FINALLY SOMETHING TO REPLACE BOWLING

Recently, I got to talking with my son’s “friend who is a girl but not his girl friend’s” father.  Our kids are both six and my son is a little touchy on the girlfriend/boyfriend terminology.  Her father happened to mention how the people on the island and in the Seattle area were in general overly competitive.  “Even during the whole nineties grunge thing” he told me, “people were all like I’m more grunge than you are.”   I tended to agree with him and found his insight on the Seattle scene interesting.  Seattle in the 90’s seems like a different place than the city I know today.  It’s still talked about in terms of “before the condos” and “when such and such used to be here.”  I wondered if some of it was done in an attempt to exclude the non natives.  In the navy we called them plus ones.  We all know too many people like this, the scene is full of them after all “It’s not the bands I hate it’s their fans” right?

Listening to one of Matthew’s mixed CDs, which were things we used to make before they were called playlists.  Did you see that?  That was my subtle attempt at +1-ing you, suggesting that I was somehow better than you by passing the presumption that you don’t know what mixed CDs are.  Maybe suggesting that even if you did, I knew about them first or had been doing them longer than you.  It’s a pretty universal concept not entirely based around any particular music scene.  311’s “Do You Right” from their first major release Music came up at the end of one of these mixes.  I can’t think of a more quintessential band that embodies the feeling of over competitiveness and +1-ism growing up, than this band.  I first heard the group on an old radio station in Detroit that no longer exists.  My freshman year the song “Don’t Stay Home” appeared on the station’s Christmas compilation along with Goo Goo Doll’s “Name.”  I saw them in concert several times after that and it became apparent that we all really liked 311.  By we of course I mean the alternative kids in the high school marching band.  I feel that I should mentioned I never understood the negative connotation and stereotypes surrounding band nerds until I moved to my second high school.  The band kids at my first high school embodied the persona of the counter culture, what I had always assumed were the cutting edge of cool.  My second high school band though was filled with socialites bordering on autism.  

With 311’s recent success it wasn’t enough to like them, or even to wear a concert shirt to school.  Someone deemed that the band was getting too popular and only true fans liked them before they were popular.  Only the true fans had a copy of Music and their second album Grass Roots.  But the segregation bled into other aspects of our MTV lives.  On a trip to Disney World I picked up a Cat in the Hat, hat.  At the time it seemed ironic or different and cool.  Looking back, nothing screams white trash more than bringing home a novelty clothing article from any theme park.  I wore the hat to a party one night and was accosted by the self appointed muscleman of cool.  “Hey.”  He told me with his high school facial hair beyond his years, “I had that hat first.  You don’t wear that shit.”  He then pulled the hat off my head and walked out.  I remember seeing him wear it on the bus to a band competition once, but surely I could make him understand that I had gotten before that.  His reign didn’t stop there.  There was a girl I liked from a nearby catholic school, her friend wore this cool black flag shirt and in the rules of high school I figured I was safe to wear the same shirt to my school since I hadn’t seen any one else wearing it.  The third or fourth time through the wash I was sitting at lunch when Mr. Cool came up to me demanding that I tell him whether it was the band I liked or just the bug spray.  I was in the early stages of my punk music phase and insisted that I liked the band.  “What do they sound like then?”  he demanded leaning aggressively close to me.  “They’re harder music.  Like 311 but more raw.”  I told him.  I must have passed the test because he nodded in agreement and said.  “Ok.”  The next time I was at the record store in Dearborn I bought Black Flag’s TV Party 7” to validate my apparel.

Hum was the first band that I felt really had the ability to rip my soul from my chest. I bought the album the winter of 8th or 9th grade after hearing their single Stars play on Detroit radio’s 89X. You’d Prefer An Astronaut became one of the most quintessential albums of my youth. It seemed that all of my friends simultaneously picked them up too. There was a guy that ran in our circle of friends who cyclically turned from drugs to Jesus all the while wooing the girls with his guitar, bringing tears to their eyes as he sang “I thought you’d be there holding daisies you’d always wait for me.”

Instantly I knew I had to play guitar. Though I didn’t get my first electric guitar until after graduation, I took advantage of plugging the floor models at the local music shops (that I dedicated entirely too many hours of my youth in) into a Boss Distortion and MXR Phase 90 pedal, disseminating drop D guitar riffs. I consistently listened to this album every day for four years. My own lyrics poorly imitated Matt’s, with dreamy references to radar, circuitry, blue lights, and radio frequencies.

Even now as I look at the album cover, there is something comforting about the two shades of green and that zebra staring back at me. My first Graphic Arts project in senior year, I replicated the very cover for a sketch pad. My instructors tried to talk me out of it, suggesting I wait until I develop the skills to reproduce the zebra on the light board. Far from a printer’s perfect, I went ahead with the task and I got an A.

