bubblesandgutz
Bubbles&Gutz
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Every Record I Own - Day 820: Nomeansno 0 + 2 = 1
Nomeansno began in 1979 as the rhythm section two-piece of Rob and John Wright. They added Andy Kerr on guitar in 1983, a year after releasing their debut album Mama. While Nomeansno always retained a heavy focus on the interplay between bass and drums, Kerr found a spot to insert his wiry, jagged guitar lines without undermining the low-end force of the Wright brothers. Kerr wound up with another crucial role: nodules on Rob's vocal cords meant that he had to step back from lead vocals, allowing Kerr's snotty timbre to outweigh Wright's booming baritone on the remainder of their '80s output.
Nomeansno closed out the '80s with the most popular album of their career, 1989's Wrong. The band's rising profile across North America and Europe allowed (or perhaps forced) them to quit their day jobs, and by the beginning of the '90s the band was touring full-time. When it came time to record the follow-up to Wrong, the band was in a very different position. They were no longer practicing several times a week and slowly stockpiling new material---they'd been on tour non-stop and were now having to quickly cobble together another studio album so they would have something new to tour on. The band had become a job.
Such realities weren't generally considered cool back in the '90s. Being a career musician in a punk band wasn't heroic to anyone. Professional musicians didn't take you seriously and the punks considered you a sell out. The irony was that Nomeansno were phenomenal musicians and staunchly committed to the underground.
If anything, Nomeansno could've benefitted from playing the industry game a little more. Their press photos were always confusing and never clearly featured all three members. They championed younger bands and even started their own label, but they also avoided opening for bigger bands, even as they watched the younger bands they'd supported eclipse them in popularity. Nevermind had come out just two months prior to 0 + 2 = 1 and Nomeansno could've easily capitalized on the global interest in the Pacific Northwest underground rock scene, but instead they were content to continue touring squats in Europe. At a time when it seemed like Nomeansno should've gotten even bigger, they instead saw the first dip in album sales.
Maybe folks just weren't as excited by 0 + 2 = 1. Maybe it was written in too much of a hurry. But I don't buy that. I'll admit that i don't love "Everyday I Start to Ooze" (some of the vocals tread a little too far into theatrics) and that I mainly get my fix on Side 1. But jeezus... can we talk about those first five songs?? "Now" is an electrifying album opener. "The Fall" is classic Nomeansno power. "0 + 2 = 1" is like a nightmarish mashup of Ginsberg and Burroughs prose sent against a lurching Man Is The Bastard riff. "Valley of the Blind" reasserts their classic punk vigor before "Mary" comes crashing down with its monolithic bass-driven weight. And Side 2 is packed with punches too. Whether it's the vitriolic attack of "The Night Nothing Became Everything" and "I Think You Know" or the blueprint for Unwound's future blend of guitar dissonance and mid tempo bass throb on "Ghosts," the songs are solid enough for the album to be held on the same pedestal as its predecessors.
But Andy Kerr would leave the band at the end of the album cycle, officially capping off the classic era of the band. Grunge was having its moment in the spotlight. Pop-punk would follow on its heel steps. And the two weird old guys from Victoria, BC that looked like Phil Donahue's long lost siblings and sounded like Dead Kennedys and Rush had a baby would continue to avoid the limelight while cranking out records and living in tour vans.
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Every Record I Own - Day 819: Nomeansno Live + Cuddly
I liked Nomeansno as a teenager. They checked off enough of the punk boxes: they were loud, they were angry, they could play fast, and there was a contrarian angle to what they were doing. But I didn't LOVE Nomeansno until a college friend came by my house with a stack of LPs he'd swiped from our college radio station.
I should maybe back up a bit. Sometime around 1999, I started making music with my friend Andrew down in Olympia. I played bass. Andrew played keyboards and programmed the drum machine. We were called The Sexual. I wanted it to sound like a more pop-oriented, up-tempo version of Thrones, but I wasn't used to taking a strong songwriting role in a band capacity. Andrew was more musically adventurous than I was back then and he was much better at bringing all kinds of sounds and styles into the fold. But it was still a bit of a struggle to find a middle ground between our interests. We had both been excited by the more chaotic and flamboyant brand of DIY hardcore that had proliferated in Olympia back in the '90s, but it felt like that scene had run its course and now we were branching off from that world in different directions.
