Kurt Vile - Wakin on a Pretty Daze

Kurt Vile – Wakin on a Pretty Daze

Matador, 2013

Kurt Vile always reminds me of the worst time in my life. That would be the summer after I graduated college. 2009. I’d just met the girl I was going to marry and I had absolutely no prospects. No job. Nothin’ but a girl who loved me which is really always enough pretty much. But I was dicking around. I was freelancing for the Pitch and that ruled but it was still college mentality. Adulthood was foreign at the moment. And then one of my best buddies Chris Bianculli got me a job at the property management company he worked for. First Management. They own a bunch of real estate in Lawrence and I heard the dude who owns the company has a giraffe or an elephant and a private jet. Some serious fucking moneyed guy. Anyway, I got a job doing move-out inspections, apartment cleaning and move-in inspections. I tried to hang on and at least have a ten-hour a week job to hang on to until I found something but the hours kept vanishing. Eventually Chris got fired for some nebulous reason and the person hired to fill his role managing the Canyon Court apartment complex in West Lawrence was totally out of touch. The first day I worked there she had left this note that instructed me to post all these fliers on every door of every apartment at Canyon Court but specifically instructed me NOT to throw all of them in the trash. It might have read like a joke if it hadn’t implied that I was some simpleton and was just going to say “fuck what my boss told me, I’m gonna play pool all day because there is a pool table literally twenty feet from my desk.” So I wrote her a note. It basically said “I think what you wrote here was really condescending. Why would you even imply that I would throw these fliers in the trash? I was paid to do a job and I am going to do that job and I think it’s kind of messed up that you implied that I wouldn’t do the job I was hired to do.” So I put up the fliers in the summer heat and went back to work. Work basically consisted of waiting for residents to get locked out of their apartments and charging them $25 to get let back in. It was a shitty place but I did it because I didn’t have a job. The rest of the job mostly consisted of playing pool and putting up balloons. I was still pretty annoyed with the new manager, and since she specifically instructed that I put up balloons I used the office’s helium tank to pump up like fifty balloons and I daisy chained them with ribbon and made a monolith of balloons out by the pool. I should note that the tone of her instructions was pretty horrible and that my note really wasn’t that bad. OK, it was pretty bad. I was totally in 22-year-old fuck you mode, but really, she had it coming. Because if you just took over an apartment complex and you want to win the trust and respect of your underlings you don’t get all I AM THE BOSS AND YOU WILL RESPECT ME on them. Because that is some stupid shit they probably teach you in business school. I don’t know. I never went to business school and I could probably out-manage any of these fucking pretenders at this point in my life. But anyway, I got fired for my transgressions. It was a beautiful firing. Grandiose and full of fuck you. A firing I never thought I would have because I am usually such a dutiful employee. Always on time, always eager to learn and eager to help. Once when I was working at the Chase Court Apartments KU Basketball legend Sherron Collins got locked out of is apartment and I let him back in for free! I knew I should have charged him, but who charges a local hero a fee to get let back into his shitty overpriced apartment that is probably being covered by the University anyway? Not this guy. When I was doing move-in inspections at Apple Croft (the lowest-rent of all First Management’s properties dubbed “Crapple Loft” by pretty much everyone because it was a dump) I encountered a German exchange student who was baffled by the amount of roaches in his apartment. The roaches were myriad. I’m talking climbing up the walls, climbing on the ceiling and navigating the carpeting. He had mattress cased in plastic wrap leaning up against the wall and the roaches had managed to find a way inside and were climbing all over the mattress.

            “This is really messed up,” I told him. “I’m going to get someone in here right away.”

            He just laughed. “In Berlin, apartments are much worse,” he said in his immaculate accented English. He poked at one of the roaches under the plastic wrap over the mattress and I ran back to the office at Chase Court to get the manager to send the exterminator out. Most of the apartments at Apple Croft had roaches. Most of the apartments had black mold too. I reported this problem and they just sent out Patrick the maintenance guy to paint over the black mold with white paint. Done and done. Apple Croft was also home of the pool where all of my friends and ex-friends notoriously went skinny-dipping. An absolute dump through and through.

