November 15, 2016 On Music Love Saves the Day By Dan Piepenbring David Mancuso When I moved to New York I wished that its legendary dance scene, the one from the seventies and eighties that people never shut up about, was still alive—that I could pop in at Paradise Garage or The Gallery or The Loft, maybe wearing tan polyester poplin leisure pants or something pleathery with lots of studs in it, and writhe the night away. I don’t know why I wanted this. It takes three drinks to get me to look at a dance floor with anything other than fear. But I’d listen to the music from this era on my 160 GB iPod Classic (still ticking, thanks be) convinced that I’d been born too late, dreaming up names for twelve-inch house and disco tracks while I walked around. “Susurrations of the Heart.” “Avenue Days, Boulevard Nights.” “Our Ribbon Cutting (Snip-Snip Vocal Mix).” There were other even stupider ones, I don’t know. I’d pass by the old locations of these clubs and think, Well, Dan, that’s where it all happened, alright. I was a disco tourist, guilty of romanticizing a New York I never knew: one that wasn’t made for me, one whose return was made more impossible every day as people like me (straight, white, male) moved here in untenable droves, and I knew that. But I forgot it whenever I put on Dexter Wansell’s “Life on Mars,” or Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face,” or Ashford & Simpson’s “Stay Free.” Those tracks are all on David Mancuso Presents The Loft, a two-disc compilation that I kept in heavy rotation the first year I lived here. Mancuso, the impresario behind The Loft and thus someone who can legitimately claim to have thrown some of the best parties ever, died this week at seventy-two. Read More
October 6, 2016 On Music Leave Alexa Alone By Paul Grimstad Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho. 1. The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He sounded sort of like Bob Dylan, if Bob had just been defrosted out of a block of carbonite. (I was intensely devoted to The Empire Strikes Back, so carbonite was almost always on my mind.) Other Steely Dan records like Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam, and Aja opened onto a strange and ominous world: double helixes in the sky, Haitian divorcées, the rise and fall of an LSD chef named Charlemagne, someone who drinks Scotch and then “dies behind the wheel.” The photo on the inside gatefold of the Greatest Hits showed two nasty-looking guys standing in what appeared to be a hotel dining room. Read More
August 22, 2016 On Music Lou and His Dream-making Machine By Dan Piepenbring Pearlman, center, with the finalists from O-Town. Lou Pearlman, the slippery impresario behind the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, O-Town, LFO, Aaron Carter, and about a half dozen other agreeably vacuous late nineties pop acts, has died in prison. Yes, the Lou Pearlman. The guy practically invented boy bands. I mean, he didn’t—he just ripped off New Kids on the Block—but he invented the most lucrative boy bands, and as he’d be the first to tell you, that’s the more major achievement. You couldn’t turn around in 1999 without seeing one of his acts: massively telegenic, deeply ordinary, somehow memorable. They had branded lip balms, bobbleheads, and throw pillows for sale. I know this because I spent a lot of time hating them. Read More
May 13, 2016 On Music You Think You’re Special By Dave Tompkins Prince Pizza Aktion restaurant, Innsbruck, 2013. Photograph by author. I have 294 records of showers of living things … there’s no accounting for the freaks of industry. —Charles Fort, Book of the Damned While My Guitar Gently Gets Bent at Pizza Hut The florist sat drunk in the corner booth of a Pizza Hut in Myrtle Beach. “Erotic City” quietly grinded away on a jukebox over near the bathrooms. For the past three hours, I’d been feeding the florist cans of Coors Light while he drove his son and me across South Carolina. Purple Rain played the entire route. “Let’s Go Crazy” in Pageland, “The Beautiful Ones” in Ruby, “Computer Blues” through Cheraw, “Take Me with U” to Aynor. That October of 1984, my friend’s listening habits skewed toward Pyromania. Mine: keytars, eyeliner dudes, and black radio—whatever Les Norman, “The Night-Time Master Blaster,” happened to be playing on WPEG. I remembered Leppard for their one-armed drummer arrested for spousal abuse. Meanwhile Prince played, like, twenty different instruments while having sex in the backseat of taxicabs, ducking the Antichrist, and shouting for gun control. Also: girlfriend on drums. What’s fair is fair. Read More
February 24, 2016 On Music Supercalifragile By Adam Sobsey Game Theory’s Lolita Nation, thirty years later. Scott Miller, 1983. Photo: Robert Toren This month, Omnivore Recordings rereleased Lolita Nation, the 1987 double album by the San Francisco pop band Game Theory, who were dissolved in 1990 by their leader, Scott Miller. (Obligatory note: he’s not the Scott Miller from the V-Roys). It’s the latest and most prized offering in Omnivore’s reissue of Game Theory’s complete catalog, long out of print—original pressings of Lolita Nation sold for more than a hundred dollars on eBay. Lolita Nation checks off all the boxes of the sprawling, ambitious double album: its twenty-seven tracks, mostly of Miller’s knotty but grabby songs, are interspersed with outbursts of experimental noise, rash new musical ideas, a backward-masked Beatles crib, and references to the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Joyce, and Kubrick. There’s a song in 5/4 time, loosey-goose instrumental interludes, and self-referential snippets of other Game Theory songs—a trademark Joycean habit of Miller’s—all of it marshaled into an apparent concept album about the anxious transition from youth to adulthood. But Lolita Nation defies thematic pigeonholing, just as its songs resist easy listening, and it still sounds fresh and compelling almost three decades after its release. Mitch Easter, who produced it along with five more of Miller’s albums, told me, “Scott was always modern in a way that took me a minute to say, Are you sure?” Read More
September 23, 2015 On Music The Coltrane Home in Dix Hills By Andy Battaglia The deceptively ordinary house where Coltrane composed A Love Supreme. Coltrane’s unassuming house in Dix Hills. In an empty corner of a modest home in suburban New York, hiding beneath a construction zone’s deposits of dirt and dust on the floor, is a patch of bright, bold, almost electrically colorful vintage purple carpet. It couldn’t be more out of place; the rest of the surroundings are just exposed old wall beams and tattered bits of plaster coming down. But it seems right at home, somehow calm and calming, in the midst of it all. The carpet dates back to the 1960s, when John and Alice Coltrane used to live here and make their way back to the same corner room to go to sleep at night. Close by the master bedroom was the kitchen, the heart of the home in a way, and from there the hallways led out to the kids’ rooms, the den with the fireplace, and the garage out to the side. Over that was the ashram. In the basement was a recording studio. Then, up a now tenuous set of stairs, was the chamber that made this modest suburban home most famous: the room where John Coltrane composed his stirring, searching masterwork A Love Supreme. Read More