At some point Andrew mentioned he had just bought the latest Nomeansno album, Dance of the Headless Bourgeoisie. This struck me as a little strange as Andrew didn't seem like the kind of person who'd be a Nomeansno fan. And I hadn't even revisited their records in several years. Maybe it was Andrew's way of nudging me as a songwriter... like, "hey, here's a band where the bassist leads the charge... take some notes." I remember digging up my Small Parts cassette and playing it in the Botch van on our way up to play a show in Bellingham (where most of the live footage from the "St Matthew" video was shot). By the end of the '90s, my interest in hardcore had eclipsed my interest in the weird skronky brand of punk that I loved in the earlier part of the decade (see also: My Name, Victim's Family, etc), so Nomeansno had fallen out of my personal rotation, but now that Botch was veering into math-rock territories, I was hearing some of the parallels between this band I'd loved as a young teenager and the music I was currently making with my friends.
The Sexual dissolved sometime around 2001 and Botch would be done a year later. But my interest in Nomeansno was rekindled. I had already graduated from college so I no longer had my radio show and the accompanying access to their neglected storage room full of vinyl. But I mentioned to a younger friend who still had a show that I would trade him some hardcore records for any Nomeansno LPs he could liberate from that sad, dusty, basement closet. A few weeks later he showed up with six Nomeansno records.
That was a lot of Nomeansno to absorb all at once. I gave 'em all a cursory listen, but it was the double live album Live + Cuddly that immediately grabbed my interest. The performances were locked in, but it still felt frenzied. The air-tight production of their studio albums was replaced by the room sound and scuzzy audio bleed of the show environment. And this was essentially a greatest hits collection of their '80s output, which meant we were hearing Nomeansno at their peak.
Here was a band that could balance hardcore aggression with prog-rock musicianship while retaining a post-punk sense of austerity. They captured the angst and power that drew me to punk as a teenager while displaying a level of nuance and sophistication that could keep me interested as an adult.
This was the point where I started to LOVE Nomeansno.
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Every Record I Own - Day 818: Nomeansno Wrong
I was hoping the Alternative Tentacles vinyl re-press of Wrong would show up on my doorstep before I got around to writing about the most popular album by Nomeansno, if only to hide the shame of the "borrowing" of my copy from my alma mater's radio station, but there doesn't appear to be any specific release date for the reissue.
It's a shame Wrong has been out of print for so long. Originally released in 1989, Wrong was the right album at the right time. The band had established themselves as a major touring force in Europe. They'd released the ambitious and production-rich Small Parts Isolated & Destroyed. The grunge explosion was still a couple of years away, but the groundswell of North American underground rock that had slowly developed over the '80s surrounding labels like SST, Dischord, Alternative Tentacles, and Touch & Go meant that decidedly non-mainstream bands could still find a sizable audience if they toured enough.
Nomeansno had become road warriors. And while Small Parts Isolated & Destroyed showcased a band that could take punk to more grandiose places, the epic-ness of the album arguably diminished some of the band's no-frills power. So with Wrong, the band went for the jugular. The songs are shorter and meaner. The big expansive moments of Small Parts are excised in favor of proto-math rock intensity.
As always, the lion's share of power behind Nomeansno resides in the rhythm section of brothers Rob and John Wright. From the opening bass punches of "It's Catching Up," it's clear that the bass guitar is the driving force. Hell, it might take several listens before you even realize there's no guitar on "Big Dick," just a rhythm section that's absolutely shredding. It's no slight on guitarist Andy Kerr, who excels at inserting himself into the mix in a manner that accentuates the band's sound without over-saturating it.