            But I lost the thread. The point is, I was trying to make a stand for what was right and just and trying to make management see things through my eyes and they flat out refused. The next Monday, on the day of the all-staff meeting, I was called into the Chase Court office. I was met by the manager of Chase Court (who I’m fairly certain was the highest manager there was who didn’t own a Mercedes/exotic pet) and the new manager of Canyon Court who I had oh so recently reprimanded. I was promptly fired. I knew I was going to get fired because I’d been specifically instructed to come in early. I told Jenny I was probably going to get fired for what I’d said to the new Canyon Court manager and she didn’t seem too upset because it wasn’t a real job anyway. I got in the car and Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy was in the CD player and it was just starting over. Track one. “Hunchback.” It only took me five minutes to get to Chase Court from our apartment on 22^nd and Tennessee and that song got me pumped up to get fired for the very first (and I can only assume last) time. I went in cool as a cucumber, had my transgressions recited to me and told the Chase Court manager what I thought of what was happening. I told her that I thought it was bullshit, and that what the Canyon Court manager had written was bullshit and I stood by the helpful notes I’d left on the weekend instructions. I awkwardly pried the keys off of my key-ring. I really should have taken them off before hand because that just made things weird. I threw them on the table, told them to “get bent,” and walked out the door. I reentered the office and told them both I was sorry I’d said “get bent,” and that I’d always wanted to say that to somebody and it just happened to be them and that I understood completely why I had been fired.

            In the parking lot I ran into my bro Mark. Mark and I had started at the same time. Both of us had been hired to clean apartments and not so explicitly let go at the end of turn. I slapped hands with him and told him what had happened and wished him good luck. A solid dude, through and through, forever and ever. He wished me luck and I left to the rest of Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy.

            Four years later, I’ve managed to work my way up into the management team at the Half Price Books in St. Paul. Lately, I’ve been driving to work listening to Kurt Vile’s latest album Wakin on a Pretty Daze and every morning I drive to work I can’t help but think of getting canned because Kurt Vile immediately makes me think of music to get canned to. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s music for the people who understand that the world works in a specific way and that the way the world works is never a way they’re going to work with. It’s a big fat fucking game, and I think Mr. Vile gets that. To me, his music always feels like a big fuck you to everybody. He just does his thing, rambles on, and then goes on his way.

            There is plenty of rambling here, more rambling than ever even. Childish Prodigy is still my favorite record of his because it was so messy and so built on Kurt Vile becoming a bona fide Singer/Songwriter with capitals. Smoke Ring For My Halo had a few tracks I loved but mostly I got bored. At first, I got bored with Wakin on a Pretty Daze until I listened to it a dozen times on the way to work. There was something transcendent about listening to the quasi title track at 7:45 in the morning and waiting for trains to pass on my way to a job where I felt like I was doing legitimate good work. Where no one is going to fire you for sticking up for yourself. I’ve always felt like that was why I got fired, and why I’ve always held the opinion that Doug Compton and First Management could all go fuck themselves. I fantasized about doing a mini comic about the whole experience and leaving it in the plastic Apartment Finder stalls located around downtown Lawrence. But the whole thing is easier to fit into an album review. Honestly, it’s ones of the best experiences I’ve ever had. You get it if you’ve ever seen the inside of one of those $900 a month apartments.

            After that I worked at CD Tradepost in Olathe for a handful of months (a job I did actually write a mini comic about) until I parlayed that experience into a job at Half Price Books. And I’m content enough. It’s not a dream job but I’m hungry and I like the work and I like the people and I like that I’m not working for a CEO who owns a private jet and a giraffe and buys up all the cheap property in a town and sells it back to the people at exorbitant prices. Those people can all get bent.

