Good morning. Hello. You doing okay? I hope so. Not a lot of comments on yesterday’s post. I suppose no one wanted to hear about how Amy Covid Bash did something not 100% loathesome. I understand. I didn’t want to hear it either. Lesseee. Wednesday today. Only two meetings, that is nice, and only regularly scheduled ones, not one-offs. It’s the one offs that stress me out. Had a meeting with the auditors yesterday. They are very nice but those meetings always stress me out. Not while doing them, just in advance. I really build up a good head of dread before some meetings. I am not sure why. It’s really unhealthy.
Yesterday was a big music day over here. Let’s go through it all.
Before I start that, though, I would just like to grumble that I opened a new dozen eggs yesterday, my $9 eggs from Vital Farms, and they did not include the small paper insert, The Vital Times that is usually inside every carton. I was very sad. Luckily, I just discovered that The Vital Times is online — all past editions. This website really is a glorious circa 1999 corporate website and I love them even more for that.
I watched the new Young Southpaw video, Humpty Dumpty in HD. Young Southpaw is the comedic alter ego of my old friend and former bandmate Aug Stone. It grows on you.
Young Southpaw is very divisive it feels like to me — some people love it, some people can’t handle its rapid-fire very obscure references and relentless tangentialism. But a thing I realized is that Young Southpaw’s guile, his discursiveness, non-sequiturs and stray lines of thought will work really well with an elderly person, I think. Young Southpaw is going to be even more amazing when Aug is in his 70’s.
I first heard Cindy’s voice in 1998 or so, on This Mortal Coil’s “Kangaroo,” the opening track of It’ll End in Tears (which is also how I learned about Big Star, thank you Ivo). I was obsessed. One great thing about those This Mortal Coil records is that they tell you about the origial bands of the performers on the album, which is how I learned about Cindytalk, which I duly looked up in my trusty Trouser Press Music Guide. By 1990 I had moved to Boston and had rapidly acquired their albums: Camoflage Heart and In This World, which came in a day version and a night version, something I’d never seen before. By 1994, after a brief detour back to Alaska, I was back in Boston and had met Annie and Mike. Annie was running a great zine called Tear Down the Sky (I still have my copies) and Mike and I were living together, or about to. I was at Newbury Comics, flipping through the records, and found a new Cindytalk 7” single, Muster. This was back before you knew these records were coming out. There wasn’t really an internet to tell you. They were nowhere near popular enough to make the chalkboards at the counter of Newbury Comics telling you about the new releases. Annie might have known, for she interviewed Cindy for Tear Down the Sky around this time, and they developed a rapport. I went home and listened to “Muster” and was blown away. It was a change for Cindytalk, but it was exactly what the song claimed to be: an incantation, a ritual.
Not long after, the new Cindytalk album came out, Wappinchaw. It was their first in four years, their first since I was friends with Annie and Mike. We were all very excited about it. It came out on World Serpent, which was a label we liked very much, but knew that they didn’t really have an American branch. No one put the album out in America. This made me sad. Annie said that Cindy wanted to tour America. But with no label, there was no real chance. So we stepped up to the plate and we made it happen. We bought a few of those 90’s Indie, book-it-yourself books and guides, took out an ad in the Alternative Press, which yielded a collaboration with Ash from the LA band Trance to the Sun, who had actually booked shows before, and away we went. Ash helped book the west coast, Val from Mistle Thrush, who had also done this sort of thing before, helped with the east.
Five Scotts, Annie and I trapped in a Dodge Ram van for six weeks of complete insanity on the road, too little money, competing dietary, party, and sleep habits, and the challenges of booking a tour on the fly, without the internet, without a booking agent, without a label. Venues would get cancelled, shows would get moved. San Francisco was particularly fraught, the original venue The Maritime Hall falling through, and me driving all over the bay area to find a PA to play another venue. But the show happened. Every show happened except for the never-quite-solidified Chicago one. Boston, Cleveland (the amazing Speak in Tonges), Detroit (the legendary Alvin’s), Minneapolis (Prince’s club), Seattle at the Off Ramp, where we met Layne Stayley after the show, at the weird backstage hotel they had. He hit us up for drugs. Portland, San Francisco, LA, Phoenix, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Orlando, Charlotte, DC (Black Cat), New York, Boston again. It was the first time I ever went to the state in which I now live, North Carolina (where Cindy, the only time on the whole tour, sang “Holocaust” during sound check). A cop pulled us over in South Carolina and demanded cash payment for our speeding fine, right then and there, or else we were all going to jail. Played with and met some amazing bands and people: Bowery Electric, Shallow, Sky Cries Mary, Trance to the Sun. Comet Hyakutake was hurling through the sky, and we could see it whenever we were driving between two cities, on America’s interstates.
We fought a lot, I was too young and under too much pressure, stressed about money and deadlines, herding cats getting everyone into the van to move on to the next city in time, when the band wanted to, not unreasonably, see the sites, see the country, and meet the fans. It was hard, but amazing. My sister was on a bit of the tour, my girlfriend Megan came for a bit and offered us all a much needed soft bed and shower at her parents place in Texas. Friendships were made, Cindy would tell stories about London early 80’s squatter culture, the squatter’s rights movements, and the artists she’d meet in those days. I particularly hit it off with the drummer Paul, whom I stayed in touch with for decades after until he sadly passed away in late 2019. That hit hard.
