At the Knob Level

What seem the most ephemeral aspects of underground music apparently last forever, and I can hear the same crappy, C-level hardcore bands on my local college station that I could when I was in high school. Not the same type. The same bands! The same songs! The same forced sense of humor and forced anger! And you know what? It still sounds so damn good sometimes.

As embarassed as I was about listening so purely to a musical style, so limited in scope, so paltry in its grammar, for so many intense years, it was a regret I hardly earned. If I earned it, it was only by surviving. I've met enough of my childhood heroes and thought, 'Wow, this guy is a fucking loser.' Which begs the question of what I am if not that. A question best left unanswered. I only record, with honesty, my initial reaction, the following feeling to often be: well, so what? He's seems just like a dingbat you know from high school. So what? Were you expecting Bat Man?

On the way back from Chelmsford, I listened to the UMass Lowell radio station. This is what got me thinking.

I noted with pleasure that the dj would suddenly turn the pot down and switch to another song, as if bored. Enough of that one! The magnificent part being the songs are generally under two minutes. Who gets bored during a two minute hardcore song? What sort of music so dilutes your attention span that anything longer than 2:32 seems labored and lumbering? I suppose even having a clown show up at your house and punch you dead in the face would lose its novelty after a certain point.

The dj also interspersed with set with Wesley Willis songs. Willis was a Chicago-based schizophrenic who made hundreds of recordings. For those of you who haven't heard them, the good stuff, the stuff remembered, involved him playing variations of the same chords on a casio keyboard. The tempo was, apparently, manually varied at the knob level. The songs were quick, confessional, and ended with the refrain: "Rock over London, rock on Chicago," followed by a line from a commercial. Pontiac, we build excitement. That sort of thing. Over and over again. Through it all, Willis recorded the details of his life in absolutely literal terms. In fact, the literalness of it gave it it's character: the exact number of attendees at a Tool show he attended, the name of his psychiatrist, how many Big Macs he'd eaten that day. At the time, he was also lumped into a group of marginal, mentally ill musicians, nearly all of whom were exceptional songwriters: Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson most notably. It would almost be cruel to judge his music, since it simply doesn't operate by any standard to which conventional judgments might be made.

Willis died in 2003.

I put a song up on my facebook page if you'd like to get a sense of what I'm writing about.

Rock on London, Rock on Chicago! Wheaties! Breakfast of Champions!