“What We Listen to and Why,” feat. Josh Buergel: A Discussion and a Playlist

Imagine our delight in learning that software engineer Josh Buergel was not only a boardgame designer, but a simultaneously mordant and self-effacing capsule writer and tireless curator of music at his Five Random Songs blog. Josh indulged BGS in an exploration of stuff we love—and how people and delicate circumstance pushed our listening lives in new directions.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: I began by de-digitizing my morning and making a mental note of the random song snippet that was in my head when I woke up. It seems to arise from the same part of my mind where anxious second voices offer unwanted running commentary, but it was a good track: "Santa Cruz" by Fatboy Slim. 

I've revisited several tracks from Better Living Through Chemistry and found them even stronger than I remember. I overdosed on hip hop between '87-'94, but the UK big beat stuff became a staple of my mid-late '90s listening because it recalled the thrill of discovering hip hop: those Big Beat producers loved breakbeats, scratches, punchy vocal samples.

There are worse ways to start a day. How did your musical day start off?

JOSH BUERGEL: I came to Fatboy Slim from a different direction, as I was a big fan of The Housemartins back in the day, so knowing that Fatboy Slim was Norman Cook made me more curious than I otherwise would have been. I was never a huge Big Beat guy. During that time period, I was mostly consumed with indie rock and noise rock, but I definitely sampled it here and there. 

I have to relate one of the dorkiest anecdotes I have: I was in debate in high school (that's not the dorky part, or at least, not all of it), which meant that I spent a fair bit of time hanging out with other high schoolers in motels with limited supervision. However, this didn't result in any of the bacchanalian hijinks that the movies of the time would have led me to expect. No, it mostly led to things like "gluing ceiling tiles back in place with spray cheese" and "teaching ourselves how to play bridge." 

One time, as we sat around a room listening to The Housemartins, a favorite among that group, we decided that we were going to record our own little cover of it. In the absence of proper recording equipment, we disassembled a headphone and secured it at the bottom of a lampshade, giving us a makeshift mic. We gathered around and did a shout-sing into a lampshade, recording straight to a cassette tape, belting out "Sheep" as best we could. Did it sound terrible? You know it. Did we have fun? Absolutely. Did we get yelled at to keep it down? I think you know the answer to that.

Anyway, my musical journey this morning began when I woke at 4 a.m. out of unspecific anxiety. As my unfocused mind tried to go back to sleep, it flipped through my mental songbook and settled on the punchy intro to the Slackers' "Every Day is Sunday” Not the whole song, mind you. Just that intro, looped into infinity like a klaxon for the world's coolest old-timey fire engine. It's reminiscent of the horrible old Wiseblood track, "Death Rape 2000": seven and a half minutes of three notes drilling their way into your skull. At least I didn't have that in my head, I suppose.

Where did you head after Big Beat? For me at least, I had to purge "Every Day is Sunday" by actually listening to the tune, and I headed from there to listen to the rest of the album, which is a treat.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Ah, remembering your penchant for ska guitar from my Five Random Songs listening. Hopefully that killed the earworm.

One note on Fatboy Slim and The Housemartins: I had London 0 Hull 4 on tape in high school and didn't uncover the connection until I'd been listening to breakbeats for several years. I hope you have that recording you made somewhere.

Mid-'90s to early aughts began my tutelage: My boss, Tim, and two of my colleagues, Michael and Sam, took me to school. There is no algorithm that will ever replicate the range and depth of stuff they turned me onto. And they'd do it in the coolest way possible: I'd hold forth on the handful of things I knew about, and they'd be like, "Yeah, I love that shit, but check this out." I knew a lot about a little. They knew the best five adjacent alternatives for everything I would rattle off. Electronic, psychedelia, punk and art punk, metal, jazz, garage rock, soul...

One of my favorite lessons: closing the bars one night and ending up at Sammy's place. I had a Photek CD I had just bought on the strength of a good review. The first track was good, and I was trying really hard to like the rest, it being well-reviewed and all. I tried to impress Sammy with it. It played for 30 seconds and he slurred, "We're not listenin' to this fuckin' porno music." Then he threw in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Eno and Byrne and just fucked my head up.

JOSH BUERGEL: Alas, I think that hotel-room Housemartins recording, scratchy and distant, is lost to time.

The value of a music guru in one's life cannot be overstated. In high school, as I began to develop actual music tastes and begin to explore what I might like, the closest thing I had to a local music guru was my oldest sister. And obviously, that was wildly unacceptable to a fourteen-year-old. This obstinate, rock-headed stance meant that I was slow to recognize that my sister's taste was really good, and led me to disdain The Clash and Elvis Costello for years. Youth is wasted on the dippest of shits.

I had friends in high school who were also exploring underground music. It was a challenge to find stuff in pre-internet days in Spokane, WA. The key guru in my life at that time was an anonymous dude that my debate partner (shut up!) and I met at a debate camp (SHUT UP!) at the University of California at Berkeley. 

As he lived in a far cooler part of the state, he had access to far more information about underground bands. When he caught us listening to Nitzer Ebb in the dorm while reading through newspapers for things we could egregiously take out of context, he started talking to us about industrial. It became clear that we didn't know a whole lot—sure, Nitzer Ebb and Nine Inch Nails, but those bands weren't hard to find. And we knew about Big Black, so that was pretty cool of us, comparatively anyway. Rather than disdain us as the hopeless busters we obviously were, he decided to educate us.

He wrote down a whole bunch of bands on a scrap of paper. Just off the top of his head, he threw down a canon of industrial and underground shit for us to track down, a Rosetta Stone, but for clattering noise and angry shouting. It became a quest for us find records from this list, some of which are still very much favorites. Einstürzende Neubauten, for one, was on the list, and they're not only absolute geniuses and one of my favorite ever bands, they're even still going. 

