Category Archives: Tuneage

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

The Other Half of the Phone Conversation in The Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace”

“Hello baby” yourself. Is this the Big Bopper?

Nice of you to phone. Working late again?

Don’t “sweet thing” me. Do you still have time to pick up that thing for my mother? You know, like we talked about?

I asked if you were going to pick up that thing for my mom like you promised. Will you or not?

C’mon, stop the deaf act. You know I don’t like that.

No, what I like. Can we talk about that for a change? Yes, the Chantilly lace, the ponytail….big eyed girl?! Why would you say that? You know I’m very sensitive about my eyes.

I said I’m very sensitive about my eyes. And here you are talking about spending your money, but you won’t pay a plumber to get that leak in the shower fixed. Every weekend you tell me you’re gonna get around to it but you never do.

Don’t “but, but” me! Are you going to do this or not? Because if you aren’t, I’ll just call up the plumber and it’ll be done, like it should have been weeks ago. You know I would like you take care of this.

Yes, what you like again. It’s always about you, isn’t it? Listen, my car’s still in the shop and I want to go to that community meeting about that new shopping center they want to build just outside of town. I don’t think the proper environmental impact studies have been done and it could add a lot of traffic that this area just can’t handle it. Is there anyway you could pick me up at 8? The meeting starts at 8:30 and I don’t want to be late.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to stick around. You can go watch the game at the bar down the street, but I want to go because I think this is a very important issue for our community.

You don’t need any money for this. I can give you a couple of bucks if you want to get a beer or play Big Buck Hunter. I just need to know if you can do this one thing for me.

God dammit, Big Bopper! You never listen to a word I say! It’s always about what you like. What about my needs? What about my feelings? I’m not happy, and I can’t remember the last time I was! I want a separation. I’ve been talking to a lawyer and I suggest you do the same.

I never loved you, Big Bopper. How do you like that?

I hope you also like divorce papers, because you’re getting them on Monday morning, you creep.

Jim Henson’s Street Walkin’ Cheetah Babies

Last night, my daughter was very excited about the prospect of wolfing down some candy she’d been promised after dinner. (If you must know, it was a Kinder bar, a German confectionary whose creepy displays are ubiquitous in the Polish delis in our neighborhood.) The way she said “candy!” in an anxious cadence triggered something in my brain, and that something forced me to sing “Candy, candy, candy” a la the Iggy Pop tune of the same name that hit airwaves right around the time I started frequenting record stores as an almost-teen. I distinctly remember going to a local Strawberry’s and seeing the walls plastered with the Charles Burns artwork for Brick by Brick, and seeing that same artwork stay there for years.

Of course, I couldn’t sing “candy, candy, candy” just once. Thanks to several undiagnosed and serious mental illnesses, I felt compelled to sing it over and over, amusing no one except myself. Finally, The Kid asked me, “Is that a song?” By which she meant, Is that a real song or are you just singing it to drive us all insane?

Yes, I told her, it’s a real song by a guy named Iggy Pop. This name made her crack up, and I realized that to a 4 year old, “Iggy Pop” sounds like the dumbest, most hysterical name ever.

“Iggy Pop did songs?” she asked between the chuckles.

Yes, I told her. In fact, did she remember the commercial with the pirates in the boats? She did. I told her the song in that commercial was an Iggy Pop song, too. (Yes, I’m fully aware this is a Captain Morgan ad. It’s on TV all the time on every channel, guys. I’m pretty sure it’s in heavy rotation during A.N.T. Farm.)

“I like that song!” she said. “I like Iggy Pop. When I grow up, I want him to be my boyfriend.”

This last line has gone into heavy rotation lately. It’s been applied to virtually everyone she sees on TV and likes. Previous recipients of this honor include Daniel Radcliffe and Jose Reyes. She has eclectic tastes.

Normally, I would just laugh this off. But the idea of my daughter wanting to date Iggy Pop, no matter how hypothetical and far into the future, set off some primal Dad Warning in my brain. So I told her, You probably don’t want Iggy Pop to be your boyfriend. He’s old and kind of weird.

“Does he have good manners?” she asked. No, I said, he does not have good manners. He did lots of silly stuff on stage. I realize “silly” is not quite the adjective to describe someone who used to snap mic stands in half and carve up his chest with the broken ends. But silly is as close as we’re gonna get here.

Then I remembered that the quickest way to discourage someone from thinking they like Iggy Pop is to show them a picture of Iggy Pop. I have a book of glam/punk photos by Mick Rock, a large coffee table slab I snatched up for free when some philistine abandoned it at an old job. I pulled it down off a very high shelf and flipped to a pic of Iggy on stage, grasping the mic, shirtless and adorned with makeup. (Think the cover of Raw Power.)

That’s Iggy Pop, I said, and she immediately recoiled.

“Ew!” she said. “I don’t like Iggy Pop. Boys shouldn’t take off their shirts. Girls don’t wanna see that!”

Oh no, they definitely don’t, I said. I showed her a few more pics of Mr. Jim Osterberg, and she remained convinced that she didn’t like Iggy Pop. Crisis averted. Except, now she wanted to see the rest of this book, which contained many photos of things it’d probably be best a four-year-old not see. Like Lou Reed.

So I swapped the photo collection for another large, artsy book, this one on Tex Avery, and we spent the next several minutes looking at classic cells and sketches of cats getting their heads blown off.

A few minutes later, she said to me, unprompted, “You’re a good dad.”

Thank you, I said. Why am I a good dad?

“Because you’re not in jail.”

Can’t argue with that.