It was exhausting and depleting but also rewarding and one of the things I am most proud of pulling off in life. And the shows were phenomenal. Not too long ago Annie dug the Mini DV tapes out of the archives and I watched the Minneapolis and DC shows again and they were every bit as amazing as I remembered. I remember the first time Annie and I were sitting there, with Cindytalk in our practice space, and they played Muster for the first song they rehearsed. Just banged it out. They thought it was a garbage take but we were both blown away. That incarnation of Cindytalk was just such a fearsome live band. Phenomenal.
Around the same time, Mike met a young man who was equally obsessed with European underground music as we were, but a lot younger, so was behind on his record collection. We were perpetually short of cash, Mike especially, so we would often sell records to this kid. I sold him my Current 93/Nurse With Wound 12” that I still miss to this day. Not long after that, he started a pretty popular website, kind of a proto social networking site, before Myspace came along, called Makeoutclub. I did a little design for him, with my friend Christine, but I don’t think they ever used it. In later years, I’d see that kid around at the clubs — he became a pretty popular DJ in town and ran a great dance night that I went to for a long time. But I’d also see him at, like, a Crispy Ambulance show or something. He moved to New York around the same time I did, so occasionally I would go see him DJ at Lit lounge. We stayed in casual touch all these years, because of the mix of underground music and working on the internet.
These last few years, as a side hobby, Gibby started a record label with one of his friends that has grown to be one of the most vital, important, and successful independent record labels in the US, Dais Records. Full circle, one of the artists on that label is Mike, under his Drekka guise. The label has a strong deep underground streak, and many of the artists now on the label are artists Gibby used to buy of the records from us — Coil, Drew McDowall, Psychic TV and Genesis P-Orridge (whose autobiography, you may recall, I’m reading right now, which also features long passages about the 80’s London Squatters rights scene, full circle), Merzbow, Tony Conrad, William S Burroughs. But also some of the most compelling modern bands — bands like Drab Majesty, Iceage, Xeno & Oaklander, Adult., Choir Boy (and, for good measure, fellow Bostonian I met through a completely different scene, Chris Brokaw, but Gibby was always like that, he transcended scenes).
A few months ago, Gibby told me he had gotten Cindy to agree to re-release Wappinchaw and the soundtrack album from a few years earlier, The Wind is Strong. I sent him some of the old tour paraphernalia — a couple of the decaying shirts, pristine copies of the original tour posters — and he sent me a Dais care package.
And yesterday, pristine new editions of Wappinschaw and The Wind is Strong, along with two beautiful new Cindytalk T-Shirts arrived at my door. I’ve not worked up the emotional fortitude to listen to them again yet. I know it’ll be intense, and I need to get my mood sorted a bit first. But my god, they are beautiful, beautiful.
Reading the Genesis bio seems timely, I’m spending my nights in 70’s London, learning about the squatters movement again, learning how Genesis converted these houses into houses for artists. I would read a whole book about it. It seems completely alien, unimaginable now, that there would be a government agency that just said “yeah, sure, take this empty house, make it something nice. It’s yours.” And of course they didn’t just say that out of the blue, a movement caused it. I want to learn more, again.
On the completely different end of the spectrum, I watched the Woodstock ‘99 documentary last night. I knew it was going to be bad. I knew it was going to be fucking bad from the day it was announced, it was obvious. I sort of take issue with a bit of the framing of the documentary. There was a difference between Woodstock ‘69 and ‘99 and it wasn’t just “the culture was so much worse at the time.” Woodstock ‘69 was countercultural. The US was still in their first forever war at that time, most people were not hippies, most people were still quite normie. Woodstock ‘99 appealed to the MTV mainstream, the 90’s equivalent of the hippies knew not to go, they knew that culture, that music was bad, there was a robust counterculture in the US still in 1999 — it’s so crazy that this needs to be said, but I guess 1999 is ancient history now. Still, though, very solid doc. What a giant clusterfuck. But remember: plenty of people saw it coming, people knew it was going to be bad. No one should have been surprised.
I almost got thrown in Facebook jail yesterday. They took one of my comments down, flagged my account, told me they weren’t going to suspend my account this time but be careful. The sin was that I make a joke to my friend Ashley that I almost — well, I guess I can’t say it, since I cross post these to Facebook. But she wrote a brilliant parenting advice parody and I didn’t realize it was a parody at first and it was upsetting until I got it, ha. Now I’m like… it was obviously a specific word, that people use sarcastically all the time, that triggered the action, because, and this is just stunning to me, Facebook doles out warnings for the use of specific words with no regard to context. Their algorithms are as sophisticated as a 1982 Apple Works find and replace algorithm. For a company worth one trillion dollars.
And, of course, I write, oh, god, two thousand word a day that I post onto Facebook, so now that they’re watching me, it feels like only a matter of time before I get kicked off.
So subscribe to the email while you can, I guess, I am such a subversive.
Okay, well. I have a long list of things to write about that aren’t about music, but I will save those for tomorrow, I guess. This took longer than expected. Let’s do a mix. Completely different mix from the music being talked about here. Though I guess Bobbie Gillespie is a Scott making music at the exact same time as Cindy, both with punk roots. Wouldn’t be surprised if their paths crossed at some point. And my god, that new Low song. So good, so good. Ending this one with two “oldies” that have been in my head yesterday.
You and me, always, and forever.