            Kurt Vile’s latest album is a bit long in the tooth, but it’s a piece of motherfucking honest work. You get an impression of this guy when you listen to his album. There’s not posing. No artifice. No goddamn dicking around. Just a dude from Philly speaking his mind and often doing it at length. “Wakin on a Pretty Day” is over nine minutes long and it’s got maybe the prettiest little riff I’ve heard all year. A laid-back riff that puts the mind at ease. To this day Childish Prodigy is my quintessential fall record. Every autumn, it finds its way back into my CD player. Something about the finger picking on “Blackberries” and pretty much every song. There’s a tone that bathes that whole album in dimming golden light and it is so insanely beautiful it’s almost impossible to express. Wakin on a Pretty Daze abandons the distant tone for directness. You can hear it best on the absolutely gleeful “Shame Chamber,” the sassy-as-fuck “KV Crimes,” and the chord changes in “Pure Pain.”

            Don’t be fooled into thinking Kurt Vile is some sort of prodigy. The feast he offers up is mostly sick guitar work and drugged-out-sounding vocals and cryptic lyrics, but the level of refinement he has achieved is brand new. I loved Childish Prodigy for its rawness, and I love Wakin on a Pretty Daze for its confidence. Kurt Vile is probably the sort of guy who wants nothing more than to be reviled in his own time and only appreciated years after his death. Too bad for him so many people are catching on.

Against Me! - Reinventing Axl Rose

Against Me! – Reinventing Axl Rose

No Idea, 2002

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013

Price: $4

I was never very good at being a punk. There was a solid year in high school where I really cared about being legit, but that all fell apart when I admitted to liking Radiohead. But there was a year where I was listening to nothing but Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Descendents and every band signed to Fat Wreck Chords (I always had a soft spot for pop). Against Me! Were a part of that too, but I never had the nerve to ever consider being an anarchist. Sure I wore an American flag patch upside down on my patch-covered hoodie but who was I kidding? I hated America, but 9/11 had just happened so I couldn’t really hate America. I was sixteen, and if I remember anything about sixteen it’s that all of my beliefs and opinions about God and Country were so fresh off the boat that they were quaint at best. Just groundwork for a more adult understanding of the Issues. But holy shit I loved Against Me! So much. They were making punk rock in a way I’d never heard before. The folk elements and the scream-a-long atmosphere like it was all one big party drew me in on the surface but it was Tom Gabel’s lyrics that really made me fall in love. There is just so much honesty in these songs. A sort of honesty that was kind of absent from NOFX (with the exception of The Decline) or Bad Religion or any other band trying to topple the system or making fun of George W Bush. Part of it was the way Gabel sounds like he’s about to lose his voice at any second, part of it was that he was just singing about his friends and himself. Personal politics are way more interesting than world politics. I still can’t tell if he’s serious when he’s singing “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” but it doesn’t matter because the point gets across. The point gets across because it’s funny. Not like fart-joke funny but like legitimately, at its core, beautifully hilarious. I find it hard to believe that Gabel was being entirely sincere on that track considering Against Me!’s eventual signing to Sire Records and making a slick sort of folk-punk that was apparently better suited to the masses. I saw them play at one of 96.5 the Buzz’s summer concerts at City Market and I was just baffled that they looked like they were trying to be rock stars. I know it’s silly to call anyone a sellout, because as an adult and not a sixteen year old punker I understand that if you can justify compromising your ideals so you can provide for your family then you probably do it so long as it’s not too sleazy, but it wasn’t the band I fell in love with. The band that helped me stay politically aware and suspicious in a time when blind patriotism could have very easily taken over my young brain. You really can’t expect your punk rock idols to stay young and hungry forever, I suppose.

