track 29: hello cruel world

It was the summer of 1992, my hair was dyed black and one of my favorite musicians, Tori Amos, was playing a shoe at the Carefree Theatre in West Palm Beach for her Little Earthquakes tour on August 16. It would be a while before Tori would be playing at giant arenas. I wanted desperately to see her play and my Mom and Dave agreed to go with me since, quite frankly, I didn't have any friends. Or at least any who'd be interested in going. Actually, no, no friends. No job, either. I went in for an interview some place and ended up spending two days canvassing Homestead with a group of environmental activists campaigning to save the Everglades. I had very little idea what I was doing with them and it was obvious after the second day when they said, "maybe not." Anyway, we decided to make a weekend out of it, driving up, seeing the show, staying in a hotel and heading back the next day. It was a huge bonus for me because it meant a weekend away from home and the stepfather.

Once there, we find the theatre, which is a small place, about the size of my high school's auditorium. Maybe a bit larger, but not much. Inside, there are a couple of guys passing out cassettes, samplers of the opening act. It wasn't until the opening act took the stage that I realized that the guys at the door were up there: A man with the unlikely name of Parthenon Huxley and a man called E.



I think his band consisted of him (on a keyboard, looking on at Tori's piano with envy), Parthenon and maybe one other guy. He played a set of melodic pop that was both funny and heartbreaking all at once. A lot like my life. Audience members shouted out requests at one point, one of them being "Have you never been mellow?" E was great, though and my mom & Dave liked him a lot more than Tori. The next day, on our way out of town, we stop at a Peaches record store and pick up the cassette of A Man Called E, which becomes one of my favorite albums ever.



hello cruel world
so this is you
a broken heart
but with a view
i'm looking out to face another day
the angry mob
the happy mass
this birthday cake
may be the last
i'm looking out to find another way
Norman Rockwell colors fade
all my favorite things have changed
but what the hell
hello cruel world

It was love at first taste and I completely identified with E's outlook, "Fitting in the with the misfits," "Are you and me gonna happen" and "You'll be the scarecrow" are constants in my ipod. I even wrote him a fan letter and in it wrote something like "thank you for NOT playing 'Have you never been mellow'!" He responded with an autographed photo that said "Rick- Have U never been mellow? -E." which to this day is taped to my wall at home.

One week after the show, Hurricane Andrew was on its way to Miami. Everyone was hunkering down for the worst. I remember the last thing I did before the storm hit was shave my head. My hair was down to my shoulders, which made the awful heat worse than it was already, and like I said, dyed black. When I tried to re-color it red, I ended up with red roots and... black hair. Tried to bleach it and got this insane rainbow effect. Shaving my head was the only solution. Then August 24th Andrew hits Miami. Luckily, our house was fine. Our neighborhood is powerless for a few days, trees are down but nothing too awful. My stepfather's cousins, who lived in Homestead, where the storm hit the hardest, completely lost their house. We take them in and all live together for a few months.



When E's second album, Broken Toy Shop came out, I picked it up immediately, stupidly on cassette. If anyone out there wants to drop $100 for a copy from amazon, I'll send you my mailing address! Then he disappears for a while, only to resurface in 1996 as the leader of a band called The Eels, singing "Novocaine for the soul" on MTV. I get their debut, Beautiful Freak and don't like it much. I like Electro-Shock Blues somewhat more and keep compulsively buying their music for years despite never really loving it. Until I'm in my 30s, living in New York and my flatmate gives me a promo of their best of collection, Meet the Eels and the rarities album, Useless Trinkets. Maybe listening to the music with an older, more experienced pair of ears allowed me to really understand it, to connect more. But it connected deeply and I've rediscovered a lot of the older Eels songs since.



Reading E's (ok Mark Oliver Everett's) book, Things the Grandchildren Should Know this year really made me an eternal fan. Once again, his ability to combine humor and sadness is something I admire and even identify with. I connected to that book in a way that in turn allowed me to make an even deeper connection with the music. I had always wondered how E had gone from A Man Called E to "Novocaine for the soul." I think get it now. Ha.

Click here to see the video for my favorite Eels track, "Last stop: this town"!

liner notes: this is my life and it's nice to be able to wade in it...

"Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it." -Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Just a quick note to say that I'm totally open to feedback. If you're out there, if anyone is reading this... Is it pointless to add links to Amazon for MP3s when pretty much everyone would much rather use iTunes? More videos? More salacious personal details? Regardless, I hope people are enjoying this blog because even if I have no audience, I'm going to keep this up. It's enlightening and even comforting to revisit these old memories and hopefully share music with others... If you do like what you see, please check out a website I help run, pop culture crazed Pictures and Frames Magazine.

xxoo
rick

track 28: ghost of a texas ladies man b/w someday?

