| july
7
|
What is the big freaking deal with Frannie & Zooey? I needed some reading material for the flight home from D.C. this weekend and picked through mom's books until I came across F&Z in her bookcase and borrowed it. (I'm shocked that it looks essentially unread -- spine in fine shape, no tears or bends, just her college dorm address label in the inside front page.) Then again, maybe this should have tipped me off that F&Z, despite being trumpeted all over the place as Salinger's next best thing, is essentially nothing special. I mean, it's the belabored tale of a gorgeous college co-ed in the 50s and her equally gorgeous older brother (we know they are gorgeous because Salinger insists on telling us this). Said sister, Frannie, has taken to heart a religious tome and is now mumbling prayers to herself, and Zooey is about to try and make a stab at snapping her out of it. All of this takes place in an upper-middle-class washed-out WASP-y atmosphere of privilege and unreal reality (I expect someone to be wearing a beaver coat a la 1920s) in which people make a big damn deal about going down to Greenwich Village and say "Goddam" a lot. And smoke. And smoke. And smoke. Jeez, do they smoke. At least it's a fast read.
So I went home for July 4. The train seemed in danger of being shut down and yet was also too expensive, so I got a cheap flight and actually flew to D.C. for the first time in years. The shortest part of the trip is the air flight -- 34 minutes -- while it takes 54 minutes to get from D.C. Metro to Shady Grove Metro; 15 minutes from mom's house to Metro, and about 15 minutes from my place to LaGuardia. But the whole thing was $140, so you really can't sneeze at it. I left early on the 4th -- 8am -- and by noon I was at the local pool with mom and Larry, and it all felt very unreal, as if I'd just popped into another neighborhood. Two hours door to door is pretty darned good. Initially I'd just wanted some hotdogs and burgers (fake for me, real for them) on the grill and a trip to the fireworks, and somehow that turned into: Me, Larry, Mom, Craig, Kris (see below), Kris's mom Jennifer, Lynda, Jill (mom's friend from her ex-work who kind of needs assistance in finding a social life), Suzanne, Gershon (Suzanne's 20+ senior boyfriend, which makes him, like, 81) and Buddie. Suddenly, it was a major do. So we only got a few hours at the pool, which was lovely -- I hadn't had proper chlorine immersion in a long time, and it had been even longer since I'd been on a diving board. However, 10 feet is just not very deep when you're diving; I scraped up the knuckles of my toes pushing off the bottom after a deep dive. Still, there's nothing more peaceful than going all the way under and being a dolphin for those few seconds until your lungs give out. We sunned and swam and ate pretzels and drank water and then had to get home for the major party. I also had my mini-Martha Stewart project to finish -- frosted cupcakes. I'd made the cakes the night before at home, hauled them to Maryland and frosted them with a) dessicated coconut b) red sprinkles c) blue sprinkles d) star sprinkles and made a "flag" out of the grouping. So. We had a grouping of people who either a) knew each other and loved one another b) knew one another and couldn't stand each other and c) had never met before, which made things a little volatile. Buddie gets more and more agoraphobic and self-absorbed by the day, which tends to limit her conversation to grousing and complaining and being a grumpy old fart. She's the same age as Gershon, and he's fairly dynamic (despite not being able to hear everything) and that appeared to piss her off, because she's all but a shut-in of her own design and he's a go-getter with a girlfriend and a life. So Buddie spent most of the evening making oblique comments about Craig being heavy and me not being married. (I'd rather be not married, personally.) Craig decided that since Kris's (story: they were working mortgages and she called him for some reason from her office in Arizona, that turned into emails and finally she moved here last year which is why he missed Thanksgiving -- he was helping her move) mom was coming to visit, he would ask Kris to marry him to make his intentions clear. So my not-quite-30-year-old-brother is engaged. For the second time. Yeah. So. But Kris seems nice. She's in her mid-20s and I'm not sure what kind of read to get on her; she seems quiet around everyone. Lynda and I taught her the Movie Game (name a movie. name an actor in that movie. name another movie that actor's in. and so on) and learned her favorite movie is Steel Magnolias. I told her that was a good movie, despite Julia Roberts's presence. That was the main concrete thing I got from her. Meanwhile, her mother is relatively bubbly and did agree with me that when she was a kid, "Jennifer" was a pretty rare name, whereas these days I think every third female child and some male ones have it. So Jill came over with way too much extra food, we ate and drank Lynda's white Merlot and Mom and Jill took Buddie home before the fireworks and we all met up at the fairgrounds, where a band was playing a mix of covers pre-fireworks. Mom and I danced to some of the tunes, and I bought those little glowsticky tubes you can bend into bracelets and distributed. The fireworks were, as always, loud and bright and beautiful and never quite long enough. They played patriotic songs during them and we all discoverd that despite generational and educational system differences, we all had variations on lyrics to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The ride home was less enjoyable -- despite our prime parking location it took for....ev....er. And I crashed in the car; Lynda's wonderful but the drugs she's on keep her peppy way past all sense and reason, so I zoned until we got home. She and I sat up until 1am watching this fab documentary I first saw when Steve and I were still dating: Dr. Death: The Rise And Fall of Fred Leuchter Jr., then she left in the morning to head into work. The rest of the weekend was taken up with visiting Buddie, going out bowling with Rebecca (man, I suck -- but we made up fake names for the scoring page and I got to be Rocket J. Squirrel while she was Bullwinkle, and I was Marge to her Homer). And I had one project to attend to.