Sparks - Angst in My Pants

Sparks – Angst in My Pants

Atlantic, 1982
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2011
Price: $2.50

For all the haterade the 80s get dumped on them, were they really any worse than now? Are the 2010s the new 80s? The fashion is stupid, the popular music is brainless garbage, and the cool music all sounds like the same electronic bullshit that is going to sound incredibly dated by 2020. But that’s just the haterade talking. The haterade that courses through my veins and abates when I find a band that feels honest and genuine. I am reminded that they still exist, and get to avoid the fact that I’m living in the decline. This ties into Sparks because I feel like they were just weird and didn’t give a fuck and had fun. It’s incredibly dated to the era of early 80s synth-pop and new wave, but it’s cool. “Angst in My Pants” came into my life circa 2008 when it popped up on a mix CD a friend gave me. I was told the track was from the Valley Girl soundtrack. And then it never quite left my rotation. It would occasionally come up on shuffle and I’d be like “Oh yeah, this song is weird and catchy and great!” And I found the album a few years after that and that was that. When I finally watched Valley Girl a couple years ago I was dismayed that “Angst in My Pants” was not featured in the film proper. Instead the film uses “Eaten By The Monster of Love” and I cannot for the life of me understand why the soundtrack used a different Sparks song from the same album on the soundtrack instead of the one that was in the actual goddamn movie. Ok ok I figured it out. The point I was trying to make was this: Why does every cool band have to give off the appearance that they are too cool to have fun? Everyone is so fucking SERIOUS about their craft and/or image these days it’s impossible to enjoy anything. Angst in My Pants is enjoyable, dumb, and brilliant and I wish more bands were willing to be brash and more willing to make fools of themselves.

Iron & Wine - The Shepherd's Dog

Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog

Sub Pop, 2007

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $3

This is right about where I stopped listening to Iron and Wine. I spent my senior year of high school clutching tightly to Our Endless Numbered Days and The Sea and the Rhythm EP and I got distracted. That’s what I think happened. I went to college and someone found this great program that let everyone in Hashinger Hall to share our music and that was that. It’s nice to hear Sam Beam branching out from the hushed acoustic sad-folk that made him famous. The arrangements here are fun and thoughtful and though The Shepherd’s Dog is a fundamentally good album, I can’t help but feel indifferent to it. There’s a sound he made his own in the early 2000s and that’s what I want. I don’t want to sound like I’m pissed that he changed, quite the opposite. I’m really glad he didn’t get bogged down. I’m glad he didn’t keep making the same record over and over again. It’s just that now the only record of his we ever listen to is The Creek Drank the Cradle. That’s partially because until now that was the only Iron & Wine album we had on vinyl, but even with this one we’ll still just listen to Creek. It’s satisfying on a level that The Shepherd’s Dog just can’t reach because it’s not tied to nostalgia and it’s just not as pure and lovely. There are flashes of loveliness here, especially on “Resurrection Fern” and “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” (even Twilight can’t ruin that one). Having heard Iron & Wine’s latest—the tragically not very good at all Ghost on Ghost—The Shepherd’s Dog sounds like the best thing ever. While it’s impossible to cling to the past in real life and exist as a functional person, thankfully the rules don’t apply to records.

Phil Ochs - I Ain't Marching Anymore

Phil Ochs – I Ain’t Marching Anymore
Carthage, 1965
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $2

I owned Phil Ochs’ All The News That’s Fit to Sing years ago and I’m fairly certain it ended up in a stack that got hawked. Recently I got obsessed with the band Kind of Like Spitting. Eventually, after working my way through their discography and came to an Ochs tribute album they recorded called Learn: The Songs of Phil Ochs. I found it remarkable how fitting it was for a guy who has made a career writing some of the best sad bastard songs I’ve ever heard to tackle some of the best protest music America ever offered up. I say that now, having reacquired a few of Ochs records and digging in. On a personal level, I’m an emotional sad bastard and I also have a million opinions about politics, morality, and social justice. It’s like all this stuff just stews and threatens to destroy me and I listen to a Kind of Like Spitting or a Phil Ochs or a Billy Bragg and it keeps the pot from boiling over. Bragg—who’s albums are typically half songs about getting dumped and half songs about miners or picket lines or whatever—is particularly fitting to my sensibilities, but Ochs is straight up taking on every injustice he can get his hands on and doing it with wit and outrage. He makes Bob Dylan seem like a pretty boy pretender on the protest song front and gets closer to the spirit of Woody Guthrie than Bobby D ever did (No offense to Bobby D, I love him, but Phil Ochs has more grit). That said, I kind of love this album. Ochs hates rips into everything. The draft, the death penalty, unions, Marxism, patriotism, the civil rights movement (“In Birmingham, tourist city of the South, you can bomb the church of your own choice with the apparent blessing of governor George Wallace,” read the notes for “Talking Birmingham Jam”), the State Department, and the American Politician (the “gutless master of procrastination with a maximum of non-committal statements and the barest minimum of action”). Some of it is dated to the sixties, but thematically almost everything can neatly be tied bow-like around modern American politics, foreign policy, and capitalist ventures. So it’s nice that Kind of Like Spitting did that Ochs tribute, because this shit is still as potent as it ever was and I regret not buying all of his albums when they came in this great big record buy at HPB a few months back. But I’m glad I got this one.

