if you're gonna scream, scream with me.

me and high-school really didn't get along. god, i hated that place. and that time. i graduated from the ironically named Elmira Free Academy a full year early - june of 1993 - and in the 16 years (uhm, wow) since have annihilated or overwritten most of those memories. lately i've been thinking about that shithole again. about the kid i was, the music i listened to and how it got me to where i sit today*. as the youngest of my three upstate siblings tries to find her way to the light at the end of study hall alot of the weird memories of high-school have been flowing back in.

by the time i became one of elmira's finest achievers i was WAY into collecting punk tapes. do you remember that gigantic waterproof sony walkman that was YELLOW with the locking mechanism on the side? why was it YELLOW? why, when cassette tapes were tiny and light as feather did this thing have to be a goddamned dictionary in your pocket? why was it YELLOW? yellow is basically the worst color on earth (fresh pee) and somebody at sony thought, let's make that shit YELLOW and way way bigger than it needs to be! let's make a PISS BRICK! i wore the most enormous pants back then and i can still remember straight struggling to get that thing out of my pocket. luckily it had cutting edge AUTO-REVERSE technology so tape-flipping was less of an issue but still - can you imagine kids on capitol hill using one of these? i think the yellow would go over fine, but actually getting it into a pocket of the modern trendsetter would be a physical impossibility. perhaps an ironic fanny pack is the answer. i dunno. i can't help you.

the thing i remember most about that walkman was the way it looked loaded up with my misfits Legacy of Brutality cassette. while most cassettes were that weird metallic clear plastic this shit was BLACK. you know what else is black? DEAD STUFF. man the misfits were my favorite band right around the time i had this stupid ass yellow walkman. thinking about it now, the thing probably looked like a goddamn bumble-bee but i remember thinking it looked so completely badass. I would listen to Static Age, Legacy of Brutality, Walk Among Us and Earth A.D. over and over until the AA's died or the tape got eaten.** I had at least 3 Misfits t-shirts including the classic skull shirt and an Earth A.D. shirt with several bloody wolf-man- zombies hanging from a nooses. ***

nowadays cassettes are long gone and i'm not sure why this happened but the misfits never transitioned into the CD/record collection for me. i thought for a while that maybe i had lost or let someone borrow my misfits CD's but i'm realizing now that i never had them. just the cassettes. i guess i just started getting into other stuff around the time CD's came out / i got into records and i just never replaced these formative classics.

over the years my taste has really expanded. to think that i really only listened to punk for years and years is pretty astonishing. I often make the mistake, when thinking about my own experience with music - changing tastes etc. - of thinking that i'm the only one that spent his childhood feeling songs like MOMMY, CAN I GO OUT AND KILL TONIGHT?, HYBRID MOMENTS and BULLET - despite a real inability to understand what the fuck Danzig was actually singing. Seriously, could you tell me the lyrics to those songs before Google existed? I don't think so. The misfits were ferocious and full of attitude; exactly what i needed at the time.

In the years following my taste slowly morphed - from clearly punk music (dead kennedys, bad religion, misfits, sex pistols, black flag, minor threat, minutemen) into sometimes poppier emotional punk of the bay area (jawbreaker, green day, crimpshrine, mohinder) -into whatever the sam-hell it is today. along the way i discovered a guy named david pajo. mr. pajo is probably best known for his contribution to/creation of the post-rock movement as a member of Louisville band slint (Tweez, Spiderland) and later tortoise (the amazing Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT). even though i love and admire all four of those records it wasn't until i heard pajo play alone, stripped bare as papa M that i really fell in love with his music. Live from a Shark's Tank, Whatever Mortal, Papa M Sings, Songs of Mac and his six singles (entitled 1-6, all on drag city) are an exercise in delicate and deliberate song writing that is on the surface completely at odds with my early years as a connoisseur of punk rock. pajo's most recent release is a collection of misfits covers. listening to Scream With Me has filled me with such happiness. maybe it sounds dumb, HAPPINESS and MISFITS unlikely sentence mates - but this record, just feels like going home. it has forced me to contemplate where i came from***** in relation to where i am today. perhaps more importantly it reminds me that there are others out there that have traversed similar territory in terms of music and perhaps more importantly - in life. what's the goddamn dif i guess, right? the songs themselves are triumphant in their ability to transcend the inherent brutality of a misfits song to create something aesthetically beautiful. it's amazing what slowing the pace and tone of a song like I TURNED INTO A MARTIAN will do to the feeling it exudes. as each note crawls by pajo asks us to reexamine danzig's lyrics beneath the cold light of one's lifetime -

