For the past nine years, Ghostwriter (known to his family as Steve Schecter) has been strapping on a dirty-sounding hollow body guitar and using it to tear out some vicious country-blues riffs, while straining his already tortured vocal chords to spell out stories of working men, hard living, and kicking against the pricks. The hard-working Schecter is also a testament to the DIY spirit, releasing all of his albums on his own and booking all of his shows and tours (including a recent date in Portland opening up for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds).
Some of my earliest memories are of records blasting through the house. My folks have always been really into music, which is lucky growing up in Friend, Oregon (rural Wasco County). We didn’t have TV reception, so the stereo was our focal point. There are stories of me bouncing on the couch to Waylon Jennings as a toddler, and I have faint memories of Kristofferson and Dylan. But Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True has to be the first album I really remember being infatuated with.
I guess I was around five or six when I started to be aware of musicians, not just music. It was like 1981 and my Dad was on a huge Elvis Costello kick. Armed Forces and This Year’s Model were also in heavy rotation, but My Aim Is True was the one that got really ingrained. I knew all the intros and fade-outs, and when his voice came in it was like a magnet. I memorized the lyrics, substituting words I did know for the ones not in my vocabulary. (I guess this is telling, most the songs are wordy and kind of ranting!) I didn’t know what the Working Week was, and the Mystery Dance really was a mystery, but each song was an adventure. It was my earliest soundtrack. And his picture! I must have had a sense that he was from far away, because no one looked like that in Wasco County.
Around that same time, my dad was bringing home records by Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Rank and File, and the Blasters. (The Blasters’ Hard Line is another album that I remember vividly, but that was a couple years later.) Shimmering, twangy guitars and infectious rhythms, whatever it was…post-new wave, early cow-punk…it really spoke to me and left an impression. It was honest music. The bands were serious about their songwriting and revered the greats.
I ended up finding a lot of those memorable records in used bins over the years, My Aim Is True being one of them. I put it on the other day to see if it would hold up, and it did! After listening to it once I wondered if I’d ever written a decent tune! I’m definitely shy on chord changes.
