Why The Medium Matters

Some have scratched their heads at the recent vinyl record resurgence. Why would all these “kids” want to spend $20-30 for a record when they can just get it free or cheap online? Isn’t it the same music? Add to this a rediscovery of cassette tapes as a cheap, effective way to release music. Yes, people are buying cassettes again. Even VHS has some diehard fans. Millions of DVDs and CDs are still being made and purchased. Essentially taking digital files and putting them in a box and upping the price. Why not just download the files? There isn’t a real difference in terms of the viewing experience. Why bother with buying the “thing”? Aren’t we trying to de-clutter and get rid of all our stuff?

Here’s the thing, the medium matters. The medium can change the experience, it can make something more “real”. Sure, sometimes the medium is a nostalgic one, it can take you back–listening to cassettes on your Walkman while lying in bed as a teenager. But it isn’t just a nostalgic experience. It is a visceral one. It deepens and expands the experience. I know from years of experience that listening to a vinyl record is altogether a different experience from streaming digital files. Sure, if you blindfolded me I might not be able to tell the difference half the time but that misses the point. My eyes aren’t closed when I listen to a record, I am looking at the jacket or browsing other records to find what’s next. Listening to a record is a tactile, sensory experience. There is no separating the two.

Physical objects can act as bridges, companions and bookmarks. They can bridge our past and present, they can connect our senses, they can bring together people, they travel with us. An effective object demands presence and focus. It whispers in our ears “take care of me and I’ll take care of you.” It is a constant companion as we navigate all the changes in our lives. The object externalizes and bookmarks our journey. Our brains are wired for recognition and struggle with recall. Every object we own has the power to trigger memories that might disappear otherwise. 

Humans have always been fascinated by the flickering of a fire or the song of a bird. We spent millennium finding ways to capture and reproduce those experiences. It wasn’t just to play the experience on repeat but to own it, to touch and feel it. The power of a vinyl record is as much the visual of seeing the sound in those grooves and marveling at how the tiniest diamond in the world could so wonderfully bring a sound back to life! The magic of  “motion pictures” wasn’t just on the screen, it was the film we could hold in our hand, looking at the individual frames, marveling at how they could somehow turn back into motion. We weren’t just looking to capture sound and vision to reproduce it. We had to hold and touch it. We needed to feel it. The medium matters, almost as much as the content it holds. 

John Lee Hooker's Endless Boogie

I was checking out at Mississippi Records in Portland Oregon. I was holding 4 records when I was informed they only took cash. Ok, I shouldn’t have been too surprised. It was a quirky place, known as much as a label for obscure blues reissues as they were for being a record store. I only had enough money to buy one of the records. The double album “Endless Boogie” at $12 seemed like an obvious buy. But buying John Lee Hooker albums is tricky business and I was hesitating. 

A week earlier I was in San Francisco, part of a 2 week family trip along the West coast, and I was in a record shop off of Haight and Ashbury. It was my first record shop on the trip and I was excited to start digging. I thought 2 weeks on the West coast would turn up some real gems but in the end I was disappointed how picked over most of the stores were. This was my first stop and anticipation was still high. And I was happy when I found a mint copy of Blue’s eponymous first album (a real gem from 1973 if you are into British power-pop from that time) but since I already had a copy I gave that up to my buddy and fellow digger Daniel. On the way out I spotted the "John Lee Hooker Live at the Soledad Prison" on ABC. It was $25. I had never seen it before. This look interesting since I was looking on for his records on ABC from the late 60s/early 70s. Why would that be?

It all goes back to my first John Lee Hooker record- “Serve You Right To Suffer”.  I found it about 4 years ago in a collection I came across. It was on Impulse- a label that was purchased by ABC in the late 60s. The weird thing was that Impulse was a Jazz label but they put out this "Suffer" record and it was awesome. Brutal, raw and soulful. I’d never been a big Blues fan outside of Howling Wolf (who was truly amazing) and now I was captured. It reminded me of when I bought Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, it was my doorway to Jazz. I then went and bought every record by Coltrane I could find. There are many great Coltrane records but none as good as "Giant Steps”, it transcends. With "Suffer" I had heard a new world. I wanted to find more John Lee Hooker albums. 

This brings us back to the live album, recorded at a prison. Ok, so I bought it and it sucks, really sucks. The recording sounds really bad, the playing is bad. Johnny Cash he is not. I was pretty bummed and it wasn’t the first time that Hooker had burned me. I have spent years trying to find something to match or top “Serve You Right To Suffer” with little luck and the prison album was yet another middle finger in my ear. Maybe it was time to give up the hunt. 

So I’m standing at the counter at Mississippi. Enough money to buy one album- and I had some good ones including some African funk comps I was eager to hear- but hope springs eternal and I went with “Endless Boogie”. 