Spring of 1992. I'm at Sound Warehouse (WHY do I want to type "Sound Wherehouse" every time?? Can I get some confirmation on this? It was on Kendall Drive and is now a Bed Bath & Beyond...) with my dad, browsing. The way that I do. At this point I am still in school, but unemployed. The previous fall, I had what I now know to be THE GREATEST JOB EVER. In fact, now that I think about it, I may have been back during that spring, I'm not sure. The job was simple, customer-free and I could listen to music the whole time. You know when you're in school and you have the whole fundraising thing where you get catalogs and try to sell stuff- usually Christmas or Easter time- tins with candy or stuffed animals, etcetera? My job was going through the order sheets, finding the merchandise in the warehouse and filling up bags and boxes properly. Another plus? There were like three employees and two of them were friends of my mom, which is how I got the job. It was fun at the time, but in retrospect, total bliss and a piece of cake. But sadly, a seasonal gig.



Anyway, if I wasn't picking up Easter shifts there, I was either saving my allowance or saving up my lunch money by eating snack machine food. At the music store, I see the CD single for a new Concrete Blonde song called "Ghost of a Texas ladies' man." And I think "meh" (only not because that word wasn't in usage yet) because if you read my entry about "Joey", you may recall that I wasn't so crazy about Bloodletting. However, it also has their cover of "Everybody knows" on it. I had the soundtrack to the film Pump Up the Volume on cassette and loved that song. I buy it. I find myself really liking "Ghost." I also like the remix of "Bloodletting (the vampire song)." And their cover of Nick Cave's "The ship song." In fact, I like it all. I give another listen to Bloodletting and find myself enjoying it more than before.





Cut to March 10, 1992. I'm out at Dadeland Mall with my mom, Dave & his friend Nick. We browse through another music store and right at the front, in the new releases and just out that day is Walking in London. I buy it and... I LOVE IT. From the single to "Someday?" and "Long time ago" the whole album just rocks. It becomes all I listen to. I go out and find the two earlier albums, Concrete Blonde and what would end up being my very favorite CB album, Free. There was just something about Johnette Napolitano's voice, the stories she told in her songs, that suddenly clicked with me.



After that, Concrete Blonde has always been one of my favorite bands. My very favorite bands, up there with Bic Runga, Travis, Indigo Girls and Aimee Mann/'til tuesday. Not just, "oh I love them." I LOVE them. I had to have anything I could find by them, every single, every rarity. T-shirts? Yes please! Baseball cap? Uh-huh. I even wanted to get a tattoo of the sun/moon art that graces the cover of Free and Walking in London. But I never got to see them play. The album after London would be their last (for a long while) as they went their separate ways. Which is why it always kills me that in high school, when Kristi and I were going to go see Sting, with Concrete Blonde opening, we changed our minds and saw Slaughter and Poison instead. WHY??!?!?!?? Since then, I've followed Johnette's career through the many projects she worked on in between Concrete Blonde and her eventual solo album, Scarred.

It's interesting to me that a band who I had shrugged off a year earlier, could suddenly become my biggest obsession. What's funny is that it would happen again. A couple of times, most recently with singer/songwriter Regina Spektor. But the next time it happened on a much bigger scale.

track 27: silent all these years

Another morning getting ready for school, in the spring of 1992, I catch a music video and am struck by how different it is; Different sort of song, different sort of video, different sort of girl. Not as conventionally pretty as the usual MTV girl. Pale, with red curly hair and singing a song accompanied only by piano called “Silent all these years.” That was my first taste of Tori Amos.



Soon I picked up the cassette single on an outing with my dad. Oddly enough, I also picked up the single for “hit” by the Sugarcubes that day, my first taste of Björk! I liked Tori more. At the time I probably identified somewhat with the song. I had a stepfather that I didn't like, who could be kind of a dick (I got the antichrist in the kitchen yelling at me again), so in a way I think I spent a lot of my time on tiptoe trying to avoid any interaction with him and keeping my frustrations to myself (my scream got lost in a paper cup/think there's a heaven where some screams have gone?) and so I spent a lot of time writing and discovering ways to express my thoughts on paper rather than out loud (sometimes i hear my voice and it's been here/silent all these years). So one day rode the bus(es) down to South Beach to visit a record store I’d gone to once with Raul and Michelle. It was called Uncle Sam’s Music Café. Music store/café? Cool. I went there hoping to find Little Earthquakes and succeeded.



I remember playing it when I got home. It felt amazing. It felt the way I did when I discovered Sinéad O’Connor and later on, Joni Mitchell’s Blue. It seemed as thought this singer/songwriter had actually gone further than any of the ones I knew, bared even more of her soul. I connected with her music so immediately and became devoted to her at once. Her next two albums, Under the Pink and Boys for Pele are the sort of albums I impatiently rushed out to buy on the days of their release. As time went on, Tori’s music has gotten a bit loopier and I’ve found myself being a fan more of her individual songs than complete albums. However the first three discs are a part of me forever.

b-side: hit

On the day I bought the single for "Silent all these years" I also picked up one for a song called "Hit" by Icelandic band The Sugarcubes. I was crazy about the song and played it over and over again. The b-side, called "Thief" not so much. What I didn't know at the time was that it was my first exposure to one of the few contemporary musicians I now consider to be a bona fide genius: Björk.

track 26: big sky country

In the fall of 1991, my mom, Dave and I went to the Miami Seaquarium for a music festival. "Snake" of Skid Row would be there, signing autographs, and Julian Lennon would be there, too. Unfortunately, it wasn't made clear that Julian wasn't performing and there were some pretty pissed off people literally heckling him as he signed.

