SO/SN/SB/SB — 3/6/23

Something Old

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to Mississippi John Hurt, and one of his songs ("Louis Collins") dimly lit up a memory in the deep recesses of my brain, as if I knew the song already somehow. It took me a week or so to fully exhume the memory—I knew it from some bootleg-made-official from Jerry Garcia and friends called The Pizza Tapes, an album I had owned when I was a teenager and disliked enough that I deleted it from the iPod in my early 20s. And yet something about John Hurt's original version of a song I knew from it stirred something within me. In my mid-30s, maybe it was time to give it another go.

It's not that The Pizza Tapes had changed. The bluegrass-via-folk stylings of Garcia, guitar picker Tony Rice, and mandolin player David Grisman were still the same, having been committed to tape in 1997. The songs were still there, covers of traditional folk tunes ranging from "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" to "Long Black Veil" (which I knew from the Band) to fucking "Amazing Grace." The myths are still there—never intended for popular release, Jerry Garcia's decision to tip the pizza delivery guy with his copy of the tape ended up spiraling into a thousand bootlegs, and an eventual decision to give it a proper release in 2000. It's all the same, but what's changed is me.

I've changed mainly in the ways I've softened about certain genres of music, and how I'm more willing to accept unfamiliar and challenging sounds into my life as I get older. But there's also the idea that I needed more time to put the work in. Listening to The Pizza Tapes at nineteen was like skipping a few steps. First I needed to really chew on Dylan and the Band and all those who were putting rock spins on folk music. Then I needed to listen to folk music through Americana like Tyler Childers and then Americana through bluegrass like Sturgill Simpson. Then I was ready for pure blues folk music via John Hurt. Only then was I ready for interpretations of that folk via Jerry Garcia in David Grisman's basement studio.

That previous paragraph is condensing the journey too much, maybe, but you get the point. After a decade or more on the outskirts, The Pizza Tapes are back, and I can finally say that they might actually be worth your time, if you're at the point in your life that you can appreciate this shit.

Something New

I'll be getting into some Oscar discussions here on the blog later in the week, but I probably won't have time for everything. There were too many movies this year, and not enough time in this household, where films take at least two nights to finish. Exhaustion is real, and normal, and comes at the expense of consuming movies of artistic value according to a film academy.

So let's give a shoutout to one of those movies right here (I never said this blog column had to stick to music). Let's very briefly sing the praises of Aftersun, which was nominated for one of the "big eight" awards. Its adult lead Paul Mescal (Phoebe Bridgers' boyfriend) is up for Best Actor, and it's a well-deserved nomination. It's not so much what the character says, but what he doesn't say. Mescal's performance is designed to be implied, not stated outright, and he threads that needle pretty deftly.

I have a working theory that Aftersun is great in the same way that the children's TV series Bluey is great, in that they both tell the story of an adult(s) through the POV of a child(ren), which renders that story incomplete for the audience in very interesting ways. There's always some poignant shit going on in the background of Bluey with the adults; you get enough half-snippets of dialogue that you can fill in the blanks sometimes, but it's always in the background to whatever innocent, hilarious game the kids are playing at any moment. This is the whole point with Aftersun—clearly Mescal's Calum is going through something, and we see his daughter Sophie try to figure out exactly what that is, both in real time and retrospectively as an adult. She doesn't get answers, neither do we, and we're left with the same conclusion that Bluey and Bingo give us—the adults have their own lives, and we the children are never going to be privy to it.

These thoughts are a work in progress but I appreciate thinking about them across disparate works of art.

Something Borrowed

Speaking of Bluey... we've been watching a lot of Bluey in this house over the past month or so. I'm all in. It's by far the best children's entertainment my kids have gotten into in their lives so far. Like, it's so far above whatever second place is that I don't even know what second place would be. If you asked me what my top-ten favorite TV shows of all time were, there's a legitimate chance that I'd include Bluey on that list among otherwise prestige drama shit.