XTC - Mummer

XTC – Mummer

Virgin, 1983

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $1.50

I feel like once a Summer I get into a new XTC album. Which XTC album I get into is completely random and left up to chance. That is to say I pick up whichever one shows up on vinyl at the store. How fitting that last year I went completely ape over English Settlement. Mummer is the group’s sixth LP and follow-up to English Settlement. While it lacks a lot of the bombastic pop maneuvers of its predecessor, Mummer is weirder, more acoustic and charming in the sense that every time I listen to an XTC album I feel like I’m a little bit stoned (which is to say I just want to layabout and eat Gardettos, which is exactly what I did when I listened to this album). Somehow XTC manage to come off as almost entirely free of artifice, which feels like a major accomplishment considering the style-over-substance attitude you get from many/most New Wave acts. They just seem like normal dudes which severe gifts for popcraft.

A Man, A Plan, A Root Canal!

I think if someone had ever told me what a root canal actually was I would have spent every day of my life up to this point making sure I never had to have one. I’m talking flossing and brushing more consistently and going to the dentist for biannual cleanings like a grown-up. Instead, I internalized an irrational fear of the dentist and last month went for a cleaning for the first time in four years. And only because my wife would seriously not get off my case. The hardest part for me was finding the right dentist. There are so many options and you don’t want to pick a bad one. I’ll agonize over a restaurant’s menu every time. Even restaurants I love, I’ll get the same thing because I go out so infrequently that I want to make sure I’m getting something I like. Fortunately, Jenny picked a dentist and I rode her coattails to ADT Dental on Hennepin in Uptown.

ADT is a dental practice staffed entirely by women, which did wonders for putting me at ease. I generally hate having men work on my body in any way. It’s nothing homophobic, I just feel more comfortable around women. Probably because I’m a mama’s boy. So I made an appointment and my cleaning was going swell until my dentist Dr. Knox said “Uh oh” whilst looking at my x-rays.

            “This looks cavity is pretty deep,” she said, staring into my gaping mouth and then asked her assistant to schedule me for a full hour in case it wasn’t a routine filling and she had to do a root canal treatment.

            “I have to have a root canal?” I asked, voice trembling.

            “We’ll see,” she said. “When the decay gets into the pulp of the tooth, we have to do a root canal.”

            “So what’s a root canal?” I asked. “Other than the stereotypical thing you do not want to have when you go to the dentist.”

            And then she matter-of-factly described what was going to happen on my next visit if she found that the cavity had broken through to the pulp. I’m glad she didn’t describe the whole procedure, because my next appointment wasn’t for another three weeks and I really wanted to be able to not agonize over the prospect of having a root canal.

My next appointment rolled around on Monday May 6. My fear of dental work rippled through my body but the dental assistant who was in charge of getting me prepped for the procedure was great and put me at ease. Her name was Theresa. She put a little memory foam pillow under my head and gave me some sunglasses to tone down the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights. Then she put some numbing gel on a q-tip and stuck it in my mouth and made sure none of it dripped on my tongue. All of the prep was done calmly and very carefully. I felt good. Dr. Knox came in and talked about the weather. It was the pretty much the first day of Spring in Minneapolis after a bafflingly long winter that included a massive snowstorm the weekend prior. She numbed me up and I felt nothing. She drilled into my tooth and within second knew that my tooth was doomed.