Is Wrong Nomeansno's best studio album? Maybe. But given the growing audience for weirdo rock bands at the tail end of the '80s, Nomeansno's mythical live shows and heavy touring itinerary, and the stripped down approach of Wrong, and, ya know, the killer songs, it's no wonder that it's become the band's most revered title.
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Every Record I Own - Day 816 & 817: Nomeansno The Day Everything Became Nothing / Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed
In my previous Nomeansno posts, I mentioned that I couldn’t quite pinpoint when I started listening to the band. Was it 1991? 1992? Well, now I remember clearly; it would’ve been around September 12, 1991. It was my friend Frank’s birthday. We’d heard “Dad” off of Sex Mad on a local radio station, and I’d bought him a cassette tape combining the Day Everything Became Nothing EP and the Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed LP as a birthday gift. In a strange adolescent move I still to this day don’t fully understand, Frank was appreciative of the gesture but insisted that I keep the tape. So I did.
What I heard on that tape was quite different from the straightforward power-chord punk of “Dad.” These songs were much stranger. Longer. More rhythmic. I didn’t have a frame of reference for what this brand of punk was trying to achieve. It was like the bass-driven power trio skronk of Minutemen, but far more menacing. It was also a little like Fugazi to my teenage brain in that it was eschewing a lot of the speed of punk in favor of groove. But it ditched the anthemic nature of Fugazi and had a more theatrical storytelling vibe to it. I couldn’t think of what to compare it to back then, and even today I’m at a loss to come up with an apt comparison. No one sounded like Nomeansno before or since.
There was a lot to digest on that tape. Songs like “Victory,” “Forget Your Life,” and “What Slade Says” were these protracted, epic, dynamic, patient statements that avoided the political sloganeering of their peers in favor of these darker and more abstract existential statements. Then you’d have tracks like “Dead Souls” and “Teresa, Give Me That Knife” that were firmly in the loud-fast-rules camp. My favorite songs resided in an in-between territory. I instantly liked the bass-heavy throb of “Dark Ages” and “The Day Everything Became Nothing,” even if I hadn’t yet started playing bass.
It’s strange to think of Nomeansno being a popular enough band in the underground back in 1991 that their music made it out to Hawaii. A little less than two weeks after I purchased that cassette, Nirvana would release Nevermind and the national spotlight would suddenly shift to all the punk-leaning underground rock bands of Seattle. At this point, Nomeansno were one of the biggest punk bands on the European touring circuit, trailing just behind Fugazi and Bad Religion. Despite their global popularity, Northwest location, and their oft-mentioned influence on Seattle bands, somehow the grunge boost didn’t elevate Nomeansno’s profile. And 30+ years later, they seem largely forgotten.
Perhaps it’s because their records went out of print and haven’t wound up on streaming services. Or maybe it’s because their popularity was largely fueled by their strength as a live band. But one thing is certain, their fade from the limelight has nothing to do with the aging of their sound. These two records still expertly capture a band with incredible chops, an idiosyncratic approach to punk, an elevated approach to songcraft, and an ear for powerful production.
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Every Record I Own - Day 815: Nomeansno Sex Mad
My first introduction to Nomeansno was hearing Sex Mad's "Dad" on a punk rock radio show on Oahu's Radio Free Hawaii station sometime around 1991 or 1992. The song's straightforward fury and harrowing depiction of domestic abuse carried the musical power and lyrical urgency that was like a drug to my young teenage mind. But I wouldn't actually hear the rest of Sex Mad until my college buddy dropped this LP on my doorstep a decade later.
The first two tracks off Sex Mad---the title track and the aforementioned "Dad"---sound like classic early North American hardcore. But that one-two-punch opening sequence was a Trojan Horse. By track three we have "Obsessed," a twisted and puzzling instrumental song that's like a punk version of Rush's "YYZ" (side note: I wouldn't actually hear Rush until sometime around 1997, and I distinctly remember thinking "this sounds like an arena rock version of Nomeansno"). Then there's the a cappella shout-fest "No Fgcnuik." These aren't exactly the kinds of departures that your average liberty-spiked punk wants to hear. Side one wraps up with "Love Thang" and "Dead Bob," both of which deconstruct hardcore's rage with syncopated rhythms, jarring shifts in song structures, and a general musical aptitude that one could only imagine both intrigued and puzzled the punks back in 1986.
