Joe Bonomo - Field Recordings from the Inside: Essays

ALSO BY JOE BONOMO

This Must Be Where My Obsession with Infinity Began

Conversations with Greil Marcus

AC/DCs Highway to Hell

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found

Installations

Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, Americas Garage Band

Copyright 2017 by Joe Bonomo

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bonomo, Joe, 1966- author.

Title: Field recordings from the inside : essays / Joe Bonomo.

Description: Berkeley, CA : Soft Skull Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016040601 | ISBN 9781593766627

Subjects: LCSH: Popular music--History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3470 .B69 2017 | DDC 781.6409--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040601

Cover design by Faceout Studio

Interior design by Megan Jones Design

eISBN 978-1-59376-670-2

Soft Skull Press

An Imprint of Counterpoint

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.softskull.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Amy

Every human being is an archaeological site.

LUC SANTE

B ORN OF A mathematician and a nurse into the lime-green cradle of the suburbs, fifth of six kids, Patty Hearst on TIME and the fall of Saigon, windows onto a troubling landscape, early lessons in magic at the Wheaton Rec Center and bike rides into and out of woods that promised solitude and necking couplesbut I really want to steal the origin story of my younger brother, who at age one was holding himself up on the stereo cabinet in the living room watching a record go aroundit was Sinatra or Wes Montgomery or Paul Revere & the Raiderswhen he turned and for the first time in his life walked upright, beaming, a song behind him.

S CHOOL STARTED AGAIN in the fall, my tan faded, I trudged into Saint Andrew the Apostle with scissors, Elmers glue, a pencil case, and brand-new textbooks with pages that were blurry yet vivid to the touch. I looked down at my feet, they were there and they werent; in my head, or from a passing car, 10ccs The Things We Do for Love was playing.

A T HOME, AN open notebook on a desk, James Dean on the wall, siblings in the hall, half-there, half-invisible, Id look out my bedroom window at dusk and see half-world, half-me, before I learned the term rack focus, the world, back to me, the world, back to me, the world, back to me, below, kids walked to homes Id never see, though Id imagine them. In my head, or from a passing car, Cheap Tricks Dream Police was playing.

T HE 45 TWELVE-PACK from Korvettes spun in rotation on the family stereo and the Sweets Little Willy became as real as my real friends, until the day my older brother sat on the record on the living room couch, cracking the single for good, and then I learned the sadness of broken recordsF. Scott Fitzgerald compared his nervous breakdown to a cracked dinner plate; Ill call adolescent sadness a cracked 45, irreparable, for-good gone, and the analog era of snapped tape and busted 8-tracks and torn album covers crept forward, and all of the kitchen Scotch tape in all of Wheaton could not splice together the Dart Drug cassettes lost to mean feet or indifference or random tosses down the basement steps.

I N THE B ASEMENT Era all you needed was a steady hand, a screwdriver, some Scotch tape, and the nerve to believe that a cassette tape could be broken into, and if you were lucky not to fatally crack the plastic case and get in, the world inside was promising, somehow comforting in its thereness , its motocross of tape and spindles over which you hover in a kind of preteen omniscience, your fingers impossibly large, trembling now to find and lift one end of the snapped tape and with a sliver of Scotch tape marry it back to the other end, all the while feeling, because youd watched The Wizard of Oz again with the family last night, that youve pulled aside the curtain, magic and private, the cassette tape vanishing and emerging from a dark youve now flooded with basement fluorescent light, humming, nervous as you reattach the plastic housing, hoping against hope that when you press play the homespun little-boy mend wont catch on the tape heads and split again, not aware even in your deepest imagination that one day tape will recede from the basements and bedrooms and rec rooms and from beneath tires on the driveway and the streets out front, that one day the dark that youve imagined inside your Certron C90, the dark you cracked as puberty loomed and all sorts of unsolvable mysteries upstairs threatened, the dark entered with the suburban toolkit of tape-and-wish would merge with an anti-language spoken in ones and zeros, the dark that once seemed impenetrable would come to be seen as less a mystery to ponder than a digital nothingthere to never quite understand, a dark that stymies boys when they have the urge to fix things. Keep out .

A SCRATCH ON a 45 or an album was the uninvited bully, the mean kid who shows up at your party, a little gouge youd see with a sinking stomach as you held the album up to the light to reveal the chip, the dent, the cut. Wed try to shoo away the skip by placing a penny on the tone arm or, when that didnt work and we were feeling bold or desperate enough, by pressing down ever so lightly on the cartridge as the skip approachedright after the chorus or right when the solo starts or during the first line of the bridge, the interruption youd come to know as a wound that never healed rightmy finger shaking slightly, and Im hoping for just the right touch, just the right balance between pressure and lift so when that skip comes the needle will move right through, unafraid, and the next time we play the album the needle will play right through him again and eventually hell get the message.

I F I DIDNT succeed, if I lost my Zen-like poise there in the basement or if the gouge was just too deep, no magic touch could finesse that scratch out of the room; he was there for good, the unwanted stepsibling, the weird cousin who came for the summer but stayed, blinking at a past of melancholy at which you could only guessthere for good, to trip the song into permanent disability. Yes, a scratch was like that, a figure out of bad dreams who showed up one day and stayed. No amount of gentle laying-on-of-hands or Windex or dusting or praying would ever get rid of him, and the world would go out of focus and back into clarity and something would change for good, though you couldnt name exactly what.

J OE O . WAS in the rec room, struggling to play the simple opening chords of Foreigners Cold as Ice on the piano, and I was upstairs in my bedroomupset about something, red-faced, strangely sequestered that day from the kid I was playing with, the same Joe who lived with nearly a dozen siblings stacked two to a bed in a tiny red box of a house on Nairn, the boy I went to kindergarten with and who got in trouble with me when we slid on our knees, side-grins at each other, that language, the boy who went to Saint Andrew with me, growing into the man hed become, who was more athletic, the day at recess when the bell rang as the football he threw at the tail end of a play precisely designed zipped on a line into my ribs, stinging terribly, the same boy who in an act of betrayal to my childish leanings went to a different high school where he wasnt big enough to play football so he volunteered to run the first-down markers during the game against Good Counsel, where I watched from the bleachers feigning disinterest as he marched up and down the field, a small adult now, barking orders, speaking in a foreign language to kids I didnt knowalone, trying to make sense of the promises made by a pop song badly played by a friend downstairs who was already, although I didnt know it then, leaving.