INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE STOOGES, FUN HOUSE

Recorded 50 years ago (May, 1970), The Stooges sophomore LP was not my introduction to Iggy Pop, but it was the album that got me to turn my gaze to the past for challenging music and not just look forward. I'd read about Iggy and his antics in various music magazines like CREEM and Hit Parader a couple of years before I bought any of his records, but it was his 1979 appearance on The Midnight Special that got me ready to pull out my wallet in a record store. I think it was the episode hosted and curated by The Cars where they played two of his latest promo videos for his recently released New Values LP. Both Five Foot One and I'm Bored were aired that night and that was all I needed to become a fan of Mr. Pop.

At the time I bought New Values, my attention and interests were firmly forward facing in terms of looking for new music. I wasn't at all interested in what had come before. The zeitgeist of the times, with "punk" and "new wave", was to blast away the past and focus on the future. That said, when I kept reading references to The Stooges and how they were the "first punk band", my obsessive collector nature kicked in and I decided to roll back the clock 9 years and dip my toe in with The Stooges second album, Fun House. I decided to start there because I wasn't quite ready to abandon the current decade and step into the 1960s with their debut, though that would come to my collection soon enough.

Fun House appealed to me, at least superficially, thanks to the insane looking album cover. Iggy looked like he was on a slide, heading into the bowels of hell. The fiery color pallet and posterized graphic style gave the album a look of intensity and the contents didn't disappoint. Within its grooves was a kind of raw rock & roll which was nastier than any heavy metal, and sleazier than what I'd found to that point within the punk/new wave sphere. This was pretty scary music made by disreputable people who probably did questionable things in seedy places. Definitely not the kind of fellows the parents would invite over for dinner. It was stripped down and bare and edgy and way ahead of its time. It also took chances, like the manic finale freak-out of LA Blues, a song that felt like it left your turntable in ruins.

Once I heard this music, my mind was opened up to the reality that challenging music wasn't only happening in the present, but that there were precedents for it in the past and that it was worthwhile for me to turn at least some of my attention in that direction and understand some of the roots of the music with which I was obsessed. From this vantage point, bands like The Velvet Underground, CAN, Silver Apples and many others became fair game for exploration and helped expand my understanding of the way the past influenced the present. It helped me understand that these new bands I was falling in love with were standing atop some pretty impressive shoulders and those needed to be appreciated as well.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE SHAGGS, PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD

I first heard about The Shaggs reading a little article about them in a 1980 issue of CREEM magazine. The article, written by Robot A. Hull, described...

"...Betty, Helen and Dorothy Wiggin, lonely sisters losing their minds in Squaresville in the limbo years of 1969-72. Sheltered by their parents as if they were porcelain figurines, the Wiggin sisters never had a chance to date, never were allowed to taste of the delicious sins down at the local Tastee-Freeze. So they went up to their rooms, cried their eyes out, and formed a rock band, the self-destructive and chaotic Shaggs."

The article left an impression, but it wouldn't be until some dozen or so years later that I'd actually get a chance to hear them while going through my partner's CD collection after we moved in together. He had a copy of a CD reissue of The Shaggs, Philosophy of the World, but it was coupled with bonus material from a 1982 album of unreleased early 1970s recordings (released then as "Shaggs Own Thing") and the CD was simply called The Shaggs.

In the interim between reading that article and discovering that CD, I'd come across numerous other references to them, all falling somewhere between ridicule and reverence. By the early 1990s, I was more than a little acquainted with "difficult" music, but nothing in my musical vocabulary could have prepared me for what I heard from these three sisters. At first, I reacted as I'm sure most people do, by contextualizing it as a joke, some kind of prank or simply the product of such profound musical ignorance that it was merely laughable. Over the years since that first listening, however, I've come to appreciate it's idiosyncrasies as far more than an accident of ineptitude.

Yes, ignorance does play a critical role in this music because it sounds like these girls were raised in utter isolation from the world and had to invent the very concept of music all on their own without any points of reference to guide them. That means that this music exists with its own internal logic and rationale. It's not like they're incompetent at playing regular music. They're actually quite precise about how they play THEIR music THEIR way. In that regard, one simply has to acknowledge that these sounds are not the result of stupidity or incompetence. They're the result of resourcefulness and ingenuity forced to function in a vacuum.

