That is all.

We could sort of pick up this AM station out of Dallas that had a metal show on Sunday nights, and that was the greatest shit ever as far as I was concerned. Usually, as long as the air was dry enough (which was damn near ever day), and if you were maybe a little lucky, you could probably pick up about half of that show. I’d hang out in my room, huddled around the radio, running to the bathroom to take hits off of my toilet-paper-roll pot pipe, trying to miss as little of the music as possible. Also, Barry, the kid next door, had a brother who was like the Abilene metal ambassador. The guy was in college, and when he would come home for holidays he would always leave a bunch of tapes with Barry. Dude turned us on to Dio, Rising Force, Raven, Krokus, Saxon, Maiden . . . seriously, the list was fucking endless. Once he even took us to Dallas to catch the Scorpions over at Reunion Arena. I don’t remember much, other than kissing some fucking dog on a dare as we walked back to the car.

Outside of sports there really wasn’t much to do growing up in Abilene. Personally, I never really wanted to play sports anyway. Those guys were apes as far as I was concerned. Real knuckle draggers. Fuck ‘em. Not for me.

Barry got a Hondo Les Paul copy one year for his birthday, and after that he was like off to the races wanting to start his own band and shit. Somehow Barry conned this Mexican kid from school to play drums. I guess his dad was like a Tejano star or some such shit, which meant the dude had a killer kit. He also had a weed connection that never never dried up, even in the winter, and despite the fact that he was a shitty-ass drummer, there was no way Barry would get rid of the guy. And I was the bassist.

Thing is, I didn’t have a bass. I had an ichigenkin.

Yeah, I had a fucking 1 silk stringed, wooden plank looking Japanese motherfucking ichigenkin. Real pussy magnet. I could have had “Panty Dropper” tattooed on my forehead if was gonna go and lug a fucking ichigenkin around.

And I didn’t even pick the thing up in some sort of badass foreign exchange fairy tale wherein I am carried through the Japanese countryside on the backs of peasants who walk upon the petals of roses thrown before them to lighten their step as the West’s greatest ichigenkin player is carried amongst them. Nah, my grandfather gave it to me. He was in the big war, over in the Pacific, and the guy was given the thing on his way off of some fucking island over there. Fucking people probably wanted to get rid of it so they tossed it to the guy they’d never see again. Ever play an ichigenkin? No? Wow, what a fucking shock. Ever heard of one? No again? Total shocker. Why’d I take it? It’s just that my grandpa overheard me wrangling with my dad for a bass and basically guilted me into taking the damn thing. I love the guy, though he is a bit goofy. He’s done a lot for me. I felt obligated.

Barry laughed so hard when I walked into practice with that thing that he sort of shit himself just a little bit. I still think I’d rather carry an ichigenkin to a metal band practice any day than shit my pants, even amongst friends.

At first what pretty much happened was Barry played guitar, the Mexican dude played drums, I sang, and nobody touched the ichigenkin. It’s one string was broken, and oddly enough, nobody in Abilene was selling any. Sure, I told grandpa I used it, but when you have songs called shit like Thunder Sorceror and Blood River, rocking an ichigenkin really is less than ideal.

We learned a few songs. Uh, as in, we learned to fake a few riffs, and then we got our first (and only) gig playing at this girl’s birthday party. She was pretty popular, Barry’s brother used to date her or something. Either way, it was pretty cool getting our first gig.

I should have known that Barry’s brother would tell everyone at the damn party about the ichigenkin. Of course, he brought the fucking thing on top of that. I tried to play it cool, tried to act like the fact that I would never speak to another chick in the entire city of Abilene again didn’t bother me at all. I pled my case. “No string, man. What the fuck. Can’t play it, can I?”

Barry’s brother is a real resourceful guy. He had already strung the thing with a low E guitar string. Then, he taped a contact mike to the thing. This was happening. We ran the thing through some stomp boxes, and eventually we were able to get something other than feedback out of it.

The guys went into Cat Scratch Fever by the Nuge, and when it came time for the solo, I free-styled the motherfucking ichigenkin through a distortion pedal, through a wah, through a phaser, and directly into Abilene metal history.

I’d show you the ichigenkin if you wanted to see it, but the truth of the matter is, after grandpa died, I ended up using the thing as a cleaning table for the fish I caught up at Lake Fort Phantom Hill one summer.

They say that if you go just east of town, over in Stevenson Park, you can still head down to the paved area beneath the railroad tracks and see it, painted on the cement in badly faded letters. It’s still there, Im told. And it reads — “METAL NINJA RULES!!”

I hear Barry’s brother drowned in a diving accident in Belize a few years ago. I often wonder if he heard the sound of the single wailing string as he struggled for air, as the last of his life was swept away in the warm Caribbean Sea.

