Continuing the Captured Tracks spotlight, Michael Stasiak of Widowspeak shares some of his vinyl memories. Check out some of the dreamy indie tracks from their debut self-titled album, just released in August.
I bought my first records from vendors at the Star-Lite Drive-In movie theater swap meet. The Star-Lite used to project horror movie double features onto a giant white screen that dwarfed the adjacent B&I Marketplace, an indoor shopping center whose main attraction for twenty-seven years was Ivan, a captive and forlorn silverback gorilla.
Widowspeak | Nightcrawlers
Upon the arrival of multiplexes and the death of drive-ins, the owners turned the Star-Lite into a weekend flea market. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, in the same parking spaces where Jason and Freddy had once stalked across windshields, guys with pickup trucks and panel vans unloaded decades worth of stuff. The stuff was theirs, or it was stolen, or scrounged from estate sales and dead persons’ storage units. Velvet portraits of Elvis, grandfather clocks, baseball cards, samurai swords, guns, knives, guitars, lawnmowers, gorgeous porcelain dolls and grungy Cabbage Patch kids, assorted hubcaps, video games… and thousands upon thousands of records.
I was indiscriminate at first, only being familiar with names I heard on the oldies and classic rock radio stations. I made no distinction between In Through the Out Door (overblown, portentous, late-period) and Led Zeppelin II (ballsy and bluesy and great), or The Final Cut (pretentious) and Wish You Were Here (brilliant). The Billy Idol Dancing With Myself 12” came home with me on the same day as Something New With The Beatles and a Nevermind cassette.
Widowspeak | Gun Shy
Widowspeak | Harsh Realm
At the Star-Lite, you could hop lightly through genres and styles, the critical eye obscured and made slave to whimsy. But as I went deeper and heard and read more, I started striking deals with guys who didn’t know what they had; “I’ll buy the whole box for fifteen,” and suddenly I owned everything Frank Zappa had ever recorded, as well as a dozen Ted Nugent records that promptly met the garbage can. I became intoxicated around records, drunk on the hunt, mesmerized by gatefolds and run-on grooves.
A brand new record never feels the same to me as one that reeks of decades worth of cigarette smoke and, inexplicably, pancake batter.
—Michael Stasiak
