Well, that's a bleak sunrise

Vampire Weekend, Cindy Lee, and Bob Dylan (April 2024)

I started this Substack to encourage creative writing and create space for writing outside what my work life tends to allow. I hoped to make this a routine part of my weeks, but as with so many things meant to encourage creativity, I did not need the push. In the middle of lockdown, I started this Instagram project related to MAD MEN, which I planned to use to spur creative action. Well, it did, to the degree that I abandoned it, lol. But I also started writing the book that will be out later this year. An ok trade-off, I suppose. But I think all of these projects matter, even if (especially if) they flounder and fail on their terms. Like Julia Cameron’s proverbial “Morning Pages”—they exist so that other things can exist.  Also, I went on leave this Spring, and time became demanding in very different ways. At any rate, I still love having some erratic platform to jot down thoughts that get lost in notebooks or reels.

Some recent moments that have wedged their way into my brain:

• Vampire Weekend // Only God Was Above Us

  well, that's a bleak sunrise

I realize talking about Vampire Weekend in 2024 may provoke some uncomfortable reactions. Their sound strikes at the heart of the Obama years, especially those heady early days when things seemed less horrifying for ten minutes at a stretch. Why not put on a Decemberists album and relive 2003, that moment when the map forward seemed a bit less smudged, a bit less charred. Hell, just put on that Disintegration cassette and really dig in by channeling 1989, when home as a concept struck a slightly more believable fiction. There is a quote that I sadly lost track of, but it goes like this: I can watch a film four or five times and see things I’ve missed—bits and pieces of details, scraps of embedded meaning. But with albums, some of which I have heard hundreds, maybe thousands of times, I can tell you where I was standing when I first listened to a song, what I was wearing, how I felt at that moment—the Proustian potential of pop. You hear a specific chiming guitar or a particular chord change, and whoosh, the past merges with the present, decades compressed into the infinity of now. The Shins tapped into this: “Lucked out, found my favorite record / Lying in wait at the Birmingham mall.” Which is a great line. I also had the exact same feeling in 1993. In a shopping mall. In Birmingham (Alabama, not the UK, which is where I always assumed Mercer is referring to). So when I hear this song (“Know Your Onion!”), I think of that moment when I found the record I had been looking for. Of course, now I also think back to last summer when I was riding the #48 bus in Seattle and made a playlist of the Shins on the fly. The layering of memories (re)colliding logarithmically.

The fun part is when nostalgia, or something nostalgically-adjacent, touches a song—like the dying embers of a childhood’s sunny Sunday afternoon (derogatory). Songs like Billy Joel’s “My Life” invoke such distress that I become queasy. I don’t have a working early memory of that song (I was only four when it came out), but something submerged in that track still haunts me. Weirdly, something similar happens (albeit in the opposite, more positive direction) when I hear “Lovefool” by the Cardigans. One can imagine that if a song I have no real working relationship with can stir such ripples, what happens with music that I do care about?

Anyway, Vampire Weekend has a new record that I keep returning to. And it’s catchy and woozy and deep and warped in all these meticulous ways. I didn’t expect it to hit as hard as it has, but here we are. Multiple hooks rotate through the record, and something new has caught my ear each time I listen. Maybe it will drift away into the playlists of the unremembered, but right now, its talons are jagged and sticky.

• Cindy Lee // Diamond Jubilee

  in a fantasy / a burning memory / of something true

A couple of years ago, I caught the end of a conversation with an indigenous activist on a local public access radio show. She was talking about an uncle’s band called Sugluk, a Canadian band that had recorded several singles in the mid-1970s. They were recorded in English and Inuktitut, and three of their tracks were included in the Native North America, Vol. 1 compilation by Light in the Attic. I failed to catch the band's name then, but I quickly Shazammed the song they played. It turns out it was “I Didn’t Know,” which I proceeded to listen to approximately one million times in the months after. The song isn’t much more than a garage groove, and it’s one of those recordings that is just so perfect in vibe and tone. About halfway through, there is a break with the requisite “2, 3, 4…” but the drummer sort of stumbles back in—he eventually gets it, but for a brief moment, it all threatens to fall apart. And then they’re back. The whole thing is so amazingly moving (the vocals and guitar, but also the exuberance and joy of playing together as a group) that I can be moved to tears just hearing that mid-song break(down). It’s also a scary reminder of how much music is out there that could change your life that you may never hear—just existing out there right beyond your grasp.

As a society, we seem to have fashioned an impossible situation where many of the old, imperfect ways of connecting to culture have been eradicated and replaced with wildly broken, if moderately convenient, methods that have forever distorted how we listen, watch, and read. None of this is new, and all of this was predicted in various ways over the years, yet here we are, tethered to an unwieldy streaming system that monetizes everything but the art. The idea that we now have to contend with AI poets instead of poets using AI to create poetry is the grand narrative of our time. And it is all depressing. Tech so quickly moved from “Cool, a new music gadget that I may or may not ever adopt” to “Hey, you now have infinite subscriptions to wildly unstable catalogs of material, now with ads” that it has erased our connection to what was expected just a few years ago. Some of this change is annoying on a large level (finding unaltered prints of certain “updated” and “CGI-enhanced” films), but a lot of it just irks on more minor everyday levels. Looking for records that had once been streaming, for example, and finding them removed, or just particular songs removed. We have lost so many things: liner notes, bonus material, DVD extras, good music compilations, among a lengthening list of other pieces of media tossed into the ether. Cultural erasure and amnesia pulsate out in radiating waves of loss.

