Emmet Listens

doomandgloomfromthetomb:

A Child’s Introduction to Jazz

Narrated by Cannonball Adderley, featuring Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Sidney Bechet, Thelonious Monk. Thanks to Open Culture for the heads up!

thekingsahni:

I wanna know

I listened to my dad’s copy of Win This Record! about a million times as a kid (that’s two million fewer times than I listened to El Rayo-X), yet retained no memory of this song’s title until last week when I listened to the album again for the first time in what, 30 years? Between 2001 and 2006 I did a mixed bag show on Regina’s community radio station, CJTR, called Radio Spodie-Odie. I chose that name because I was obsessed with Jerry Lee Lewis at the time, though the first time I remember noticing the term was when I read On The Road at 14. 

To this day, I haven’t listened to any David Lindley except those two albums, which amazed and enchanted me so much as a kid. Still do.

Darcy James Argue, of the inimitable Secret Society posted this to his Twitter feed earlier today. Gerry Mulligan, of course, is a favourite of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the independent democratic detective of Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s novels. It’s worth noting that when I saw Argue’s Secret Society in Vancouver last June, they played a composition called “Zeno”, a reference (made explicit by Argue in his introduction) to Zeno’s Paradox, which is a central theme in Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novel The Chill, which I was reading at the time. Like Argue, Macdonald grew up (at least in part) in the Lower Mainland. Which is where I was living at the time and where I continue to live as I post this now. 

MP3: “Zeno” by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society (Live at the London Jazz Festival, 2010)

I’m counting down the 70 best Lou Reed songs. Here’s #1: “Disco Mystic”, from The Bells.

I’m counting down the 70 best Lou Reed songs. Here’s #2: “She’s My Best Friend”, from Coney Island Baby.

When I was 12 or 13 I knew a guy who liked to break in to cars. I don’t know, thinking about it now, maybe he stole them, too. He never did it in my company. All I knew back then was that he always had a brown paper bag full of cassette tapes.  

You could get about a dollar per tape back then at the used record stores. I know this because just before my Grade 8 graduation party there was a terrific thunderstorm in the middle of the day. The power went out, there was talk of heading down to the basement. Once the storm cleared, the sun came out and it was a typically beautiful June afternoon in Saskatoon. When I went outside I found a box full of country music tapes. I don’t know, I guess the storm had left it behind or something. It wasn’t wet or anything, but there it was. I didn’t have any use for country music back then, so I got on my bike and took the tapes downtown to the used records & tapes place where Da Finus Guds—a comic shop/arcade where I used to buy Action Comics Weekly and play Altered Beast—used to be. The guy who ran the place kinda knew me, and kinda knew my car thief friend, and he definitely knew that I knew my car thief friend. 
“I never figured you for a country music fan,” he said as he looked through the box. “You sure these are your tapes to be selling?” 

I got around $15 for the box, which was a lot of free money in 1991 for a guy who’d just turned 14 and had yet to develop any real vices. Heading off to my Grade 8 grad with that much money in pocket, I figured I knew what it was like to be a rich kid. 

If you didn’t know any shoplifters or car thieves when you were 12 or 13, you weren’t getting out much. That’s all I’m gonna say about that. Pre-teens are the thievingest bunch of people you’ll ever meet. Half the guys in my grade eight class were grounded at any given time for such an offense. But not me, I was more into vandalism and graffiti. Self-expression over materialism. Plus, I was too chickenshit. 

The tapes that wound up in the brown paper bag were dupes, dubs. Albums recorded onto blank tapes. They were worthless to my friend, there was no secondary market for dupes. So this guy would give them away. “Hey man,” he said. “You like music?” 

Of course I did. I had, like, five tapes in my collection at that point: Beastie Boys’ License to Ill, Howard Jones’s Action Replay, Simple Minds’ Life in a Day, the Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs and the Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim. The latter two were nicked from my sister (see, I was a thief like everyone else after all!), the Howard Jones and Simple Minds were gifts from my sister, and License to Ill I got for my 10th birthday from an on-again-off-again elementary school best friend who may or may not be a serious writer now. There was absolutely no self-direction in my musical tastes. 

He gave me two tapes, on identical cassettes, with identical handwriting. One was labeled “Squeeze - Singles 45 & Under” and the other was Lou Reed. Side A was labelled “Transformer” and Side B was labelled “New York”. I enjoyed the Squeeze tape okay, but I was nuts for the Lou Reed. I had no way of knowing that there was actually a third album on the cassette, Coney Island Baby. It started on Side A after Transformer ended, and then carried over to the first half of Side B, which actually left off about half of New York. 

I knew “Walk on the Wild Side” of course, even the Saskatoon FM rock station played that. But other than that all I knew about Lou Reed was the line from the Pixies’ song “I’ve Been Tired”:

I said, “I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed.” “I like Lou Reed,” she said, sticking her tongue in my ear. 

So I knew, at least, there was something to be gained from liking Lou Reed. Like a tongue in my ear. But I didn’t even know there was an album called Coney Island Baby until I was almost 15, I didn’t even know that—at that point in my life—that was my favourite Lou Reed album.

I’m counting down the 70 best Lou Reed songs. Here’s #3: “Down at the Arcade (the Great Defender)”, from New Sensations. “It’s rooted in the fifties, but its heart’s in 1984!” I was a frequent reader of Details Magazine between 1990 and 1995. In one issue, they had a brief interview with Lou where the writer met him at a New York City arcade. It was titled “Pinball Lizard”. 

I’m counting down the 70 best Lou Reed songs. Here’s #4: “Romeo Had Juliette”, from New York. My sister gave my Between Thought and Expression: The Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed for my 15th birthday. It was a great gesture, but in some ways kinda futile. By that point, I had all those words committed to memory. We’re talking about a guy who had the Lou Reed boxset on cassette. Cassette. But the great thing about the book was that it had two interviews at the end: one between Lou and playwright and then-Czech President Vaclav Havel, and another between Lou and novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. I’d never heard of either (hey, I was fifteen!), but by my 16th birthday I’d read Selby’s The Demon and Last Exit to Brooklyn. By my 17th, I’d pretty much committed most of his short story collection Song of the Silent Snow to memory the same way I’d done with Lou’s songs. A new edition of that book will be published just before my 35th birthday. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT THAT. 

Anyway, “Romeo Had Juliette” is probably Lou’s most Selby-ish song. 

I’m counting down the 70 best Lou Reed songs. Here’s #5: “My Friend George”, from New Sensations. I’m not gonna say that I named my son after this song, but I’m not gonna say that I absolutely didn’t. I sure as hell have been singing the chorus to him since the day he was born (the verses, not so much). Hey, bro! What’s the word?

I’m counting down the 70 best Lou Reed songs. Here’s #6: “Rock & Roll Heart”, from Rock and Roll Heart. “I guess I’m just dumb, cuz I knows I ain’t smart, but deep down inside I got a rock & roll heart!” For all his lit-cred, this is the Lou I love best. Giant riffs, steaming organ, macho drums: it’s big, dumb, barechested rock.