I don't remember anything much about the musicians who actually played, other than this guy who got up on stage and sang these bluesy rock songs, Chris Whitley.. He was this insanely skinny guy, singing these gorgeous, sort of mournful almost country-ish songs up on stage and I was totally transifxed. I even talked to him after his set and asked to get a picture with him. Dork.



A few months later, for Christmas, I received a copy of his album, Living with the Law. My Favorite song off of the album was "Big sky country." I also loved "Kick the stones" and "Poison girl." His music was more new territory for me. I had never heard of his most likely precursor, Stevie Ray Vaughn, or anything blues related before. My singer/songwriter tastes tended more towards female singers, and it would be another year or so before Jeff Buckley would appear with "Last goodbye" to sweep me off of my feet. Living with the Law is definitely another one of the albums I appreciate more as I grow older. Oddly enough, I never listened to any of his other albums, despite the fact that he continued recording and to great critical acclaim.



Chris Whitley passed away quite unexpectedly in 2005 and I remember finding out when I went to Academy Records on 18th street in Manhattan. They had an article taped to their front door about Chris passing away (and another for someone else who'd recently died). It was hard to believe he could have died- he was only 45 years old. Here's a video of him performing "Big sky country" in 2002:



Here's a link to the 1991 music video for "Big sky country" in which Chris looks just as I remembered him at the show.

And then there is this, which is just uncomfortable from start to finish... In 1991, Chris appeared on Arsenio Hall's show to sing the song and was introduced by Sinbad. The introduction is so awkward and Chris looks a bit bewildered to be there at all.

track 25: love... thy will be done b/w gett off

In the fall of 1991, I started going to school at MDCC. I took pretty general classes, with a slight focus on English. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. All I really wanted to do was keep writing. I began to take public transportation for the first time. Unlike New York City's mostly reliable transit system, Miami's was a real mess. The buses were unreliable, few and far between. It was only two to get to MDCC and the timing for the transfer was pretty good, unlike years later, when I worked at Barnes & Noble in Kendall and often got to the first stop five minutes after my second bus left, leaving me stranded for another hour. So in the mornings, after I was all ready and waiting to go out for my bus, I'd often have the TV set on. At some point, it would be on AMC- back when they showed truly classic movies. That was how I discovered one of my favorite movies ever, Private Lives, the film that introduced me to my beloved Norma Shearer. But I think that was a little later and I'm not sure what triggered my desire to watch old movies. At this point, it was still MTV or VH1, which is what I was watching one morning when I caught the video for a new song by my old favorite, Martika.



I guess it was sometime later that week, but I think I had to stop by Kendall Town & Country for something for my stepfather and while I was there went to the music store (Record Bar? Tracks?) and bought the cassette single, since the album, Martika's Kitchen wasn't even out yet. I became utterly addicted to the song. Soon enough, I got the complete album and listened to that all time, too.



The new album was a bit more sophisticated sounding than Martika's debut. There was just as much pop goodness, but it felt a bit less fluffy. Although at the time, I was just like, "More Martika!!" but today I can admire the cleverness of the title track, the call to home of "Mi tierra" and yes, I can even own up to the fact that some of the songs are a little too ambitious and don't exactly work. I love it nonetheless. Several songs on the album were collaborations with Prince, who I had never really been a fan of at that point, despite the fact that one of his proteges, Sheila E had made an album I loved called Romance 1600. However, at the time he had just performed "Gett off" at some MTV awards show and his disc Diamonds and Pearls was out. Encouraged by the music he made with Martika, I picked up the new album and found myself really liking it.



Despite having loved music my whole life, I think it was probably listening to Prince that I started to really pay attention to the way music was produced. Of course Prince adds lots of amazing and interesting layers to his work and I found myself really loving the pop funk of "Thunder" and "Daddy Pop," I still can't say I'm crazy about the title track, despite being able to sing along to every word. While I never became a hardcore Prince fan, this all led to my discovery of some of his older music and for a few years, I followed his career. Meanwhile, Martika never released another solo album. A few years back when vile Eminem sampled her hit "Toy soldiers" for one of his songs, Sony put out a greatest hits compilation (and only Sony could pull of releasing "best of" albums for artists like Martika, Jeff Buckley or The Fugees who only ever had two proper albums!) that features an excellent Prince remix of "Love... thy will be done." Martika spent some years out of the spotlight but has recently gone on to create music with her husband, Michael Mozart, under the name Oppera.