The proof of the above proposition rests in the fact that Dot (Dorothy) Wiggin has continued to tour and perform this music with a backing band of professional musicians who have been able to replicate the nuances of the original recordings with the guidance of Dot. They have personally verified that she is completely cognizant of the intricacies of the arrangements and their function. In the same way that Don Van Vliet was able to transcribe his abstract, angular vision into the music of Captain Beefheart, the Wiggin sisters were able to do the exact same thing for the music of The Shaggs.

If there's a lesson to be learnt here, it's that "music" can be defined as any organized sound provided that there is an organizer. The structure, method and techniques of this organization are, however, completely up to the individual doing the organizing.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE CARS, THE CARS

You hear a lot of talk about "gateway drugs", substances which start you out on a path that leads you into more serious addictions.  In music, the most potent gateway drug I ever encountered was the 1978 debut LP by The Cars. 

My attention was initially drawn to the album courtesy of my obsession with all things Queen related.  The connection here being with producer Roy Thomas Baker, who'd just worked on this debut and who had previously enjoyed a renowned relationship with Freddie and the boys.  A favorable review in CREEM magazine got me intrigued enough to seek out the record and add it to my still meager, embryonic vinyl collection. 

At the time, I was getting a bit fed up with a lot of the other, more "mainstream" bands I was listening to.  As I've mentioned at least once before, I was tired of buying albums only to have one decent song on it and the rest just tired old boogie-woogie rehash drek.  So many of the AOR bands of the time fit that mold.  I was primed for something fresh and that's what I got with The Cars.

This album turned out to have far more than one or two good songs on it.  The opening trifecta of Good Times Roll, My Best Friend's Girl & Just What I Needed was enough to leave your head spinning.  If that was the end of it there, I'd have considered the album a hit.  But it's not and the good times keep rolling right to the very last song.  There's just nothing less than an A+ song on this album. 

But it wasn't just the stellar songwriting that was key here.  Stylistically, it was completely fresh and modern.  The production on this record glistened like the sheen of a streamlined new auto, fresh from the factory floor.  It was build tight and smooth and futuristic, but with a retro flair and classic rock 'n' roll rebel attitude.  For a naive Ontario boy in 1978, someone who'd been noticing all the press in the music magazines concerning this new "punk" and "new wave" music, it was a siren call.  It beckoned me off the path of the mainstream and pointed me towards more exotic and unusual sounds. 

The clincher came when The Cars were booked to host an episode of NBC's Friday night music staple, The Midnight Special.  In an unprecedented move, the producers gave The Cars carte blanche to curate the episode and book whomever they liked.  Taking full advantage, they stacked the show with the likes of Iggy Pop, Lene Lovich and, most mind shattering of all, New York's premier bad boys, Alan Vega & Martin Rev, aka SUICIDE!

After this, the floodgates were opened and my musical attention swung decidedly into the left field.  All bets were off at this point as I dove into every extreme of alternative music I could unearth.  No matter how far afield I've gone in my explorations, however, I always look back to the first Cars album as the one that set me on that journey in earnest.  I got in touch with their world and never looked back.

THE PAPER AGE - MUSIC BEFORE THE INTERNET

I’ve been contemplating life before the internet lately, specifically how I acquired information about music when I first started collecting it.  Long before there was a Google or Discogs or YouTube, one had to do a bit of reading the old fashioned way, in printed media, in order to learn about things that were happening in certain corners of the world.  Of course, there was radio and TV available to expose some of what was going on, but by and large, those media outlets focused on the mainstream  in a fairly superficial way and you had to go to other sources if you wanted to discover anything off the beaten track or more in-depth.  You might see the odd new wave act on Midnight Special or Saturday Night Live, but the music press was where you got to know these artists in detail and discover what they were doing and when.

