moments in love
james
chicago 1,863 Posts
At ground level, things now are probably same as they ever were, but whatever used to be in the air around here, whatever used to be the air around here, is mostly not anymore. The knowledge comes faster, for sure, but it goes faster, too. The growth is rapid, but the ones who used to bring the water so reliably aren't around like they used to be, so the sargasso more and more often dehydrates into deep weeds, and there are whole days at a time when reading through all this shit is like licking zombie arm. So many have settled for the endless refinement of a persona, or the compulsive stroking of pet causes, or fanning fake tails to make themselves beautiful to strangers, or just easing into a kind of dimly personable laziness. There is so much retreat. (Joel Felix: "We are all sensitive people, eating lunch in the car.")So I am asking you, soulstrut, on this most sacred of commercially mandated holidays, to turn on your fucking lovelight. Just a little. Whether you're an old head who's been hard-bitten into spiteful celibacy or a young scrappy who's been saving it up, now's the time to break that tax tape, homies. Time to hammer your promise rings into room keys. This is a call for your stories from the intersection of love and music, or lust and records, or begging and auto-reverse, or whatever. Those times when it sounded like exactly what it felt like, you know?Here's one of mine--a small one:....On a Friday night in the fall of my freshman year of high school, there was a somewhat-less-than-officially-sanctioned dance in my school's Old Gym. There was a New Gym, too--a gym with more space and without broken bleacher pieces and skeletonized desks piled head-high against all four walls like cord wood for the pyre--but the only nighttime events that got those keys were the moneyed Baptist youth rallies that trafficked chiefly in deferred desire and event-specific t-shirts to be worn by the faithful to school the very next day, still creased and still so very very clean. This was not that. This was some Old-Gym shit.Chris DeVito's band was playing, and the old room was swallowing most of the details, leaving a spinal, ravenous bass from which only the occasional pealing guitar or insistent vocal would escape. By turns, the sound would twist itself into shapes approximating "The One I Love" or "Scarred But Smarter" or "Gigantic." The only lights in the whole room were four canned stage lights aimed directly at the underside of each band member's chin, and the lights only had three settings: full, quarter, and off. At quarter-light, the whole back wall was covered in a dusky brown glow in which the bands' shadows roiled without definition, like the glare of a bushfire that's still a long way off. At full light, the wall fried so white you could barely look at it, and their four shadows fused, stretched, and sharpened into a single ceiling-high claw. I spent most of my time eeling through the crowd with my friends, but used the long seconds when the lights flashed bright to scan the room for this particular girl. She was sort of seeing a friend of mine at the time, but they hadn't been clicking teeth for long, and I kinda felt like maybe the door was still cracked--like maybe something could still happen. I buttonholed a few different people who said, yeah, she was just here, but I don't know where she is now and didn't the two of them leave earlier, anyway? I kept on, and the songs seemed to sprawl longer and less recognizably, more panicked--the flashes fewer and farther between. At some point close to the end, there was this little sloppy guitar lope (after the fact, I figured out that this must have been the intro to "Blister In The Sun") that gave way to a drum stutter that was so painfully sharp and so cracklingly clear--when everything else (everything else) had become so muddy--that I turned to see what it was. And anyone who's watched enough TV knows what else I saw in the moment of my turning. It turned out that she'd kinda been looking for me, too, and that he had in fact left earlier--but just he. There were a few small chess moves after that, and I didn't talk to my friend for a while. Things between us ultimately never really amounted to much, but that night has stuck with me as maybe the first time that I was conscious of the absolute three-dimensionality of music, the totality of it. I wasn't being a passive radio listener or concert spectator, and the music was neither a purchased thing that I was poring over obsessively nor was it just something in the background. It seemed like a physical thing with which I was sharing space, working against, conspiring with. I was just old enough that I could feel the vague stirrings of plans taking shape, and it felt like all of us--me, her, and the music--were all happening together. ....So what's your story? It doesn't have to be like mine, as long as it's yours.(Now, I'm not stupid, and I don't believe for a minute that this will work. This thread will sink like a stone, and it may deserve to. But even so, I'd like to believe that my ink has not gone entirely to vinegar, and that the collective heart has not gone entirely to pocket, so I thought I'd at least ask. In any case, if you don't work it out here, please work it out somewhere. "Whatever you do, soulstrut, don't go home alone tonight!")love,James C-A-V-as-in-Valentine
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I spent the better part of a couple days spread over a couple months trying to find the right 4-track recorder that I could use to dump my adolescent and college-age musings (read: underground rap tapes), beats, mixes, and other assorted ephemera in cassette form.