            “I’ve got an exposure here,” she said to Theresa, crushing my tiny hope that I’d been able to avoid going to the dentist for four years and escape without any major problems.

            She transitioned from filling my cavity to giving my second maxillary molar a root canal treatment. Effectively, this involved drilling out the top of the tooth the way major mining corporations do mountaintop removal. She dug out some pulp, got the tooth ready to be root canal-ed and filled it up with temporary filling. The whole time I couldn’t stop The Mountain Goats song “Source Decay” through my head, which felt strangely appropriate. When she was done she had Theresa schedule my next appointment. Through some strange twist of fate, Dr. Knox had a cancellation on Wednesday morning and I could have it instead of having to wait another two weeks.

            “Yes,” I said, way too enthusiastically for someone who was being scheduled to have a root canal in two days. I dwell. I’m a dweller. And anytime I can just get something out of the way the better because I don’t have time to dwell on it.

            I took a sick day Wednesday and got to ADT twenty minutes early at 8:10. I was in the chair at 8:20 and a dental assistant named Nettie got me prepped. I tried to expel fear but fear overtook me once Nettie put the numbing gel on my gum and it leaked all over my tongue. I received neither memory foam pillow nor sunglasses and maybe I would have asked if my mouth wasn’t filled with stuff. I should have asked for Nitrous Oxide too, the $83 charge be damned. In hindsight, remembering as little as possible from this experience would have been a positive thing. Instead, Dr. Knox got started and within minutes I got my first twinge signaling that I either wasn’t numb enough or they couldn’t numb my teeth and gums deep enough. I spent the next hour and a half white knuckling it, waiting for the next bafflingly agonizing twinge to come. It wasn’t really so bad, the pain, but the not knowing when the next one would come created a sort of psychological agony. I foolishly opened my eyes to see the files Dr. Knox was using to dig out the pulp of my tooth and that just made things worth. The scraping. The scraping! After that all I could think about was the “Is it safe?” scene from Marathon Man.

            After what felt like forever, Dr. Knox went to do something and left Nettie to take some X-rays of my mouth. She just couldn’t get it right and kept blasting tiny Hiroshimas at my face until she got someone else to help. The new dental assistant got it in one try. I began to truly hate Nettie at this point and knowing that I was at her mercy for the foreseeable future, I was ready to leave. I wasn’t, however, ready for Dr. Knox to come back and tell me that we had run out of time and she was going to wrap it up for the day. A root canal is pretty bad, but getting 2/3 of a root canal is even worse. She filled up the tooth and asked if I wanted anything for the pain and I nodded fiercely and she gave me a prescription for Vicodin. She told me that wouldn’t you know it, she had an opening on Friday and I took it. The sooner I could get this over with, the better. I got my prescription filled, went home, took a pill and spent the rest of the day trying not to dwell on the fact that I had to go back for more in two days.

            When Theresa came out and told me they were ready for me I almost wept. She looked like an angel. A sweet, tooth-repairing angel. She got me in the chair, made sure none of the numbing gel got into the rest of my mouth, and hooked me up with the memory foam pillow and shades. The dimming the shades provided relaxed me enough to become OK with the inevitability of pain. Sure there would be twinges, I thought to myself, but damnit it must be done. Dr. Knox came in and numbed me up and after a few minutes Theresa came in and asked how I was doing.

            “I’m getting a real Hawaiian feeling!” I said, referencing the other Mountain Goats song that had been running through my head during this week of procedures. Then came the lazy, stoned guitars of UK Surf version of the Pixies “Wave of Mutilation.” I tapped out the lacksidaisical drumbeat with my thumbs as Dr. Knox and Theresa the Dental Assistant dug out my tooth like it was no big deal. I felt nothing, and the psychological terror was diminished by the calm demeanors of Dentist and assistant and shades and the radio station they always have going that plays acoustic versions of 90s hits. I remember hearing Lisa Loeb doing an acoustic version of “Stay” and feeling incredibly relaxed. Before I knew it they were practically done and Theresa got the X-Ray in one go because she is a professional. They jammed a bunch of gutta-percha into the hole and closed it up.