I first started to collect records when I was 13, back in 1976.  Soon after that started to develop into a serious interest, I also discovered there was a variety of magazines on the shelves of my neighborhood corner shops with all sorts of fascinating stories of my favorite performers and their adventures, interviews with the them and reviews of their work.  It didn’t take long for me to get just as hooked on these as I was on the records.  So much so, in fact, that I got to the point where I’d use my lunch money to buy magazines instead of eating.  I’m thinking now that this may have been part of the reason I got so svelte in my last year of high school.  Oh well, food is over rated! 

The first publications I came across were rags like Hit Parader, Circus and, occasionally, Rolling Stone.  I never got into RS much because there were a lot of non-music articles and that stuff just didn’t interest me.  I only wanted to read about rock stars.  The other two were pretty light weight, however, and I found them to be a bit sycophantic, even at my young, naive age.  But then I came across CREEM and that one really caught my fancy.  It was not so concerned with stroking rock star egos or cheap gossip.  I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was more akin to magazines like National Lampoon and harbored a kind of “gonzo” style which often took great delight in ridiculing some of the subjects covered in its pages.  The captions to the pictures were a clear case in point.  Every one of them was a joke, often at the artist’s expense.  You never got a serious comment in the photo captions.  And they had writers like  Robert Christgau and the notorious Lester Bangs, who made an art of taking the piss out of the folks they covered.  Bangs’ LP reviews were some of my favorites.  I recall one he did for Queen’s Day at the Races that read like a bad trip and I’d never even done drugs yet.  

Eventually I discovered a used book shop downtown and it’s shelf full of old magazine back-issues.  This became a regular haunt for me and I was able to find many of the older issues of CREEM going back to the early 1970s.  This became a priceless resource to me and gave me a lot of background on my favorite bands and their history.  On the other end of this spectrum, the new issues of CREEM that were coming out at the time were starting to clue me in to a lot of new music that was coming out of places like New York and London.  They began to feature bands like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, Devo and Elvis Costello.  I remember seeing an issue with Johnny Rotten on the cover and, at the time, I thought he just looked stupid and weird and found it all rather annoying.  It wasn’t until I began to get dissatisfied with the tedium of top 40 rock music that I started to wonder what all the fuss was with these new groups and why they were getting so much press.  

Like a damn bursting, my curiosity soon got the better of me and I went out and started buying records by these people.  I can actually remember a day, flipping through the pages of a magazine in my bedroom, where I made a conscious decision to go out and buy some of these records.  It started small, with The Cars, then The Clash, Ramones, Costello, Devo and, finally, the most naughty band of all, The Sex Pistols.  I remember putting on the first Clash album and feeling like someone had blown the dust off my mind to reveal it's bright, shining surface.  I remember pulling out the lyric sheet for the Ramones' Road to Ruin and being gobsmacked that there were so many songs with just four or five lines of lyrics.  And they were fucking hilarious!   It was a few days of complete revelation that would trigger a lifetime of exploration and it all came from some ratty little music magazines.

Soon, I was on the hunt for even more magazines that featured these bands.  This is when I came across rags like Rock Scene and Punk magazine.  They were both very New York centric and featured all the CBGBs bands.  Rock Scene had a LOT of press for Patti Smith, thanks to her hubby, Lenny Kaye, being the editor.  I must admit I kinda got turned off a bit to Patti for a bit because her features in the magazine became so gratuitous and obviously so.  But still it was a valuable reference, though pretty light weight in terms of coverage of these bands.  It was mostly a scenester, “who’s with who”, kinda vibe.  Punk Magazine seemed to be the most underground and hardcore at the time.  I’m actually pretty surprised, looking back, that it ever landed in a middle of nowhere town like Thunder Bay, ON.  But it somehow managed to find its way into my hands and gave me another perspective into the alternative music scene.   

In 1979, the ultimate underground magazine started hitting the local stands, Trouser Press.  This was the most out there publication I’d managed to come across and it was in its pages that I first read of names like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, The Residents and others who were truly foraging on the fringes of experimental music.  I became obsessed with snapping this one up as soon as it hit the stands.  It was coolness in print.  And it wasn’t easy to find as only a couple of places carried it, so I’d be on the lookout for each new issue with hawk-eyed determination.  It wasn’t a fancy looking magazine either.  It was plainly designed in terms of the graphics.  But it had the best written articles and most thoughtful reviews I’d come across.  Though the irreverence of CREEM was entertaining, it was nice to have something that really dug into the new music with a more serious tone. 

