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-

Hearing Pianos from Different Rooms: A Discussion and a Playlist

When a piano makes a chord, how far can it echo through your tissues?

To find out, I enlisted @TheJK — Breakup Gaming Society's Chief Spiritual Officer and author of the excellent Me Being Serious newsletter, which tracks both I Ching and cultural currents — for an interview.

We began with this quote I found in Hampton Hawes’ autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, and just went from there.

The piano was the only sure friend I had because it was the only thing that was consistent, always made sense and responded directly to what I did. Pianos don’t ever change. Sittin’ there every day. You wanna play me, here I am. The D is still here, the A flat’s still here, they’re always going to be there and it don’t matter whether it’s Sunday, Ash Wednesday or the Fourth of July. Play it right and it comes out right; mess with it and it’ll make you back up. A piano don’t lie. Check the prancing players with the sparkles in their eyes and the pretty fingernails flashing up and down the keyboard — listen closely and that’s all there is, just flash and icing, no more depth or meaning than a wood chip dancing down a waterfall. A keyboard is more consistent than life, it gives you back what you put into it, no more, no less. In the forties Bud Powell had grease in his veins and burned the motherfucker up; Thelonious Monk plays it strange and beautiful because he feels strange and beautiful. The piano was the first secure and honest thing in my life, I could approach it on my own and fail or be good. Straight to the point and quick.

THE JK: That's interesting about "It gives you back what you put into it." To me, the piano is a movie instrument. It's like a film camera.

You can say any instrument can paint a picture, but a piano with the right fingers can create sudden suspense, peace, or chaos (many will say any instrument can do this, and that's fine).

Other instruments, to me, often feel like they announce themselves coming and going more than a piano does. A piano feels slippery, and sneaky.

If piano was a planet, to me, it'd be Mercury. It can trick, it can communicate, it can be incredibly fast, it can be malleable.

Electric guitar or drums I'd probably say belonged to Mars. The microphone to the Sun, a sampler, like an MPC, to Saturn, since it can deconstruct and manipulate the dead.

But, piano, I'd say belonged to Mercury.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: OK, that was a lot to chew on and I want to get into some of this with you. I also love the piano, and know you to be both a serious head and a cerebral person. 

But I’ve noticed that while we share that reverence for music, a lot of the stuff — even within genres we both love, like hip hop and jazz — we gravitate to is wildly different. Like when I get drunk and text you all those random tracks and am stunned to learn that I was not, in fact, listening with your ears. 

I like the boogie and swing and stride. You like the fusion and funk and experimental stuff.

So what piano song these days is painting the trickiest pictures for you these days? 

Or help me understand a piano song you think of as classically mercurial and cinematic.

THE JK: Yeah, we do have different tastes with that.

There's nothing new at the moment that comes to mind, but I thought about some older stuff:

That DJ Premier beat sounds like a tiger creeping through an NYC alley.

Or for piano used a bit differently, you have "Runaway" by Kanye West.

There was an original version that doesn't have the buildup, but the album version has a plink that keeps hitting like a drop of water in the sink until the rest of the song comes rushing in.

As far as cinematic, the first thing that comes to mind is an actual movie (my favorite movie of all time): Eyes Wide Shut and this song: 

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: When you started talking about piano snippets in Golden Era joints, the first thing that bubbled up in my head was “Hip Hop Rules” by Boogie Down Productions off their Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop LP. It’s funny, not to oversimplify, but I feel like I’m drawn to the percussive qualities of the left hand while you’re thinking about how the right hand leads and makes moods.

Speaking of which, I haven’t watched Eyes Wide Shut since its theater release, but I do remember that piano figure that keeps repeating — it definitely seemed to carry the themes of menace and alienation in the movie. Halting, haunting, spare.

I had a buddy who was a true polymath who could write and play for piano and guitar. One summer he taught me how to pound out simple left-hand octaves with my left hand and mirror them with three-finger chords and he was always like, “Remember, the piano is a percussion instrument.”

One night we got wrecked in my folks’ home in Park Hill when they were gone somewhere and he videotaped us pulling off some stupid duet where I played the one thing I could do with the technique he taught me and he just effortlessly followed along. I didn’t have any knowledge, but I did have rhythm, and we just knocked the living hell out of that basic-ass melody until past midnight and that was probably one of the best nights of my life.

THE JK: Honestly, Return of The Boom Bap is probably the KRS album I return to the most, so I wasn't familiar with that song, but it's good. 

That is interesting, especially if the left and right hands serve different purposes while playing, because I wasn't aware of that. I dropped out of my piano class (along with many other classes) in college.

That's also interesting about the percussive instrument stuff. 

It sounds like a good time. I don't have any first-person stories like that, but my grandfather used to tell me his dad would play the piano drunk, sing songs in Austrian (or Czech, or Slovak, I don't know which one my family was using) and put his arm around him on some "My son!" shit.

