Words about music
A self indulgent introduction. Welcome to my Sub Stack.
Music has always had an outsized presence in my life. What I remember most clearly from the first few weeks after my family immigrated to Canada are moments in my dad’s Chevy Nova, listening to the radio and noticing stuff like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and Chris Isaac’s “Wicked Game” sounded really cool to me. Seven year old me couldn’t relate to anything else that was going around me in this new place, especially when I started school, but I spent a lot of time listening to the radio. If a song I really liked was on, my dad would often drive around the block one extra time on the way home so I could hear it until the end.
When we would return to Portugal to visit family I would spend hours late into the night with my cousin Nuno making mixtapes. Just a few years older than me and with the added perspective of living in Europe, Nuno always had stuff to show me that would spark a year or two of inspiration until I saw him again. I’m pretty sure I was the only kid in my school listening to Atari Teenage Riot. I don’t think I’ve ever told him this, but those mixtape sessions are among my fondest childhood memories.
As I entered high school and met a few other weirdos from my suburban town, music was almost exclusively the bond uniting us, as we traded CDs and formed bands. The late night programming on Much Music like Much West, Much East, and the Sook Yin Lee-hosted The Wedge, opened my mind to the idea that there were even more weirdos outside of my high school who made up scenes where music and art was flourishing.
I spent just as much time collecting issues of Spin and Rolling Stone or loitering at book stores reading the expensive UK import magazines like NME and Mojo as I did flipping through CDs at my local independent record stores - Cactus Records and Records On Wheels, which were right across the street from each other. The jaded 70’s burnouts who ran these shops, along with the guys at Gear (the guitar shop down the street), and my goth English teacher would suggest bands and lend me records. For a precocious introvert who only wanted to talk about music, these relationships meant a lot to me. Now that I’m a jaded 2000’s burnout, it’s amusing to think how I must have come across to these people - an eager, opinionated kid in a Nine Inch Nails tee shirt with ever-present headphones around his neck picking their brains because he clearly had nothing better to do.
Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, a semi autobiographical film inspired by his own formative years as a teen rock journalist, made a huge impression on me. It hadn’t occurred to me that most of those people writing in the magazines I was reading did that as their job. I related to William Miller (the 15 year old Cameron Crowe surrogate), his awkward obsession with rock bands, and his relationship with the now legendary rock writer and “gutter poet” Lester Bangs, who by the time of the film’s events in 1973 was himself a jaded 60’s burnout.
I found Let It Blurt, a biography of Lester Bangs by Jim DeRogatis of The Chicago Tribune, who as a 17 year old was the last person to interview Bangs before his tragic overdose death in 1982, for a school project. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and Mainlines, Blood Feuds and Bad Taste, two collections of Bang’s work for seminal rock publications like Creem and Rolling Stone, followed. He centered himself in his writing, started a long feud with Lou Reed, and invented the term “punk rock”, but he was just a schlub like me. Unlike contemporary gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who, with his mythical adventures seemed to have more in common with writers like Kerouac and Hemmingway, Bangs was just a guy typing away in his small apartment, wired on uppers. He was relatable and largely overlooked - an underdog I immediately idolized. His writing style was inspired by the music he was covering, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
In 1976 Creem published Lester Bangs’ “Death May Be Your Santa Claus: An Exclusive, Up-to-Date Interview with Jimi Hendrix”. He prologues the piece, stating, “Needless to say, it took a lot of legwork, both on and off the astroturf, to track Jimi down; he’s been a pretty reclusive dude for about five years now.” Bangs had the audacity to fake an interview with the late Jimi Hendrix - characterizing himself, the interviewer, as a big fan of Hendrix, while boldly depicting Hendrix as critical of his own recorded output, and self-conscious about his place as a black man in the predominantly white world of rock and roll. To say that Bangs had no right to pen such a story is an understatement, but it’s a fascinating read. It’s a pure, critical expression of Bangs’ reverence for Hendrix. He admired rock stars enough to spend his short life writing about them, but he didn’t buy the myth. They were just people like anyone else, with flaws and personal agendas that Bangs was eager to pick at and lay bare, even if that meant putting words in the mouth of a dead man.
I spent a few years as a music journalist starting in the late aughts, mostly covering the indie rock boom in Toronto, and it was a cool time to be plugged in to all of that excitement. I don’t think I even came close to Lester Bangs’ creative and fearless style, but I wasn’t afraid to be a fan. Events led me to lose the spark that made me want to write and I unceremoniously gave it up completely and got a normal job with dental benefits. It was refreshing to listen to music and not feel like I had to be on the pulse of anything. I would often cringe at people who encouraged others to pursue their passion as a career, which isn’t terrible advice, but they never warn that you can easily lose your enthusiasm for it in this pursuit.
With that in mind, this was all a very long winded way of explaining who I am and my intentions regarding this Sub Stack page. I want to continue the feeling that I don’t need to be on the cutting edge of music or even any scene in particular, and will write about whatever is interesting to me at the moment, old or new. There will be lists, diatribes, reviews, and maybe something else will take shape eventually but I hold no expectations. I was only inspired to start doing this again because I was really annoyed by a Tom MacDonald song after all.
I’m going to rant occasionally about the Tom MacDonalds of the world but for the most part I want this page to serve as a positive celebration of the music I love. I’m seeing a lot of lazy takes about the supposed vapidity of music today, and the absence of traditional guitar-based rock bands in the top 40, but I’m regularly hearing new music that blows my mind.
Besides, if rock is dead, it died in the mid 70’s when Lester Bangs pronounced it so, but I don’t buy into the myth.