Things get even weirder (and WAY cooler) on Side 2. "Self Pity" is the kind of protracted, exploratory, slow-build jam that completely avoids the three-chord, top-speed formula of hardcore. Instead, a low, menacing bass riff and nimble drum pattern drive the song, with brief explosions of guitar hinting at some inevitable climax. We keep getting teased with a big pay-off, and there are a few moments of thrashy release, but you get the overall sense that the ultimate moment is just on the horizon. And then it arrives, and it's not some big mosh part or circle pit anthem. It's guitarist Andy Kerr sending a signal through some sort of delay effect and tweaking the knobs into a swirling storm of chaos. Thirteen years later, Botch would do something similar on "Transitions From Persona To Object" without ever having heard "Self Pity."
Side 2 continues on in its strange journey with "Long Days." This is another track that almost owes more to prog rock than punk. Rob Wright plays a dexterous bass line on an infinite loop while John Wright keeps teasing us with various fragmented drum patterns. Rob sings a mournful melody on top of all of it. Andy appears to have not shown up to the studio that day. There are a few moments where John finally locks into a four-on-the-floor drumbeat and it's completely gratifying, but the overall intention of the song seems to be all about depriving the audience of what they want.
That vibe continues on "Metronome." Another looping bass line. Another song where John spends more time hinting at a beat rather than playing the full kit. Andy is back from his coffee break to provide vocals, but when the song actually lays into the bass riff it's so satisfying that the band apparently decided to leave guitar out of the mix entirely. There's hardly any guitar on Side 2 until the closer "Revenge," where Rob ditches the bass. We get angular guitar riffs for the verses and triumphant chords for the chorus. It's big and epic, but hardly the kind of straightforward blitzkrieg that kicked off the album.
The punks must have been completely perplexed, but maybe the punks were actually bored by the old formulas at that point. After all, Sex Mad gave Nomeansno their first hint of success. The band got signed to Alternative Tentacles, providing massive exposure across North America, and the band was invited on their first tour of Europe, where they would close out the decade as one of the top drawing punk acts on the continent---just behind Fugazi and Bad Religion. By 1986, the first batch of North American hardcore bands were dying out or crossing over into metal territories. Up in British Columbia, Nomeansno were charting a path that would now qualify as "post-hardcore," taking the urgency and DIY spirit of hardcore but expanding its parameters with a broader emotional spectrum and a larger arsenal of musical influences under their belt.
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Every Record I Own - Day 814: Nomeansno You Kill Me
Nomeansno's debut album was a tightly coiled amalgam of art punk and jazz fusion, but it didn't wield the power of their later records. Between 1982's Mama and their 1985 EP You Kill Me, the band would expand beyond the sibling rhythm section of Rob and John Wright to include guitarist / vocalist Andy Kerr. The addition of guitar added the layer of grit and distortion that had been missing from earlier Nomeansno records, and the band fully embraced that newfound abrasion with an EP that demonstrated their full sonic menace while also establishing their stylistic and aesthetic stamp.
The EP opens with "Body Bag," a long-form, tension-baiting, quiet-loud-quiet rocker that harkens back to the bass-and-drum interplay of Mama, but adds jagged spikes of guitar in the chorus, giving the song an amplified sense of resolve and potency. From there the band launches into "Stop It," arguably the band's first foray into a sonic territory that could be deemed "hardcore." Set against a rock shuffle, the band sneers and spits its way through a Black Flag-style rage anthem. It's here that we get the first taste of Rob Wright's burgeoning distorted bass tone. With the gain knob cranked for maximum crunch, you can hear Rob dig into the strings to the point where they growl with aggression.
Side 2 opens with "Some Bodies," a song that harnesses the band's newfound vitriol with their signature off-kilter rhythmic configurations. There weren't a lot of punk bands playing with polyrhythms back in the 1985, but for Nomeansno it almost seemed second nature. There's even a riff in the song that is eerily similar to the main riff in Botch's "Vietmam."