I think I went to Yesterday & Today Records (new site: here) for the first time when I was 15. It wasn't long after I met Jez and Jerry (Jez pictured above) in high school, and I was impressed by the fact that not only did they have the new Wham! album, but they had it in a special plastic bag holder. So one day after school we drove -- I sense that Valerie and Melissa were with us -- out to Rockville and they walked me into this tiny store at the end of a strip mall. It had a smell. Of records, of must, of sweat, of personality. It had albums, damn, it was -- as Salinger might have put it -- lousy with albums. This was pre-CDs and tapes, as we all knew were for losers. A good mix tape trumped a bought cassette tape any day. So we were all about the singles and the albums. And within the bowels of Y&T over the years I learned about collectible records -- and 45 singles. There was colored vinyl, there were extra tracks. There were 45s that ran on 33rpm, there were small local labels, there was something called "indie" records, which meant more than just independently released, it meant a kind of sound. There were 12 inches and 10 inches, there were picture disks. And most importantly, in the days before the record stores were international and named Tower and HMV and Virgin, there were imports. Stuff direct from the shores of England, personally imported by the owner. It was Hi-Fidelity, just like the movie, sort of. The clerks were surly and yet knowledgable, they were too cool for us. (And it wasn't until a few years later I learned just how cool they were.) Most everything there was used, and what wasn't was imported. They'd play a track for you if you asked nicely. And everything was divided up into sections with white card dividers that had been written on in black ink -- no pre-printed labels. It was small. You had to squeeze by other patrons. And that was just the main store. The secondary store, which you had to walk out of the main store to get into the store next door, was all singles. (In later years the owner knocked down the dividing section and now it's all one biggish room, but for a while that secondary office was like a library. Quiet. Reflective. Covered in posters from floor to ceiling. For a time you could buy some of those posters -- I wallpapered my room with various images of beautiful effeminiate Brits (Scritti Politti, Howard Jones, Depeche Mode) and hardier looking rockers (Steve Winwood, Crowded House) bit by bit. Prior to this, music stores to me were Harmony Hut; Waxie Maxies -- sterile organized environments in which you'd find something if it was common, but don't try a real challenge. And don't ask to have a song played.
Summer after my freshman year at college, I needed some kind of job. By that time I'd been coming in for a few years, and was back at home without my own car, going to Montgomery College to take a summer Spanish course, without any access to cash and champing at the bit for a little freedom -- Mom was still asking me to lock the door when I left the house in the morning, which made my fillings hurt. Anyhow, I had to make some kind of money to just get around and along and the owner, Skip, who I'd gotten to know over the years, suggested I work there. Now, I knew I wasn't nearly cool enough nor did I have the requisite musical historical knowledge, but I grabbed at it. So for that summer, I was a Y&T employee, along with some of D.C.'s greatest musicians, although I didn't fully appreciate it at the time. As I understand things, Y&T opened in 1977 as punk was really starting to take over. Skip, the owner, produced a few records by local band the Slickee Boys, and created Limp Records to release them (that was a play on the seminal English punk label Stiff, heh). From that, local musicians who were underage and unable to get into clubs picked places here and there to hang out, and his place became one of them. When Ian MacKaye and some of his contemporaries wanted to release some hardcore punk singles, Skip lent a hand in setting up Dischord Records in the early 1980s, produced some records, sold the records in the store, and for a while let the store be the record label's address. Ian's early efforts -- Minor Threat -- led to Fugazi, which was just forming when I started working in 1988. He and fellow Fugazian Guy (pronounced the French way) were working there that summer, along with another Dischord band member, Amy of Fire Party. Those three, along with a former member of local band The Razz (excellent songster Tommy Keene got his start with The Razz), Ted Nicelely, worked there (Ted was manager). There was also a silent, taciturn other manager named Dave who I think knew I was the idiot in the bunch, and treated me accordingly. The summer was a blur of filing records, running the register, learning that Cathal Coughlin came from Microdisney (among other connections) and trying not to be intimidated by shaven-headed Ian (who was actually very nice) and Guy (who was much more easy-going). Skip wasn't there all the time, and often had me in the back room shrink-wrapping imports (you put the record in between two sheets of plastic, set it in a metal frame, pressed the frame down, which heated, and you got a loosely-sealed album. Then you took a super-hot hairdryer thing and the plastic shrunk around the album. That was kind of cool. I inventoried back there; even then Skip was planning on going into mail-order. I also (I'm ashamed to admit it, but here it is) occasionally lifted a record I wanted but