poebegone
Songs You Should Be Listening To
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You Got MeGlenn Branca/The Static & Theoretical Girls
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I grew up in a family that loved popular music with a passion. To them I owe the way I am unafraid to listen to anything at all. Sure, no one played Otis Redding or Ornette Coleman, Suicide or The Stooges in the house. There was no Zooey Deschanel bequeathing collectible records to Patrick Fugit, but we fought over the cassette deck the way other households fight over the TV remote.
My father, a listener of the '30s to '50s, introduced me to Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., The Andrews Sisters, The Platters. My mother, a child of the '60s to '80s, turned me onto The Beach Boys, The Mamas and The Papas, The Carpenters, Paul & Paula, and, seriously, Alice Cooper. Already, in my earliest years, I had a daily dose of songs spanning the 20th Century.
As a pudgy little introvert, I most fixated on what A Day in the Life, American Pie, The Terminal, and Hotel California were trying to say to me exactly. We all loved The Beatles like the rest of the world. My fondest memories were of blank tapes, shared-bedroom walls, and Spanish guitars.
My mother went through a crazy mixtape phase where she stashed extra copies of the same things in the tape racks. Enter the daughter whose singing voice is golden. She would tape over the extra copies her own voice when practice-singing. Enter the daughter whose preferences were hard to find in record stores. I would tape over the practice tapes copies of other people's bootlegs. And on and on it went.
We three sisters slept in a teenager's room gone haywire. My wall had these artsy punk / new wave gig posters, but then you looked to the left and there was Leif Garrett (this big sister moved on to Patti Austin), and you looked to the right and there was Debbie Gibson (this little sister moved on to Nirvana). Later my 12 years younger brother listened to Gorillaz and had a whole room to himself. Lucky duck.
You can tell I am awfully homesick, can you? Finally, there were the family reunions. Every year, my father did his kickass Spanish guitar playing thing while we girls did three different voices to the songs. It meant I learned quite a number of Spanish-language tunes as a kid. I can still remember them although in a third voice that is nowhere near how they actually sound like.
Continuing these unlikely music legacies, big sis never joined a singing competition she did not win, little sis wedded a grunge rock band leader, bro was a club DJ for some years, and me, I MOG.
I was a freelancing bum when I started Mogging and have long since waited to resume posting long and nerdy again. Here's me and a warmup.
In the music magazine of heaven, Steve Albini and Butch Vig share a glossy spread for entitling a single rock band that entitled a full decade in rock history. In the fringes, you should find Mark Kramer. He elevated the grayscale newsprint with defining moments you seldom read of (pre-internet), prefixing the Nineties - post, anti, proto, and all that hyphen - across avant-garde, alternative rock, dream pop, slowcore. Not that this eclipses Albini's and Vig's other feats as, you'll see, they never left the picture.
^ Kramer, no versus
For a bit of back story, Kramer had his start in producing music in the early Eighties for Shockabilly, in which he played bass and the organ. By the decade's turn, he owned Noise New York and Noise New Jersey, and then Shimmy Disc that he later sold to Knitting Factory. Shimmy introduced America to Boredoms. With Ann Magnuson in '85, he founded Bongwater.
King Missile, New York. John S. Hall was the mouth that launched the missile, and Kramer was the biz around the mouth. Hall took off with guitarist Dogbowl as King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) and, after Dogbowl left, Hall got replacement Dave Rick from Bongwater, who got multi-instrumentalist Chris Xefos, and altogether they reincarnated King Missile (minus the parenthetical). Kramer produced all the albums, for Shimmy. He foreshadowed post-folk in the debut Mystical Shit, with minor hit Jesus Was Way Cool scoring the band a stint with Atlantic, and next in Happy Hour, with MTV hit Detachable Penis.
Urge Overkill, Chicago. What happened, you ask? Urge Overkill perhaps never did but its producers made it like so. Nash Kato's roommate, Steve Albini, gave the debut EP Strange, I... and debut album Jesus Urge Superstar their noise rock, and Butch Vig gave the follow-up Americruiser its punk on the way to alternative rock. In the Stull EP for Touch and Go, Kramer gave rock more atmosphere than arena, and mega-spawned the Neil Diamond cover Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon. Score! Geffen came knocking. The rest was history that, long after these producers and Pulp Fiction have left the building, ended unfortunately.
Ergo, A: Rock be airy with Kramer's hand in production for King Missile's and Urge Overkill's categorically hugest charters, moving both to a major label, for better or worse.
^ King Missile - Martin Scorsese
Galaxie 500, Cambridge, Massachussets. The dreamsome threesome had help in making music to space out to. While Harvard students, they sent out a three-song demo to Shimmy, which got them a signing and all their three studio albums produced by Kramer. His vision of depth of sound circa post-punk was nowhere more realized than there: Today, for Aurora, On Fire and This Is Our Music, for Rough Trade. Kramer, whose name is most attached to Galaxie 500, also provided live sound production for every show the band ever did.