I finally found the right model with the right specs, and after losing a few times I won it on ebay for a fair price a few days ago. As my mind was combing over the various tapes I had stashed in a box at home - I am rarely there so the inventory of that box is pretty fuzzy - I couldn't decide what to work on first. Would it be that tape that people have been asking me to remaster and reissue - the one I'm not entirely comfortable with a decade later but stands to this date as my most successful effort, commercially and artistically? Or would it be some glory-era mixtapes, some better than I recalled and others merely shined up by the inconsistencies of a romantic stoner's memory... I wasn't sure.
I was sitting down to dinner last night with my better half and it occurred to me that she still had the first mixtape I had ever given her - titled "Beautiful Songs For A Beautiful Lady". How many dudes have rocked that title? Anyways, I thought about how I pulled out the best of my shoddy collection and mailed this girl a tape because she was on my mind. We barely knew each other, but that tape might be the sole thing that's responsible for our life together. This was before eBay, before Good Records NYC, shit it was before I knew what I even wanted out of a record. I can't hardly remember half of its contents but more than a few of the titles I can would gross out the lowliest strutter... Wes Montgomery on Verve, demolished Nina Simone bootlegs, you know... the kind of shit you pick up as a sincere music fan before you mutate into a "record collector". I know, my self-hatred is poorly masked.
Anyway, there is perhaps only one record from those times that to this day remains in my collection. It's a dollar bin record to the core. It has survived endless purges, moves, break-ups and fights and to this day makes me weep. It will be our First Dance in October when we are to be wed and it was on that tape. And all of a sudden I had my first project. I was excited, stoked, eager to give my girl this CD of music which she hadn't heard in years but would be instantly familiar.
I got an email this morning from the seller and he discovered that the machine was broken and refunded all my money. I am so fucking BUMMED. Best part is, though, that I never once second guessed the tape itself, back now 10 years ago almost; so I might be short a 4-track, short on time, short a couple of bucks, but I've got her.
Here's to all the mixtape makers out there. Make this one count.
No worries. The story itself is immaterial; the important part of that post is the solicitation. I'm sure you have your own story involving music and affection--you should post it up. If not now, when?
I just spent my day at work making my wife a mix. This is the first mix I have ever made her in the 6+ years we've been together.
There was once, when we were wooing, when I put a couple songs and EPs together on a tape. Her car had been broken into, and all her tapes stolen, so I taped a bunch of stuff from my records to replace it. But, I made sure to clarify that, 'THIS IS A STOP GAP; STAND IN; SUBSTITUTE. THIS IS NOT A MIX.'
So, she said I owed her a mix. And, I kept on owing her a mix. And, then it
seemed it would never happen.
And, then, today, the inspiration hit. So, I cranked it out at work. From, 'Yes, I'm Ready,' to 'That's How Strong My Love Is,' it is sitting under my hand and ready to go.
Happy Valentine's day, y'all.
Sure, why not. I can't usually write at length on the Strut, as I only have internet access at work and I need to keep it brief so I can get back to...well, work. But here's a short one:
Several years ago, I had just begun to get serious with this lovely young woman, and was putting together a mixtape for her as part of a birthday package. I know???same ol??? story as everybody else here, but we are, after all, music nerds, and that's just how we do.
It wasn't the cleanest mix???there were a few hammered 45s on there, the occasional skip, and plenty of crackle for ambience???but I really put my soul into it, and that's what matters in the end. Still, at the time I was a bit self-conscious of its flaws, and worried that she might think I had half-assed it.
But I gave it to her, along with a pair of red sneakers she had been dropping hints about, and she assured me she really loved it. Of course, even if she hadn't she would have said so anyway, so I was still a bit worried (I was in my early 20s at the time, and hadn't overcome the nagging shadow of insecurity yet).
Things continued to heat up, and after a while I forgot about the tape. We were in love, and had moved in together.
But life isn't nearly as pat as we'd like it to be, and after a while, we started to grow apart. She had only been with other women before we met, and after a year and a half of living together, she finally broke down and said that, although she loved me, she couldn't go through the rest of her life without being with another woman. We split up.