couldn't afford. I think I'm more moral now, but I was a little shit about it then. Anyway, I got stuck back there a lot, which I figured was my due, since I didn't know much about helping customers find obscure things. Turns out (well, Skip says now) that he rarely let anyone work in the back room but did it 'cause he could trust me. Shit. I really need to do some karma work on that one. But at the time, I was alone and it got boring sitting back there. I remember one particular incident, which taught me about judging books and covers, or rather musicians and albums -- Ian was making some comment one day about Ted Nugent, who to me is one of the big losers of rock and roll (these days more for his stance on various political issues, rather than music), and I made a joke about how Ian couldn't possibly like Ted, or some such thing, and Ian rushed to Ted's defense. He was serious. He was a fan. And in its own way, that made Ian even cooler than he already was. He would defend crap music -- and that maybe meant the music wasn't so crap after all. What I remember best, though, was being able to play all this new music and play it frequently enough that you got a feel for it and learned how wonderful bands like Prefab Sprout were. I got really into INXS; WHFS the radio station was still very, very wonderful and we'd have some kind of music playing all day. When I was in the singles record shop I would pull out stuff that looked interesting and play it for myself; I got into Hot House Flowers that way. One day I was in the back filing some stuff with Skip and a guy came in to sell some CDs (this was probably a summer later). One of them was The Alan Parsons' Project I, Robot. Skip didn't want it. I waited until he turned it down, then made an offer and landed a cheap CD. Skip gave me a stink eye over it, but didn't object too hard. I got $5.25 an hour. Tax-free, cash at the end of the day. Yeah, it was a great job. Later on, when I started writing a big long fiction book, I decided to have part of it take place in a record store -- and used Y&T as the backdrop. And as a nod to the owner, I called the owner Skippy. Man, that'd be cool if that story got published for no other reason than that. I went back at least once pretty much every visit I ever made to Maryland, and got friendly with Skip. He's one of those guys you have to get to know, but once you do he's terribly warm and generous. (He let me have my 10 percent employee discount even after I stopped working there.) Ted and he had a falling out and after a brief stint at culinary school, Ted now produces records for indie bands; other musicians came and worked and left in the store and I met them when I came to visit -- Archie and Jim from Velocity Girl, to name a few -- and Ian and Guy and Fugazi took off and are still recording records. But they're not well known except by those who know the scene and the achievement that Dischord is: Ian sticks to bare-bones indie musicianship after all these years -- his shows are all ages, and last I checked still cost $5 to go to. He gave me an interview when I was still in college when he wouldn't talk to anyone else. Yeah, Ian's very cool. I have total respect for hm. Dave -- dunno where Dave went, don't care. Skip got married and had a kid and she's now 11. They're often in the store helping out when I come to visit. But. All of this to say that Skip has finally decided to close the old store down. He's had the lease for 25 years, and is going to go full-time on the mail order, which he says he's doing quite well with.
And though it pains me to see it go, I suppose it is time. You can get just about whatever music you want on the Internet or via Ebay these days, and slowly mom and pop stores are becoming passe -- which I think they were some time ago, but specialty stores like Skip's catered to the kind of music that the big stores didn't care about. And these days, small bands can get their start selling records on their own web sites. So when it goes, it'll probably be time. And that'll be in September. So I got Alternative Press to let me do a short article, and if I'm lucky I'll get a piece in another paper or two -- because it's a milestone for me, of course, but for so many others in so many ways. If I'm lucky, former Black Flag/Rollins Band man Henry Rollins will provide me with a quote: Skip says early on Henry would help out around the store because he couldn't wait to get his hands on the new English product. I did part of an interview on Sunday while Skip helped out with customers, and he showed me a bunch of photos and articles he'd saved over the years. This was a favorite, from the Washington Post. Date: January 22, 1989:
The "Henry Garfield" is Henry Rollins, before he changed his name. And there's Ian. Skip's quoted towards the end. And here's the photo which accompanied the article:
And there's Henry front and center. Says Skip, "There's no reason he should even be in that photo -- he wasn't really that punk." But apparently the Haagen Daaz downtown was a big hangout, and that's where Rollins did work, and that's probably where the Post reporter found them all. So I'll write my little article, go down memory lane, and watch as a piece of the past shutters its doors. They might have a closing down party in September. I'll go back for that. Skip thinks Henry and I would hit it off great. "You'd be like Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson for punks," he said. Or something like that. Skip always does have those funny ideas. |
