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.