?

DD : At this point, the only meetings that involve the DJs are our staff meetings. Also, when our on-air fundraisers approach, the air staff will gather, with others, for pre-drive meetings to “plan our attack”.

MW : Why doesn't WFUV use jingles?

DD : It’s not really a non-commercial thing, I guess. It has never been something that’s ever been considered, that I know of. That’s more of a commercial radio trait. We do have slogans, though.

MW : Tell me about your Top 3 interviews...

DD : Wow. It’s so hard to answer this because I’ve done so many interviews over the past twenty-five years; more actually. So, I’ll answer this way:

The first interview was with Joey Molland of Badfinger. I did that remotely - not at WFUV’s studios, but at a hotel we were both at. This was early 1987. Joey and the late Mike Gibbins were in the process of a Badfinger reunion and they were appearing as special guests at “Beatlefest”, now called “The Fest For Beatles Fans”. (“The Fest” is a Beatles fan convention held every year in the New York / New Jersey area, and also in Chicago. It was started in 1974.) The interview was great and I turned it into a four hour Badfinger special on WFUV, also in 1987. The second interview was a phone interview with author Karl Dallas, who published a Pink Floyd book called “Pink Floyd Bricks In The Wall”. We had an awful phone connection from New York to England. Only portions of the interview were salvageable and those were used in an overnight (six or seven hour?) Pink Floyd special. The first in person interview I did at WFUV’s studios was in 1991 with guitarist Laurence Juber. Laurence was the last lead guitarist in (Paul McCartney’s) Wings – 1978-1980. He also went on to collaborate with Al Stewart (essentially replacing guitarist Peter White as Al’s right hand man), starting in 1994. At the time, Laurence was promoting his first solo album, Solo Flight. (He now has well over twenty!) The most recent interview I did was the art pop band, Sparks. Coming up, I’ll be interviewing Dhani Harrison and the Dream Syndicate.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed (in no particular order) – Ringo Starr, Donald Fagen, Peter Gabriel, Bob Geldof (twice), Neil Young and filmmaker Jonathan Demme, Robbie Robertson, Sting, John Fogerty (twice), CPR (featuring David Crosby), David Bowie (phone interview), Robert Plant (phone interview), Brian Wilson (phone interview), recording engineer and producer Geoff Emerick (who was the Beatles’ recording engineer from 1966 until their breakup), some of the members (those not named John, Paul or George) of the pre-Beatles band, the Quarrymen (twice), David Sanborn, Dr. John (in his Manhattan apartment; with his dog, Stupid, in the background!), Al Kooper, Bob Mould (multiple times), Thurston Moore, Buddy Guy, Trey Anastasio (of Phish), Richard Thompson (multiple times), Tori Amos (twice), Richie Havens (multiple times), Nick Lowe (twice), Robyn Hitchcock (multiple times), Jorma Kaukonen (multiple times), Hot Tuna, (jazz legend) Charlie Haden, Glenn Tilbrook, Bruce Cockburn (multiple times), Julian Lennon (twice), Daniel Lanois, Warren Zevon (I also interviewed his widow, Crystal Zevon, about her book on Warren), Los Lobos (multiple times), Ian McLagan and the Bump Band, Warren Haynes, Matthew Sweet (multiple times), Ian Hunter and the Rant Band, Al Stewart (multiple times), Garland Jeffreys (twice), Graham Parker and the Rumour, Jack Johnson, the Waterboys, John Mayer (twice), Marshall Crenshaw, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Sarah McLachlan, Leon Redbone and more!

MW : Describe your own record collection, picking out some of your favourites, maybe even rare records...

DD : In a nutshell, it’s VERY LARGE! Unfortunately, it was once very organized, but in recent years, I’ve allowed it to fall into a state of disarray. So much to keep organized and not enough space (or time)! As for vinyl, I’d guess I have over a thousand albums and a perhaps two hundred singles (and some other odds and ends). As for CDs, we have to be talking well over ten thousand. The quantity of CDs is greater because I have received, and continue to receive, a lot of free/promotional material from record companies over the years, including stuff I really don’t need to keep, but I do anyway!

As a fan, collecting the Beatles, together and apart, is my primary hobby. I’d say collecting Pink Floyd is second. I am trying to replace many of the singles I had as a young boy and obtain copies of albums from my father’s record collection - albums that I grew up hearing when I was between four and, say, seven years old. There are other “target” artists and albums for me, as well. Trying to explain what appeals to me, what I look for, how much I’m willing to spend, etcetera, is difficult to briefly sum up. Condition is very important to me as I collect music and I will walk away from a record, or CD, I really want if the condition is not up to my standards.

My collection centers on: CDs and vinyl records – both new and used original pressings, original issues, reissues, box sets, deluxe editions, etcetera - some collectables, BluRays/DVDs/VHS tapes, music magazines, Beatles and Pink Floyd publications, books, concert souvenirs, and other assorted oddities. That’s not to mention a decent sized accumulation of Woodstock and New York Mets publications and other assorted memorabilia. Oh, I do leave a little room for my family!

MW : ... do you ever de-clutter?!

DD : Much to my wife’s dismay, I never declutter! Why would I want to get rid of anything?!

MW : What role, if any, does your wife Sherri play in your own “magical mystery tour”?