I eventually learned to play every song on the album, my favorite being I Hate It Too. I used to sit on my suburban porch during the summer, strumming out the rhythm on my Ovation guitar, pounding the base of my palm below the sound hole to simulate the heavy drums. I played it so much that one day, when I was pissed at something or someone, I strummed at nearly twice the speed, and when my dad came out to smoke a cigarette, he commented about half way through, “That’s not how fast that goes.”
“Huh?” I said, sort of snapping out if it, “No, I guess not.”
I started over, this time playing a bit slower. When it came to the part when the distortion was to kick in, I broke my low E string as I strummed too hard trying to buzz the strings.

Suicide Machine reminds me of the squealing tires I always heard in the distance behind the sound of automatic sprinklers on warm spring nights around midnight. My bedroom window faced Fort Street and I could smell the Detroit River less than a mile away. The airport beacon from the Gross Ile Municipal Airport in the distance alternated white and green on clear nights as I played the forty-five minutes this album had to offer, over and over again, laying on my floor, staring up into my ceiling fan.

Few albums have directly impacted my music preference like Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love. With the explosion and near peak of Napster at the turn of the century, I joined the army reserve just after getting my feet wet. Until recently, I kept all of the letters I received during those ten months away from home. During the last few weeks of basic training, I received a letter from a friend of mine who had found this amazing new band, along with the lyrics to a song that reminded him of me. A song he said that I would love.

You get the car I’ll get the night off You’ll get the chance to take the world apart and figure out how it works. Don’t let me know what you find out. I need a car you need a guide who needs a map? If I don’t die or worse I’m gonna need a nap. At best I’ll be asleep when you get back. I wanna see it when you find out what comets, stars, and moons are all about. I wanna see there faces turn to backs of heads and slowly get smaller. I wanna see it now. I wanna see it now. I want specifics on the general idea. I want to think what I should know. What should I do here, why’d you show? I wanna see movies of my dreams. I wanna see movies of my dreams. I wanna see movies of my dreams. I wanna see movies of my dreams.

For a while there, Twin Falls was my favorite song off the album. With lyrics like “beneath a parachute I saw her without shoes.” I fell in love with Doug Martsch’s writing style, later hearing that he never wrote his own lyrics and took submissions from his friends and people he knew. “Twin Falls isn’t even one of the good songs!” my best friend’s girlfriend protested one night as we drove the streets of Windsor Ontario. “And their other albums are all way better!” I didn’t care, I still loved the album’s nostalgic childhood references. “That Brontosaurus must have stood a thousand miles high.” For years, Built to Spill had been the foundation of electric guitar inspiration leading to most of the songs on my first album. Long after we left Michigan, Built to Spill poured from my car speakers, stemming from one album or the other, escorting us in Virginia and across Southern California. Prior to our departure, my friends, one in particular, used to criticizing me for my taste in this new indie music as they would so sarcastically say. “What’s with you and these seven inches and vinyl?” he asked one night amidst a night of drinking whiskey sours and inappropriate sexual innuendos. Perhaps I just grew up too fast for that group. “What are the guys in Built to Spill going to do once they’re old and no one wants to hear their music anymore?” I was asked once, as if I was trying to be talked out of it. “Dude, they’re like in their forties.” I replied. I really have no idea how old Doug Martsch is, but needless to say, I’ve met with or talked to those guys less than a handful of times over the years. Since then, my kids have come to love Built to Spill as much as I do, singing along with it every time.

Six months ago I promised something new at asaurus.org after the unfortunate closing of Asaurus Records. My plan was to get things up and running by August, but damn if I didn’t enjoy my new freedom a little too much. It was never my intention to close our beloved label only to start another “music blog”. These events are totally unrelated, and the only reason Finally Something to Replace Bowling is on asaurus.org is I think folks who enjoyed our music will also enjoy what we’re going to attempt to do here. And what is that, exactly?

Honestly, it is only halfway thought out so far, but the bulk of this new site, run by the founders of Asaurus Records, Matthew and Corey, will feature regularly posted music-centric essays about our lives and how music has shaped our experiences. We will not be tastemaking. We are not afraid to talk about bands that everyone already knows and loves. We’ll also dig deep and share the music that is wrongly underappreciated. What you won’t get is a few sentences a day and a link to an MP3. You’ll get thoughtful, possibly entertaining essays and articles about music and about being music lovers. We’ll be going back to the records we loved as children all the way to our most recent discoveries. This is where we are choosing to start.

Much like Asaurus Records, we are starting out with low expectations but a determination to keep doing things the way we want to do them and hope people find they like what we have to offer. Since we ran a label for 7 years and many of you coming here were fans of our releases, we’ll also be offering free downloads of unheard music from our archives, plus our hard-to-find releases. Our label website will remain online indefinitely, as it is the best resource for info on our bands and releases.

If you can forgive a shaky start, I think for the sake of getting this thing moving forward, we’ll just start posting and work the kinks out as we go. I hope you find asaurus.org a nice place to visit.