Foetus was on the list, and JG Thirlwell's catalog is untouchable. And that marks referencing his work in each of my installments thus far (he's half of Wiseblood). Coil was on the list, and God only knows how some random high schooler knew about them, but they rule and Horse Rotorvator is a stone-cold classic. And so we go. When I went off to college, I made sure that I got a transcription of the list to take with me, and I continued to hunt for records from it even then.

But beyond the actual contents of the list, which mostly ruled, what that list did was give me the courage to take shots on things. For whatever reason, prior to that point, I was cautious about buying new music and seeking new artists. I was eager for new sounds, but still conservative about things. I had to have some significant exposure to the music before I was willing to have a go. I gradually expanded my exposure to music, but at a slow-ish rate. The list, though, gave me permission to have a go at stuff based on vibes, a quick recommendation, a capsule review, a shared music label, whatever. Buying a blind record went from scary to thrilling, and that was a sea change in my relationship to music. My tastes exploded in that last year of high school and through college, fueled in the latter by getting involved with college radio and new friends big into music. But it all started with one guy at debate camp who made a list.

So, what's your list? You meet an eager kid, just starting to explore music, and want to blow them away. Who are your five acts that you want them to learn about?

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: To your point, you gotta grok what direction the kid's headed in if the recco's gonna stick. Cool recent story: Gal who works at the coffee shop I sometimes hit on Main St. Sweet kid, very talkative. Told me she was into classic jazz lately, “..like John Coltrane." After taking a couple seconds to process that fact, I got her to throw an Ella track on the shop's system—I was on a Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie kick at the time—and to keep an eye out for Lee Morgan, particularly Sidewinder. In hindsight, I'd tack Sidney Bechet, Hampton Hawes and Django in there for good measure, what the hell. That's five. That seems like a good exploratory starter kit for a young person who's receptive to jazz.

If it's out of their emotional frame of reference, it withers. Got another kid at the smoothie shop to listen to "Gates of Steel" by DEVO, but that's only because I found out during register chit-chat he didn't know who DEVO was, and I got all strident and weird and messianic about it. On the subsequent visit, found out he'd actually listened to it. He made some polite observations, but he didn't care about that shit. He didn't have a bridge to it. The bridge has to start on their side.

JOSH BUERGEL: It's my suspicion that for most people, it's basically impossible to predict what I'll call a breakthrough record. Once someone decides they like a genre or scene or whatever, they can and will explore freely within that genre, and will probably be pretty open to recommendations within that genre. The reason that list of bands worked for me is that I was already into industrial, so it was a way to explode that interest out in every direction. And sure, some of those bands pushed the envelope—to describe Foetus as like anything else is probably foolish—but those bands had a track record of appealing to fans in the genre, so it worked. But if that same list was presented to a kid who was mostly into what we called college rock at the time (R.E.M. and the like) or post-punk or new wave or whatever, it wouldn’t take.

There are blessed moments where a special record breaks through genres, knocks down the walls surrounding our tastes and shows us that we might love a different genre. I can name some of those records easily off the top of my head: Raising Hell showed me that I might love hip-hop (and Three Feet High and Rising and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back taught me I definitely did). Those three records are, of course, stone-cold classics, inner-circle hall of fame records that have been praised in every corner, and deservedly so. 

But the tricky thing about a breakthrough record is that there's no real way to predict it. An album has to hit someone with the right sound, at the right time, in the right mood. It's an alchemical process, pure serendipity, and the only way it's ever happened for me is just happenstance. I hear a thing in a store, on the radio, at a party, at a friend's house, wherever, and I get a blast of magic through my head. 

The album that cracked the door to punk open for me was Allroy's Revenge, by ALL (the band that descended from the Descendents). It hit me just right. I couldn't explain why, but it sounded great to me, and I made a copy of my friend's CD and listened to it a ton. That led me from there to other work by them, by the Descendents, other SST stuff, the Dead Kennedys, and on we go. But that breakthrough record? Nobody could have predicted it.

It's why, to this day, I just try stuff. Records that I don't know, bands that I don't know, genres I don't love (but might soon), all kinds of things. It's an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle again, and I'll never get tired of chasing that high. It's getting harder and harder for me as the years go on, but I'll never stop.

I got through all of that without saying I'm not qualified to talk about jazz. Not bad!

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: So, what track most recently created that serendipitous (and increasingly evasive) blast of magic out of nowhere for you? Let's hear it.

JOSH BUERGEL: Good question! I used to be kind of an off-and-on again metal guy. I always loved Metallica because I have ears. I really enjoyed Slayer after being curious why they were on Def Jam and getting my skull crushed by Reign in Blood. I learned about Napalm Death in college and just slowly added metal bands I followed gradually over the years. But I never really went out seeking things. Wasn't my scene, you see.

By 2013, that stable of metal bands that I liked had grown enough that I think most rational observers would conclude that I was a metal fan, but I still sort of resisted that notion. The record that pulled me over the line from "Yeah, I like some metal, but not a ton,” to "I suppose I'm a metal guy" was from Altar of Plagues. It got a nice writeup in the AV Club, so I picked up Teethed Glory and Injury. I was sitting in the parking lot of my son's preschool, having arrived early for pickup that day, and was listening to it in the car. It was riveting. Sure, I'd listened to black metal before and even enjoyed some of it, but the visceral impact of the album hit me just right. I got to "Burnt Year" and it all clicked. That song, in that parking lot, on that day, tipped me over. I became a metal guy.

