Tag Archives: record ignite!

A Sample

My roommate had an odd look on his face. It was an unsettling mixture of trepidation and something close to embarrassment. I thought either someone was dead or I’d won a lottery I didn’t know I’d entered.

“You have a voice mail,” he told me, “from Kathleen Hanna.”

Kathleen Hanna had called me because I’d emailed her about doing an interview for the zine I had just started. I named it Jes Grew, after a “disease” in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, a novel about race and the influence and spread of black culture into the mainstream. Said novel was one of my many obsessions and a driving influence behind Record Ignite!, the band I’d formed a while ago. But that band was no more, and so this zine was where I thought I should channel my creative energy.

I’d emailed Kathleen at a generic info-type address on her website, so I didn’t have a huge expectation I’d actually hear from her. It felt like asking for a million dollars–this probably won’t work, but it’d be awesome if it did. When I’d formed my now defunct band, there were a select few groups in my pantheon of what I wanted it to be, and Bikini Kill was one of them. I admired their commitment to doing something that was genuinely dangerous, and was also sympathetic to their brand of feminism, though I realize now my understanding of exactly what feminism entailed was rudimentary at best. (Now that I have a daughter, I feel like I understand feminism better than I ever did before, but that’s another post entirely.)

In other words, getting a call from Kathleen Hanna was an enormous deal in my universe. My roommate left the room so I could listen to the voice mail, sensing that this was something he should allow me to enjoy by myself. Hearing a recording of her voice address me was enthralling and terrifying all at once. She sounds just like she did on that Mike Watt album!

I eventually reached her on the phone in person, which was even more terrifying, and we arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Soho for the interview. The day we met was a gorgeous late fall afternoon, just the faintest chill in the air, summer stubbornly hanging on. At this point in my life, my only interviewing experience came as part of a group affair when Jello Biafra came to speak at NYU. Me and another editor at the school’s humor magazine lobbed questions at him along with 20 other “reporters,” one of whom took a good 10 minutes to ask Jello if he would lend his time to something called the Million Marijuana March.

I did plenty of advance work to prepare for this interview, and yet was still frightened beyond comprehension before it began, afraid that I’d say or do something unspeakably wrong. That feeling faded quickly once I actually met Kathleen, because she was unbelievably warm and engaging, completely putting me at ease about talking to someone I considered a hero. (I imagine she had extensive experience doing this.)

We talked for 2 hours, in large part about her new artistic direction, since her first solo album Julie Ruin had just come out and was quite a musical departure from Bikini Kill. But we also covered the gamut of politics and feminism and music, and I somehow managed to sound coherent on these subjects while cognizant of the fact that I was discussing them with Kathleen Fucking Hanna.

Before we parted, I gave Kathleen a bunch of 7 inches from the label my friends upstate had started, including my old band’s sole release (seen to your left). I can’t say why I did this. Perhaps because I felt I should offer some kind of token of appreciation for taking the time to talk to me, and I had nothing else to offer. I think my rationale was, We all love you, so here’s something you, in essence, helped make. She demonstrated far more thankfulness than she needed to, and left. I hadn’t the slightest idea, really, of what I’d just done.

Continue reading A Sample

The Past of the Future!

I recently wrote a post about my days in a band, one that focused on the unfortunate aspects of the experience. However, those days were not all bad. In fact, they were almost all great, some of the greatest times of pure, stupid joy I’ve ever had. Rare are the moments that I am able to shut off my brain and just have fun, and many of them happened when I was in this band, or rocking out to friends’ bands, or just hanging out with them and being colossally dumb.

That’s why I’m pleased that someone has seen fit to chronicle this scene on its own Facebook page, Save the OCNY Music (OCNY = Orange County, New York). If you were around there/then, it has lots of photos from the time (some of me, like this bizarre picture of yours truly in a West Point cadet’s jacket; you’ve been warned) and some music clips that will cause a Proustian rush of memories. If none of this is familiar to you, you may still enjoy checking it out. I know I always like to see photos of a scene gone by, something made by and for kids that they loved madly.

You can also check out an ever expanding archive of music from said bands right here. My band’s first demo can be found there, as can the first demo from Life Detecting Coffins, which I cannot recommend too highly.

I am very happy someone is saving this stuff for posterity. Enjoy.

My Heart and the Real World

While working the $1 LP table at the WFMU Record Fair this past weekend, I occasionally browsed through the boxes, hoping to find something awesome, or hilarious, or awesomely hilarious. I believed I’d discovered an example of the latter when I stumbled upon a ludicrously designed record sleeve. It featured a cluttered ink illustration involving Satan and skateboards and blunts, with a needlessly complicated script tsomewhere in the Venn intersection of Ed Hardy, Bones Brigade, and bowling shirt. The sheer number of needless embellishments suggested the artist had a deep phobia of white space.

The album was a punk comp from a SoCal label dating to the late 1990s. Most of the band names didn’t ring a bell, except for two. One was a group an old roommate used to toss on his stereo from time to time, much to my chagrin. The other was a name I hadn’t thought of in years. Or had tried not to think about for years, because I associate it with one of the more profound, soul-crushingly disappointments of my life. It was a very early 20s kind of disappointment, dating to a time when I did not have a firm grasp of life or what aspects of it were truly important. However, the feeling still stings.

Many eons ago, in my increasingly distant college days, I decided to form a band. I recruited my brother and other friends from my upstate hometown to fulfill my vision of Black Flag meets the Stax/Volt box set meets early, bitter Elvis Costello. When asked, I said the kind of music we played was Hardcore Soul. In truth, the results were a lot closer to the former than the latter, and you would have had to dig very deep to hear real evidence of those aforementioned influences, but the pairing of hardcore and soul was too great to pass up once I’d thought of it. Anyone who had pointed out that I should have written Ian Svenonius a royalty check for all the points I cribbed from Nation of Ulysses would not have been wrong.

I wrote most of the songs on bass, because I still didn’t have the chops or dexterity to play guitar (and barely do now), while leaning heavily on my drummer to devise appropriate beats, a task he was quite good at.* I also decided that I would be the frontman and sing all the songs, if only because they were mine. To know if I was any good at this, you’d have to ask observers. I do know that I enjoyed doing it immensely. I was always uncomfortable in my own skin, unable to assert myself, but while onstage, I was able to adopt a self confident persona that was impossible for me to pull off elsewhere. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but writing was solitary, the very definition of delayed gratification. When I played a show, or even just practiced, I could immediately demonstrate my firm belief that this band was the greatest goddamn thing ever.

* The band’s singular claim to fame is being sampled in a Le Tigre song, but the truth is, it’s not the full band being sampled. Just a thundering beat from our seven inch, because our drummer was that good. He’d later go on to play for one of my favorite bands, the criminally ignored Life Detecting Coffins.

I named the band Record Ignite!, after a weird little shop I found during one of my trips to The Bronx.** It had clearly been a music store at one time, but had given up the ghost and halfheartedly converted to a bodega. It still possessed one sad cabinet full of cassettes, falling on each other like a failed domino sequence. The name of the store–probably chosen by someone whose familiarity with English was passing at best–sounded much more dangerous than it probably intended to be, which is why I loved it. I added the exclamation point to further emphasize the broken English weirdness of it all. (Those who pointed out similar punctuation in Wham! received dirty looks.)

** While a student at NYU and spending far too much time alone, one of my solitary pastimes was to get on the subway, disembark at a random station, and wander around a neighborhood I’d never been to before. Somehow, I was never murdered.

Continue reading My Heart and the Real World