“The first records I ever owned were the Chipmunk Punk LP and a 45 of “Memory” from the musical Cats. I don’t remember acquiring these. They seemed to always exist – like my record player – amidst my other toys. My musical awareness, similarly, began almost pre-consciously.”
“My father played Blondie, Black Sabbath, and Fleetwood Mac records while I was in the crib, and my grandmother used to regularly arm the player piano with showtune and jazz standard piano rolls (she even had the “Star Wars Theme”). I didn’t like “Memory” much, but I loved Chipmunk Punk, which was composed of sped-up versions of Tom Petty, Blondie, and Cars songs (not exactly punk, but at three years old, I was yet to split such hairs).
My father, noticing my increasing interest in music, took me to the mall and told me to pick out some singles. I chose three – Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings,” “Starship’s “We Built This City,” and Howard Jones’ “Things Can Only Get Better.” I acquired a Walkman for Christmas and began compiling tapes of these songs to play in the car on family trips. This is around the time I began to understand music’s great function for tuning things out.
My uncle tried turning me onto the Byrds, Neil Young, and the Velvet Underground, but none of these would take for a few years, for I had, by this point, gotten into heavy metal. My cousin had a band called Carnivore, and I began listening to his music. I procured a 7” single by his pre-Carnivore band Fallout, a record which now fetches very large sums of money. I played those two songs—“Rock Hard” and “Batteries Not Included”—constantly.
Knowing that my cousin had made this record taught me that it was possible that I, too, could someday make a record. Though I was a good eight years from discovering the punk and hardcore scene, a scene in which communion with your heroes was as easy as a handshake across a merch table, it was Fallout that eliminated, for me, the idea of rock stars as unattainable demigods. I knew that when I got older, I’d make records.
As a child, any time I received money—for shoveling a neighbor’s snowy driveway, from a birthday present from a distant relative, from a bribe from my mother to do well on a spelling test—the cash I earned went to records, tapes, and eventually, CDs. I have collected albums ever since. Entering a record store with enough cash on hand to walk out with a few new treasures is still one of the happiest feelings I know.
It’s a feeling better than drugs and almost as good as sex. What a rush!”
—James Jackson Toth
Wooden Wand’s Blood Oaths Of The New Blues is on store shelves now via Fire Records.