I'm happy to report that I made the right choice. I was rewarded with 4 sides of 6 minute plus songs. Sonic bliss. Some of the best musicians from the time locked in groove with Hooker. Sometimes it sounds like he is making up the songs on the spot and chord changes rarely happen. In research the album I read a review that chastised it for its simplicity and lack of chord changes, the guy called it boring. Please know- that guy is a COMPLETE IDIOT and doesn’t understand what a great John Lee Hooker album is all about. It’s about the groove, it’s about going deep, exploring the story, the sound, the feel, the moment. Chord changes are a distraction.

I have a record player that will play a side of an album over and over, it just picks up and starts the side over when it is done. I love this feature but it pushes me to think twice about what I put on that record player, I will probably hear it more than once, often many times before I get around to changing it. You start to separate the good from great albums quickly. The ones that make the cut get set aside. They are my “go to” records. I have listened to side three of “Endless Boogie” 3 times (make that 4) while writing this blog. It has officially made the cut. 

Thank you to YouTube for giving us the entire album (not on Spotify from what I could find):

Every Record Tells A Story

It was 1996 and I lived in Bloomington with 3 of my closest friends. It was our last year of college. We were all fans of Big Star, myself especially. I realize not everyone reading this is a music nerd so here's their Wikipedia page.  Big Star was a rock band from the early 1970s that influenced almost every "Alternative/Indie" band that came after them- REM, The Replacements, Teenage Fan Club, etc. They put out three albums, going from pristine power pop to heartbreaking sketches held together by threads. When I first heard Big Star's "Big Black Car" in 1991 it felt like I'd made land. It gave me a new vocabulary, a new world to explore. I was in love.

So me and my friends decided to go on a pilgrimage to Big Star's home town of Memphis. We piled into a 70s Econoline van with no seats in the back. We decided to turn it into a living room on wheels, pulling in every blanket, pillow and bean bag we could find along with our guitars. We didn't have a plan as much as a map. But I knew what success looked like for me. I wanted to find some original Big Star albums, on vinyl, the real stuff. 

I hadn't really started collecting records before then. I switched to CDs around 1984, an early adopter I guess. CDs sounded so amazing back then. No background noise, just bright, crisp and consistent sound. They seemed so much better than records. Now I know that in reality I probably just needed a new needle for my turntable- in fact, I think this was a big driver of the CD revolution, people had gotten lazy and their records all sounded noisy and dull thanks to old needles. 

By the mid-90s I'd started listening to records again and was liking how they sounded, how they felt more "real" than CDs. But finding rare records back then was a real challenge- no internet, no eBay. Original Big Star records were, and still are, pretty rare things, selling for $50+ when you can find them. You almost never see them in the "wild", i.e. record stores. But I figured if any place would have a Big Star record it would be their hometown of Memphis. 

After digging through a number of Memphis record stores and coming up empty I was beginning to give up hope. Then I got lucky at the last store we visited.  I asked the guy behind the counter if he knew how I could track down some Big Star records. He completely shocked me when he said "actually I was just at a garage sale for an old Ardent Records employee (Ardent was Big Star's original label in Memphis) and they had the first two records but without the jackets, I guess they were promos or something. Not sure if you still want them but I can do $8 each". He then went behind the counter and pulled them out. Sure, I would have loved to have the original jackets but I was thrilled to get them for so cheap. That's one of the records (#1 Record, to be specific, what a great title for a first album!) in the picture above. I listened to it while writing this post. I have a much "better" copy now I still like to listen to this one. Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems to carry some of my personal history in its grooves. 

So here's where I going with all this, I believe that physical objects can attach themselves to our memory in a deeper way than digital objects. Think of your phone, almost no-one saves their old phones. It's the content on that phone that matters, not the vessel that carries it. For most people, losing a phone is simply an inconvenience (buy new phone, hit restore), not an emotional event. We don't feel like we have lost any of ourselves in losing that device. I did a little research on this topic and came across some studies that show we remember content better when reading on paper vs screen. 

I think some of this stems from the fact that reading on paper engages more of our senses. The more senses we engage, the richer the memory. I believe the same goes with records. We have a deeper connection with the sound we are hearing when we know it is coming from a physical object- one with artwork and grooves, something we can physically engage with, one that can travel with us through time and build its own life alongside ours. It is no longer just sound we are hearing, it is our sound, it is our object, we own it and it becomes part of us. When we lose it, we lose part of ourselves.  When we give it away we share part of ourselves with others. I love giving people records for this reason, it feels like I am connecting with them on a deeper level. 

Over time I have come to see my record collection as my memory bank. Every record tells a story. In the past few years I have started hiding little ephemera in-between the records. Little drawings my kids have done, tickets from shows, cards from my wife, letters from my parents. These things matter more and more to me as so much of my life becomes digitized.

