The Return of Bart Pepper

 

One of the perks of getting older, especially if you’ve had many years of cognitive behavioral therapy, is that it gets a little easier to forgive yourself, at least for the small stuff. The most recent post for this blog until now is more than eight years old, which might as well be a lifetime ago. (For seven-year-olds, it truly is.) Anyway, reviewing some of those old posts now, I can look back with more fondness than expected on the early-thirty-something who wrote them, certainly more charitably than I would have just a few years back. These posts had to be written fast, before the editor in me had time to brutalize and shame the writer into silence, and I'm pleasantly surprised at just how well the writer managed to acquit himself under such harsh conditions. I think I’m most proud that he (I!) actually found time to write at all. It’s been considerably harder in recent years to carve out that time. 

 

The biggest change in the blog’s subject matter in the intervening years has been my almost complete abandonment of “Project 90s” (which, fine, we can agree is a pretty cringeworthy hook) and my subsequent immersion in collecting jazz records. I sold at least a few of the alt-rock records reviewed here, something that old me would have seen as a deep betrayal. I even sold that Matthew Sweet record, which had acquired something near grail status for me when I spotted it on the wall at Academy. Still, I've never regretted selling it until only recently, though with power pop’s stock priced indefinitely low I can’t imagine I’d have too hard a time buying it back. Maybe even for less than I paid the first time.

 

That’s more than I can say for most of the jazz records I’ve acquired since, which tend to be of the original Blue Note/Prestige variety and have repeatedly busted through the top end of the market in the last couple of years, especially during the pandemic. No doubt thousands of smart comics/action figures/laserdisc dealers have made a mint during COVID as the disposal income saved from thousands of never-to-be-had work lunches and gas refills was plowed into the collectibles market, and record sellers certainly weren’t left out of the bounty. In short, these things have gotten stupidly pricey and I’m grateful to have bought what I have, which I’ll admit came mostly through refreshing eBay with junkie-like single-mindedness and snapping up severely underpriced Buy-it-Now listings. I welcome your scorn (and will happily wallow in your pity).

 

I’ve been collecting jazz in earnest for quite a while now, and perhaps with some embarrassment I should say that I still feel like a novice in evaluating the musical content of these records beyond saying that I know what I like when I hear it. A good number of years in now, I can only occasionally pick out a particular player by ear. (Coltrane, sure. Rollins, on a good day. Piano players somehow easier—I seem to be able to ID Wynton Kelly or Red Garland more regularly than even I expect.) And while I’ve been playing the guitar for decades and have a basic grasp of music theory, the technical explanation of why a particular solo works from a harmonic standpoint (rather than rhythmic or simply pure intensity) often eludes me. I suppose a crude measure of what draws me to the records I like is simply the unexpected—a song or player’s tendency to go in a surprising or intriguing direction, or something that strikes me as risky. Maybe music is more like storytelling than I’ve previously considered. 

 

Anyway, this all brings up question of what exactly this blog (blog!) should be, since I think there are many people on Instagram who do a far better job than I could hope to do in analyzing the music, and compared to the most thorough collectors the contents of my shelves would hardly quicken anyone’s pulse. My instinct, then, is to just keep doing this for myself as a way of stimulating whatever writing muscles haven’t atrophied into powder. 

 

Plus, there’s the images. I doubt even the most musically focused collector could deny the sheer visual power of these vintage jazz covers, many of which have to be considered classics of mid-century design. That’s why I’ve led this post with a photo of Lem Winchester’s Winchester Special. Not only does it happen to be on my turntable as I write this, but it’s also just beautiful. It's fun to post these photos just so I can look at them on my phone when I'm not home. Plus, I love a good vibes player. Probably I’ll get around at some point to writing about Walt Dickerson (another New Jazz artist), but Winchester and Golson together can’t go wrong here. Really, it’s hard to go wrong with Benny Golson in general. This is the first Winchester record I heard, and I was excited by the melodicism Golson brings to the compositions. His absence is felt, I think, on the other Winchester New Jazz outings. There’s a nice sonic tension between Winchester’s playful vibes and Golson’s thicker tenor tone, something that’s missing when Winchester plays with, say, Frank Wess—the vibes and the flute are both delicate sounds and to my ear the pairing doesn’t offer quite enough contrast. 

 

Anyway, I’ll stop before I don’t finish this, because if I don’t finish I probably won’t post it, and I can think of ten better ways to feel like a minor failure. Am I back? Is this blog (blog!) back? Who knows. Check back in a month and if this is still the latest post it’ll probably be another eight years until the next. And hopefully by then I’ll be telling you how I don’t grasp a thing about classical music despite being long on Dutch Gramophone pressings from the 50s. 