possession of the mind is a terrible thing

it's a transformation with an urge to kill

not the body of a man from earth

not the face of the one you love

i turned into a martian

i can't even recall my name

sometimes i never hardly sleep at night

i turned into a martian today

- there is newfound disaffection in the words as pajo sings:

i walk down city streets

in an unsuspecting human world

inhuman in your midst

- i still consider myself to be into punk rock. it's just another kind of punk i guess. another feeling. i think ray barbee sums it up pretty well****: "[punk is more of] a way of thinking...if you've got a heavy metal show and you book a jazz band in there, that's punk." pajo's fragile covers have gotten me thinking about what glenn danzig was trying to get across more than i ever did as a kid. in that way this collection of songs is a completely punk rock record and i am more of a punk now than i was then. fuckin' a.

it's the very best thing i've heard this year. I really can not recommend it strongly enough. It's a limited edition vinyl release (1000 pressed at 45rpm) and comes with free CD of the full record.

Here's the tracklisting:

Angelfuck

Hybrid Moments

Where Eagles Dare

Bullet

Teenagers from Mars

Devil's Whorehouse

I Turned into a Martian

Horror Business

You can and will buy it here.

*

**i was pretty proud of my ability to fix cassette tapes when i was a kid. i wore these fucked up thick plastic glasses when i was young and was always having to use the mini-screwdriver to tighten them and what-not - presumably due to the unnatural weight of the thick lenses. anyway i quickly discovered that this little tool could also be used to dismantle audio cassettes. i would repair a friend's damaged tape in exchange for a dub of some other album. i remember i would lay the tape on the table as if i was about to perform a triple bypass. i think i washed my hands first. i'd open it up and untwist the tape and even do splices with my mom's scotch tape. i remember one time i had this fugazi tape - it wasn't 13 songs because that wasn't on cassette - OH -margin walker it was - i had that all laid out and i need some scotch tape to repair it and i asked my mom - who sent me on this wild search through the basement for a mystery roll of scotch tape that was left over from wrapping christmas presents. i remember searching around, STRESSING that margin walker was splayed out all over the table (should've secured my surgical materials prior to making the first incision) - any old breeze could come by and blow everything all to hell. luckily that didn't happen and i believe the repair was a success. thank god, fugazi tapes were like 6$ and not available at sam goody.

***I also eventually owned a couple of danzig shirts including one from the 2nd record LUCIFUGE that had the outline of an upside-down cross on the front with the danzig skull inside it. On the back were big blood red letters that read GOD DON'T LIKE IT. hahaha, oh man, i'd wear that today if i still had it.

****

*****epicly later'd is a brilliant video series about skateboarders, created by patrick o'dell. ray barbee's episode is here.

Your's Truly, The Commuter.

Jason Lytle is the best guy ever. I’ve never once met him and barring a single Grandaddy show many years ago I’ve never even been in the same room with the dude. With that said it feels like Jason is one of my friends. One of my tightest bros from way back when. Lytle is the same as me and those that I’ve known all my life – cut from the same jib, of the same ilk –WHATEVER, the guy constructed a brilliant song around a Neil Blender sample (Grandaddy’s "N. Blender"). Do you know how many times I watched that video when I was a kid?

LOTS.

Hell, I still have the VHS and I’m watching it now.

Despite my affinity for the push-push, skateboarding alone is not nearly enough for me to get fanatical about someone’s music. Over the years Jason Lytle has made some of the most elegantly raw, beautifully honest songs these ears have ever heard. Grandaddy’s second album, The Sophtware Slump is on my ridiculously short list of 100% perfect albums. Lytle’s songs have always been written from an immensely accessible position of solitude and vulnerability (you’ve been there)– his hushed vocal style, soothing keys and ingeniously plopped synthetic blips hang together to create songs you just can’t not like.

Yours Truly, The Commuter finds Lytle on familiar, but shaky ground. The album’s title track begins just as tentatively as Grandaddy’s final album (Just like the Fambly Cat, 2006) ended. The opening notes call to mind the most masterfully synthetic moments of his past while ceremoniously introducing us to the future. When Lytle sings -


Last thing I heard I was left for dead/Well, I could give two shits about what they said/I may be limping but I’m coming home


-he summarily acknowledges the sadness and alienation of his last years in Modesto (Grandaddy’s tumultuous demise, commercial pressures ,$, substance abuse) and announces that despite all the shit he’s been through that yes, he is giving this another go:


All work and no play mighta done me in/So I’m stoked I’m back after where I’ve been


Often seen as downer-rock there is a positive undercurrent to Yours Truly, not seen since the peak of his former band’s success; 2003’s Sumday. That being said the comfort level and pop-confidence of the aforementioned album is greatly understated here.