I'm not sure I've been hit quite the same since then? The previous one I can really remember was when Easy Street Records in West Seattle put on "Up From The South" from the Budos Band in the store in 2005 while I was waiting for my table at the nearby Mashiko. It was instant love. I became rabid about soul instantly, especially the new wave of stuff at that time. I'd been at least an occasional soul listener, as any hip-hop fan sort of invariably is, but that record and moment really kicked it into overdrive. So, every eight years-ish I hit one of these on my own? 

Those aren't the only records I've fallen in love with over that time, of course, but those are time where my tastes shifted and came into focus, and my path of seeking music bent in some new direction.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: My revelations this summer came from revisiting bands that I could hear with new ears now that I'm no longer a teenager (well, not in most regards) and don't stridently base my whole identity on which group listens to what. With gentle nudges from two friends who pointed me at tracks I never listened to from For Those About to Rock, I spent about two weeks this summer, mostly drunk, just listening to Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, Motorhead and AC/DC. I went after grainy concert videos. Weird late-night showcases like Don Kirshner's Rock Concert salvaged from the VHS collections of diligent obsessives. Listened to stuff other than the handful of tracks that FM radio ground into the dirt.

I was like that Ford exec in Ford vs Ferrari when Damon's character took him for a little spin in the monster he and his fellow senior brass had commissioned, but hadn't experienced. It's a great scene. He was weeping at the end: "I had no idea!"

The last instance was something like that divine visitation. I was legless in my kitchen, somewhere in the temporal warp between midnight and false dawn. The accent lights I placed all over my kitchen transformed its hideous and dated surfaces into an ethereal rock club. I think I listened to "Southern Girls" by Cheap Trick 15 times in a row. Each replay my brain was picking out new small touches that made it work: the pristine backing vocal melody on the chorus, the way Rick Nielsen's reverb-y tricks over Bun E. Carlos' lunchbucket drum intro make you salivate for that first big downstroke chord. The joy was absolute.

I used to think I'd go watch the Battle of Hastings or see Charlie Parker play at Harlem clubs if I had a time machine. Give me that option today? I'd just rewind a few weeks and do that night again.

JOSH BUERGEL: The point about not caring who listens to what is certainly one of those gifts we gain with age, and it's without a doubt a valuable one. Young Josh wouldn't be caught dead listening to country (Uncle Tupelo didn't count, maaaaan). My dad always derided the stuff, which was omnipresent in eastern Washington, and I certainly absorbed his contempt. And while I haven't come around on pop country at all (it's bad), learning more about country has been a nice journey. I'm certainly not well-versed or anything, but there's some outstanding music out there, and I don't even flinch at the sound of a twang anymore.

Broadly, I think there's a lesson there that only took decades to sink in, which is if something has stood the test of time and still appeals to people, there's probably something of value there. And it's worth seeking that value and learning about it, not just to see if it's for you, but even to acknowledge that it's there. 

Plenty of stuff will come and go, not really have much of a legacy. But if it did and found an audience, "Why?" is a great question to ask. Why do people still get amped by AC/DC? Why does Cheap Trick still sound like a million bucks today? You can unpack the micro, like you are, and find brilliance at that level. You can let the macro wash over you, let out a little "Fuck yeah.” Doesn't really matter, because if you pay attention, you can hear the quality, and it'll click.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Yep. Speaking of which, you deserve to know that your efforts with Five Random Songs were not wasted on me. You're one of my Music Influencers, as proven by the fact I now have several tracks from The Fiery Furnaces on rotation and have for a couple years. At the time, it was lost on me in the hipster noise coming out of Brooklyn, but one night I hit Play on your site's embedded player...and I was sold.

So, good job, Mr. Save Stuff from the Cultural Memory Hole.

-FINIS-

Probing Clutchy McGritterson’s Tender Parts: A Discussion and a Playlist

Twitter’s Clutchy McGritterson is my favorite kind of Midwestern Gen Xer: brilliant and irascible, hypergraphic and quite approachable beneath all the barbs. A disarming mix of clear-eyed fatalism and modesty that arises from either fundamental Ohioan decency or towering self-hatred. I think there is an army of McGrittersons — sensitive, bright, insightful, middle-aged Xers, lashed to desks at office parks doing jobs they’re extremely good at, but who are resolutely unsentimental about how those desks connect to the skein of deep economic and cultural rot that is 21st Century America.

Anyway, I reached out to Clutch for an interview when I realized he had a guitar, liked effects pedals, had deep crates in his head and pointed opinions for every inclusion in them.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: So, I listened to some indie rock in the ‘90s, but I’m still mining the era and coming up with tracks that make me feel less like a mandarin and more like a tourist.

I actually saw Built to Spill on Colfax Ave. in Denver in the ‘90s, but I don’t remember it. I was gobbling pain pills and booze. My little sister and her fiancee were there, but they complained about the sound and left.

But a few weeks ago, the algorithm led me to Built to Spill’s “Goin’ Against Your Mind,” and it’s one of the most tremendous things I’ve ever heard. How was I deaf to this?

CLUTCHY McGRITTERSON: I mentioned the other day I've always operated under the assumption that anyone who likes this band also likes Superchunk. They feel very much the same to me. I like the idea of them having a Piedmont/Snake River Valley feud like the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalry. I wonder what a Superchunk diss track would sound like. I hope it sounds like "Slack Motherfucker" and has a line as good as "relax, sit down, I'll kick that stool right out from under you" in it.