Sometime in 1980, the next phenomenon to hit my collecting obsession arrived in the form of the “import”.  The little record shop I favored, Records on Wheels, introduced a small bin of LPs labeled “Imports”.  The concept was utterly new to me, but I soon realized there was a whole world of music being released in other parts of the world than never got released in Canada.  Now, most of these ended up being imported from the UK, but that was enough as all the strangest stuff seemed to get released there.  Along side these import records, the shop also started getting UK music papers.  Things like NME and Sounds started showing up and these were a whole new world of music journalism. 

I even discovered I could purchase records directly from these papers.  They had classified ads in the back pages.  This is where I found I could actually get a copy of the holy grail of albums for me at that time, Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box.  I’d read about it in some publications and it had a sort of mythical allure about it because it was so exotic sounding.  The standard double LP version had been released in Canada and I'd fallen in love with it, so there was no question that I needed it in its original format.  Finding out it was just a matter of calculating the currency exchange and sending off a money order was thrilling to me, but also nerve-wracking.  This was, of course, long before internet or cheap international phone calling, so putting money in the post and having to wait three months in the blind hope that something would come back was a bit daunting.  But it worked and, after duly and patiently waiting, I had my hands on my treasure, greedily drooling over it like Gollum with his “precious” ring!  

When I moved to Vancouver in 1982, I continued to buy the UK papers as much as I could afford to, though I would often just read them in the import record shop that got them in.  In Vancouver, it wasn’t just a bin in the shop that sold imports, it was an entire store dedicated to them.  I swear, the first time I walked into Odyssey Imports, I was like Dorothy prancing through the gates of the Emerald City.

As I got settled in a new city, I found I was buying fewer and fewer magazines.  Trouser Press ceased publication in 1984 and CREEM in 1989 (though it kinda lost its edge a few years before that and I stopped collecting it).  The UK papers still had some attraction, but by the early 90s, I wasn’t buying records much anymore because I was so poor.  There was also the transition to CD going on and CDs, particularly imports, were going for stupid prices like $40 a pop!  It’s funny now that’s the average price for a domestic piece of new vinyl these days, but you practically can't give a CD away. 

It wasn’t until the dawn of the new millennium that I was set up with a proper computer, a high speed internet connection and a functioning credit card so that my collecting bug could lurch back to life and i dove head first into the world of online shopping.  I was working a decent job with a reasonable bit of disposable income at hand, so no limited edition collectible was out of reach for me and I had the tools to track who was releasing what and also follow recommendations for new artists.  I had automated “sniper” tools for buying on Ebay so I could snap up rarities at the last second.  I went a bit nuts, I must confess.

These days, I’m poor again, but the internet and YouTube have offered me a new way to indulge my music mania and I’m swimming in an ocean of music, both old and new.  While I love the convenience, I do still have fond memories of those bygone days of picking up a magazine and reading about some strange new artist.  I was thinking the other day about the old ads from Ralph Records for The Residents and that got me inspired to write this piece.  I recall the strangeness and mysterious infatuation with their mystique that drove my imagination.  That sense of wonder is so much harder to find or create these days. 

These days, I don't read much about music, particularly reviews of albums.  I find I don't rely on them to discover new music anymore.  I use my own judgment as to whether I want to investigate something because I can always preview it, usually on YouTube.  I use Discogs "Explore" feature to play with search filters to find interesting combinations of genres and styles.  I still read the occasional interview or analytical article, perhaps on an old release being re-appraised or celebrating an anniversary.  But I look at magazine racks in the stores and there's nothing there anymore for me to pick up.  All the music magazines have pretty much vanished or you have to go to some out of the way specialty store to find them and I can't be bothered. 

I used to have a huge box of all my old rags I'd kept for many years.  I think I may have held onto them until the end of the 1990s before I finally dumped it all.  I wish I still had them now.  Some are available online, but it's not quite the same as holding it in your hands.  Kids don’t understand it now, but I remember it and I’m glad I got to bridge both worlds.