The month in high school after I bought Popular Favorites 1976-1992: Sand In The Vaseline, the Talking Heads’ new 2-disc great hits collection, was possibly the first and only time in my teenage life when I enjoyed getting up in the morning.

It was May 1993, the weather was finally nice, and my first-period class was B&W photography. There were only four of us in that class and Ms. Yellick-Manley loved us, or so we thought, because we were smartasses and she let us get away with a lot. Phil was in that class with me, and so between that and the fact that we loved taking photos, and were given a lot of room to experiment while shooting and in the darkroom, it was pretty much a glorified, artistically invigorated study hall.

My morning routine that month consisted of waking up and listening to the following songs from SitV: “My Love -> Building on Fire”, “Don’t Worry About the Government”, “Warning Sign”, “I Zimbra”, “Once In A Lifetime”, “Burning Down The House”, and, finally, “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”. If I recall correctly, they were all on the first disc (this was back when we still had discs), and they were a good way to trace the most joyous, buoyant route through the first half of a mostly joyous, buoyant musical career. “Naive Melody”, especially, was the best way to send myself off into the often difficult, occasionally revelatory existence that was 10th grade in a small town in Iowa.

While riding my bike to work along the Mississippi River this morning, “This Must Be the Place” appeared on my iPhone’s shuffle. I keep my phone in my pocket with its tiny speakers emitting my favorite songs, however faintly, so I don’t get something terrible stuck in my head during the long ride. (QV last night, when I inexplicably got “What Would You Say?” by the Fucking Dave Matthews Band lodged in my head during my ride through downtown.)

Anyway, “Naive Melody” made me glad to be awake on a Monday morning, riding my bike, even if I couldn’t hear it all that well, and even if (especially if?) I was no longer 16 years old.

Talking Heads - “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” (via Hype Machine)

Posted: May 4th, 2009 under General, Grinnell, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: none

Over the weekend Amanda and I flew to North Carolina to attend the marriage of my friend Wes to his fiancée, now wife, Theresa.

Even before the wedding, we knew it was going to be a pretty great weekend because our rental car was a silver Mustang, and upon arrival in Raleigh we went straight from the airport to Waffle House.

The wedding was the next day, and I didn’t know many people there beyond Wes’ family, and my other friends Mark and Phil. The four of us have been in the same room only a handful of times since our band ended eight years ago. So reconvening with them is a rare, often emotionally charged prospect, at least for me.

The ceremony was brief, beautiful, and sylvan, and Mark and Phil performed a song they were confident only the four of us would recognize.

The song was “Today You Move,” by Trip Shakespeare, a song and a band Wes helped us all discover seventeen years ago. When it came to music, we took all our cues from him, and were never misled.

I’ve been to a lot of weddings over the last few years, but this one was significant because it was the wedding of my oldest, most consistently dear friend.

While that friendship is now about 25 years old, it wasn’t always close, geographically or otherwise, and it didn’t always come easily. It is probably an axiom of human relationships that your longest, most intense friendship will almost by necessity be not only the most complex, but the most complicated.

But not fragile. While we drifted off each others’ radars a few times, a corollary to the above axiom is that after a certain point it ultimately requires less effort to let the distances between us close rather than to keep drifting.

So, here’s to Theresa and Wes. May you care for him, Theresa, as well as I’ve often wished I could.

More here.

Update: Somehow I forgot to mention that there was karaoke at the wedding (as you can probably tell from the Flickr set) and that Amanda and I performed “Kiss From A Rose.” Don’t know how the hell that eluded my original account, since it was obviously the highlight of the wedding.

Posted: April 20th, 2009 under General, Grinnell, Images, Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 7

While in Iowa over the weekend, my brother and I traveled to Iowa City to attend the joint birthday party that Ransom and Angie were throwing. It’s an hour’s drive east from Grinnell, a drive I’ve probably made close to a thousand times.

It was dark. My brother, in the passenger seat, cued up “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” on his iPod. I smiled for the entire duration of the song. I found myself entertaining the admittedly mundane thought I always do in the presence of great art:

How sad that people who died before this song was released cannot hear it.

But maybe they can—and for the rest of the song my only (mundane but worthwhile) wish in the world was this: that all the dead people I’ve known and haven’t known should be able to enjoy “Single Ladies”—and every other creation of equal or greater value.

Driving back, at 3 a.m., my brother put on Lost and Safe by the Books. I’d forgotten all about that album, and the Books, but 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway was the perfect time to be reminded.