I was never a huge Built to Spill fan back in the day. Part of that is just timing, but I am a little surprised I've never revisited them. I know I heard There's Nothing Wrong With Love whenever it came out (1994? 1995?) because I had friends that liked it, but it must have missed me entirely.  I went back and listened to that record again a couple days ago and I can get why.  1994/1995, I was listening to a bunch of industrial stuff. A lot of Joy Division, too.  Now, this song actually isn't too far afield from that in some kind of post-punky way, but at the time I think it mattered to me a lot more how the thing actually sounded, whether or not it had the right "vibe" or whatever.  For a long time (really, until I started listening to a lot of Ministry and Coil, in particular), I thought the ideal band was a three-piece.  I didn't really respect bands that had two guitar players, let alone something crazy like a keyboard or, God forbid, a horn section. That kind of rigidity was still present in my thinking about music even after I branched out a little bit, started to understand that not all bands had to sound like Husker Du, Minutemen and Wipers.  And I liked Bowie and Devo well enough, but they weren't the same thing.  A band could be fun, and I might even like them, the music might be beautiful or fascinating, but they weren't serious.

And I was very fuckin' serious during that little slice of the mid-90s. Also, pretty unforgiving. If I heard a song I didn't like, I would just write a band off entirely. That kept me from listening to a few bands over the years. Just the bad luck of hearing a song that didn't do anything for me. And a lot of those particular songs still don't. Like, I always thought "Get It On" was a dumb song when I was a kid, so I spent the first 30 years of my life thinking I hated T Rex.  I still think it's a dumb song, but any band that can make a record like Electric Warrior is fine with me, even if I don't like a couple of the tracks. You can't tell me "Monolith" isn't badass.

Anyway, now, Built To Spill feels like a less methy Modest Mouse. Had I heard early Modest Mouse first, there's a decent chance I would have liked Built To Spill more at the time. Like I said, it takes me a while to really grasp things sometimes, and the connections aren't always obvious to me.  I never understood what Joy Division was up to until I started listening to my neighbor's old Stooges records and really got into Eno-era Bowie. In any case, Modest Mouse really hit for me in 1996 or so in a way Built To Spill didn't. I reckon this probably had to do with the “Interstate 8” EP being incredible, me getting a little older, having my heart torn out a couple times, spending some time couch surfing around the Rust Belt and living in my car off and on for a bit, etc. The world will do interesting things to you, if you'll just let it.

Even though I'm not so familiar with Built To Spill, I've actually heard a lot of Doug Martsch because he got together with Calvin Johnson and made those Halo Benders records. Those I've listened to a lot. If you haven't heard them, check out "Virginia Reel Around The Fountain". Assuming you can handle Calvin Johnson's voice and, uh, interesting lyrics, I think you'll like it. Weird-ass band, all over the place. But they cranked out some real gems. Martsch is a hell of a guitar player, actually. Listening to "Goin' Against Your Mind" again as I'm writing this, and it's getting harder to understand why I never revisited these guys.

I will say this song is too long. I don't mind long songs, but this one does not need to be this long. I think the last minute and a half (the last verse and chorus) are superfluous, musically. Lyrically, maybe not. I'm just saying I would have given this one a hard stop at about 7:35 or so. I think it would've been a better ending. Maybe I should send the band my notes, help them out. I'd lay off the high-pitched bit over the instrumental in the beginning, too. The second lead bit, not the first one, maybe a minute in? Sounds like the keys and vocals in that My Morning Jacket song I can't remember the name of, but that I recall, for some reason, was in an episode of American Dad. Meh.

I've probably typed too much. Bad habit. Do you know what hypergraphia is? If there's an equivalent condition involving mechanical keyboards, I may have it. Why do you think I tweet so much?

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: I have now been on a weird cycle where I only listen to tracks from Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak and a smattering of late-Classical masters: Liszt, Chopin, Shostokavich.

What are you listening to tonight? Why?

CLUTCHY McGRITTERSON: Thin Lizzy is great. I have been looking for a replacement for Twitter ever since The Boys Are Back In Town bot went down.

I heard a lot of Liszt as a kid. My mom likes Liszt. Out of those three, I prefer Shostakovich. An author I like wrote a (fictional) book where Shostakovich was a main character. William T. Vollmann, Europe Central. I'm not sure if I can recommend it or not, it's not an easy read. Although it might be less surreal than most of his other work. Among other things, it's about some moral choices people might make when living through crisis, and the amorality that sets crises in motion. Set in Germany and the USSR in the mid-20th century. An interesting read, and if nothing else you should read Vollmann because the FBI once thought he might be the Unabomber.

Lately the thing I've been mildly obsessed with, and was listening to earlier this evening, has been this Wipers record.

Earlier today I was thinking about Nirvana's cover of D-7 because I listened to the original version earlier this week.  I'm thinking Nirvana probably should have just covered this whole record.  

There's some alternate universe where The Cars ended up more punk than new wave, and they would've sounded a bit like Wipers. 

It's somehow hard to believe that Greg Sage was already nearly 30 when he made this record. Maybe that's why it seems to be a bit better assembled than some of its late 70s/early 80s punk-ish contemporaries.  A little more thought out, a little less predictable.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY:

• ‘Boys are Back in Town,” that little bass fill dude does on the first few bars…*chef’s kiss*

• So…I have only been listening to Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2”; the melodic progression is beguiling, it hurts my heart, there are no virtuoso parts, but it’s so gorgeous

• Please listen to “Skyliner” by the Charlie Barnet Orchestra

Its funny you brought up The Cars, because I always think about how they prefigured the durability of The Strokes: the smartest blend of new wave/punk and instinctual pop-rock songwriting. Ocasek standing there, bored, in his mirrored sunglasses; Ben Orr capturing the camera because he was gorgeous; and the best guitarist in the universe, Elliot Easton, never getting any camera time.

I note you post pics of your axes and effects pedals once in a while. What are you playing these days? Why? Have you made a cool new sound you’re proud of? How did you do it?