A year later, a friend of mine from college was in town visiting his folks, so I went over to see them. We were reminiscing, and he popped in a student film he had made while we were roommates at school. It was about a forlorn, borderline suicidal young man and his heartbreak over the disintegration of his recent relationship. The end of the film was him (off camera, as director) asking a series of questions to several different women???an attempt to divine the mysteries of love from a female perspective. I was taken aback to see my ex-girlfriend as one of the interviewees. One of the questions was, "What is the greatest thing a lover has ever done for you?"
She answered, "He made me a mixtape."
I think the phenomenon James described is most pronounced during those early high school years when your experience with music is so intertwined with the changes one's body is going through and the sexual/romantic instincts/emotions that are running you at that point. Chris Rock said once that the music you hear around the time you start getting laid is music you will always love. I wouldn't say "getting laid" per se, but I agree that the music around you when you realize you want to get laid and start attempting to get laid and/or making out with girls remains most dear to you.
For me, it's my high school years of '90 through '94. Like James, my high school had informal dances that were basically DJ-led throwdowns that happened a couple of times a year. My friends and I were crazy little dudes who didn't drink, but we were way into music. We would have loved to go clubbing, but we were 14. I can't really speak for my guys, but I lived for these dances. The music itself was whatever top 40, but the volume and the energy and the excitement in that room would give me tingles. It was that thrill of possibility. Possibility of anything; a fight, a kiss, a phone number, or just doing my damn thing on the floor.
I remember seeing this chick from my English class there. In school she was pretty mild-mannered, but on the dancefloor she got low, low, low. I didn't think she was capable of that. You got to see this different side of all the girls in your school. My boy Josh, who was a bit of a Milhouse-esque geek at the time, captured the vibe the best in describing what was happening to many of us for the first time. He emerged from the dancing throngs and ran up to the rest of us, sweating and exclaiming, "Dude! Tons of sweaty girls rubbing up against my body! I'm going back in there, man!" Then he disappeared into the crowd. Sure enough, when the needle hit the record, everyone could get some action, no matter how accidental.
While most of the "possibilities" I hoped would come to reality at a jam rarely did, I knew at least that if the music was tight, I could still have a ball, despite ending up empty-handed or empty-bedded. This is totally lame to say, but I could count on the music to give me some play.
in 7 years of knowing and loving this person, we've sung together in the pouring rain, discovering the streets we walked on every day. we've spent hours sitting smoking entirely too much weed with a a D-cell powered boombox listening to the acrid sound of the subway melt into the clatter of wherever we were. we've caught each other's eyes countless times at the utterance of a ridiculous line in some new song ("who fuckin' with my golf swing?!"). everything in our life together has music somewhere, running laps.
that's why, late last year in africa, after a particularly grueling day of filming students at probably the single most vacuous art school in the entire world, we were transported through an entire lifetime when we turned on the radio in our rented car and heard the woozy sound of the five stairsteps 'ooh baby baby' trying to penetrate the static that clung to the antenna like dust to our eyelids. almost 2 years earlier, i had flown to chile to DJ her birthday party, and closed the night with that song. some months before that, she had heard it in a movie, taken a mental note to ask me about the song, and forgotten all about it after we hadn't spoken in a while. the song is short, almost achingly sweet, and completely magical. how the song made it to the radio rurale in dubreka, i am not even going to try to get my mind around. we just sat in the car and breathed the air of familiarity, grounding us into each other. i've never felt more simultaneously at home and alien in my life. that instantaneous, ephemeral response rattled around the car for a few minutes, then we took off and stopped at a used auto parts kiosk for some warm bottles of fanta.
On the tape was a scattering of different songs, but the two I gravitated to the most were Tracy Chapman's "If Not Now, Then When" and Bob Marley's "Waiting In Vain" and however cliche or maudlin those two songs may be as anthems of unrequited love, I became fixated on them in that "oh my god, this song is so speaking to where I'm at right now!" And that's one thing I do love about music - it's ability to condense, inside a few scant minutes, what you think of as the core of your emotional being. Of course, a pining/broken heart is equivalent to beer goggles for your ears - the most trite lyrics now sound like the most profound things every written. But I'd wear that tape to static, just listening to Bob and Tracy express that which I couldn't.
That was fun, and got some SERIOUS love from the ladies.