rotation fatigue?

By Robbie on September 2, 2010

Item: An afternoon drive in the New Hampshire countryside, and a copy of Rosanne Cash's latest record, The List. After the first few songs, the thought: I like this enough to hear the whole thing. Which I do, continuing to like it all the way through. I can't honestly say I love it, but it's pretty and thoughtful and has plenty going on to hold the interest and suspend the snark. When it's over, I replace it in the case, thinking: Listened, liked...and will in all likelihood not listen again. The enjoyment has been real, but the experience doesn't beg to be repeated.

Item: An afternoon drive to the post office, and a copy of Live at Bob's, by my good friend John Sieger. This one I start to love, and I leave it in the player for the rest of the week, looking forward to every little auto outing. It's a record that revisits some of John's best songs from the last 20-odd years, clothing them in minimal instruments and presenting them to a minimal living-room crowd. For these reasons -- its touching on previous, half-recalled experience, and its leaving some space to the imagination -- I listen 5 or 6 times consecutively, with keen pleasure. Then I realize I've listened enough, and I put it away, maybe for good.

From my first store-bought record (age 6, Blood Sweat and Tears's first) to about age 40, much of my music listening has been on a kind of serious-dating-with-marriage-in-mind model. You ardently search out promising pieces of music, feeling out their virtues and beauties and dark corners with thoroughness and care; the good ones become part of your identity, and are returned to eagerly and continually. With age and itunes, the gates seem to be closing. The idea of repeated listening -- ten, fifty, hundreds of times -- actually galls. I think I still love music, and I hope I love it as much as I ever did, but I don't want to marry it.

With Edison's amazing invention, music attained the frozen status of the verbal and visual arts. Leaving aside the perspective of the observer and the vehicle of delivery, music, in document form, was now an unchanging half of an enduring and evolving relationship. A great record could be enjoyed as a great book. À la recherche du temps perdu is a different experience every ten years or so, and so you keep it on your shelf for periodic invigoration as you age. Same with Hank Williams.

But no matter how young and fresh you strive to keep your aesthetic receptors, with the accumulation of years and listening, the senses dull and the standards rise. Very little that comes before your ears, you start to notice, can fairly be called Proustian. Nearly everything good you hear can be taken in in a listen or a couple, and nearly everything bad can be sussed out in a half-minute and left for dead. What's more, asking the creators of records to come up with five good minutes of music is asking a lot; who can really compose a solid 50 or 60 minutes' worth, year after year? The convergence of the singer-songwriter model with the LP/CD era, which carried the music industry along for 40 years of the last 50, looks increasingly absurd -- more of a method for creating jobs than lasting music. And as for "lasting," if it means a work's ability to withstand a hundred hard encounters with the same set of ears, is that really an attribute we should be attaching to good music? The heavy-rotation approach to music degrades it, placing on it masturbatory expectations, that it serve as the handmaiden for listeners' banal nostalgias, briefly restoring lost times and selves. A song, though provisionally tool-like, is not a tool -- nor a woman -- and I for one feel no compunction in ravishing it a time or two, then, having taken my pleasure in it, casting it breezily upon the groaning shuffle pile. 

last night at the hideout

By Robbie on August 31, 2010

There will be no show.

it's been that kind of summer

By Robbie on August 26, 2010

Torpid is the only word for it. A summer of little consequence and less accomplishment. As the days of June rolled unfruitfully by I blamed it on my wife's being gone, but then she returned in July, and the kids disappeared for a spell into day camp; and still motionlessness prevailed. The sump pump did not get installed in the basement. The little chinks in my traveling chariot -- a leak in the brake line, another in the freon hose, spark plugs unchanged well after the 100K mile mark -- sat unheeded. Compact discs, collection agency threats, and speeding tickets sat in a jumble on the kitchen table amid items requiring no immediate action, ever: ipod cords, chopsticks, single socks. Nary a song was written, nor fat Russian classic cracked.

Torpor in excelsis!

Where did it all go? Weekends I worked, usually out of town. (Characteristically, these jaunts left me tour-poor.) Mondays I did my thing at the Hideout. Daily I wore that particular chauffeur's hat known to all parents of children between the ages of 6 and 16, delivering them faithfully to friends' houses and music lessons and tennis and bar mitzvahs and movies bursting with graphic sex jokes for socially retarded twentysomethings. I also took them on a couple brief vacation-y trips, tried to keep up with the guitar for an hour or two a day, worked a little on learning to frail the banjo, ran three miles most mornings, read some easy books...and that's it. A pretty meager showing for a non-trivial fraction of my roughly three-score-and-ten allotment (1/280th).

I have just discovered a folder in my itunes library marked "July's Daily Song Sketches." It contains a 30-second file of me humming, recorded July 1.

School started today, an unmistakeable sign that it is time to grease up the cortical axles and make some magic happen around here, no excuses, now that six productive hours have been added to the weekdays. Speaking of school, how the hell do two kids run up $1500 of back-to-school expenses? Fifteen hundred dollars! This even more non-trivial figure includes bus fee ($500), clothes from Target ($300), and a very fancy $150 calculator from SchoolMart.com, which must be the Goldman Sachs of online school supply retailers. The gizmo is assured to last my son through high school; but why oh why did last year require a different, $75 calculator? I had thought there was a recession on. When I was in the 8th grade, there was Carter-era stagflation and my family was on a $12,000 yearly income. If I had incurred a $429 back-to-school bill ($1500 in 1977 dollars), I probably would have had to get a job to cover it myself. Our neighborhood, though comfortably suburban, contains some hard-up people -- dads who lost their jobs last year and are still looking, recent Asian immigrant families in tiny apartments off the interstate, etc. Is a $150 calculator on a public school manifest intended as a blunt tool with which to shame these people?

This is why I charge what I do to play at your wedding, in case you wondered. Does a single night of my talent offer as much value as a $150 calculator which is usable for at least 5 years? You should ask Miss Lila B., of the great state of Montana, whose sacred union I am gracing this Saturday, and on whose account I am at present knee-deep in a song called "You Make My Dreams Come True" by Hall and Oates. (Great song, by the way.) If you live up that way, please don't crash her wedding, but instead come to see me and the boys in Great Falls on Friday night at the Forde Nursery -- a little more info on the tour date page.

this monday at the hideout

By Robbie on August 22, 2010

It's String Summit of the Demigods, as Jenny Scheinman, Robbie Gjersoe, and I yank mellifluently at each other's chains. We've played tons of shows in every possible combination of twos, but only thrice before as a trio (summer of '09). What the hell will we play? The hallowed names of John Coltrane and Sonny Throckmorton have been bandied about, but words such as "Throckmorton" are easy to say, no? What will actually unfold at this show is anyone's guess, at least until the three of us meet a half-hour in advance at the Hideout and pretend to talk it over while greedily lapping at Courvoisiers, and after that it's an utter mystery. There should be a lot of good playing (there always should be), and it should start at 7PM (it never quite does).

this monday at the hideout

By Robbie on August 14, 2010

Beau Sample and me. Banjo-bass and guitar-bass duets. Beau is one of those rare guys who knows the entire Slim and Slam catalog by heart and yet is not a drooling, antisocial freak. If you don't know much about that kind of music (small-group swing, or pre-1950s rock-and-roll, whichever you'd call it) you could drop dozens of dollars on itunes and broaden yourself...or come see our show, for only a sawbuck. See? "Sawbuck" -- I'm already talking like one of those drooling fantasyland guys -- it's that delightful. The handsome bassist/singer and I will also play tunes he and I wrote, and touch on Merle Haggard and some others. Please drop by if failing to would gnaw at your soul.