A lifelong skateboarder – I can’t help but think about blowing out my knee as a kid (Lytle himself tore his ACL skating), the subsequent surgery and recovery. I remember feeling like my leg didn’t belong to me anymore– that my mind knew exactly how to do all the tricks I’d learned before the injury – that I could see myself as I was before but nothing seemed to work. I remember feeling like a lifetime of accomplishments was gone forever. As I got stronger the successes of the past began to find their way the surface and eventually everything came back. It sucked but I’m better for it. Yours Truly, The Commuter is the onset of Jason Lytle’s recovery; limping forward through the crippling injuries of his past - relearning tricks; getting himself healthy. While musically the album is not much of a departure for Lytle it’s obvious that he’s revisiting earlier work in an attempt restabilize and grow. Yours Truly, contains some of the best songs Lytle has ever written. “Birds Encouraged Him” and “Flying Thru Canyons” recall the fuzzy catchiness of 2001’s Through A Frosty Plate Glass EP while the acoustics of “Brand New Sun” and “I Am Lost (And the Moment Cannont Last) fall somewhere between Under the Western Freeway and The Sophtware Slump. When I hear Jason Lytle’s music and look at his art I feel like we grew up together, watching skateboard videos, laughing and dreaming.

I’ve been unemployed since April and this is the only record I’ve bought since.

Highly recommended.

Originally posted here.

lend me your ear. (an introduction)

i don't know what the hell is wrong with me these days. i thought i had it all figured out. i thought everything would be ok. goddamned better than ok. after 33 years i'm now beginning to realize that nothing is ever truly figured out. i guess i figured that out a little late. go figure.

some smart dude once said that "the only constant is change." i've gone through some changes lately that have landed me in some seriously sketchball territory. i'm no regret stricken post-op tranny or anything; i just feel pretty lost. i made some wrong turns and just sort of forgot who i was and what makes me happy. my brains got broken.

the crap to appear on these pages will be an attempt to acknowledge and chronicle the things in life that have always made me happy. made me who i am. the things in life that flip the middle finger at what that smart dude said about change.

i don't even really remember much before the age 12. that was the year i got my first skateboard. suddenly my four friends and i had something that no one else could even fathom. unbreakable solidarity. unending creativity and x-ray vision. it's like that minutemen song: skateboarding changed our lives. that grey future primitive gave me a reason to live. a way to get through 5th period. a way to endure small town high-school life. a way to get by with one parent instead of two. friends and memories that last a life time. even when lifetimes don't last as long as they should. skateboarding will get you through that too. i'm here today because of the skateboard. plain and simple. i love the way a skateboard feels under my feet. i wear vans. they are turning my feet into flippers but guess what,

i don't care because i want to feel my board.

it's under there: i'm ok.

if you don't like skateboarding, i feel bad for you. please look away.

skateboarding is what first got me searching around in life's cracks and crevices. looking for new, different things. something more. when you're a skateboarder you've got a vision that looks past what's right there in front of you. you wash right over generations of football, SAT scores, proms and the grateful goddamn dead. fuck the sediment, you're in the rapids now son.

soon after i got with the push-push i found the punk rock.

my dad used to take me to a nearby college town to skateboard. when he was in night school i would try to wallride. at least that's how i remember it. regardless of how it happened this string of events: the future primitive (w/boneite), x-ray vision, the dad in night school - it all led to me getting that first cassette tape. the first punk tape i ever owned was bad religion's "how could hell be any worse?"

I still remember handing it to my dad and watching him look over the
cover and scan the song titles.

fucking post apocalypse, inferno red cassette and songs like "we're only gonna die" and "fuck armageddon...this is hell." i had never heard them but this was the tape i somehow got my dad to fork over 9$ for. the underproduced raw attitude and intelligence of that tape forever jacked my mind on music. before that day my ears knew only of john cougar and huey lewis: the musical equivalent of cigarette-smoking-gym teachers and two kids at 20.

i'll always love my dad for buying me punk rock tapes.

that 9$ has bought me 33 years and counting.

music is the best and worst parts of life purified. black-tar-life-concentrate. these pages will make every attempt to get you to listen to the music that makes my head spin. i will force it on you with words, photographs, and context.

you will succumb.