DD : In general, my wife has been involved in numerous aspects of my career, mostly providing behind the scenes support and encouragement and offering occasional feedback on my radio shows (although these days she isn’t awake when I am on the air!) and when I emcee live shows.

MW : Do you kids wish to follow you onto radio?

DD : My son has developed a bit of an interest in sports broadcasting, mostly baseball, but for the most part, broadcasting hasn’t interested my kids much. (It doesn’t interest any of my kid’s friends, either. When they find out what I do for a living, it’s usually met with indifference!).

If my children were interested in broadcasting, I would try to steer them towards sports and news and away from music. Quality opportunities for the traditional DJ/music show host have been dwindling for some time now.

MW : List in order of preference your Top 5 Beatles albums, and tell me about your No.1 choice...

DD : I always struggle with lists like this and end up spending far too much time agonizing over them to make them “perfect” and accurate (as if some sort of World Order is at stake!). Right now (and this will change in an hour or so), I’d say:

Abbey Road  (1969)

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band  (1967)

Revolver  (1966)

Rubber Soul  (1965)

A Hard Day’s Night  (1964) - The UK versions of 3, 4 and 5.

By the way, The Beatles, AKA “The White Album” (1968) , and Magical Mystery Tour (1967) are knocking on the door!

Abbey Road is simply a perfect album. The Beatles were at the top of their game as musicians, the production was flawless, the song craft was impeccable, etc.

MW : Why do you love baseball so much?!

DD : Honestly, I am not sure. I’d assume it’s because when I was growing up, baseball was THE sport – not only in my neighborhood, or in New York City, but in the entire country. There was no doubt about that. Football and basketball have made significant inroads in American culture over recent decades; hockey to a lesser extent.

Today, I am not sure baseball is still the most popular sport in the U.S., but it’s still near the top, at least. When I was growing up in the Bronx, New York City, in the 1970s; there was no question that baseball was tops. Football was probably a distant second. Kids played a lot of baseball, and subtle variations of baseball, back then. So, when I hit the ages of 7 and 8, I naturally gravitated to baseball, like most boys did.

New York City is a huge baseball town and we have two teams – the New York Yankees, who play in the Bronx and have been around since moving to New York City in 1903, and the New York Mets, who are in Queens and started play in 1962. Needless to say, being from the Bronx, I was surrounded by many Yankees fans, but my allegiance went to the Mets. As I grew older, my passion for the Mets grew and my hatred of the Yankees has intensified! (“Let’s Go Mets!”)

MW : Thoughts on the demise of The Village Voice (print version) ...

DD : I was never a reader of the Voice, except for the concert venue listings. I believe the Village Voice had the most thorough concert/show listings in New York City and, before the rise of the internet, the Voice was essential if you wanted to keep up with the city’s music and arts events. Despite not touching a copy of the Voice for a number of years, I still think it’s incredibly sad that the print media, like music, has taken such a lethal blow from the internet. Sorry folks, I’d rather have a physical newspaper, book, CD, LP, etc. If you go all electronic, you’ve lost me as a reader and/or listener.

MW : Thoughts on 50 years of The Rolling Stone magazine...

DD : I’ve always enjoyed thumbing through Rolling Stone, but, I rarely thought of it as a ‘must read’ publication. It has a significant place in history and should always be around - IN PRINT. I’m not a passionate reader of it. Their record reviews often seem to be pandering.

MW : Outside of the radio studios, what do you enjoy doing / seeing?

DD : As I have gotten older, I have become very much a homebody, and I tend to enjoy quietly relaxing at home. I’m pretty easy going and I don’t need very extravagant vacations or eventful evenings to dot my social calendar.

This past summer, I went to Citi Field a lot with my son to see the New York Mets play. We attended twenty-three of the eighty-one games they played at Citi Field this past season.

I do go to occasional concerts, but not quite as many as I used to go to. I usually go see artists I have been fond of for many years – the old tried and true favorites. I don’t really venture out to the clubs to see newer acts, or just to hang out, like I used to. I miss it; sometimes a lot; but I have grown mellower (lazier?!) as I’ve gotten older.

Having a family slows the social life down significantly, as well. I just never got it totally revved up again!

MW : Tips for new artists / groups to watch out for in 2018?

DD : As hard as this may seem, I don’t really have my finger on the pulse of what might be coming or what is presently causing a stir in music. Usually, if I do have an opportunity to embrace a new artist or band, it’s just as an album (or maybe a single) is coming out.

MW : Where can we tune-in for more?!

For those in or around the New York City metropolitan area, we are located at 90.7 FM on the dial. As for listening elsewhere in the world, our website is www.wfuv.org. You can stream us there. You can also listen on our app and the TuneIn Radio app.

I am presently on the air: on the main WFUV at 90.7 FM, www.wfuv.org, and the radio apps – Mondays through Thursdays (into Tuesday through Friday mornings) from 10 p.m until 2 a.m Sunday night / Monday morning from midnight until 2 a.m (Monday) on the HD2 channel, “WFUV Music”, at www.wfuv.org, the radio apps and 90.7 FM-HD2 – Saturdays and Sundays, three times each day from midnight until 4 a.m, 8 a.m until noon and 4 p.m until 8 p.m.

Listeners, and music fans, can link to me by joining my Facebook “radio” page, Darren DeVivo On WFUV Radio. The link is:

https://www.facebook.com/DarrenDeVivoOnWFUVRadio/

© Mark Watkins / October 2017