Fucker.

A friend lent me Two Dancers by Wild Beasts. Limp wristedness initially turned me off, but started coming around by the second listen. Really love “We Still Got The Taste Dancin’ On Our Tongues”:

Gal Costa’s other self-titled album:

Downloaded from an obscurities website one of Gal Costa’s self-titled albums from the late 1960′s (probably the second one, from 1969, although AllMusic Guide seems to disagree). Great Tropicalia, with infectious catchy experimentalism. Am especially digging the lead track “Cinema Olympia”:

This Gal Costa album:

Have had mixed feelings about Grizzly Bear, but digging their album Veckatimest. Creepy video for “Two Weeks”:

For my part, I don’t plan to take very much with me. A desk. A couch. An air mattress. Some clothes. It’s all expendable, replaceable, forgettable. Frankly, the only two things that have me up at night at this point – really the only things at all – are:

1. My coffee conveyance. I am considering downsizing that in general but I’ll definitely need to have something. Something to make coffee with. French press is sounding like the best idea but there does need to be something.

2. My music. I have two hard drives with all my music on them. And I remember all my previous moves and the need to find a good way to keep the music in one place and transport it from one place to another – I don’t know of anything that reasonably carried that much music, frankly. Now that it’s all digital, it’s much easier to move. And in terms of what I need in my new place, there just isn’t much. Except my music. And it is most of what I have. I just don’t have very much furniture, very many appliances, very much in the way of clothing. Yes, after looking back over 38 years of life, really all I have to show for it is thousands and thousands of songs. That’s it.

And I am more than OK with that.

So, yeah, Westerberg’s solo work turned me onto the ‘Mats, and to this day I have a very soft spot in my heart for 14 Songs. I probably know that record as good as any other album I’ve ever owned. It was on one half of a cassette shared with the Gin Blossom’s New Miserable Experience. I thought then that both records were masterpieces. Exemplars of great pop-songwriting, and the beginning of what would be a lifelong affair with sad-bastard musics. But when I was 18, I badly misconstrued the meaning of both records.

That happens when you’re young. Even when you’re 18, you tend to miss things at the movies an adult would see and hear. You read works into your own life. In 1993-95, when I played that tape to death, I heard the Gin Blossom’s record as an almost journalistic remembering of the recent past. A drunken college kid trying crawl back into the senior year womb. That’s where I was anyway. I knew what beer and cigarettes felt like, and I had broken up with my first girl because I liked another girl. Who ended up liking all that drama more than she liked me.

14 Songs sounded like an old guy’s curmudgeonly advice. A window into adulthood for a kid who needed one. Nearly the entire record is a series of conversations from the same helpful narrator, warmly coaching a friend or lover about how to cope with adulthood. I thought, this is what getting old is like. And it doesn’t have to be terrible.

Runaway Wind
You don’t blow like the breeze you were born to be
You die down in the trees and try to hide
Will you witness the dark
All you need is a spark
A cathedral of torches to light the night

Now I hear both records as concept albums about a bitter old dude’s delusions and nostalgia. But where New Miserable Experience’s vivid effort to undrink the last 15 years sounds earned and authentic and desperate (i.e., really real), the adult me hears 14 Songs as cheesy and cynical. About as sophisticated a picture of adulthood as an 18 year-old-kid might dream up. I had read that Westerberg wrote many of the songs for other people to sing; only now do I hear the compromises that seemed to entail. The adult me knows what it’s like to have your knees creak. And to drink light beer with your friends and talk about babysitters. Westerberg’s world on 14 Songs alludes to the boredom and regret without bringing it into focus. It’s the movie version of adulthood, where your old girlfriend comes back for one more fling and everything gets cool again.

Someone I Once Knew
Hey you someone I once knew, sit your butt down
You got brains all the way down
You’ve never changed
I just never got past
Your little rock & roll ass
Shot bolt upright
When you mention the whole night
I was on the mend when
You let a smile crack
And it all came back

It was hard to see what was wrong with Westerberg-lite back then. Although I bought Pleased to Meet Me and Let it Be fairly soon after discovering Westerberg in the pages of Rolling Stone, I wouldn’t find out how good he could be until early in the new millennium, when I finally bought Tim and when Mono/Stereo came out. To me, what’s funny is how much smarter and insightful Westerberg was when he was 8 years younger… and when he was 8 years older:

Baby Learns to Crawl
one last crushing blow
a final crashing bore
and it’s always time to go
as you’re inching to the door
(let’s go)

Or maybe, it’s just that I got smarter instead. I watched the rest of the movie.