“Be Good to Them Always” began and I immediately pictured an extremely specific location: the corner of Pierce and Damen, facing east, four years ago. Morning, summer. Taking a left at Penny’s and rounding the corner, hurrying to catch a train. Already sweating in my work clothes. I suppose song was in heavy rotation on my iPod.

The song’s lyrics—if you can call snippets of dialogue and field recordings lyrics layered over beats, cello, and Rhodes, all chopped into carefully reconstituted smithereens—those lyrics were unsettling then, and seem prescient now, on the perpetual cusp of national disaster.

Different music, different context, same mundane but worthwhile wish: that the dead should hear this music. At 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway that wish was transformed; it became less mundane, more desperate, both less and more specific—extrapolated out to address whatever amazing song might be playing, but now also invoking a singular departed.

Posted: April 7th, 2009 under Chicago, General, Grinnell, Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 1

Right now I am suffused with equal parts disbelief, joy, and pride about the gay marriage decision in Iowa. It’s hard to believe that only fifteen years stand between the unvarnished, institutionalized homophobia that colored my teenage years, and this.

This should give the Iowa/Midwest/flyover-bashers pause, for at least a little while.

In honor of this momentous occasion, I am going to listen to Reverend Lovejoy’s 2001 smash hit single, “Prescription: Iowa.”

Image courtesy David Morris, via Flickr

Posted: April 3rd, 2009 under General, Grinnell, Images, Music.
Comments: 5

Grinnell photo walk

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Posted: January 9th, 2009 under Grinnell, Images.
Comments: 3

Dear Neil, Mark, Phil, Wes, Ben, Dave, Aaron, Brian, Dave, Eric, Scott, Paul, Sarah, Matt, and anyone else who had the rare pleasure of attending Grinnell High School in the early 1990s and being involved with the theatre program there and participating in the improv troupe Impulse, where Larry Pinder bestowed with great force and cheer the gift of good improvisational acting on our impressionable young addled minds:

Doing this in a blog entry might be horribly gauche, I realize, but I am lacking most of your email addresses and I haven’t even seen many of you in nearly a decade and brazenly frank blog entries rife with oversharing are apparently my thing now more than ever. But I wanted to fill you all in on what happened in Grinnell the other night.

My brother and I both made it back to Grinnell for Larry’s service on Wednesday, and we were among the few representatives of GHS’ theatre alumni. I guess this is one of the dubious advantages of remaining in the Midwest: it’s slightly easier to make it back to Grinnell for things like funerals and Thanksgiving.

The service was held in the high school’s new auditorium (which I regarded throughout the proceedings with good-natured envy, recalling the days when we did improv in church basements and stuffy classrooms and people’s attics because the school didn’t have a proper theatre of its own) and was eminently tasteful and well-organized and pervasively joyous rather than sad. It was an open-mic sort of affair where people were invited to share their memories of Larry. I was overwhelmingly pleased to see a couple rows of seats occupied by various Grinnell College alums from 1992-1994—Brian, Brandon, Phil, Jim, Craig, and others—who along with Larry intimidated the hell out of us while at the same time teaching us how to do good improv sixteen years ago and whose word we regarded as gospel and very presence we felt made us smarter, cooler, better people, whether we were playing improv games with them in the black box theater in the Fine Arts building or watching a Stumbleweed show with them in Gardner.

These are people I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again, people who had informed my creative universe for a good two or three years in high school and then graduated and went on to bigger things in other cities, and we acknowledged at the reception afterward how it would have been nice if the circumstances reuniting us didn’t have to be so shitty.

Several people’s comments at the service, including my own and my brother’s, were about how Larry taught them to be funny, to have a good sense of humor, to laugh. To integrate the rules of improv into daily life like zen tenets. To elevate one’s taste in art while appreciating the lowbrow and the absurd. But also—considering my brother and I both secured our first post-collegiate jobs at the newspaper, under Larry—he helped teach me and many others how to be grown-up. How to do the smart, responsible thing. This is charmingly ironic since, to hear his friends and family tell it the other night, he never stopped being a very big kid, in the best possible way. Read more »

Posted: September 12th, 2008 under Grinnell.
Comments: 5

I know I’ve addressed this before, but today’s date reminded me that there are a few people whose birthdays I can remember even though I haven’t seen them in years, dates sunk into my brain far deeper than the birthdays of more recent, closer friends—my brain was younger and therefore more plastic when I learned them, I suppose. At some point in 1987, not long after becoming friends with him, I committed to memory the fact that April 11 is Michael Mutti’s birthday.