I am sure nothing I am writing is particularly eyebrow-raising, and there are good cultural critics out there writing thoughtful and well-sourced paeans to what has been tossed off the sides of the boat. But I have thought a lot about the lack of weirdness today. The concept is that we had access to deep wells of eccentricity. Not everything was established for some ad revenue, but people made music and art that operated outside of expectation and money. And yes, plenty of people still do, of course, but culturally, we have made it almost impossible to access these subcultures on any wide scale or with any consistency. The destruction of alt-weeklies, zines, weird, unsponsored websites, etc., has made it near-impossible to collate something beyond what is mediated and packaged. The modern spaces where this art still percolated—Twitter, say, or TikTok—have been purposefully blown up by the digital goliaths to undermine further any easy (sub)cultural communication. Anyway, we need more weirdness. We need more strangeness. The documentary on Elephant 6, released a couple of years ago, offers such a beautiful meditation on many of these ideas. A time and place (Louisiana in the 1990s) so far removed from the current moment you might as well be talking about Coney Island in 1903.

All of that has been spinning around my brain for the past few months. And then Cindy Lee drops Diamond Jubilee. I first saw a reference to this record via a person I follow online who always posts really great jazz records I have never heard of, but then almost immediately, it was everywhere. The trick, of course, is accessing it. The record isn’t on any streaming sites nor exists (to my knowledge) in any physical form. It seems to exist only as a YouTube link via a GeoCities site. All of which is as confounding and beautiful as the music. It is, of course, quite ironic that as I lament the ubiquitous state of streaming, I also got annoyed that I could not easily access this music via Apple or Spotify. So is our cultural prison. Anyway, Diamond Jubilee is gorgeous and strange and otherworldy and curious and limitless. It is as if that one disintegrating moment in Sugluk’s “I Didn’t Know”: so human, so on edge, so fraught. All the possibilities in the world held in the hands of a drummer just trying not to fuck up the take. Breath holding. Breathtaking.

• Bob Dylan // Austin (April 6, 2024)

  the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way

I was fortunate to see Bob Dylan on his final night of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour with friends old and new. This tour, which I suppose is now over, has been a masterclass in the distance between how a show looks through a setlist posted online and the performance itself. The setlist, with several key exceptions, has been pretty static, all things considered. Still, one leg got funny asides related to the location. Later, he replaced these bits with a series of place-specific covers. These tweaks have been great and fun to trace. But the core show itself (“Watching the River Flow,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” all of Rough and Rowdy Ways—minus one—and a bit of the gospel era) also changed throughout the years. Dylan played with arrangements (sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly), and the band membership shifted a bit, but looking at a setlist beforehand would show hardly any of these changes. As has been said repeatedly, Dylan is doing something so rare and unique right now regarding his age, stature, and musicality. I have seen a clutch of these shows throughout this tour, and they were all so wildly different in mood and vibe and music.

On this final night, I only wanted to hear “Big River,” which I assumed I’d miss, given concert karma and the mercurial conductor at the center of it all. He had played the Johnny Cash song over the past few weeks, but you never know. Going to a Dylan show with firm expectations for anything is a fool’s errand. The night seemed normal, but then we got Jimmie Vaughan guesting on half the set. This one addition shifted the gravity of the entire show and offered a unique look at the mechanics of Dylan’s show. Watching Tony teaching Jimmie the arrangements on the fly was one of the great concert experiences. It all came together on “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” with Jimmie missing Dylan’s nod and Tony leaning over to yell, “Go!” Dylan seemed in high spirits throughout, but watching Jimmie learning the songs in real time was thrilling—at times, nerve-wracking (will he hit it?), at times, rousing (Dylan shows have eschewed much in the way of soloing this tour). But the very human tableau of learning arrangements in real-time and also sitting just off stage as regular rhythm guitarist Doug Lancio subbed back in for a couple of the slower songs was all very touching. Still, watching Tony negotiate Dylan while Bob Britt (the other ostensibly lead guitarist) watched his bandleader’s hands for any key/rhythmic changes was a masterclass in how all these pieces converge. Finally, beyond these changes, it is difficult to quantify what exactly Dylan has done with “Every Grain of Sand,” his set closer to this tour. A prayer? Something weirder? But that last blast of Bob’s harp lifts it into something even less definable. Stunning. Something to experience.

Oh, and yes, I got to hear (gladly, joyfully), “I taught the weeping willow how to cry…”

One for the ages.

A melancholic thesis statement of sorts threads through these three disparate thoughts, but at the same time, it’s enough for now to allow these ideas the space to collide and melt into one another.

At this point we take what we can get, even in a debased form. Because what’s left?

—Stephen Malkmus (2020)

Acknowledgments:

1. Any discussion of Dylan and setlists requires me to mention the book Erin C. Callahan and I edited: The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances. Also, check out her new podcast/Substack: Infinity Goes Up On Trial.

2. As always, I am privileged to participate in the Million Dollar Bash regular roundtable at the Dylantantes.

3. Laura Tenschert listened to me complain about streaming and is always such a wonderful sounding board for all things Dylan. Also, Eralda Lameborshi helped assure me that not everything needs to be a thesis statement.

4. Finally, Ray Padgett has created and collated some of the finest discussions of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, among many other subjects.