The reason it's so good is that it's the reverse of the usual children's television formula. Take something like a cartoon we used to watch as kids. Rugrats, for example. Rugrats is a show for children, but there are moments that appeal to adults, little easter eggs that make the experience enjoyable for adults too, even though it's for their kids. Bluey is the reverse. It's an open secret that Bluey is a show for adults. There is plenty of stuff for the kids to enjoy, and often that kids stuff is front and center. But ultimately, this is a show for adults.

For parents, specifically, so that narrows the appeal a little bit generally. But as a parent, I find myself these days trying to live up to the standard set by the cartoon dog parents, Bandit and Chili. Endless patience, and endless energy, and an unflappable willingness to indulge in playtime. Sometimes, after a long day at work, I come home to the two non-infant kids begging me to play a game with them, and I'm tempted to just say NO! I'M TIRED! and leave it at that. But that's not what Bandit would do.

I read an interview with Bluey's creator, Joe Brumm, that addressed this specific issue:

NPR: I want to talk to you now about Bandit, who is this absolutely phenomenal dad who seems to have this limitless well of patience for the creative games his daughters want to play. Do you ever hear from parents who are sitting at home and watching Bandit and feel like they cannot possibly ever measure up to the example that's shown?

BRUMM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's quite a quite a common thing in my life now, people mentioning that they don't have the energy or patience of Bandit. And I think that's fair enough. I think he rarely is fully into the idea of playing with the kids. It's usually with a groan and, oh, man, not this game again. But the thing with Bandit is he still does it. And that's what I found I was doing. It's the most of my parenting life. It was like, wow, you know, there's a lot of work to this, but, you know, I'm up for it. I'm going to do it. But I think what I usually answer to that is they are dogs. And if... dogs, probably more so than any other animal, they just love to play. And so if they ever did start walking upright and talking, I think it's a pretty accurate representation of how much they would play with their kids.

Read the whole interview HERE. I think the "well they are dogs" is a convenient excuse. Brumm may not want to admit it, but Bandit really is setting the standard here, and as much as it is a pain in the ass sometimes, we'd all be better parents if we were like him.

Something Blue

I want you to know that I take recommendations seriously. I do. If you tell me to listen to an album, it might be six months until I listen to that album, or it might be six days, or it might be eighteen months, but I will eventually listen to it, and let you know what I think about it. I have a system, and that system involves a list of albums I need to check out, but the selections from that list are random, or actually more like a gut-feeling-type thing. That's how it goes.

But if I'm taking the recommendation seriously, then you have to take you recs seriously as well. Don't give me any shit you're not fully committed to. I want to love what you love, but if you don't love it, then the recommendation to me is weak. Give me the good stuff. Don't expect me to defend something that you aren't willing to defend yourself.

I'm being harsh because I'm speaking in general terms and about no one and no album in particular. I could talk about someone in particular, and that person is reading these words right now, so I'll say to that when he or she or they recommended Aeon Station's 2021 album Observatory, I took it seriously, and I appreciated the recommendation, so I mean no offense by today's "Something Blue." 

I listened to it. I had a good opportunity to listen to an album while I was trying to put the finishing touches on a fixed bathroom sink. It was a frustrating experience, but I'm 90% confident that my lack of skills as a plumber had nothing to do with my sub-par opinion of this album. I was open and willing to enjoy it, despite how much I want to smash the bathroom sink into tiny pieces. It just... I dunno, there were a couple big moments, but overall it was slow and boring and felt like it was trying to be more important than it was. (I have thoughts about the Wrens too, but they probably aren't important to the point I'm trying to make here.)

Which, okay, fine, I'm not going to like everything. But then at this point in the Recommendation Process, I reach back out to the recommender, and ask them what it was that they liked about it. To see what I'm missing, ya know? And the response was along the lines of "I didn't like it either, but I thought you might." I do appreciate talking about music in general, but I find very little worth in discussion music that both parties are lukewarm at best about.

Keep the recommendations coming, friends! Just be ready to tell me what you like about your recommendation! If you don't like something, then put it aside and don't listen to it anymore!