Starting in fifth grade and continuing more or less all the way until high school, Michael and I informed each other’s troubled, surreal preadolescent sensibilities. We were similarly introverted and socially awkward and had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the institutional and social vagaries of Grinnell Middle School. We drew bizarre cartoons and science-fiction tableaux in our notebooks that might get today’s eleven-year-olds sent to a child psychologist. We made up cruel nicknames for the popular kids in our class, and crueler nicknames for our teachers. We staged epic schoolyard battles where the playground equipment became spacecraft and the grass and gravel became—of course—either hot lava, flesh-dissolving acid, or deep space.

I now realize that in these idiosyncrasies, we were profoundly normal boys.

And like most young American people our age, we negotiated the pop-culture landscape far more adroitly than we did the social rituals of our peer group. Frequently assisted by Chuck Munyon (9/6/77), we became highly discriminating connoisseurs of Duck Tales, Ghostbusters (the film), The Real Ghostbusters (the animated series), Weird Al, Airwolf, the 1988 Olympic Games, Police Academy, Future Problem Solving, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Laser Tag, Dragonlance, Legos, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Odyssey of the Mind, Foxtrot, the NES, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Headbanger’s Ball, Michael Jackson’s Bad, Weird Al’s Even Worse, and—last but certainly the hell not least—Def Leppard.

Michael actually ended up going to undergrad at Lawrence, just like me; by then, however, we had fallen out of touch, which is weird, and which I’ve always regretted. I haven’t seen him in a long time and probably won’t hear from him until he finds out about this post and emails me to request I remove it because he doesn’t want prospective employers to Google his name and see this.

Until then, happy birthday, Michael.

Posted: April 11th, 2008 under Grinnell.
Comments: none

1973: My father obtains a position in the fledgling Russian department at Grinnell College and moves, with my mother, from Baltimore to a tiny town in south-central Iowa. Their families think them crazy; they might as well be joining the Peace Corps and shipping off to Zaire.

1975: Grinnell College scores a major coup by bringing to campus a relatively unknown young singer-songwriter named Bruce Springsteen. It turns out when he’s on the cusp of a national breakthrough; he plays Grinnell a month after releasing Born to Run and a month before landing on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

My mother and father attend the concert to see what all the fuss is about. It’s held in Darby Gym, an ancient barnlike basketball structure a block and a half from their house. Darby has a high, curved roof and an ornate brick facade; it’s a gymnasium, of course, so the acoustics aren’t the greatest. My parents are there for only a few songs when my father decides to leave. My mother stays a little longer, but my father, about to turn forty, deems it simply too loud.

1983: “Dancing in the Dark” is taking the pop charts by storm, its video in heavy rotation on MTV, to which I am glued whenever possible. We’re renting a row house in Greenbelt, the my mother’s hometown near DC. I spend the evenings bouncing off the walls in my pajamas, listening to Top 40 radio in the bedroom my brother and I share, trying to stave off bedtime. I thrash around on the bed, imitating Courtney Cox’s dance moves from the video.

1985: Singles from Born In The USA are still ruling the charts; now it’s “Glory Days”, Springsteen’s hokey bar-band anthem about summer, baseball, and drinking. I only really like one of those things I and I still love the song.

I’m watching the video on MTV one afternoon in Greenbelt, the volume cranked way up, when my father comes thundering into the living room, raging at me about God forbid his sons should go outside, God forbid they should read a book once all summer, about Goddamn it watching this crap all day.

I sadly hit the volume button on the TV’s remote, and the E Street Band’s rollicking good times fade into the background.

Posted: March 19th, 2008 under Grinnell, Music.
Comments: 6

1979. My parents took me to Paris to visit my mother’s sister Mary and her husband Greg. Because I was three years old I was obsessed with all things Sesame Street and was horrified to discover that, on the French version of the program, Oscar the Grouch was blue and played the trumpet. The number-one song in the United States on Christmas Day was “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes. Greg had a massive record collection and I implored him to operate the record player so I could listen to Beatles albums and the brand-new Muppet Movie soundtrack, which caused me to become frantic with glee.

On Christmas morning my father and I were the first ones to awake. We sat in the kitchen for about two hours while he read the paper and wondered to himself when I was going to remember that it was Christmas morning. When I finally did, I opened my presents, which included a wind-up plastic bird and a miniature car ferry with removable cars. Mary made me a pretend radio out of a cardboard box and wrote “Jake’s Radio” on it. On New Year’s Eve I spent the last ten minutes of 1979 dreaming about Big Bird and willing myself not to wet the bed.

1986. My family moved to Ann Arbor, and the snowfall seemed more intense and abundant than what I was used to back in Iowa. Our new home had a fenced-in yard, which made the snow drifts seem even larger. The number-one song in the country on Christmas Day was “Walk Like an Egyptian” by The Bangles. In my fourth-grade classroom I was the New Kid, and during our current events unit I struggled for the first time to understand AIDS.