Low, Duluth, Minnesota. Kramer is credited for discovering this duo and a bassist who waxed sad and slow before it had a name. For the Virgin imprint Vernon Yard, he reprised post-folk atmospherics in the debut I Could Live in Hope, with its light-as-drizzle cover of You Are My Sunshine, and the sophomore Long Division. Low's succeeding records sounded noticeably less "created in a huge, empty room" sans Kramer. As an aside, the equally glorious Things We Lost in the Fire was produced for Kranky in 2001 by Albini.
Ergo, B: Spacey meant a world of difference between Galaxie 500 and Luna, and Low's albums, with and without Kramer's handle in production.
To end, the above four bands and moments benefitted from a distinct air-to-breathe sound that, indicating Kramer knew what he was doing, could best be called shimmy (as in understatedly shimmery, to my ears).
Comments
King Missile side notes: Kramer produced for B.A.L.L. and Phantom Tollbooth, both bands including Rick; When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water, including Xefos; and Hall's first solo album, Real Men, in which he also played. He performed with Dogbowl as Dogbowl & Kramer.
Kramer of course records solo and also played in Butthole Surfers, Half Japanese, Ween, and with John Zorn, among others.
Low - Slide (from I Could Live in Hope)
and for the perfect ending...
Galaxie 500 - Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste (Jonathan Richman cover) (audio only)
I was a bit informed about Kramer, but really had no idea how much influence he had in early-90's indie rock. Fantastic, well-researched piece here, Ilay. Merci beaucoup! :)
Really, I had no idea about this man Kramer, you rock historian you. Amazing post ilay, thank you. I've only read the first half & will come back later to finish the rest. Interesting stuff. . . .
I can recall two instances when I had to get around with a limp for a week or so to go to class.
The first instance was that a friend and I went to a concert with bleachers tickets. Her bright idea was we'd jump over the fence at lights-out. Said fence actually fenced in a mosh pit, locked and empty at the time, and her other bright idea was we'd jump to the ledge without falling into the pit and get to the good seats. Well, she landed on the ledge and I landed on the pit. Way below. To this day, my then-sprained right foot hurts a bit when it gets too cold, and it can't seem to catch up as well as my left foot when I run.
The other instance was that I somehow ended up at the second row, next to the all-male front line, of what was to become the most historically violent student protest against the US military bases in my country. I was 17 or 18. What happens in these rallies is that the cops and the protesters form their human barricades face-to-face and do like a reverse tug-of-war. The cops push with their armors to break the protesters up, until those in front fall down and those in the back start a stampede, and you all run for dear life or you go to jail.
My entire row fell down and, because of my proximity to the cops, I got the beating of my life. Paddles, truncheons, water cannons, all the bumping into and stepping on that occur in stampedes. It was just my luck that I and a tear gas canister fell to the ground at the same time, next to each other. It popped open and I inhaled everything that came out. Tear gas blocks the airways. Blinded and not breathing, I don't know how I managed to run to a diner somewhere, grab some guy's bottle of 7-Up that he was in the middle of drinking (Ew.), and pour it all over my face and guzzle it down like nobody's business.
The entire left part of my body, shoulder to toe, was bruised and wounded with the whole spectrum of colors. Also, in the press photo that showed up all over the papers the next day, I was the faceless girl in the foreground, caught in the act of falling to the ground. Which I fully grant was kind of really funny. Anyway, this is just the sort of story you tell when you think no one's around. Sshhh.
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Build It Up is One for the Team's followup to 2006 debut Good Boys Don't Make Noise, out this year via The Militia Group.
"Minneapolis-based quintet One for the Team offers a healthy dose of sunshine on its sophomore album, Build It Up. ...It's an unabashed optimism that manages to be contagious without being overly precious or earnest." [NPR]
Lost in the Supermarket ~
Ouch. At the moment (and for the next few months), I can relate, times about 1000. I'd be O.K. with a week's incapacity. But, nooooooo!
The music puts a nice spin on things, though. As long as I'm listening to it...
Mike, omigosh, how freaky, could i have been channeling your bike accident when i made this post...? i didn't mean to be insensitive. (i wasn't, was i?) it must've been all the ghosts in MOG today. (;
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Comments
Gothenburg, Sweden's The Electric Pop Group, in fact the non-electronic duo of Erik and Martin Aamot, released its self-titled debut album in 2006 through Fraction Discs, followed by an EP out this year.
www.theelectricpopgroup.net/
Beautiful story Poe, guess its really in the blood for you. The Munsters pic is classic. Lilly was always my favorite. Wow, being able to sing to Spanish guitar is awsome. It truly is an incredible sound. I think it was The Doors "Spanish Caravan" that I had my first auditory spanish guitar expeience. I lived in farm country and if you had a radio you were fortunate. Dig The EPG.
Ilay, great post as always. I'm trying already to get my kids to listen to anything and everything in the hopes that they'll be open, and not blinded by what's popular.