This EP and a few of the other Nomeansno records in my collection were given to me by a college friend the year after I graduated. He was a year or two younger than me, and he had a radio show at our campus station KUPS (90.1 FM, if you happen to find yourself in the North End of Tacoma). I was a Nomeansno fan only so far as I owned the Jello Biafra collab album and a cassette copy of The Day Everything Became Nothing / Small Parts Isolated And Destroyed, but I was excited by the gift. This means I wouldn't have heard You Kill Me (or Sex Mad or Wrong, but we'll get to those at a later date) until at least 2001. But there are more than a few little musical moments across those records that parallel parts of my own songs. There's the aforementioned "Vietmam" riff, which we would have written right around the time this EP came into my collection. But there's the "womb / tomb" rhyme in "Body Bag" that I'd also used in Botch's "I Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Terms" at least two years prior. There's another inadvertent parallel to a Botch song on Sex Mad's "Self Pity," but we'll discuss that later. And a bunch of Nomeansno-isms would later appear in These Arms Are Snakes material, like the descending chromatic guitar solo in "Body Bag" being deliberately swiped for the pitch-shifted bass solo in These Arms Are Snakes' "Mescaline Eyes" (sorry, Andy).
I won't lie, Nomeansno's aesthetics sometimes leave a lot to be desired. I don't love the cartoony album cover. But Nomeansno rubbed off on me in other ways. There are moments across their records that seem a little silly, especially given their musically and lyrically heavy moments. But that irreverent and sardonic twist contained its own kind of malice---taking something child-like or frivolous and setting against something dire and dripping with existential dread somehow gave Nomeansno an added layer of human dimension. They could be theatrical, but they weren't cosplaying as total misanthropes. The humor almost made the serious material even heavier. The band also had a fascination with human sexuality and confronting sexual mores (see: the band's name, "Some Bodies," "Body Bag," etc.) that would continue to pop up in their music. And you could see the parallels in Botch's often absurd and/or salacious song titles (see again: "I Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Terms," "Frequency Ass Bandit," "Saint Matthew Returns To The Womb").
I wouldn't have cited Nomeansno as a primary influence back in 2001, but I already appeared to be walking a parallel path, and I would deliberately tread into their territories in the following years.
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Every Record I Own - Day 813: Nomeansno Mama
I'm only home from tour for a few days before heading back out on the road, but I figured I'd try to squeeze one of these out before life gets hectic again. I just finished reading Nomeansno: From Obscurity to Oblivion, so I've been on a bit of a Nomeansno bender these last few days. So it feels like a good time to dive into discussing one of my favorite bands of all time.
Nomeansno originated in Victoria, British Columbia in 1979 as a two piece comprised of brothers Rob Wright (bass, vocals) and John Wright (drums, keyboards). After recording a couple of 7"s and gigging around Victoria and Vancouver, the brothers gathered up their resources and self-released 500 copies of their debut album Mama.
It's difficult to imagine what audiences thought of Nomeansno in those initial three years. The brothers had played music from an early age, giving them a musical adroitness more on par with prog bands than punks. But it was the tail end of the '70s and they'd been exposed to The Ramones, Devo, The Residents, and, perhaps most importantly, Vancouver's hardcore legends DOA. The power and DIY spirit of those artists spoke more to the brothers than the excess and panache of arena rock. But there's little on Mama that's reminiscent of punk and/or hardcore, even if the band would later come to be affiliated with those scenes. Maybe there's a little of Gang of Four's dance-punk leanings or Minutemen's jerking and skronking rhythm section and there's certainly some of Devo's spirit in their angularities and art-rock leanings. But if you're looking for distortion, three-chord anthems, and unmitigated rage, Mama is not for you.