 

Elvis Costello & the Attractions / Armed Forces (Radar Records,Germany, 1979)

To my ears, Armed Forces is Elvis Costello's last perfect record, the final moment when his ambition doesn't quite begin to outstrip his talent and charm. There are many genius moments on 1980's Get Happy!, some of which match or even exceed the best moments here, but creeping in with the gold are the first signs of Costello's desperate and bothersome need to telegraph sophistication, manifesting itself in the lyrical equivalent of dropping lines from a Waugh novel into a pop song. Maybe this is your cup of tea (are you English?), but when I'm listening to pop music so propulsive and bright I want to lose myself in the lyrics, to find the instant identifier.  On Get Happy! Costello is kicking your shin to point out his cleverness so often that I lose focus: It's the moment where the lyrics go from "very literate" to "so literate I no longer give a shit." By Imperial Bedroom, when we get to "Long Honeymoon":

All the bedroom lights go out
As the neighbourhood gets quiet
Everything in heaven and earth is almost right
But there's a wife who's wondering where her husband could be tonight
And when the phone rang only once she took a dreadful fright

 

Yeah, I'm reaching for the Track Forward button. And by Kojak Variety I'm reaching for the Album Forward button. I'm not saying that the guy shouldn't try to expand his range, just that I don't have to find the attempt successful or interesting.

But damn if Armed Forces isn't a juggernaut. In fact, since Costello is the kind of artist that makes one slip all too easily into High Fidelity mode, let's just go ahead and say that this is probably a top five Side 1 record. All six songs are faultless and substantial. Nobody doesn't like "Alison" but "Party Girl" is probably my favorite Costello ballad. And my college girlfriend told me when we broke up that she listened to "Big Boys" on repeat as a kind of revenge. Ouch.

 Still, as much as I love this record, it's not something I've dug for on vinyl. Too often his early platters are banged up, and the art on the American sleeve is kinda stupid; why mess with elephants? But this German pressing was too sweet to pass up. Check the specs: Four-way fold out cover with fantastic inner art (except for the center, which is the American cover art), a bonus 7" EP, and thick-stock cards with pictures of Costello and the band. And the record's in great shape, too. Cheers to Amoeba in San Francisco for pricing it like bin record.

 

 And just because Nick Lowe never gets enough credit for his production on the first six Costello records: Great work, Nick! 

Pixies / Surfer Rosa (Rough Trade, 1988)

 

The Pixies will be our Stones: the music we thrilled to as kids that ends up marking time between floors in elevators before we're forty. My cohort is hardly the first generation to find the anthems of our youth reduced to background music in increasingly less hip restaurants, but that doesn't lessen the sting, does it? One of my earliest music listening memories comes from an eighth grade spring when I gathered with my childhood friends John and Brent in John's bedroom and we put on my newly purchased copy of Doolittle and had our minds blown by his shitty boombox speakers pouring out "Debaser" at the best volume it could manage. Then just the other day I heard another song from that record wafting from the yuppie-cave sub-Adobe Grill hellhole around the corner from my apartment. The kind of place where everyone is over fifty and in sandals and the food sucks but nobody cares because their taste buds were the first thing to decay when soul rot set in. The Pixies in the 2010s—music to eat your decrepit enchilada by.

Do we just have to take it? Or should we let it drive us to music that's just too difficult to be played in an eatery? I doubt my friends who love Glenn Branca worry about hearing him in coffee shops anytime soon.

 

Surfer Rosa came a bit later for me in my Pixies chronology. Probably after Bossanova, an album that confused me at the time because it's space-rock production sounded like such a departure from Doolittle. In Surfer Rosa, though, I could see the rawness that had been smoothed away on the subsequent release. It helped define for me the band's trajectory, especially after I eventually heard Come On Pilgrim. (To this day I have never owned Trompe le Monde, or even heard it in its entirety.) As my inclination was always toward polish, it took me a bit longer to really get into SR, but I recall quite fondly a vacation afternoon in a Jersey shore motel when I got stuck on "Brick is Red" and listened to it at least twenty times in a row. I used to bring my CDs down to the shore in their jewel cases so I could look at the booklets, and worried that my mother would flip out about the topless lady on the booklet cover. (You chuckle, but this was the woman who just a few years earlier had made me return the cassette of Pearl Jam's Ten I'd won at a boardwalk game booth after she found out the lyrics included swear words. The booth guy looked at me like I was a sad asshole, which I surely was.)

