so, i come up in the cassette time. like when my older brother came home with chuck berry, or skip james records when we was young, or they played a REALLY good country song on the radio, the music would be put on tape to be repeatedly enjoyed later. or if i borrowed a killer banjo record from tom ludwick {this local cat that had a big pile of bluegrass records}, i’d tape it of course.
 
in my later adult life, there were these legendary tapes that were kind of circulating {nationally and/or regionally}. metal ones, joke ones, really strange ones.
{i think the first bad brains was on tape.} sometimes they would be cryptically labeled or something and there would be no information on them other than a title, or maybe a doodle. tapes were cool cuz like with a record you could see how long all the songs were and how many were on a side you can even tell how loud/bassy something is by looking at the groove, but tapes were kinda mysterious. and reusable. and those little reels were spinning around. and if you played it again it was slightly different because it would wow/flutter in a slightly different place and would have shed a minute bit of oxide from previous run.{veil} and if you played it in a different jam box or car, it sounded slightly different. and you could stick them in your pocket. the music i was/am into: dub, bluegrass, punk rock, actual country music, and metal sounds really good on that format. i still like to check mixes by whupping them onto tape. usually kinda hot, high bias.
 
one of the epic tapes from the van days was from my friend steve mannion up in NJ. he made this really strange 4 track masterpiece that is the funniest most amazing punk rock thing ever been made. i don’t think hardly anybody ever heard it but just a few friends. {the bad livers made many a late night drive across thousands of miles of highway while listening to this type stuff ha.} it may have originally appeared as a cdr, but it was quickly taped.
 
so one of my dreams was to put it out on my own weirdo cassette label so, years later i kinda started one, got the tracks and eventually got it put out by him. just the moment of discovery with that thing is unbelievable. the moment when you go through the arc of “this is kinda weird, hey cool….what IS this???? man this is the greatest thing i’ve ever HEARD!!!!” 
 
ah yes the tarot of the old aristotelean catharsis. i’ll take two!
 
in a sense the art that i get into the most is kinda like that. in my system, the music/image should be slightly veiled. especially certain parts of what’s happening. details can only be perfect in one way, but they can be slightly off in millions of ways. i find great interest in this. 
 
 
the experience i’m having right now is that the best stuff has to proceed somehow from zero, or has to have some zero in it. if everything{even the execution} is all wide open, you get burnt out on it due to dataoverload, and things of that nature. therefore, minimalism is mostly a valid statement in an overly/needlessly complex localized being context, because it provides a zero. {that’s kinda of an axiom i’m working off of that i think i made up?} i really like zero in my personal space/physical reality too come to think of it. random events arise out of nothingness. sometimes the coolest stuff comes out of less choices rather than more.
 
steve made all this stuff just himself voicing various characters in the narrative. come to think of it, he’s currently enjoying life as a very talented comic book artist, and perhaps this tape of his was like a comic book, he sort of treated the songs as chapters, or frozen moments or whatever. the way comic book story lines move along one chunk at a time. whatever the deal was, he made it and it was legendary. and if the bad livers woulda thought you was really really really cool, you prolly woulda got a copy of that tape. but prolly not cuz prolly nobody except zippy up in kansas or something would qualify, but he would have already had it trying to give it to you or something. richie from agony column. it was a pretty select list. it still is. 
 
as you can see, it meant a lot to me to put it out. and my little label that i run out of my kitchen, well technically it’s the dining room, became home to a lot of my stranger output, and some of my friends’ kinda weirdo stuff. most of the runs were/are 100 tapes only. 
 
see, one of the many side benefits of releasing cassette material in this current linear time coordinate, is the only folks that will even pick it up are total music freaks. there’s that kinda veil mentioned earlier. the coolest stuff kinda gives a casual listener lots of places to jump off the boat in order to let them go ‘head and get up and split. of course at some point you have to make a sandwich but that’s a whole other can of night crawlers.
 
my sort of early life cortical programming was from the aesthetic of where the platonic ideal form was to drive a ratty truck but have the best motorcycle you can afford. so in some sort of seeming result of that, it would appear there’s quite a few folks that drive older cars/trucks and lots of them have working tape decks and it’s pretty funny to put out music for that. 
 