That's one thing about piano, I guess, as shown by your story: It can be a collaborative instrument.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: We were piss poor on the farm in Missouri, but The Moms did have a piano. She tried to teach me. I was lazy and I quit. The plodding folk melodies in the beginner’s books blinded me with boredom. Trying to read the sheet music. Quarter notes, half beats, all the notation…it made me insane. I just wanted to boogie.

But before I ever got sat down for a lesson, I have this memory of approaching the keyboard with “Yankee Doodle” in my head. So I thought I was just going to sit down and play that shit. I started pecking at the keys thinking it was just going to come out. I was horrified at what I heard. How could this be? Why couldn’t I just bang out the song? So I think that’s one of the things that spoke to me in the Hawes passage, that envy of someone who can just sit down in front of that tool and work it, make what’s happening in their head happen with the keys and pedals.

I cannot tell you the size of the impression that hearing boogie woogie made on me when they’d play it during evening programs on the radio on whatever NPR affiliate my parents liked. I was transfixed. I revistied the giants of the ‘30s — Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Meade Luxe Lewis — and I not only was still in love with it, but it started a growing sense in my mind that maybe I belonged to that time and not here. It leapt out the speakers with such immediacy that I swear I could understand being in the room the day it was made.

And back to that left hand: eight beats to the bar like a jackhammer, never tiresome in its repeating (well, because the right hand flourishes bring the melody out and the soloing was…basically rock and roll, except it’s 1938 or something). Like Freddie Slack said in “Down the Road a Piece,” “If you want boogie woogie, then you’ll get your fill/It’ll put the eight beats through you like an old steam drill.” That’s what happened. I am still marked by it and still return to it weekly and I love it so much it hurts me.

When people treat old jazz like ambient brunch music or lazy cultural shorthand or irrelevant, it makes me feel very lonely, it feels like I’m the only person alive in the room.

THE JK: Yeah, sheet music is a little too much for me. It feels like math. And this is coming from someone that dedicated their life to the I Ching.

I feel you, but I think we all have one talent or skill that would cause someone else to say "Wow," if they saw us putting it into action. Not to discount any masterful piano players or anything, I just think we all got a little something.

That's interesting you can pinpoint when exactly it was that the instrument put you in a headlock. I'm not sure I can do that.

I think a lot of people don't realize just how many styles of jazz are out there when they look at it that way. Of course, it's all dependent on personal tastes. There's a lot of masters in the past, but if the style isn't my kind of jazz, it won't really resonate.

Rap album liner notes were my gateway drug, and it led me to people like Ahmad Jamal.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Yes, tracing samples back through time is crazy fun. That’s why I think I may get one more tattoo before I die: the Beatnuts logo, which they lifted off the Hank Mobley “Turnaround” LP. It’s all right there: the spirit of jazz and hip hop in one beautiful, organic, swirling arrow. (Funny side note: When “U Can’t Touch This” broke, did you ever meet anybody who heard that song before they heard “Superfreak” and they were like, “Heyyyy, he stole that from Hammer!” XD XD XD). I guess we could get on a different thread about the vanishing of historical awareness, but yeah.

So Ahmad Jamal. He algorthimed into my rotation last year. Now we’re back at the piano. 

My jam by him is “Poinciana” from a live ’58 recording. It’s miced exquisitely. The percussion is so crisp and warm at once. I kept it in my Likes because it is fairly long and it defied my expectations of what a ’58 cut would be: minute after minute, I’m waiting for the piano or a lead sax to erupt in solo, but it…just keeps gliding and gliding with subtle fillips here and there to keep you tickled. Patient and buoyant. Full of light. I love that song.

THE JK: I didn't realize they got their logo from that. Haa, I was only three years old when "U Can't Touch This" came out, and while I knew of the song when it dropped, I wasn't privy to those kinds of conversations. I did, however, get my uncles ribbing me about all of the stuff Puffy sampled in the late '90s, like "Kashmir."

I don't know that one off the top of my head, but I may have heard it. I don't know if there's someone I'd rather hear on the piano than him. 

It made me remember, though, that in my producing days I think I sampled him on this track I did for a friend: 

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Wait a goddamn minute. 

Did you just cap this with an original beat? Was not ready for that. God bless you. That’s a good loop.

One final question: you said drum and sampler energy issued from fundamentally different planets. So which planet belongs to the TR808 kick drum? Does it reside in the MPC/sampler bucket, the drum bucket, or does it have a star of its own? Your ruling will be accepted as final for purposes of this conversation.

THE JK: Thank you, man.

Haa, I mean, I'd say the sampler is a Saturnian device, but the 808 sound itself, I'd still say is a Mars thing. There's a reason crunk music threw that shit into everything. It's an inciting sound. 

It's a Martian ghost summoned by a Roland Ouija board, possessing us with the same conflict that caused the apocalyptic event that turned that planet into a red desert that billionaire neo-feudalists lust over.

-finis-