CLUTCHY McGRITTERSON: I eventually got to the point where I could play that little [Thin Lizzy, “The Boys are Back in Town”] bass fill. Used to annoy my jangle-pop college-rock bandmates by playing it at inappropriate times (our lead guitarist appreciated it, at least. He'd start playing Aerosmith songs when he got tired of the whiny R.E.M.-lite that our other guitarist always insisted on playing).

Hearing that waltz reminds me that most people can't guess what instrument I played in concert band in school... It was, of course, the oboe. Feels like I've heard that waltz in a bunch of things. Some commercial lately, for one.

I don't know as much about big band music as I should. This stuff is good. And speaking of things it feels like I've heard before, this sounds really familiar but I have no idea why. My mom used to listen to a lot of this stuff when I was a little kid, maybe that's why I know it.

Re: Elliot Easton. It's tough being the third-most-popular guy in the band.

I always thought Ocasek did some genius producing for a couple other bands. Do The Collapse was jarring for long-time GBV fans, but they never could have made that version of “Teenage FBI” without Ocasek. 

Re: guitars and equipment.

I have never made any sound I am proud of that wasn't entirely accidental. I've actually written a couple things lately that weren't half bad by my standards, but the only one I tried to record a few weeks back met the same fate as the rest of my recorded output: deleted. Not nearly as satisfying as when I used to burn the reel-to-reel tapes when I got sick of them. I don't know, it's not like I'm recording things for anyone else to hear, anyway.  I commented recently that, 25 years ago, the things I tried to record sounded like shitty, everyone-on-too-much-drugs-to-sound-good Velvet Underground outtakes. Now, I've progressed to making shitty Television knock-offs. Progress?

Lately, I've been playing a lot of baritone guitar. I don't know, could just be that the slightly longer neck is easier for my giant sausage fingers to handle. The pedal I'm most fond of right now is the Hologram Effects Microcosm.

So, anyway, I end up just sitting around for hours and playing stuff that sounds like background music from No Man's Sky. Big, echoey, bleepy.

I've been trying to get it to play along nice with my other favorite new toy from KinotoneAudio.

Honestly, the interface on that Ribbons pedal is the most confusing fucking thing I've ever dealt with. Anything cool I do with it feels accidental. I need to spend more time with it.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: OK, this feels like the piece de resistance (or coup de grace) from this conversation because a) I don’t have enough Guided by Voices coming up in my shuffle these days b) I didn’t realize Ocasek produced a whole slab for them.

So I’m pretty monomaniacal with my listening, inured to suggestions with rare exception, but I played this whole MFer tonight and it was Just What I Needed.

Good pull. Thank you, Clutch.

-FINIS-

Talking Musical Outliers with Novelist Jonathan Evison: A Discussion and a Playlist

Novelist and all-around golden human being Jonathan Evison indulged me in a months-long back-and-forth about songs we love that aren't necessarily in genres we listen to a lot.

Also discussed: the velocity of subculture co-option, the joys of being a kid in Seattle and S.F. during the heyday of American Hardcore, and shit that makes us cry.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: one-offs on my lifetime playlist. Genre breakers.

Example: Def Leppard's "Photograph," which is one of my top 100 songs of all time in any genre. But I can't sit through any of their other songs and I'm definitely not sticking around if you think we're listening to the Scorpions or some shit after that.

JONATHAN EVISON: I never liked any of that roller-rink metal, but now I find it nostalgic. I have a soft spot for the anthemic bangers that speak to teenage angst. The stupider the lyrics, the better. Quiet Riot's Metal Health, for instance:

"I'm like a laser, six-string razor, I've got a mouth like an alligator...bang your head! Metal health will drive you mad!"

I mean, how can you not love that? And it goes to eleven!

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: I dated this girl in Denver a long time ago who knew all the indie bands and 24-year-old me was gobsmacked when she put on Ratt’s “Round and Round” in the car one day. 

I was like, “Why?”

“Because it’s beautiful,” she said. I quietly marked that as a demerit, but turns out she was right.

And speaking of silly lyrics, probably the my favorite YouTube comment of all time, posted in the comment thread of selfsame song: “he never tells us why”

And I thought, “Kid’s got a point. Tell us why, Stephen Pearcy.” But he’s not going to because whatever, it’s time for the next verse now. I like picturing some dude from the band (or some flogged-half-to-death writer from the label stables) tapping his notepad furiously with the pen at 2:32 a.m. He’s got “I’ll tell you why” and he’s straining for a payoff, there’s 50 different crossed-out lines beneath it, but at the end he’s just “fuck it” and turns in the lyrics.

Or maybe he did come up with it, but they realized the chorus was one line too long and they just cut the song like it was. Who cares why when you’ve got an advance, a studio deadline to hit, and the A&R dude just came through with a chunk of flywing the size of a healthy walnut.

JONATHAN EVISON: I'm actually sorta pissed off that you made me spend the better part of my morning contemplating the lyrics to "Round and Round," which are as indecipherable (to me, anyway) as anything you'll find on a papyrus scroll. 

And let me just say that revisiting the video (apologies to Milton Berle) didn't clarify matters much. My lone observation here is that our spurned lover sure does talk a tough game for a guy who just raided Olivia Newton John's wardrobe. 

Hair metal fashion has always confused me in this way. If we're talking about the New York Dolls or Bowie, I can contextualize the androgynous stylings associated with glam. I get it. But once we throw machismo into the mix, I'm profoundly confused by the messaging. There is nothing remotely menacing to me about a scrawny dude in red Capezios and silver yoga pants traipsing around in a fog of Aquanet. 

How do I resolve this fashion statement with the lyrics of, say, Warrant's "Cherry Pie?" I guess in order to answer that question, we'd need to delve into the symbolic interactionist framework of masculine individualism, and I'm not sure I'm ready to do that after only two cups of coffee.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: The quick-cut style of ‘80s videos sure helped the lead man a lot. All the presence of a log.

