There was a record store in the Mid-Western town in which I grew up that would never open until 12:00 or 1:00 pm. It was different pretty much every day. I don't remember if the hours were actually posted on the door. If they were, then they were to be taken with a grain of salt. On the occasional unpredictable day, without notice or acknowledgment, it wouldn't open at all. God, it was a cool place. The guy who worked behind the desk was a huge asshole. Nobody knew whether he was the owner or an employee, although either way, he was the only person who was ever seen working there.
When I set about recapturing the guy's physical appearance, I think: tall, late 20s/early 30s; dark brown hair and eyes that were just a tad bloodshot; scuffed-up, tight brown corduroys and a ratty, hooded sweater of muted blue, casually baggy on his once-skinny frame. Maybe he had tattoos somewhere; somewhere his girlfriends could see. Did girls like tattoos?
To customers, particularly to we awkward teenagers, he spoke rarely and in brief statements and always disinterestedly. He didn't want -- it seems -- to be bothered. This made a certain amount of sense, considering that he was constantly on the phone, having the lewdest, most shockingly frank conversations with someone -- was it always the same person? -- about sex and drinking.
"Yeah, so I met up with fucking what's-her-name, and she fucking -- her fucking tits were just all like, fucking...there. And I'm like... So, we fucking did some shit, and we... And I fucked her. Yeah so, but anyway."
Was he talking about drugs, too? We didn't really know, because we didn't hear any references to the conventions and accoutrements of drug-use familiar to our brand of well-adjusted-if-disaffected near-north-suburban teenagedom. I mean, was he talking about...like...heroin or something? The mind would race at the mere mention: imagining the apparatus, the hardware; aren't stoves and blowtorches involved? Were the etiquettes of its commerce and consumption the same as in pot culture, except with the shady characters shadier and the music better and you get to do it to art school girls in short hair and tights?
We didn't understand the references in half the things he was saying, and for some reason this not only made him seem scarier, but it also made him seem infinitely cooler. He was an ogre-aesthete.
I remember the small store, square-shaped and high ceilinged, on a tucked-away corner of two tucked-away streets, the building's spartan front steps of cracked concrete, jutting out, diagonal and rectangular, its windows taped up with xeroxed posters and darkened halfway down by venetian blinds at three-quarters tilt. It was always summer there; sometimes, it was autumn.
It was completely intimidating to file through the massive collection of used LPs in his presence, because one of my friends got yelled at once for handling one of them incorrectly. It was a weathered old gatefold copy of Trespass, a very early album by Genesis -- the original, Gabriel-fronted version, of course. My friend learned on this occasion that this lush, atmospheric study in languid 12-string acoustic guitars and simmering Hammond organs -- somehow, simultaneously gentle and apocalyptic -- was the owner's/employee's favorite album of all time.
On a later occasion, in reference to this encounter and the unexpected revelation it produced, the same friend of mine asked the owner/employee whether he was a fan of so-called progressive rock in general. The owner/employee, caught off-guard in an interval between dirty phone conversations, and immediately regretting having opened the door to this little cretin and his chummy, credulous small-talk, said: No.
Whereupon, if I recall correctly, my friend pressed him further. What kind of stuff do you like? he wanted to know. With my friend's sally of impertinence already well underway, the owner/employee endeavored to staunch the hemorrhaging of his authority by producing the most ponderous answer he could muster. According to my friend, it may or may not have included references to free jazz, New York punk, Zappa, John Addams, Sibelius. (I don't remember.)
It seemed like he was an inhabitant of the same parallel universe from which came the spectral, silent white-skinned girls in zig-zag clothes and costume jewelry that always seemed to blink into my focus during the half-waking middle sections of parties. Who were those girls? I wanted to know that universe's impossible, aching melancholia, that menace and that violence. The power to obliterate oneself.
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I learned of Henry Cow from that guy, and bought one of their albums there. He warned me that it was probably to avant-garde for my virgin ears. He was half right.
Oh, and I wanted to add something with my memory of him. Dark Brown hair, not only bloodshot, but sunken eyes, and I don't picture a hoodie, but a ratty flannel, unbuttoned shirt, with a white t-shirt underneath.
Hey gs/nbcv,
It's funny, 'cause there were substantial chunks of the actual features of the store and the guy of which I'd found I had almost no actual recollection. In part, I think this is due to the fact that even during the period during which these things existed, most everything I knew about him came from your descriptions. Even then my awareness of the milieu was as a daydream and not a real place and time.
So, what I've expressed are reflections upon/memories of images produced by my own imagination, cobbled together from my own infrequent experiences and your stories. Kinda cool.
But that Henry Cow story is HILARIOUS, and confirms that I succeeded in evoking something that was "really" going on.
That was me in the Trespass story??!! Or was that Steve Schlei?
Huh; that part came from a fairly vivid recollection of stuff I though had really come from you. Maybe it was Steve, but...no, that can't be right. It basically has to have been you if it was anybody.
I think I did conflate the incident of his being bitchy about the handling of the records and the incident in which he said that Trespass was his favorite album of all time. But I definitely remember both stories coming from you.
Actually, because I'm finding this is sort of fascinating to pick through, here are the three basic parts of that particular story, as it appears in the post. All three of these I could swear I remember coming from you for certain, perhaps all three in separate incidents:
1) The guy actually somewhat-bitchily yelling at you about your physical handling of SOME ALBUM.
(The only other possibility I can think of for #1 is ME, but I had supposed that, were that the case, I would have remembered it that way, which isn't necessarily true.)
2) The guy saying that Trespass--much to everyone's subsequent astonishment upon hearing this story--was his favorite album of all time. To this I can add recollections of you recounting that the guy explained in some detail why, as far as he's concerned, Genesis totally lost the plot after that record.
3) In response to having been asked if he liked 'progressive rock' (or maybe 'art rock'!) generally, the guy responding emphatically-blithely: "No."
To this series of events we can add a fourth significant recollection that has come to me JUST NOW (& therefore doesn't appear in the post):
4) The guy saying that he pretty much just liked free jazz, or something very similar to it, like free improvisation. Something jazz-related that I think at the time stood wickedly beyond the then-current horizon of everyone's taste.
Now: I could SWEAR---the recollection is so vivid, which, of course, isn't to say it has to be true, but it definitely FEELS that way to me---that the conversation about his not liking progressive rock and only listening to acid jazz, or whatever the fuck it was, took place during the Trespass discussion.
It seems possible in retrospect that he could have been saying the stuff about progressive rock during the conversation you mentioned (which I recall also) in which you were warned that Henry Cow was not for the faint of heart. But, what doesn't seem right about that is that it wouldn't have seemed WEIRD for him to say he liked Henry Cow and then dismiss 'progressive rock' in general, because Henry Cow is already basically free jazz/free improv.
I remember specifically having conversations about how odd it was that Trespass was purportedly his favorite album of all time and yet he was systematic in his dismissal not only of 'progressive rock' in general, but of ALL of Genesis's subsequent output. It seemed ludicrous and therefore kind of mysterious. Like: what is it that makes him regard this one regard so highly but communicate his utter contempt for, say, 'Foxtrot'?
It's one of those things that made guys like him seem like they 'knew something' we didn't; not necessarily in a super-serious way, but in the sense that we enjoyed the theatre of stores like that and the interactions with the people who worked in them.
Sorry to go on for so long, but I'm really amused at how many layers there are to my recollections, and it's intriguing that you don't remember some of the elements of it having gone down in the same way....
I will comment at length later, but I'd like to point out that I have a notoriously poor memory in general.
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