 
which is not to say any format is better than another or any of that, if the music isn’t interesting, high resolution won’t help it. i’m referring here to being excited about music in a general way, and the type of energy where if you found something you particularly liked, you would subsequently search out the label, producer, musicians, gear, writers, studio and research every lateral aspect that would appear. then work the same process on all those new {to you}recordings you just unearthed. and repeat till the living end. that’s kinda how people find my work. if you know my stuff at all you have to be the kind of person that digs around because there’s no other way to find that type stuff.  

in taking a look at some of the various smaller music scenes around the country, a possible conclusion to be drawn or point made in regard to outcomes, would be the construction of a somewhat complex formula, describing the interrelation of the componentry. it would appear to be a bit of a “soup” with different elements tossed in or available, and if one aspect is a little shy, compensation can be made by goosing one of the other variables. like a lot of small social constructs, there are a bunch of little factors added together or strung together somehow, that influence the result on the right side of the equation.

a + b xc………etc. = the trip
 

example: an interesting scenario to ponder is greenwich village through the 50’s and 60’s. {one of the first transmissions from outer space i got as a young man was the village voice.} not to suggest there weren’t difficulties and flaws and so forth, but there were several phenomena and features that contributed to that being an explosion of great music etc. here’s a rough list:

a. affordable housing

b. high population of master musicians

c. contexts with economic compensation

d. a diverse population

e. public transport or some way of getting around or other logistic ease

f. radio to educate and inform

g. knowledgeable journalists

h. an interested/interesting populace 

i. plenty of regular jobs to get in a pinch

j. availability of academia, museums, etc.

k. easily accessible nearby large cities with vibrant scenes of their own, to work in/with, interface with.

l. record companies looking for art, with the ability to distribute it.

m. non-chain entities.

n. many touring bands coming through. 

consequently a person of even limited means could go and see john coltrane and doc watson on the same night in the same neighborhood. and ride a bicycle. {the point in invoking the names of those two icons is a general one not a specific one. they are used as variables herein.}

now i’m not saying that time period and/or physical location was perfect or that what we find today/now is bad, or any of that type of reduction. the idea is merely to state that there’s a type of equation of music scenes that produce varying types of results. the variables are interdependent. {and as always, i could be wrong about the whole thing alphonse.}

some of the smaller less influential scenes have [or have had] very similar “builds” in various time frames. right now portland has a bit of a vibe. what are some others? why and why not?

perhaps if a person were to find themselves in such an equation/scenario, a good productive response is to do the very best you can and keep working on things because in a sense, when the “scene” does good, “you” do good. 

example: if a person was a dj on a local fm radio station, a good healthy response to this is a realization that they have a unique opportunity to make a huge positive impact. what are things to be played for the audience that will challenge them and inform them? what have they not heard? what events are coming up that can be talked about that bring all this together? {example: the punk rock show on a local radio station out of seattle is really good.}
 

let’s say i’m a musician. being a content creator can have a huge impact on this hypothetical equation. how can i get as good as i can possibly get on my instrument or in my writing? where are the smartest people i can find to study with? how can i challenge, uplift and empower my audience? what other art can i talk about that would benefit from some more attention? what local artists can i support and encourage myself? what are some other things outside of my discipline i can do a project with? 

and so forth. what “needs” to be done that others aren’t doing? where are things going? 

an audience member also has quite a bit of power here. depending on things, they can have a multiplication factor rather than addition so to speak. what’s the coolest thing i can find that is playing to an empty house? what/where is the pure vision?

club owners, sound guys, neighborhoods, weather, all these types of things are accounted for. record store owners. taste makers.

in my own job of traveling, i get to witness things like this: a person comes to a show and perhaps mention they are thinking of starting a coffee house, then the next time i came through they started it and their kids work there, then the next time i come through i play there and they are expanding the building and have a poetry night and open mic night. so some things are getting done by smart people that care. at least in the subset of my touring world. i see this energy all over the country thankfully. 
 

it’s not perfect, there are bumps and ebbs and flows of course. i’m not even sure if this kinda stuff makes a difference, if it’s pencilled all the way out. {a certain type of person would say “so what?” to the whole setup.} but it sure makes living in a place a lot cooler. man art is what makes all this life hassle worthwhile! {a conclusion my nine-year-old self came to.}

sometimes you play a little place or small event and they just don’t have a way to get the word out yet, or the method they had just went away or something. or perhaps they couldn’t get the day they wanted and now have to go up against another bigger event. the variables in the equation have slightly different values across time. sometimes there are big changes. but overall there are some cool things going on in the music scenes around the country. i’m proud to be a part of that. it takes a lot of work. and sometimes you kinda wonder. but i gotta say i’d prefer to swing the bat rather than try to crowd the plate and get hit by a pitch so to speak. you kinda gotta go look for yourself. i recently played at a small festival and every band i saw was interesting. that was really nice to experience. 