Theresa had me sign something for the crown preparation and Dr. Knox sanded my tooth down to a nubbin. Theresa molded a temporary crown and fit it over my tooth and it took a solid hour to do all of this but it was no worse than a routine cleaning compared to the digging, scraping, twinge-ing, senseless radiation, and general panic of the root canal. I was in the chair for two and a half hours that day and when it was done I almost cried. Tears of joy! I wanted to tell Doctor Knox that I now understood and respected the modern miracle of dentistry and that I was a changed man. One who would brush more thoroughly, floss more than once daily, use a fluoride rinse, and come have my teeth cleaned by the twice a year (so long as I never had to deal with Nettie again because when you have doubts about someone’s abilities and they are working on an incredibly sensitive part of your body you really, really, really, really don’t want to do that ever again so help you God).

I learned my lesson. I tempted fate by thinking I could get away with avoiding the dentist for four years and when all is said in done the root canal and crown are going to cost almost $800. That is a 50-inch HDTV. 2 and a half Xbox 360s. Roughly 90 six-packs of delicious craft beer. 540 delicious beers! One student loan payment. Tickets for two for 16 Twins games (cheap seats). A month’s rent. Still, some lessons you have to learn first hand before you make sure you actually learn from them. If someone had told me what a root canal actually was and I knew my tooth would be filed down to a nubbin and replaced with a reinforced frankentooth, I might have taken better care of my teeth but I might not have too. Fortunately, I can get on an installment plan and it won’t be such a big deal, but it’s still money our perpetually broke household could really use. But if that’s what it takes for me to address the fact that I’m a grown ass man, then I suppose that is how it must be.

Long story short: Take care of your goddamn teeth. 

Laura Stevenson - Wheel

Laura Stevenson - Wheel

Don Giovanni, 2013

Hearing an artist make their first truly cohesive album is so wonderful. Where Laura Stevenson’s sophomore LP Sit Resist showed that she is a gifted at writing songs and melodies, the album’s inconsistency in style made it feel a little half done. But the melodies are so great I listened to that album a ton. Stevenson’s third album Wheel isn’t perfect, but it is easily going to crack my top 10 at the end of the year. And the fact that it’s not perfect is pretty much a compliment, because that’s what makes Laura Stevenson worth listening to. She could have gone and smoothed off all the rough edges and idiosyncrasies that make her so special and aimed for a more Standard Female Alt-Folk Singer approach (for some reason I am thinking she could be a Kathleen Edwards type and though I don’t want to know Ms. Edwards because I think she’s a fine singer/songwriter, Stevenson’s got the rootsy fiddles lurking all around this album and she’s got the pipes to pull off straight-forward alt-country chanteuse for sure) and make something that was totally boring. This sounds like an album that was demanding to be made. One where Stevenson had to exhaust herself playing catch-up with, and as a result it’s got this vital thread that runs through it and almost breaks your heart. It’s got sad songs that sound like sad songs and sad songs that sound like happy songs. It’s got heart. So much heart. It’s not a masterpiece, but it totally shows me that Stevenson has a masterpiece inside of her that is going to unfurl on album four or five. It’s just so obvious. Wheel sounds like swinging for the fences. It doesn’t matter if there’s contact—which there is plenty of, by the way—it’s the effort. She’s got those intangibles all sorts of analysts talk about when they’re judging rookie quarterbacks. Sometimes you can just tell when someone is great, or going to be great, or in the middle of becoming great, and I think Stevenson is that last one. Truly realizing what she is capable of an artist, a singer, a songwriter and a musician. It’s great.