This record came out in March 1988 in the UK on 4AD, and was imported to the US until August when Rough Trade released it here. I can't technically call this a Project 90s record for obvious reasons, though it was interchangeable in my boombox with the usual grunge suspects. Still, I'm guessing given the 1988 date that there's a bunch more of these kicking around than what came later; we hadn't quite hit the height of the CD era, and I'd imagine Rough Trade was game for printing more vinyl that any of the majors would just a few years later. The price bears it out, too, reasonable in comparison to some of the key Project 90s acquisitions.


A great example here of why a cover that works on vinyl sometimes needs to be reconfigured for CD. The printed lyrics for "Oh My Golly!" are a wonderful touch that would've been reduced to illegibility on a disc booklet, and so 4AD wisely cropped them for that issue. Plus it makes the uniqueness of the vinyl release that much cooler.

I don't pull my Pixies records out too much anymore; spinning this was the first time I've listened to Surfer Rosa in at least five years. Still love it, but it's edges feel sanded down by time now, and by the widening of my range of music experience. Or maybe they've just been swallowed up by the fruit of their influence.

Dinosaur (Jr.) / You're Living All Over Me (SST / 1987)

Boston's steady decline as a record town has been the source of no little consternation to the few left to be bothered, but every so often a dedicated digger can still find a gem. Armageddon Records, risen from the ashes of Cambridge's legendary, defunct Twisted Village, purveys a fine selection of punk, garage, and metal LPs, new and used all mixed together in the bins as regrettably has become the fashion. I haven't turned up much here over the years and find the new/used toggling annoying, so I was making a perfunctory flip through the new arrivals when I found myself staring at a great favorite: Dinosaur Jr.'s breakthrough classic, You're Living All Over Me.

I came to this band and this record late, sometime after college, having missed the 90s era, post-Lou Barlow version of the band and their excellent albums during the grunge years, though I do remember hearing a lot about Green Mind at the time. Fish to water with this record, right? Not one that needs to grow on you. It's impossible to deny YLAOM's insane melodicism, and the carefully layered guitar parts just barely discernible through the crap production that gives the record it's unique texture. This record seems both influenced by and kin to early Meat Puppets in the way it manages to feel simultaneously sludgy and bright, and perhaps also in how J. Mascis and Curt Kirkwood manage to turn their imperfect voices into remarkably successful instruments that feel of a piece with the music.

I'm burying the lede, but the coolest thing about this record is that it's a true first pressing from 1987, with the band's original non-Juniorized name on the jacket. The short story: after recording their first, self-titled record as Dinosaur, they put out YLAOM only to be instantly hit with legal action by now-forgotten "supergroup" (shouldn't a band have to produce some worthwhile music to earn this tag?) the Dinosaurs, prompting the name change on subsequent pressings of this LP. Seeing this without the Jr. made me pull a double-take, then grin like an idiot who's just found candy.

The second coolest thing about this record, or maybe the coolest depending on your perspective, is the SST catalog booklet that came inside, still in mint condition. Aside from being a kind of time machine back to the days when people spent real attention designing print ephemera, it also helps date this pressing doubly. Everything is available only on LP and cassette, excepting an insert page headed "Compact Disc-O-Rama," featuring SST's earliest CD offerings (unsurprisingly the biggest names on the roster). All in all, this is a hell of an item, a cornerstone of any punk/alt collection. Though I'll bet Green Mind is impossible to find on vinyl.

*Update* I just reread this post and think it sounds too bitchy about Armageddon, which is a very cool record store with a great deal of good stock and very friendly owners who assured me that I could return this record no problem if I encountered any trouble with it. As some of you know, there are many record stores I'd be happy to shit on for being poorly run, stocked, or organized, but Armageddon isn't one of them. Go buy something from them.

SRC / Milestones (Capitol/EMI, 1969)

I wrote a sweet post for this record while sitting at a bar last weekend and it seems to have disappeared. Now I'm not sure I have the energy to reconstruct it. Bear with me.

The short of it is: I found SRC when I was futzing around on music blogs about 4-5 years ago. Someone had posted "Black Sheep," the first track on their self-titled debut record, and I couldn't help but notice the screaming guitar tone, super hot. I listened to the whole record of psych-prog fuzz a few times, liked it a lot, and promptly forgot about the band for the next half-decade, as tends to happen when you have unlimited access to all the music ever made in the world.

