I organize my record collection
chronologically so I can keep in tune with the space-time continuum of music.
It’s like they’re all part of an epic, ongoing improvisation. Some years --1972
and 1970, for example -- are like long crescendos, with dozens of brilliant and
very different albums, and others are more like brief bridges – 1962, 1979. The
90s are the biggest gap in my stack. This is less a reflection of the quality
of music from that decade than a document of my musical life. Or, more
accurately, its near-death. That’s when I divested myself of all my LPs, and
most musicians stopped releasing them. That’s when, not long after I got my
first dial-up Internet account, I unloaded all my CDs and cassettes, and
embarked on ten long years of digitally-squashed songs crammed into a piece of
plastic the size of a cigarette pack, and squeaking out of a puny pair of ear
buds.
Now that
I’m back into vinyl with a vengeance, it’s nice to run across
end-of-the-Millennium artifacts from artists who never gave up on the medium.
It’s like being able to relive a life I missed. Such is the case with the first
release of the year from the Woodsist label, Golden Calves’ Money Band + Century Band. It’s a
double-record reissue of an early project by James Jackson Toth, a DIY-scene
pioneer and hero who’s released an untold number of albums and singles under a
bunch of different names, Wooden Wand and Vanishing Voice being the best known,
relatively speaking. Toth put these recordings out on vinyl in 1996, a year
when I seriously believed LPs were no longer being made. Not only that, he paid
for it by cashing in his meal plan at college, thereby precluding himself from
being able to “eat a proper lunch for an entire semester,” according to the
reissue’s liner notes, which Toth wrote. “I was eighteen years old,” Toth
writes. “I was taking drugs.”
Listening to the record 16 years
later, I’m stunned by the bravery and the dedication, and I’m grateful to him
for keeping grooves in the music, and vice versa. This is music that has to be
heard on vinyl. Its bones and structure are built with a single acoustic
guitar, a sound that thrives in the warmth of wax, and this sound brings a
fleshy folky-ness to Toth’s compositions, though they seem to owe more to
improvisational jazz and Africa and rhythms and trance and spooky film
soundtracks and noise than Joan Baez or Tim Hardin. He fleshes out these
odd-shaped and strummed melodies with layers of weird sounds, electric guitars
drenched in static, sustained notes from a cheap Casio synth, screechy
saxophone, atonal piano, even the hushed rhythm of an adding machine. And his
voice, soft and shaky, cracks a bit here and there betraying his youth and
unprofessionalness, in the best sense of the word, in a punk-meets-folk sense,
as he sings surreal lyrics such as “electric stacks of glass” and “my bacteria
forms” over and over again, like some sort of AIDS-era mantra. In other words,
it’s trippy as hell, but gentle and chill. I keep coming back to it, and with
each listen it reveals more and more, despite its simplicity and primitiveness.
Toth is at once egotistical and
self-deprecating in his account of the music on these rereleases. “These are
not perfect records,” he writes. “Perhaps worse than so-called ‘naïve art’ is
‘only-marginally-informed art’ … I should have let my talents marinate for a
while before rushing out records … But fuck it, man. I was hopelessly arrogant
then and remain so today. Why else would I greenlight this fucking thing?”
Thank god he did. The original releases were few in number and are almost
impossible to find anymore. But with this, Woodsist has offered up an important
document, a missing link in the unstoppable life beat of music. Real music that
you can hold in your hands and that sounds right in your ears. Toth is one who
wouldn’t let it go away.
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