I'm not a hater of digital things, they are awesome in their own way, but our digital experiences often feel thinner than their analog counterparts- like going from whole milk to skim. Digital experiences don't engages us as deeply, they don't travel with us through life, they become "outta sight, outta mind" far too often. I expect to see more of us going back to analog objects and experiences as we find digital experiences more and more unfulfilling. I think the opportunity here is to bridge the analog and digital worlds, finding ways to create meaningful experiences that jump between the two. I look at our friends over at BrainTwins as pioneers in this new handicraft digital world. I love how they move seamlessly between analog and digital experiences. 

So I hope we can find the right balance, embracing analog and digital experiences while pursuing the magic that happens when they come together. Oh, and Long Live Vinyl! 

Top 10 Tracks from 2013...so far #thinkkit

I'm a bad Think Kit-er. I've only posted once so far this December and now I'm grabbing a lifeline- Top 10 Tracks. 

2013 has been a strong year for music. These 10 songs all come from great albums so I encourage you to check them out in their entirety. Also, a couple are from 2012 but I didn't discover them until 2013 so I'm including them here. Let's break it down! 

Spotify playlist below

1. "Song For Zula" by Phosphorescent. This is the track I keep coming back to. Although my list isn't by rank I did want to put this one first, it is my favorite song this year. An amazing landscape of a song. "I will not open myself up this way again". We've all felt that way. A great song to get lost in. A rough sketch that seems to fill in with each listen. 

2. "Hey Ya" by Vampire Weekend. Probably the weirdest track here, what's up with those alien voices?, but I just can't deny it, or the album "Modern Vampires of the City", which is my favorite album of the year. No other album has endured as well for me, it has breadth and depth. My family listened to it all summer as we swam in the pool and grilled out. It is that rare album that appeals to kids and adults. It is a marvelous, deep piece of work. If you have bias against the band please discard and give them another chance.

3. "Are You With Me Now?" by Cate Le Bon. Ms. Le Bon was one of my favorite finds this year and this track just pushes every button. I love how it sounds. The thin guitars, the plucky bass, the tight and flat drums. I love the simple but powerful lyrics- "I see no reason to run, are you with me now?"

4. "Dreaming" by Mac Demarco. Oh man, I love this guy. Technically a 2012 release but only came to my attention in early 2013. I bet he's a weird, awkward dude that lives in his own world. At least that's my image of him, please don't tell me otherwise. Like the Le Bon song, we have thin guitars and plucky bass with great song writing. The whole "2" album is stellar. He's one to watch. Hopefully just getting going.

5. "The Sirens Of Your Toxic Spirit" by Of Montreal. It's so great to have this band back on top, doing great work. The last few albums seemed like a never ending descent into some pyscho-sexual nightmare. This song is perfect on all levels. The music and lyrics seem built for each other in a way few other songs ever achieve. And the lyrics, like many on the album, are just brutal- "All your addictions and shifty-ness, inherited from your father, I know you struggle to keep them in check, but at this point, why even bother?" Ouch.

6. "I Need My Girl" by The National. This band has been putting out consistently great music for the last decade. If I have any beef with them it's that it all starts to sound the same after a while. But if one is going to fall into a sonic rut it should be, as Kurt Cobain put it, a "Leonard Cohen afterlife, so I can sigh, eternally". Also, as a man that lives with 4 "girls" this song really speaks to me. 

7. "No Destruction" by Foxygen. This band became known almost much for their drama as their music. Social Media flare ups, fights, etc. Yawn... Underneath it all there is their excellent album "We Are The 21st Ambassadors Of Peace & Magic" produced by wunder-producer/collaborator Richard Swift. Not to downplay the talent of the Foxygen guys but I doubt this album would be half of what it is without Swift. He is probably the one to watch here. In the meantime, enjoy a nice 60s Stones/Dylan tromp. 

8. "Heart Beat" by Chris Cohen. Another 2012 import. This dreamy album just kept finding it's way to my turntable all year. Many nights I listened to it while stoking a winter's fire. As a whole album it can be a bit much but each side works really well as a piece of music. This song starts side two. "Beginning time is through, and the younger tears are too, drying up slow"- that really resonates with me in many ways. 

9. "Water Wheel" by Steve Gunn. I was turned on to this record by Rob Peoni, an intern for Musical Family Tree, and I fell hard and fast. Only 6 songs, 3 a side, it has a wonder symmetry to the album and each song has its own internal symmetry as well. To me, the guitar parts are logic statements, speaking to the meaning of the song as much as the lyrics. It sounds like a water wheel, doesn't it?

10. "A Girl Called Alex" by Kurt Vile. There isn't much to this song lyrically but for some reason it really works for me. "I recall a girl named Alex, she and Mark were happily wed, hey, at least in my head, I think about them all the time." It reminds me of that Hemingway one-sentence short story "for sale, baby shoes, never worn". That's Mr Vile's strength, painting a vibrant picture with a few strokes. 

Ok, that's it! What are your top ten tracks or albums for 2013?