I don’t want to sound to down on Westerberg here. I’m a huge fan, and 14 Songs is still incredibly memorable for all kinds of reasons, especially the amazing First Glimmer, which comes closest to capturing Westerberg’s gallows humor while still achieving the cinematic notes he was trying to hit:

First Glimmer
Wore my jacket and I wore your sweater
Underneath the bridge was an indian summer
Purple mascara, safety pins God did it hurt
Took off my jacket took off your sweater
And we made a wish things would never be better
Train whistle blew, and my wish came true

Finally, I’ll say this. One of the things I love about Westerberg is his insistence that a song be about something. I’ve generally insisted upon this principle in my own songs. As I suggested with Rod Stewart, I think giving structure and narrative to your songs sometimes leads you to soften the blow. But it takes courage to lift the veils of obscurity and pretense, and to let people accept or reject or ponder what you’re really saying. Rather than just mumbling words that sound cool together. Westerberg is the kind of lyricist that lets you explore songs without hearing them. And while that’s not the best way to experience a song, it should be part of the deal. It’s more than we get from most indie bands today.

What Clara does take from me is an inclination to improvise. For my part it is a necessity as I only remember a line or two of most songs. Sometimes I break into a song just based on some repetitive thing Clara is jabbering about. She will improvise. Or sing to herself jibberish while playing with her dolls. But if she is trying to learn a new song or knows one particularly well and it is at the top of her play list, she will be vigilant about keeping it tidy and orderly.

Sometimes in the bath I sing directly about her situation, usually to suggest the consequences of her not taking her own initiative to wash her hair, back and belly. At first I sang about the scariness of having Daddy wash your hair, “it’s scary but I don’t care” was a successful line in a bath song I wrote whose melody I’ve since recorded (I have a whole song’s worth of lyrics but it’s about bath toys and shampoo). It was successful in that from that event on she has been a brave little bath warrior about washing her hair.

I taught her “Buffalo Gals.” But now she is trying to re-teach it to me with cropped lyrics. She would like to forget that the whole second part exists (well it’s the second part in my rendition –there’s probably a zillion verses that I have no idea about). It’s the part about the rockin’ girl whose stocking has a hole in it. It’s a great part of the song. A bit of a tongue twister though and I think that’s why Clara skips it. We have fights about “Buffalo Gals” that usually end with her singing the first part and then me singing the second part with her singing the first part over it louder.

Our current favorite is “Teddy Bear’s Picnic.” I always loved this song but didn’t have it memorized –I don’t retain a fraction of what Oma has on hand at any given moment. I have it memorized now. Clara has the first part down, however I’m starting to get concerned that we’re doing “Buffalo Gals” all over again.

For whatever reason, in order to provide a backline, Eric, the guy who owned Emo’s, asked the Mike Gunn if Killdozer could borrow our bass rig. Scott, our bassist, agreed (a fact that I practically guarantee he regrets to this day).

Once the boys hit the stage (and their bassist/vocalist, Mike Gerald hit our bass rig), it became immediately obvious that we were a very, very loud band.

See, the thing is, even though we had been told on countless occasions that we were so painfully loud it was practically unbearable, for some reason we never paid any attention. Call it hubris, it’s as good a reason as any.

Standing in front of Scott’s rig, listening to Killdozer blast out a mind-bendingly heavy and amazing set, I destroyed my right eardrum.

And it got worse from there.

To describe the damage, I’ll put it like this. As the boys played I began to notice a tingling in my right ear. The tingle quickly devolved into an outright buzzing, not unlike the sound of a blown speaker. Whenever Gerald hit a particularly hard chord I felt a buzz in my right ear that felt similar to having a bug in there rattling around.

And yet, I stayed for the entire show. I can’t justify it now, other than to say you ought to take pity on an idiot, because that’s what I am — a total idiot.

I shouldn’t add this, but I’m going to anyway. Gerald was total dickhead about the bass rig. Not liking it is one thing. This guy took it to a higher place and was loudly bitching about how much he hated the free amp he got to use directly in front of the owner of the amp.

Seriously, Mike Gerald was a dick to Scott while Scott was taking the amp off the stage that Gerald just stood on while using said amp for free. Dickhead.

Not only that, the fucking guy didn’t even apologize for ruining my ear.

Fast forward to the Butthole Surfers show a couple of weeks later, over at the Ensemble Theatre. While the Ensemble is a much larger venue, the spastic Texans are nonetheless ridiculously loud, and I suffer another command performance without earplugs.

Keyword: idiot.

After this sublime but highly auditorily destructive show, I vow to never attend another rock show without earplugs.

Enter the Melvins.

Watching the Melvins at a place like Emo’s, for me, was a slightly religious experience. You see, the Melvins totally changed my life 15 years ago (just kidding, Justin, just wanted to see if you were reading). Honestly, though, I was pretty into catching them live. Hearing some of the Boris era stuff one night on KTRU while driving around town with Tom Carter was a memorable moment for me, so seeing them play that stuff live was something I was looking forward to.