According to the liner notes, the pressing plant who manufactured Mama went out of business and lost track of the masters, meaning that it wasn't possible to reprint more copies after those 500 initial copies sold out. Perhaps it was for the best---by the time the band returned with their next record, 1985's You Kill Me EP, they were a markedly different beast. The master tapes for Mama would be rediscovered nearly 30 years later, yielding this repress. Far from being some sort of classic in the band's canon, Mama became more of an interesting insight into how this pair of brothers from a small and sleepy town in Western Canada managed to morph into a pummeling, heady, sardonic, bass-driven force of nature that were one of the primary movers and shakers in the pre-Nevermind groundswell of the international underground.
This is where Nomeansno began, but it might not be the best entry point for the uninitiated.
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Every Record I Own - Day 812: Willie Nelson Stardust
My father-in-law passed away on February 23rd after a long battle with Parkinson’s and various other ailments. Over the last six years, my husband and I made frequent trips down to central Oregon to check in on my in-laws and help out around the house. During some visits, it seemed possible that his dad would be around for another decade or more. And on other visits, we wondered if he would be around more than a few months. Things took a rough turn around Thanksgiving of last year and his health declined considerably. My husband spent most of January in Oregon while I’ve spent 2024 fulfilling tour obligations with three different bands and making trips down to visit them during any available downtime.
My father-in-law was a great guy. He grew up in the Bay Area and was around for all the excitement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He was buddies with Pigpen from the Grateful Dead and attempted to go to the Altamont Free Concert but was stuck in the traffic jam when news traveled down the road about all the chaos and violence incited by the Hells Angels. He loved ZZ Top and Creedence Clearwater Revival and Tina Turner. But more than anything, he loved Willie Nelson.
Stardust, in particular, got a lot of spins around their house when I’d come to visit. In some ways, it’s odd that this was their Willie album of choice. After all, the ten songs on Stardust are all covers of old pop standards. Columbia Records was even hesitant to release it considering that Willie was riding strong on his outlaw country reputation at the time. But the album became a huge hit—a quintuple platinum album and a favorite among both fans and critics.
I won’t lie, I prefer Willie’s own songs, but the slow, sparse, and relaxed vibe of Stardust grew on me. I also appreciated how he chose songs with less conventional melodies (“Blue Skies,” “All of Me,” etc) and how his minimalist slow-hand style seemed perfectly suited to those compositions. The stretches of empty space, the chord changes that feel a little counterintuitive at first but then settle nicely into the larger song, the playful but rough-hewn quality to the vocals—it all has a hazy, late night, intoxicating vibe. I don’t even remember when I picked up my personal copy but it’s been a part of my collection for at least two decades.
Over the years, I heard less and less music at my in-law’s house. Television became the more constant companion, perhaps because the sound of people talking filled the conversational void stemming from the reclusive nature of my father-in-law’s disease. But when they began doing hospice at home back in January, they switched back to music. In his last days, we kept the stereo on throughout the day, switching between various CDs from their collection. I was occasionally tasked with picking out music, and I grappled with finding something that was familiar and comforting without running the risk of forever being tainted by the circumstances. Stardust was a family favorite but I never put it on for fear that it would render it off-limits once his father passed.
The hospice nurse called us on a Tuesday in February to say my father-in-law was near the end. He wasn’t eating or drinking and his breathing was labored. My husband and I drove all night hoping to make it to central Oregon in time to say goodbye. He was nearly unresponsive by that point, though he would squeeze your hand if you talked to him. Despite his condition, he managed to to hang in there for another week-and-a-half. In that time, I had to return to Seattle for rehearsals, then had to fly out to the East Coast for a weekend of shows, then flew back to Oregon, then had to fly back to Seattle to check in on a friend that was mentally struggling after being involved in a motor vehicle fatality involving an inebriated man that had been running across a busy highway.
The call came in the afternoon. My father-in-law passed peacefully. My husband and his mother had been listening to Stardust at the time, and he took his last breath during “September Song.”