Our house also had something called a “family room” where we spent most of our time and which was separate and distinct from our “living room” where we hardly spent any time. This also took me a while to parse. We had cable television, which was also novel, and I quickly became obsessed with MTV and David Lee Roth and Madonna’s video for “Open Your Heart”, which caused me to become scandalized in all sorts of ways I had yet to comprehend. Nickelodeon showed reruns of The Monkees, which caused me to become obsessed with the Monkees.

For Christmas we traveled to see my grandmother in DC. All I wanted for Christmas was Laser Tag. I would absolutely die if I did not get Laser Tag for Christmas. Then, for Christmas, I received Laser Tag, and so I lived.

I also got my first Walkman, and roamed my grandmother’s house with my headphones clamped to my head and my Laser Tag gun in a holster on my waist, blaring my Monkees tapes. On New Year’s Eve I spent the last ten minutes of 1986 falling asleep listening to Mickey Dolenz sing “Last Train To Clarkesville” and willing myself not to wet the bed.

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Posted: December 4th, 2007 under General, Grinnell, Iowa City.
Comments: 9

Last night I had the pleasure of hosting my old friends who are now in a band called Bowerbirds. They played at the 400 Bar and then crashed on my floor. It’s always bittersweet to be reunited with people who used to be such an integral a part of my life and at such a formative time—Mark and Phil and I (and Wes, too) were pretty much inseparable throughout most of junior high and high school (which is when it’s arguably most crucial to have friends from whom you’re pretty much inseparable)—I say bittersweet because I only see them a couple times a year, at best, since we went our separate ways a few years ago. Fortunately, they are the sort of friends with whom I can fall right back into the sort of jocular camaraderie that we perfected in eighth grade and which has served us so well ever since that it hasn’t changed a great deal, much to the delight and then immediately subsequent annoyance of any friends, acquaintances, girlfriends, etc. who’ve come along in the intervening two decades.

The other huge, obvious dimension to this is that Mark and Phil and I (and Wes, too) formed a band together in high school and another one later on, and any of the music we’ve made since then with other people in other permutations is inevitably entrenched in and informed by the embarrassingly naive but, again, incalculably crucial and formative initial musical excursions the four of us made in our parents’ attics, basements, and living rooms, excursions which were—fortunately for posterity and probably unfortunately for our credibilty—exhaustively documented and subsequently digitized and now housed in my iTunes library so that, when I wanted to wake the band up this morning, I simply had to turn up my stereo and begin playing a recording of a show we played in Gardner Lounge at Grinnell College in May 1994, when we opened with a cover of “New Day Rising” by Husker Dü. Their heads came off the pillows with a quickness.

And, while none of us knew back in 1991 what trajectory our musical lives would take, I don’t think we could have possibly imagined just how wildly unpredictable they’d be. We drafted Phil into the band in eighth grade and ordered him to be our lead singer. “Just make up some lyrics,” we told him. “It doesn’t matter.” At the time he couldn’t play guitar, and pretty much taught himself over the next few years. That he is now a formidable songwriter whose songs are almost frighteningly, autistically brilliant, and to have those talents duly recognized and ratified, is a surprise of the best kind, though of course it now seems inevitable. But that Mark and Phil—who probably, more than any other factor, informed my (incredibly forceful, incredibly loud) drumming style by forcing me to compete with the volume wars they’d wage with their guitar amps in my parents’ basement—would eventually land in and make their name with a rustic, romantic folk trio born in North Carolina (touring with the much-beloved Mountain Goats, whose principal player’s wife [in a quintessential small-world coincidence] attended Grinnell and was in the audience of the aforementioned 5/94 show) is, of course, an outcome none of us could have foreseen.

So naturally it was also bittersweet to see them playing at the 400 last night, in front of a large, appreciative crowd, most of whose constituents ventured over to the merch table afterward to pay their respects and buy CDs and ask for autographs—and to miss the days when Wes and I were right there with them, playing louder music to smaller crowds in smaller rooms. Bittersweet, but inspiring—it makes me want to play my drums more often and in a greater variety of contexts; to compose music; to join new bands and continue playing with the ones I’m in; to try my best not to succumb to a 9-to-5 after I get my degree in May and instead fight tooth and nail to make a living with my writing and music, as improbable and elusive as such a lifestyle always seems, has always seemed. It is not easy, and rarely glamorous, but all the more rewarding for being so hard-won.

Posted: November 1st, 2007 under Grinnell, Music.
Comments: 2