the older scenes are always ebbing and flowing, and new scenes are popping up. i’d say the trend is to more de-centralization. {not many new art ideas come out of places a regular person can’t afford to live in.} the four or five scenes that kind of defined american music for the last few decades still have interesting stuff especially if you dig around. it’s weird there’s lots of cool stuff, but you have to dig much harder. what other response can one possibly have other than to dig and to create?

awright back at it.
 

i kinda go through these different periods of study where i get on something and read and watch and listen as much as i can. that’s ONE good thing a person can say about all the computer hooraw and so forth. the average working person has access to books and music heretofore unavailable. the database of ALL that exists. {in a sense every guitarist/instrumentalist you see should be a flaming badass because there’s more free lessons available on the ‘net than you can shake a stick at. by the Masters.} therefore, it’s possible to study the best stuff like crazy.

so this one fellow i want to talk about is buck trent. first off, used to, before the bands had drums, they had this as a typical lineup: {country music} non-pedal steel, fiddle, electric guitar, upright bass, and the singer played acoustic guitar. and in dudes like hank snow’s case, some could pick the heck out of a solo on acoustic guitar adding another voice. if you haven’t spent a few years on this groove, i’d get with it. 

buck was the soloist on so much of porter wagoner’s stuff and was his musical sidekick. so many of porter’s hits were built around and/or featured buck trent’s really strange and hep playing. if you don’t know this guy, you best get hep. 

buck was a banjo player and electric guitar player, and he came up with this wacky thing that was built on a banjo frame. he took a sheet of plywood and put that on there in place of yon head. this allowed him to mount pickups in there like a ‘lectric guitar. he had some bending levers installed and scruggs tuners on every string {on the four at the headstock anyway}. he played drenched in reverb and would use either a scruggs tuner or one of the bendy pedal things to access every note he could, rather than just “play” said note. in other words, if he could bend INTO it, he would do that, rather than just pick it. so every line had this twisty snaky weird scene. notes could be mechanically accessed in sort of an arbitrary way. like generated music or something. 

the result was some really far out music. the thing that freaks me out is, this sound was on top ten big country hits, one right after another for many years. imagine a man playing a hybrid instrument that he had invented and built with some friends in a very experimental way and played in a very experimental way, on top ten country records today! 

if you don’t know about country music, you might want to go find some. porter and buck is a real good place to start. they used to come on the tv when i was a little boy, i think it was every day at 5am i would watch before i went to school. these characters were like biblical figures to me and they spoke of a world much happier and awesome than my real life and i adored them. 

my brother and i were discussing that from our birth till the time we was about 10 or 12 years old, pretty much ALL we heard was killer classic country. {it wasn’t classic at the time it was new!} every little farming town had a station that played the finest stuff. every restaurant had it on the jukebox. people went out to hear folks play. it was everywhere. it was kind of a religion. folks bought records. that’s where i got the idea that playing an instrument as good as you could, was a noble effort. and that being a musician was the best job one could have. and that music was really the greatest thing about life. and that these amazing musicians that had come before had made something truly great. this aesthetic i’ve maintained into my 56th year. 

one of the things i appreciate about actual country music is that it came from working folks [poor] and was FOR them. punk rock bluegrass blues gospel, so many of the forms was a bit of a salve or balm to the folks that worked hard. today that voice has all but disappeared. it’s sort of perceived as shameful nowadays when folks have hard times or need some help or fall between the cracks and so forth. the typical person is either rich, pretending to be rich or dying to be rich. this ethos is reflected in video games where you kill other players for resources and what not. {there is a very interesting book called the one-dimensional man by herbert marcuse.}

fortunately i’ve collected much of this stuff, and i was there and i can remember what it was like. i’m not sure if it’s just my frame of reference but that old stuff makes me happy and i suspect it was engineered for this outcome. used to, each network had an orchestra. 

i went and saw buck at branson at his showplace there with my friend mike bub a few years ago and buck sounded killer. 

hank snow has a very interesting solo guitar record and all the buck owens/don rich music is stellar. roger miller. i grew up with that as “mainstream.” a lot of the songs were around two minutes long. perfect little novels. thumbs carllile. 

music is good!