The struggle was over. It had been a long decline and by the end it was hard to recognize the warm, witty, and vibrant man I first met nearly 26 years ago in the withered and incapacitated person we’d been tending to for the last few months. I was grateful to know my father-in-law for so many years, to have a stockpile of memories of him before things got so difficult. And in the weeks since he’s passed I’ve listened to Stardust a few times. The wistful nature of the album has an added element of sadness, but the memories of listening to it in happy moments outweigh its more recent association. If anything, “September Song” feels like an even more bittersweet reminder to savor the moment and hold your loved one’s close, because seasons change and all things must pass.
Oh, it's a long long while
From May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September
When the autumn weather
Turns leaves to flame
One hasn't got time
For the waiting game
Oh, the days dwindle down
To a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days
I'll spend with you
These precious days
I'll spend with you
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Just read RC got back a bunch of y'all's stolen equipment. So happy for you guys!! Does that mean we'll get to see you rocking The Bearitone on the upcoming dates?
Thanks! We’re very excited about the recovered guitars.
I think the bearitone will be living at home for awhile. The tour where it was stolen was intended to be its final voyage anyhow… I was going to have the other guys bring it back to Chicago so I’d always have it on hand for rehearsals but switch to my Dunable baritone for touring. Now I’m gonna follow through on that plan.
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Do you wear tighty whities?
As a gay man, I appreciate the sex appeal of tighty whities when they’re on their maiden voyage, but once they’ve been worn more than a few times they just get sad and saggy. I need a little more mileage out of my underwear, so no… I don’t own any tighty whities. Briefs, yes.
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Every Record I Own - Day 811: Melanie Candles in the Rain
RIP Melanie Safka.
I first heard Candles in the Rain at my in-law's house back when my husband and I first started dating. My in-laws had been hippies back in the day, and their record collection was a mixture of '60s rock and folk singers that one would naturally assume had been in their orbit. We'd sit around their fireplace at night and listen to various LPs from their collection while we drank and played cards. At some point someone in the family threw Candles in the Rain on the turntable and you could sense everyone in the room getting nostalgic.
I had never heard of Melanie, even though she had performed at Woodstock. She'd actually had a fairly solid career in the folk world, but her general disdain for the music business and her insistence on operating at her own pace and within her own comfort zone meant that she faded from the broader public consciousness, though she continued to perform at folk festivals until fairly late in life.
My in-law's copy of the LP was well-loved... meaning it was beat to shit. We got through a few of Melanie's vibrant and heartfelt Greenwich-style folk songs before the needle started to skip. So I tracked down a better used copy at a record shop in Tacoma for $3 and brought it to their house on my next visit.
And we listened to it enough that I had to pick up my own copy a few months later.
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Read your review of Undertow and it reminded me of a podcast where Ben Gibbard said that he saw them at basement shows, seemingly, every weekend while he was in college. Didn't know if you guys were at the same shows or even knew each other
I'd say there is some mutual appreciation between the Botch and Death Cab camps. We were both coming up in the Pacific Northwest scene at the same time. We were on each others' radars and were friendly with each other when we crossed paths. And back in the late '90s and early '00s, bands like ours were much more prone to sharing the stage with like-minded artists playing different styles of music than having four-band bills where everyone sounded the same.
I think some of the other Botch guys are more friendly with Ben and his bandmates, but I've only really met him in passing. I'm sure we were at a bunch of the same Undertow shows, and probably at a bunch of other shows in that same era.
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Hey Brian, just got done reading your Stones write ups, I feel pretty similarly, a band that's been around my whole life but didn't click for me until way way later. I unnecessarily have two copies of Goats Head Soup (took one from work without realizing I already had my dad's old copy), I'd be happy to send it your way if you want!
Hey!
I suspect a lot of folks have a similar Stones journey. You spend your whole childhood hearing how great they are, but they just sound like your average blues-lawyer bar-rock band until you get a little bit more context on what they were doing and how that stood in stark relief to the cultural norms of the time. It makes me happy to hear other folks became converts later in life.
And hell yeah, I'll take you up on that GHS offer! I feel like I used to see cheap used copies of that LP all the time, and now I can only find $40 reissues.
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In case you wanna read even more of my annoying opinions on records.
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