Yes, the insane cultural alchemy of hair metal was to steal the glam look and somehow talk about chicks and partying enough so that your high school's lacrosse team captain and the heshers would go for it. I was into hardcore at the time. I wouldn’t listen to anything else. Seemed to me that the puissance of Minor Threat and Charged G.B.H. came much more honestly. 

I remember watching the videos for bands like Ratt and I never understood how such flimsy theatrics and preening were a trigger to let loose, go “Fuck yeah!” Adored nonetheless by certain macho peers who would hip check me and call me a faggot during passing period. It’s a hell of a stew, J.

But here was the cool thing about getting a tad older: I got to re-encounter some of the music on my own terms — when I was no longer burdened with the social identity overlay — and my own time. It’s nice to be surprised by things you thought you knew.

Summers home from college, The Moms got me a job at The Denver Post printing plant. I was a duckling and they put me behind the wheel of a twin-speed split-axle truck from midnight-6 and 10 p.m.-4 a.m. with one night of training, which consisted of me lapping the plant once in first gear (during which I threw it into reverse, giving my trainer the fantods). We delivered to the deliverers who assembled predawn at 20-odd district stations across the city. There was only the radio, so I listened. The R&B station was fucking up one night on I-70 East, so I switched over to 103.5 The Fox, and “Give Me All Your Loving” by ZZ Top came on.

It was one-something in the morning. I listened again to Beard’s efficient timekeeping and the guitars (especially the way they layered the rhythm guitar on Gibbons’ opening lead). And producer David Ham adds this synth to give it more heft and movement and space; just the right daub of lacquer on a ‘70s blues rock band that was in danger of fading away, and I was like, “This is a great fucking song.”

I’d forgotten I was just supposed to hate it because I used to hate the people that listened to it.

I still listen to it.

JONATHAN EVISON: Yeah, I started with the hardcore in the early '80s, too. Had a fanzine, and a band (March of Crimes) who actually played with G.B.H. back in 1982 or '83. I partied my fourteen-year-old ass off with Jock, Ross, Colin, and Wilf in a hotel room after the show. Actually stayed in touch with those guys for like ten years afterward, they were fun. 

The Seattle scene was uniquely un-stratified back then, a lot of metalheads and goth kids and mods and punks all hung out together at the all-ages clubs: the Metropolis, Graven Image, Gray Door, Monroes, the Eagles Nest, and a bunch of other places that came and went fast. My old man lived in the Bay Area, so I'd go down to San Francisco in the summers and hang out at Mabuhay Gardens, On Broadway, etc, and it was a much different scene. 

You had your mods hanging out front with their scooters, your skinheads along one wall, your leather punks along another wall, your straight-edgers in their little clique. The kids didn't seem to mix as much as we did up north, where we had no self-consciousness about our place in the context of the larger culture. 

Of course that all changed six or seven years later when the A&R guys showed up and started signing everybody. A lot of my friends became rock stars. By the early '90s, the Seattle scene was a tourist attraction. Not that it wasn't vital as hell, it just lost something when it lost that backwater innocence, when we were just a bunch of bored, energetic, and yes, angry kids sounding our barbaric yawp in musty little basement venues with no real sense of possibility as to what any of it meant to anyone besides ourselves. Sigh.

I feel bad for the teenagers today. The idea of organically developing any kind of vital subculture seems like it isn't even a possibility anymore. The corporate algorithm would eat it up five seconds after its genesis. Culture accelerates. As recently as 20 years ago, The Man was still a couple years behind the underground. Go back 50 years, and they were a good five years behind the underground. Think about it, Coca-Cola taught the world to sing six years after the Monterey Pop festival, which the real hippies will tell you was the apex of ‘60s counter-culture. The Summer of Love and Woodstock were afterthoughts. At that point the hippies were profiting off themselves. Fuck, I don't really know where I'm going with this, but globalism blows. I miss regional culture.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Dude. You opened for Charged G.B.H.? I’m more jealous of that than even your literary plaudits.

OK, I’ll bite. Please reply with your favorite song by them. I know mine, but I want to see what you pick.

JONATHAN EVISON: That's a tough one, prolly something off of Leather, Bristles, Studs, and Acne. To tell the truth, I was more into the OC sound: Adolescents, Descendents, Bad Religion, Agent Orange, Angry Samoans, etc . . .

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Ahhhh, well I’ll step into that gap: It’s “Race Against Time.” Heard it on one of those Punk & Disorderly comps and it changed my life.

JONATHAN EVISON: Yeah, I need to pick up those Punk & Disorderly comps. I've managed to replace most of the seminal comps: Let Them Eat Jelly Beans; Not So Quiet on the Western Front; the Rodney on the ROQs; Rat Music for Rat People; This is Boston, Not L.A. You know i have a stupid big record collection, right? Thousands across all genres. Finally have a place to keep them all!

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Glorious. Any outliers in there?

I inherited my Pops’ vinyl. He had his outliers, too, which stood in high relief as he was a withering music snob — which I also inherited. I tend my own playlist like some kind of radicalized anchorite and harbor violent feelings about most other people’s choices in music.

In the midst of all that world music and fusion and jazz and Little Feat in the boxes he gave me, I found a Bel Biv Devoe 12”. I even brought it up later (he gave me most of his collection years before he passed).

“You like Bel Biv Devoe?” I asked him.

“I like the way they harmonize.”

That was all he said about it.

JONATHAN EVISON: Hmm. It's difficult to think of an outlier in a collection that covers so much musical ground. I've got thirty-odd peach crates that each hold about 120 records, and pretty much every conceivable genre is covered, at least summarily. 