All that by way of saying it took me a minute to remember why their name sounded familiar when this record appeared on the wall at Academy. Milestones is their follow up, and I think I actually like it better than that first record. Side 2 is especially well-written and well sequenced, and if the spoken intro to "The Angel's Song" dates this record in a way that will never not be embarassing, it hardly takes away from the fuzz-fest that follows. Take a look, though, at the lyrics printed on the verso in the photo below and tell me if it doesn't sound like something you might have had to sing at your middle school graduation.

Record blogs and CD reissues can probably convince you that there were a million bands like SRC out there between 1967 and 1972, probably at least a thousand in Detroit area alone, from where these guys hail. But this is a better than solid example of the genre, and I love the guitar sound courtesy of Gary Quackenbush; it's still my favorite thing about the band. It's very, very trebly, to the point where I have to turn down the treble knob on my receiver to avoid feeling like it's blasting the enamel off my teeth. But I do have the feeling I'll come back to this record every few years.

Beck / Mutations (Geffen / Bong Load, 1998)

Bong Load Records scored a major coup in 1992 when cofounders Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf independently discovered Beck Hansen at L.A. clubs and signed him to release the 12" of "Loser." A year later, though, the excitement generated by the single led to a bidding war, won by Geffen, for Beck's debut full length, which appeared two years later. For Bong Load, the consolation prize was twofold: Beck's contract with Geffen allowed him to release side projects on the label, and BL got to keep his vinyl issue, which hardly interested the majors this deep into the 90s.

Things went smoothly through Mellow Gold, but after the smashing critical and commercial success of Odelay vaulted Beck to the top tier of rock artists, Geffen got itchy. Beck had recorded an album with producer Nigel Godrich that he didn't intend as a proper follow-up to Odelay, but Geffen went ahead and released it anyway, prompting a round robin of mostly collegial lawsuits between them, Beck, and Bong Load that took a year or two to iron out.

That album was Mutations, and Bong Load's LP issue is an excellent specimen, both as listening experience and object. For starters, it's pressed on heavy vinyl, and well mastered. Even better, it includes a supercool bonus 7" with three tracks not included on the CD release. The packaging for the 7" is an accordion- folded insert that's essentially the liner notes and lyric sheet for the album proper. I'll let the photos speak for themselves, but the performances sound excellent, and I've come to think that closing track "Static" is one of Beck's underrated best.

This is just a cool record to own. I actually hadn't thought it was ever pressed, but lo and behold, it turned up on Jonny's list of Record Store Day wall gems and I fought my way through scrappy Williamsburg trust-funders to snag it just moments after the store opened. My short take on Beck is that he's the closest thing any subsequent generation has had to a Dylan, and I think his work from the 90s remains underappreciated. When you have a moment, go back and listen to this record; it's remarkable how it feels simultaneously constructed and spontaneous, loose but assured. This kind of risk-taking has long since gone out of fashion.

Unhappy Returns, or, The Rebirth of the Negative Option in the Age of Vinyl Revival

For decades, the negative option was a vibrant, powerful business model. Here’s how it worked: Book or music clubs like Columbia House and Book-of-the-Month Club would offer you a slew of free selections (plus monstrous shipping and handling fees) on the condition that you bought some specified further amount at full price (plus more monstrous S&H fees) in the next few years. Since the clubs printed and pressed their own stock, their per unit costs were nearly nil, but the real financial engine was the monthly main selection. You’d get a card in the mail indicating each month’s title and artist/author, and it you didn’t return this card in 7-10 days to decline the selection, the club would ship it to you automatically. When it landed in your mailbox, you could return it for a refund, but you still got stuck with the S&H costs going both ways. Basically, the whole process put the onus on you, the subscriber, to let the club know you didn’t want product, and they made every part of the return process hellish by staffing intransigent customer service departments. Lives are busy and people lazy, and frequently it became easier just to pay for the stupid thing (even though a CD at full price after S&H could set you back over $25) rather than deal with the hassle.

Among its many other good qualities, the internet is responsible for mostly killing the negative option. With the web came far greater sources of curated content, leaving the clubs and their monthly catalogs seeming fusty and old-fashioned; plus, the negative option doesn’t work with digital files that can’t be returned, and the contraction of the book and record industries due to file-sharing (not to mention the clubs’ late-to-the-game attitude toward digital interfaces) cut the bottom out of the market for physical editions, especially music. Direct Brands, which gobbled up both Columbia House and competitor BMG, basically quit the music biz for DVDs a few years ago (no word on how long that will last), and while the Book-of-the-Month club once had two million subscribers, it now has a negligible impact on on the book world.