Various Artists - Beserkley Chartbusters Volume 1

Various Artists – Beserkley Charbusters Volume 1

Beserkley, 1975

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $1.50

I bought this four Jonathan Richman tracks because all the Modern Lovers albums we got in at the store were way to expensive. The rest of the tunes by Earth Quake, Greg Kihn, and Rubinoos are pretty much standard power pop and tend to suffer (Earth Quake especially) from the cock rock tendencies of 1970s rock n’ roll. But the Jonathan Richman tracks are fantastic. I believe the versions of “Road Runner” and “Government Center” precede their definitive release on The Modern Lovers in 1976, and considering that those tracks are timeless monoliths of pop music, they sound great any way you spin them. “The New Teller” is one I had never heard and is pretty great and helped me realize that as long as I don’t listen to huge chunks of Jonathan Richman I really truly love him. Big chunks, like that one compilation of his Beserkley years I found at St. Louis Park and could never make it all the way through, not so much. But song by song he’s wonderful. Greg Kihn’s tracks aren’t half bad, but they do suffer from being little corny (but you know, it’s a sign of the times and the only way Richman avoids corniness is because he totally embraces it).

For Jason Molina

The back catalog Jason Molina is prolific to say the least, but my favorite thing he ever released was a little bonus CD that came with the vinyl pressing of Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Company. It’s a stolen favorite, because I was only really made aware of its existence by a tour diary John Vanderslice put up on his blog in the mid 00s that sung the disc’s praises. His entries routinely featured quotes from the album. Every single line lifted was the most sad, gorgeous, poignant thing I’d ever read.

Everything you hated me for

Honey, there was so much more
I just didn’t get busted

Right in the guts. That is a line that has stuck with me all these years and whenever I hear “Just be Simple,” whatever version, I always make sure to make the room or whomever I’m with quiet so I can let it hit me again. It haunts me over time, the way all of his songs haunt me over time. The way all of his songs are haunted and populated by ghosts and the blues. Lonely highways and the moon. Always the moon figuring prominently; a sort of mythical figure haunting the land, maintaining order in its coming and going.

Mama here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws

Looks like the big star’s about to fall

I have bonded with many men over Jason Molina. Our mutual appreciation is well known. We were the guys who would make a special effort to go to his shows every time he came through town. That weird looking guy with the huge eyebrows and either a t-shirt or a fancy button up western shirt with a bolo tie. Always with that huge beastly man with the curly hair rocking out next to him with a fundamental righteousness that made your spine tingle. As if his conviction gave all the songs that extra push they needed to break your heart. At their core these songs feel designed to be played solo by a sad lonely man with nothing but an acoustic guitar and the blues, but the backing band he’d found in Magnolia Electric Company his songs took on a violent power. They went from the blues to being straight up mythic. And sure Molina is dead now and his band dies with him but my memories of seeing them live all those times, just rocking out with such a beautiful purity, those memories are still so fresh and that’s where the sadness creeps in from.

Now count every rhododendron in this cool mountain light

I made more mistakes than that just tonight

So all of you folks in heaven not too busy ringing the bell

Some of us down here ain’t doing very well
Some of us with our windows open at the Southern Cross Motel

When a sad songwriter dies I feel like the instinct is to reevaluate his catalog. It’s not like any effort is required, it just becomes requisite every time you drop the needle. It’s obvious that there are much greater tragedies than the death of a man. In just this past week alone—a solid month plus since Molina’s death—there has been a marathon bombing and a fertilizer factory explosion. People die tragically every day and hopefully those people have someone there to mourn for them. I can’t help but mourn for Molina though I didn’t know him personally. His songs are his own little eulogy to himself now and while I feel like maybe some might read into them and look for a cry for help, I don’t know if Molina could have been helped. It’s a sweet concept but deep down some things are just so wrong they just eat you up and eventually destroy you. And it’s heartbreaking that Molina was eaten up and destroyed by alcoholism and I wish I could go back in Jeff Mangum’s would-be time machine and save him. We all do, I’m sure. Even if it meant giving up the tremendous catalog of blues with which he graced the world.