Because we’ve been beating you over the head with it for a few weeks now, you’re probably well aware that TVD has its own Austin SXSW Showcase this week in tandem with our partners at NYC’s Sneak Attack Media and London’s Luv Luv Luv Records.
We think we’ve put together a line up of performers for Friday’s soiree that easily reflects the number of cities TVD has infiltrated this year and we thought we’d spotlight them here this week all ‘TVD First Date-like.’
With a nod to the nation’s capitol, Craig Wedren—late of DC’s Shudder to Think—kicks our week off. (And make sure you head over to Craig’s website as well to check out his brand new 360-degree video. Amazing for certain…)
“There were key family portals into my young world of vinyl fetish; my mother had copies of The Doors, Elton John’s Greatest Hits, and Carol King’s Tapestry, among others. I still posess and cherish her old records -even boring Procol Harum remains en crate. My father had a teeeny bit of random, precious vinyl -mostly big band, standards, and a fantastic recording of The Ohio State Marching band, to which he would exercise mornings in his underpants. When I was a kid, dad bought a K-Tel collection of Chuck Berry’s Greatest Hits off of the TV, which obviously kills. It was a bonding thing for us –we both loved rock-n-roll, and would listen and dance around his bachelor hovel. I eventually discovered and secured a leaden, recorded-straight-to-vinyl copy of his Bar Mitzvah (dad’s, not Chuck Berry’s), the only one in existence, worth a mint, a candy one.
For a time, my father would take me to the store (not the record store, but, like, K-Mart or something) and buy me singles, the most memorable of which –‘Black Betty’ by Ram Jam- remains in my collection to this day. I didn’t think about records then –it was all there was, a given; and so, like so many articles and particles of youth, I took not just my albums, but the very idea of albums, for granted. How and why could anything ever be any different? The thought never crossed my mind. I absorbed every image, every boa, every groove, and and the very nosefeel of all vinyl that Blessing bestowed. It was the classic image: a somewhat complex child lying on the bed with hands gripping what appeared to be his own square, carboard head, but which, upon closer inspection turned out to be a copy of Kiss ‘Destroyer’.
The size, weight, and sheer gripability of vinyl was small enough to hold, but large enough to eclipse literally everything else. My album collection was like a tribe of narcotic superheroes living in my bedroom with me, for me; they were my champions, and I theirs. Once it sunk in that the 2-D gods and goddesses populating (and aparently copulating, given the alarming rate at which they were taking over) my bedroom shelves were in fact human, or possibly demigods, there was no turning back: I vowed to one day join them.
When I would go downtown to visit my Grandpa Elmer, he’d take me to the neighborhood record shop and grant me 1 album, my choice. One day I chose The Plasmatics ‘New Hope For The Wretched’, and though Grandpa didn’t protest, that’s the last time I remember us record shopping together.
I have an indellible memory-snapshot of the moment I first touched, and was touched by (or maybe ‘rearranged by’) REM’s ‘Murmur’. In the early ‘80’s my BFF David Wain’s dad worked in radio, and so we always had promotional copies of whatever was being pushed on any given week. Amidst one week’s booty was a dark, kind of murky-blue album cover sitting by the Wain record player (a photo of kudzu or something? I looked for this fecundity everywhere when Shudder To Think first made it down to Athens, Ga.) that seemed weird, Other. We put the album on, staring directly at the vinyl on the turntable, which is often what I did when not staring, unblinking, at an album’s cover. What came out was perplexing and awesome, didn’t quite compute –it wasn’t punk or new wave, which was increasingly becoming ‘our’ music, but neither was it familiar radio-rock. This may have been my first experience with music that I don’t immediately ‘get’, but who’s siren song keeps me coming back until I am utterly drowned. From then on, as I grew older and became a much more discriminating, obsessive vinyl collector, I would increasingly seek that peculiar, vertiginous sensation that I first felt with David’s copy of ‘Murmur’.
One more vital vinyl memory: when Kiss Alive ll came out (’77-ish?), it had this insane double gatefold package that sat perfectly on my bedroom desk, all four members of the band sweating, bleeding, and just generally leering at me 24-7. I would force all visiting playmates to choose a character other than Gene to do an air-concert with me for as long as they/my mom could stand it. This was around when I determined there could be no other –or greater- future for me than one on vinyl.
My vinyl romance continued through the 80’s and into the early-90’s, when CD’s simply took over (but before vinyl re-instated itself as The Most Awesome Format). I still have all of my records, but frankly have not owned a turntable in a while, mainly because, living in NYC for 20 years, I simply wanted less stuff in what was always a fairly small space. But now I live in L.A., and my wife and I just bought our first house, which has me thinking a lot about all of the ways I want to live, ideally. There’s space now for my whole family to work and play, together and individually. There’s a recording studio in the back yard. So, how do I want to make, and listen to, my music? And how do I want my son to interface with music? The answer is pretty clear, as, for me, there has never been a more intimate, aesthetically inspiring, and frankly sensual format than vinyl. Time to get a sweetass turntable and bring the crates out of storage.”
—Craig Wedren
