I was on the phone to my brother the other day, and I was detailing with some sheepishness the elaborate method I have developed for ingesting new music into my cells and even sub-cellular matter ("sub-space").
"How It Is Done."
When I buy a recording, it might sit in a pile for the next five or twenty years (there being several stacks of maybe a hundred titles each to get through). Some CDs you buy one day and they sit there for years and you come to resent them, and then to dread having to listen to them. "It'd only be at most seventy minutes," you might tell yourself, but still you put it off. Must I listen to that Sublime Frequencies album of crackling raw Algerian radio that seemed like such a good idea a lifetime ago? One day, when the time is convenient for it, I will take it down, coolly unwrap it from its neolithic shrink-wrap, and put it on. In the course of that listen, I will retrieve a little notebook and note the tracks worth inclusion on a cassette compilation.
When I have recorded the track on to an ongoing cassette compilation (and it may take another thirty years for this next stage to occur, even though I might have fifty separate tape compilations on the go at any one time), I circle the track number in coloured pencil to tell my future self (and my scholarly annotators, for when I am gone from this earthly plain of fumbling illusions) that the track has been formally absorbed and assimilated into the cell walls of my tape collection.
The second stage of ingestion, to detect any good tracks missed by the first check, comes later, when a more mature and reflective re-listen to the album might follow. This second round could result in further tracks, more subtle in their charms, going onto a CDR compilation. I also have a little pocket-sized volume for that express purpose: "Compable Tracks on Disks According to Kreiter, Vol. III."
I described all this rather neurotic putzing around I do in the name of listening to any new album to my brother, and apologised immediately for it, expecting the deserved downfall of scorn. There was a pause and my brother said, "Yes, well actually I was just thinking that it sounded like something I might like to do."
There's something particularly neurotic, certainly, about putting off the best stuff 'til the rank rubbish has been exhaustively gone through. I do this with all the media –– books, comics, TV, film –– as though I have all the time in the world. Put the best off til another day –– let's read something bad. Let us you and I read the complete run of Punisher 2009 rather than The Marble Faun.
Today, while I was reading (or rather sifting through) Horace Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life, I had on some LPs from the second-go-round listen list. Background music I wasn't expecting much from. And yet the Ramleh album gets better with age (would you believe), much better than all those disappointing Skullflower LPs, while the Box of Chocolates album, despite a couple of tracks with a young Will Oldham singing on them, ain't a lick better than I remember it. I want to like that Red Simpson trucking album but it's strictly generic and for the birds.
Now I am sitting through the Carter Family and it's a tough pill to swallow. That's the "hard admission" of this article's title. We all like to like the Carter Family, and sometimes we actually do like them. "My Clinch Mountain Home" is a beautiful song. Of course, it's that rantankerous unreconstructed old-timey reprobate Old Man Carter singing lead on that one. But "Chewing Gum," "Single Girl, Married Girl" "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes," "Little Darling Pal of Mine," these are all the golden hits that got us through the Oughties, after we'd bought the reissue of the Harry Smith box and found we wanted more. The two skits with Jimmy Rodgers are priceless.
OLD MAN CARTER: How about a little drink, Jimmie?
JIMMIE RODGERS: Ah HAHHH! Boy that sounds good to me! Yodel-ay-EE-hee!
(Damian Morgan has "self-fashioned" his whole adult life around these three minutes of recorded sound.)
JIMMIE: Hey hey doggone boy it shore is pretty up here. Man look at them hills over there. Say what is that mountain layin' over there, ain't that a pretty old mou–– what is that mountain over there?
OLD MAN CARTER: [Through grit teeth] That's Clinch Mountain, Jimmie.
JIMMIE: Boy, that that ole mountain y'all been singin' about so much, "My Clinch Mountain Home", that it?
OLD MAN CARTER: Yes sir.
It's too bad that the Old Man didn't say, "Now Jimmie, how did you ever fucking guess? I'm genuinely impressed that that giant mountain 'jest-a layin over there' penetrated your cerebral cortex through the prodigious wine vapors and good blue grass or should I say purple skunk you obviously been smoking, fugging it all up."
Instead he patiently tells Jimmie, apropos of nothing, how he "went out last night" and his "old coon-dog treed two possums up one tree." Jimmie doesn't, alas, say, "Wha's that got to do with what we wuz jest a-sayin' before, Parson?" Instead Jimmie famously goes, "Y–– huh?!"
Reverend Carter, script in hand, carefully repeats the cue, sounding for all the world like Oliver Hardy, "Two possums up one tree."
"Two possums up one tree?"
"Yes sir."
Flummoxed momentarily Jimmie emits the most mellifluous –– and the most pointless –– yodel. "Yodel-ay-EE-hee!" Then he squints, tries to concentrate, and rallies: "Eh HEH, oh man, boy that's too many possums up one tree... eh... heh... so you got two up one tree?"
He sniggers, there is some dead air, and you can feel the Revered Carter urging Jimmie on with his eyes, "Do the fucking line! Do it!"
Instead Jimmie prefers to ramble a bit longer, "Doggone, I ain't never heard of that before, what kind of tree was it?"
"That's a BLACK GUM TREE."
"Y–– AW aw. DOGgone."
That's when Jimmie suggests a bit of "ridiculously harmonizing round here like we used to do," to which the Old Man, calmly placing the script in the trash, assents resignedly. They do a nice passage of "It's Gonna Be A Hot Time In This Old Town Tonight". Mother Carter seems to have been sniffing some of Jimmie's special stash, because she reels back on set going "BA BA BA, BUH-BUH BA BA BA BA BA" until they get to the chorus.
Gold like this you obviously cannot sustain, but damn it all, Mother Carter, won't you even try? Listening to three albums put out cheaply by fly-by-night labels because the recordings are now outside copyright, I think only: How you did like to sing the same song again and again with only marginally varying lyrics, Mother!
And so I trawl wearily through these tracks. Amazing to recall how I nearly bought one of those box sets of the Carters in Academy Records on 18th Street.
A rare case indeed of a "bullet dodged" by me.