Naturally, I forgot to bring earplugs that night.

This wouldn’t be a problem if I wasn’t dumb enough to stay in the main room for the entire show.

And as for how loud the Melvins play, I’ll put it like this. I have friends who never enter a club without earplugs and those guys couldn’t handle it. They went outside to join the rest of the entire packed venue after about half the set.

Emo’s had a big glass wall that separated the stage and indoor bar from the nightmarish cesspool that used to be a swimming pool as well as a smaller outside bar. From the relative safety of the other side of the glass you could watch the Melvins, sort of hear them, and then go home and tell all your friends how cool you were for sitting through that.

Not me, I was in the tiny minority that stayed inside for the whole damn thing.

These three shows were the trifecta of my trashed right eardrum.

I have since learned the err of my ways, but now it’s too late. My ear is fucked.

I don’t hear the distortion any more unless I hear an abrupt and sharp loud noise.

The only place where it gets me is when I swim. When I swim I get water in my ear and it makes me dizzy after a while. I literally lose my balance and have to move slowly.

For this, I give thanks to Killdozer, and by extension, my own damn self. It’s a vicious circle.

In my defense, I will say that live music pretty much sounds like crap with earplugs in. In fact, you are not getting the full experience when you wear them. But, that’s the deal. If you intend to outlive your 20s (something I honestly didn’t do until I was about 29 and-a-half), then, wearing earplugs is a necessity at rock shows. Of course, when you’re a self-destructive moron who needs primitive visceral experiences in order to see tomorrow, earplugs are for pussies.

Well, now I’m 42. And worse, I am the consummate pussy.

That’s what you call a malicious self-fulfilling prophecy.

I will die with my pants full of shit, my eyes clouded over and my brain a little mass of pungent sponge.

God, I can’t wait.

Wear earplugs.

But, never fear, they have a pretty cool webcast of the show. Unfortunately, I totally forgot about this, and missed Friday’s ‘fork ‘cast altogether, so didn’t get to see the Liars. And they didn’t webcast Broken Social Scene’s perf, which I would’ve liked to have seen.

On Saturday, I caught the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Of course you’re missing a lot by seeing it on a computer screen instead of in real life, but still, it’s really nice to be able to actually see the performers up close, listen without earplugs, and above all, not deal with standing up in crowded conditions for hours on end, with some annoying dude (or me!) blocking your vision. JSBX were really great; they’ve still got it. Judah Bauer plays the more complex guitar stuff on his Tele, but I was also pretty impressed with Jon Spencer’s noisy work on his no-name shit guitar. And of course, Russell Simins keeping it all together. At the end Spencer finally busted out the theremin, but also had some other noise box, which seemed a bit too much to control all at once.

Saw a bit of Panda Bear. They were webcasting the band’s video show rather than video of the band actually playing. It was alright. I dunno, the reverby vocals thing with electronic & acoustic sounds thing started to sound all the same after a little while.

LCD Soundsystem. You know, James Murphy can really sing. Like, on pitch and stuff. It’s an interesting topic, why do some bands play things repeatedly and it sounds repetitious, whereas others can use repetition towards an expression of the ecstatic?

On Sunday, I forgot about it and missed Girls, but did browse in time to see Beach House. You know, I like them, but even though I recognize some of their songs, they do all kind of sound the same at some point. Maybe a change of tempo now and again might be in order.

Also saw some of Lightning Bolt’s performance. Quite energetic, and the crowd seemed to be into it. It’s a funny sort of dance music to me, in that I enjoy them more in person than listening to them in a more removed setting.

Ah, and then St. Vincent. I used to think she was a bit gimmicky, but now I just think she’s great. Such talent. I love her stuff and am seriously envious of her hair.

Then I waited around for the highlight, finally seeing Pavement, reunited after all these years. They were scheduled for 8:30 CDT, specific 6:30 Pacific. I tuned in, but they were showing highlights of prior ‘fork fests, such as King Khan’s awesome perf of “Welfare Bread”. The time rolled around and passed. Okay, a little late setting up. But then it got to 30 minutes late. Did someone miss a flight?

I cancelled out and refreshed the page, to discover that Pavement had suddenly been removed from the list of bands to be webcasted. WTF? This the fuck, apparently. “One band member has a beef with Pitchfork’s editorial department”, probably Spiral Stairs. So you agree to do the Pitchfork Music Festival, take there money, and actually play there, but at the last second you nix a webcast because you hate Pitchfork so much? Um, okay, that doesn’t really make any sense.

Well, as indie rockers the world over say, “next year in Chicago”.