Saturday, January 12, 2013

Matthew Sweet / Girlfriend (Zoo/Classic, 1991)



When I think about Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend, I think about Robert Quine. Eight years have passed since the guitarist took his own life after falling into a deep depression following the death of his wife Alice a few months earlier, but I find that his presence as a guitarist persists for me. I come back to his work frequently, especially his sides with Matthew Sweet on Girlfriend and Altered Beast, which to my (probably heretical) mind, represent the apotheosis of his playing. His soloing on "Girlfriend" might be the best known of this work, but give a listen to "Dinosaur Act" or "Superdeformed" from the No Alternative compilation record and you'll get a sense of just how explosive his technique can be, jagged and possessed, never quite tracing the lines of the rhythm, rather erupting from the speakers like a kind of primal scream.




Quine plays on about 2/3 of the tracks on Girlfriend (1991), which is by far Matthew Sweet's best record. Listening to his previous album, Earth, one can't help best suspect a kind of Faustian bargain at work, since though Earth is a pleasant record of decent tracks, Girlfriend is a remarkable leap forward in songwriting, performance, and recording. Sweet's achievement here is typically attributed to two things: the creative wellspring borne from the dissolution of his marriage while he was making the record, and the remarkable lineup of musicians who helped him record it. Along with Quine, Sweet also got fantastic guitar work out of Television's Richard Lloyd, as well as top-shelf backup from Ric Menck and Greg Leisz. Though he would work with these artists again, he never quite returned to the heights of Girlfriend, rather continuing to make records of varying quality while slowly putting on about a hundred pounds over the next two decades. When I saw Sweet play the album front to back at City Winery last year, his voice was virtually unchanged, but he no longer seemed a compelling narrator for the emotions on this record.

As far as the vinyl goes, without giving numbers I'll say that I've never spent more on a record than I did for this one. Judging by completed listings on eBay, there seem to be relatively few copies out there, but here's a nice bonus: Though Girlfriend was released by small independent label Zoo, now long out of business, Zoo apparently made a deal with high-quality reissue label Classic Records to press their vinyl. The results are apparent on Girlfriend, which has always sounded excellent on CD and sounds even better here, bright and punchy with excellent clarity. And the iconic cover photo of a young Tuesday Weld is even more entrancing at LP size.

Here's Sweet playing "Girlfriend" on the mercifully short-lived Dennis Miller Show with Quine on lead guitar:


A Few Notes about the Blog

Though I'm sending this out to just five or seven of you, I'd appreciate any feedback you might want to leave in the comments. I imagine this as kind of a conversation, since I think different aspects of what I'm writing here will appeal to different readers. In any case, I hope it will prompt thoughts worth sharing. Plus, no one likes writing in a vacuum. Actually some people probably do. I suppose that's the essence of a diary.

I can't promise regular updates on the site since I don't know when, exactly, I'll be acquiring new records. But I will post some short bits in between acquisitions, because a lot of these records are good jumping off points for discussion of other, related things. And in these early days, I'll probably go back to recent additions to my collection that are worth mentioning, stuff that I wanted to write about at the time but couldn't because I was procrastinating starting this blog by doing something stupid.

Figure I'll keep this going so long as the self-imposed stakes are low. If I remain convinced that this blog can feel really tossed off and rough, I'll probably enjoy it enough to persist. But the second I put any pressure on myself to really polish the prose, I'll almost certainly beg off. I once wrote a humor piece about a guy trying to write the Great American Novel, but because of his laziness and the impossibility of the goal, he keeps whittling down his ambition until finally he's pleased after a long, hard day's work generating short ideas that might be candidates for the underside of the Great American Bottle Cap. That's pretty much how I feel about writing, and why, I think, I've come to enjoy simply producing jokes; it's a lot easier to whack a sentence into really great shape than a page or a story, or god forbid a book. As an editor, I see people finish books all the time, though I'm baffled at how they do it, how they've managed to navigate and make the 80-90K decisions that a book requires without collapsing from exhaustion or caving under the weight of self-doubt. (That humor piece remains unfinished, by the way.)

I also understand more why revision is writing. Anyone can vomit onto a page, but the real work, the real craft, is in shaping that into something extraordinary, which is exceedingly difficult and time consuming. Though if we might stay in that metaphor for a moment, it's true that some people's vomit is far better company than others. I don't know if that works but if I start thinking about it, I will never post this.

I promise there really will be more on collecting and records going forward.




Friday, January 11, 2013

Inaugural Post: Smashing Pumpkins / Siamese Dream (Virgin Records, 1993)


There won't be much to this blog, I promise. Time is short, good writing is hard, and the internet is full of temptations. But some of you have from time to time encouraged me to start a record collecting blog, and damn if I didn't suddenly think that was a great idea in a moment of utter procrastination. (Though, frankly, it's Friday night, 10.30pm, and unclear what I'm putting off doing. Living my life?)

What's really got me going is what I'm calling Project 90s, an attempt to track down the vinyl of some of my favorite records from my youth, from what some might call the grunge era. That said, not every record on the list is grunge, and certainly not all are from Seattle. Today's pickup is an original pressing on Virgin via Caroline Records of the Smashing Pumpkins' sophomore LP, Siamese Dream. A cute girl in my eighth grade drafting class (the teacher wore a toupee) made me a tape of this record and I listened to it a lot while staring at her adorable handwritten track listing. "Today" got the most radio play off this record, but it might be the worst song here. To my ear now, it plods too much. "Hummer" is the secret star, "Rocket" also great.

Pressing-wise this sounds decent. One frustrating aspect of this record is that it's a double LP pressed on purple-and-orange marble vinyl, which is just silly. Novelty wax makes the whole thing feel more packaged, more of a collector's item than a straight-up issue. And the format begs the question, is this really a record I want to flip three times? Only a handful of records draw a yes (Exile being the most obvious). Still, Howie Weinberg did the mastering at Masterdisc and it shows. This sounds as good as the CD, though perhaps not better, owing to the marble crap it's pressed on. Cool gatefold, pic below.

Jonny at Good Records dug this out of a recent 90s collection he picked up. He's promised further goodies from this trove but I'm not sure when he's putting them out, and I'm not sure how much more I want to drop this month on records. Major label vinyl from the 90s don't come cheap, after all. But if he's got some Soup Dragons albums, I might have to pawn my grandfather's watch. You understand, I'm sure.