So it seemed like the negative option was dead, and all was right with the world. Then, this morning, I came across an ad on Allmusic for something called feedbands.com that offered “a killer vinyl delivered to your door each month.” Intrigued but skeptical, I clicked through.

Feedbands is basically a revived version of the negative option model, a monthly subscription service made possible only through the broad resurgence of interest in a physical medium. The deal is basically thus: Feedbands discovers “smashing bands and press[es] their unreleased records” on vinyl. You sign up, get your first record free (starting to smell familiar?), and then they send you a new record each month for just $19.95, plus shipping and handling (now the stench becomes overpowering). According to the site, if you “don’t like a record, don’t pay for it,” but of course by that point you probably already have the record and the onus is on you to get your refund (Glade Plug-ins, anyone?).

The delicious twist that Feedbands uses to make the negative option their own is that you don’t even get to taste what they’re sending you. You can’t listen to the bands first, something that undermines every good thing the internet has done for checking out new music. Why not? Well, it’s because Feedbands “wants you to experience our bands for the first time on vinyl—an experience we are striving hard to create. The last thing we would want is for you to hear the band for the first time streaming a low-quality mp3 of the internet.”

Perish the thought. Folks, I pride myself on being something of burgeoning audiophile, and while I don’t know all there is to know about the vagaries of audio engineering and record pressing, I can tell you that this 100% bullshit. In fact, there’s so much misleading information on Feedbands website that it’s hard to know where to begin. On the section that asks “Why vinyl?” they write:

Vinyl records are a lossless analog format which [ed: should be “that”; are they Brits? or do they just have poor grammar?] offers the absolute best listening experience.

Not entirely true. If you have a brilliantly mastered pressing of an well-recorded analog source tape played through a hi-fidelity sound system, there’s no question it will sound better than an mp3 ripped in 1994 at 128kps. But mp3s have been closing the quality gap for years, and much of what’s been released on CD or lossless digital files in the last couple decades performs as just well as a record if not better. This is especially true since most records today are pressed on recycled vinyl, mastered for a digital format, and listened to almost exclusively on crappy earbuds against significant background noise. The myth of vinyl as the format par excellence comes mostly from the high quality of many records pressed in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, where quality control existed at every level of the production chain. Also, once upon a time people had stereo systems that were worth a damn.

The website goes on:

Mp3s, by comparison, contain only 15% of the original sound information.

We are the 85%! We are the 85%! But seriously, it’s not like the mp3 of “Stairway to Heaven” you’ve been listening to is missing a few verses and the guitar solo. Mp3s are compressed files that trade sound info for file size, but the increasingly improved algorithms by which the compression takes place are built around something called auditory masking. This describes a condition of human hearing whereby, basically, when you’re hearing more than one tone simultaneously, certain tones will be rendered inaudible by the others. It’s something the brain does automatically to make sense of all the information it’s required to process; our visual system does something analogous when it comes to seeing. Mp3s get small by essentially removing the sonic information containing the tones we don’t process. And as anyone of average hearing who’s done an A/B listening test comparing an mp3 sampled at 320kps and a CD or record can tell you, it’s pretty hard to hear the difference. But if that’s not good enough for you, most labels now offer lossless digital files like FLACs that contain far greater sonic information, and sound fantastic. So mp3s end up being a straw man in Feedbands’s argument.

This is my favorite line:

If you want to hear music exactly the way the band sounded when they recorded, vinyl is the only option.

Actually, if you want to hear music exactly the way the band sounded when they recorded, you should have been in the studio with them. Maybe in the future, Feedbands can start a new program where they fly you to a different recording studio each month to sit in on the band’s session. If they do, please let me know how much they charged to ship and handle you.

It shouldn’t amaze me that unscrupulous companies are looking to feed off the recent vinyl frenzy, but I give them credit for trying to revive what’s considered one of the oldest legal cons in the business. It makes a weird kind of sense today, when people are essentially overloaded with information, to try to make money by giving them one more annoying, easily-overlooked task to add to their infinite to-do lists. I might even have let Feedbands slide without comment were they not trying so hard to pass off much-invoked dumb canards about the quality of vinyl compared to mp3s. But with no track record or good faith effort to establish any curatorial credibility, it’s hard to see how Feedbands’s monthly meals will satiate anyone other than its investors.