If I'm understanding the context of outlier here, I'd have to pick something in my collection that I love in spite of everything going against it, like, say, Nino Tempo and April Stevens' “Deep Purple,” which is about as vanilla as anything in the Lawrence Welk catalog, and yet, I find it irresistible with its perky vocal interplay and laxative-smooth commercial sheen. Think “The Fleetwoods meet Donnie and Marie in a world made of cotton candy.” 

Ridiculously, the recording earned the 1965 Grammy for "Best Rock and Roll Record," though it is about as rock and roll as a marshmallow cream sandwich. Still, it gets my toe tapping every time, and makes me want to share an ice cream sundae with my girl.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: This is an effervescent little confection. I’m down with it. Forgot that ‘60s-‘70s technique of having the singer do a sad or flirty speech on the bridge. Bellissima.

My biggest outlier crept into my ears two years ago and has now burrowed into my bones.

So you remember the era about a decade ago when bacon was in everything and niche marketing agency founders were wearing tweed driving caps and starting new firms called Cupcakes & Strategy and shit. I hated all that shit, particularly the indie Americana, which usually drove me right out of the room.

But this one popped up on my music app a few years ago. Kept it because while it sounded a little too third-generation Neil Young, I liked his voice, the simple chords, and the weeping guitar they use to play the lead melody. Then it kept coming up last summer, when the stars aligned and I hit the “lose your job, girl, and mind” rural trifecta, it would come up on nights when I was drowning myself in brown liquor on the patio and watching the moon and clouds change all night, and the hook was set.

Both the original by Songs: Ohia and the elegiac tribute cover by Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee are burned into me. If I’m in my cups, it is not unknown for me to break down in sobs by the time the “Mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws” line hits. The whole-body sadness and incandescence with which Katie Crutchfield belts and lilts her verses makes this an all-night repeater.

But to the earlier point. This is not somebody’s cue to start playing this genre all night. Not an indie folk fan. I’m a This Song fan.

JONATHAN EVISON: Yeah, I love that song, that whole Songs: Ohia record kills me, all the more so knowing the way things ended for Jason Molina. Man, there are SO MANY songs that make me cry every time I hear them (and I don't even need to be gooned), sometimes because I have such strong associations with them — like, say, anything off of Carol King's Tapestry because it was one of my sister's favorite records when she died at 16, along with Don McLean's American Pie, but often just because songs are so achingly beautiful they trigger that emotional response in me. 

I could be in the fucking supermarket, and they could be playing Sammi Smith's version of "City of New Orleans", and I will mist over without fail because my mom used to sing me that song when I was a toddler. Or, you know, that "Three is a Magic Number" Schoolhouse Rock song, because when my son (now 13 and officially a mean-ager), used to sit in my lap when he was a baby and I'd play him that Schoolhouse Rock video on the laptop over and over, and man, he loved when that big football player crashed through the wall, and oh, the fullness I felt at finally being a dad. 

Or take Leonard Cohen: I mean, vocally the guy has the emotional range of a sump pump. If you're just listening to the music, he literally sounds like a guy burning his arms with hot candle wax in a cold water flat somewhere. But the words! My god, the guy can write about despair in a way that rings so damn true that I'll just start weeping every time I stop to listen. This, to me, is maybe the great gift of music: its ability to register emotionally in unexpected ways. 

I think it is actually fair to say that music informs my writing more than books. This also might explain why my works are so wide-ranging tonally and structurally, because my musical tastes are all over the map. I love soul, punk rock, classic country, alt-country, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, zydeco, dub, ska, rockabilly, doo-wop, you name it, and that genre will be well-represented in my stacks. And even on a sentence level, music is my barometer. I don't wanna work every damn sentence until it's black and blue trying to achieve that "luminous" effect, I just want the words to swing, you know?

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Returning to something you said earlier about the joys of being in a scene in the pre-digital era and the accelerated cycles by which things are co-opted — I was thinking about the upside to this: the profusion and breadth that accompanies this speed. You can still only fit so much in a human brain or pump so much shit into a culture blog timeline, and there are so many scenes and so much content and niche weirdness that multiplies just as fast as “sell $20K worth of shirts I made with a meme that blew up this morning.” Like zooming into the Mandelbrot Set, there’s always some hilarious piece of coastline nobody’s ruined yet.

And, of course, the power of forgetfulness. I play in the puddles of the digital firehose still, digging back, back and under. Sometimes I share an old guitar swing song with a Zoomer friend on Twitter and it blows their fucking mind.

My latest project has been mining the thrash revival stuff from about 2008-2013 — this flared in and out of existence so fast — while I was in my tryouts to be a husband and stepdad — I barely caught a glimpse of it until three years ago. And that’s how I learned about Obscene Extreme, the music fest put on by this Czech dude who started it as a lark for his birthday and is now going decades strong. You can go to a former battlefield in the Czech Republic and buy absinthe lemonade and smell absolutely as bad as you want and the promoter makes every band agree to let the fans run around on stage whenever they want.

He won’t book venues in the U.S. because they’re too lame and expensive and he won’t agree to the clauses that let their rent-a-gorillas do whatever they want to a fan who dares cross the stupid barricades they put up.

My friend: This shit is not over.

P.S. There’s another clip somewhere of these girls’ set where the costumes get even weirder and some guy gets up there with a large custom box he made, wearing a lab coat and writhing as if the thing in the box were electrocuting him or giving him ecstatic seizures. That’s the only clip I’ve found of this event where security has a presence. Couple staff intercepted him like, “Dude, we can’t do the mad scientist box thing today, sorry,” and dude politely dismounted.

JONATHAN EVISON: Hahaha! How can I not love it? It sounds like G.B.H. with a deranged muppet singing. I dig what you're proposing about the upside of speed and iteration in cultural acceleration, and I think it is a hopeful take. 

Please don't make me consider any more fractals, though — math was never my strong suit (I admire its elegance, but it gives me a headache). As a guy who spends most of his time in the woods, I find myself feeling a little besieged by all of this; not so much by the permutations themselves, but the rapidity of them. I'm a guy who likes context, and it seems to get harder and harder to find one's bearings in a TikTok world. 

Don't get me started on technology and Late Capitalism. My mania is through the roof, so my whole goal in life is to slow down, which is why I've been self-medicating with beer and weed since I was fourteen years old, and why I've managed never to go off the deep end with addiction, because it has never been about the high for me, more about finding an equilibrium. Like context, I yearn for clarity, and its hard to find when your brain feels like it was shot out of a fucking cannon. And it's not that I don't like unpredictability. I'm not that old yet. If you were to ask me what that equilibrium might sound like right now, if I could ever achieve it, it would probably sound something like this:

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: One day I will locate your mountain redoubt with some brown liquor and I don’t give a fuck if we listen to anything but Slim & Slam all night because I love everything I’ve ever heard by them, together or separately. What inviolable joy.

But yeah: Sometimes I’ll knock a beer and a shot down at The Trinidad Lounge when it opens at 4 p.m., but I get out after that because a) I have not yet interacted with the local gendarmes and have no desire to b) I ache for The Temple.

The Temple is when I throw on the six strategically placed LED accent lights in my hideous kitchen, set them on a whimsical and soothing color, and uncork whatever I have around. Finally I can detach and Listen to One Thing and Only Think About One Thing. The wind tunnel of unwanted input and useless, bifurcating thought falls quiet. I can sit in the middle of this one thing, this song, and for just a few hours it is both the absolute center and far boundaries of my consciousness.

I’m good and buzzed by now, a patient sifter. Nothing except the glittering salvage. It feels both reverent and virtuous to wonder if Billy Idol's Rebel Yell LP had any good non-hits on it because the Gen X version of 'Dancing With Myself' was fine in its original incarnation and nobody needs to hear the stupid, boring title track ever again. So I listen to the whole damn thing. And there’re two of them! What plunder! “Blue Highway” and “(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows,” and I marvel at the production muscle they armed him with, and Sweet Mother of God, did his axe man have command of that instrument. It did whatever he wanted. And they have him overdub himself on the later choruses, adding glissading, dying-bird tremolos and controlled, clipped rockabilly fills — sometimes I laugh out loud at how ungodly slick it is. It’s borderline shameless.

It’s maybe the 10th replay?

I don’t know. 

Who cares? 

My patio is now the observation deck of a starship and I can see the gods’ blueprints and their deliverables, all at once, all overlaid and not a screw loose and I can’t tell the difference between the craft in which I am borne and myself.

The rest of the week is just bullshit by comparison.

JONATHAN EVISON: I would go one step further than "borderline shameless" and just call it shameless. I like the song, and I don't always object to blatant overproduction, but for me, it's an "if the shoe fits, wear it" argument — ergo, if we're talking about Huey Lewis and the News, go ahead, overproduce your heart out. 

But with regard to anything with (ostensibly) punk rock or counter-culture roots, it's often a bridge too far for me. In short, I would much prefer a Jack Endino remaster of "(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows" to the glaringly slick, albeit proficient, excess exhibited here. But then, I thought G.B.H. was overproduced. 

On the flipside, some of my favorite "budget rock" bands, like, say, The Mummies, would in my estimation benefit from better production. My problem with the moniker "budget rock" is that I know from experience that it is very possible to produce sonically appealing (and highly apropos) recordings on zero budget, whereas some of the Mummies records are purposefully produced to sound like somebody dropped a ghetto blaster in an aquarium, which is its own sort of artifice. If I had my druthers, every Mummies recording would sound like this:

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: I have been using YouTube Music for a couple of years because — while file quality and volume can vary aggravatingly — I’m more likely to find the weird remixes and mashups on which I fixate, unlike Spotify et al. And I couldn’t find the Jack Endino track you mentioned, not even on YT Music, so this seems as good a point as any to say, “You stumped me, sensei.”

Before we go, the floor is yours: What should readers of this interview do next to support your fine work?

JONATHAN EVISON: Haha, no! Such a recording does not exist. That's my point! I'd much prefer "(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows" were it produced by Jack Endino rather than someone from the Mutt Lange school. I like my punk rock with a little hair on it, you know? Not muddy, mind you, just sonically unbridled without any slick veneer. I want my layering natural, and I don't want any range compression or a bunch of multi-tracking. 

Gimme the live sound, performance-wise. Same with my soul music. Some of those late '60s soul sides are as punk rock as anything the Stooges or MC5 were laying down. Like this, for instance:

Dig the room sound, the slightly off-key horns, those trashcan lid drums, that wobbly, weaving bass, and of course, Lee Moses's singular, off-the-rails vocal barbarism. Put it all together in real time and it just sounds like a bash I wanna be at.

Ok, my books. Thanks for asking. I don't talk about them until people make me. There's a bunch of them, eight now, I think. Go buy them, so I can keep spending all this money on tequila and records. 

If you want literary ambition, maybe start with Small World, or if you want humor and pathos, maybe try Lawn Boy (the second most banned book in America the past couple years), or The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (and no, I didn't have anything to do with the film version with Paul Rudd, but it was a cute film). If you like cave people sex and survivalist stories, maybe try Legends of the North Cascades. Old ladies on cruises? Try This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Bodybuilding Twins? All About Lulu. Novels about place? Try West of Here.

Just buy them, because as you know, wax ain't getting any cheaper and I can't drink bottom shelf liquor!

-finis-