Roxy Music - Remake/Remodel

When I think about Roxy Music, there is always this hesitation. It’s like, I really like them, but it took me a while to like them because I was prejudiced against them for some reason. I can remember a time when I knew the reason, but now I don’t. I do know it has a lot (everything) to do with some sort of jealousies involving my ex, Rob Roy. Whatever our relationship was, forever how long it lasted, for whatever aftermath remained, and whatever damage was done, one thing remains: Rob Roy was my musical soul mate. We spent the majority of our time playing, speaking of and buying/trading music. We both had a deep and abiding love for Britpop. I met him once briefly at a friend’s house, but then truly remember falling all over myself for him at my first Morrissey show here in Raleigh, Nov 16, 1997 at the Ritz. I then spent the next 3 or 4 years laying my soul to waste for him.

We were so off and on for so long, it’s hard to say when it all started, but we both know when it ended. We lived together so many different times and attempts, but it was the second to last time, in Cary, that we had our last big stand. It was the longest time we made it, but it was the hardest. The most damage was done then. However, I do remember one special occasion we had decided to drive all the way out to Carrboro to the Visart video store to rent music videos, because there was nowhere in Raleigh to find the kinds of concerts we wanted to see. On one occasion we rented Peter Gabriel’s Secret World Live and Roxy Music’s Musikladen, live from Bremen, Germany.

By this point, I had overcome my unfounded prejudice against Roxy Music, (save one song, to this day I can barely tolerate to hear, “Virginia Plain”. This song is so awkwardly uncomfortably bad to me. The vibrato of his voice, the tempo, I don’t know what it is, but I just straight up dislike it as a song in general.) We made a special trip to my parents’ house, who had 2 VCR’s at the time and made our own copies of these two videos before returning them to Carrboro. We spent many times of the next few weeks and months watching Musikladen. This song always sticks out.

I cannot accurately tell you the myriad of things about this song and video that please me, but i can name a few. It may be the saxophonic hijinx and acrobatism of Andy MacKay, but then again, it may be his pants of extreme excitement, with codpiece of proportionate mystery. It might be the overall bewildering Riff-Raff-itude of Brian Eno. My god. How can you love someone so much but yet be so terrified of them? It seems weird to me that I didn’t like Roxy Music for a while there, when I have such a deep Eno connection with the whole U2 thing, and all.

But i think what does it for me, what REALLY does it for me is not so much the fact that i want to do Brian Ferry six ways to sunday, (i always have, and always will, no matter how old and crusty he gets,) it just has to be the reign of fire he lashes upon us with his Rockin' Piano Hands at about 5:00. Few things in life have truly seemed as cool to me. In fact, that became a kind of private joke between Rob and I, if you misbehaved, Bryan Ferry would shoot you would his ‘Rockin’ piano hands’. We would often replay this part and pretend to fall over dead from being shot.

We had some good times.



Side note, in more recent times, this song also makes me think of the first time i met Frank Black after a show (incidentally) also in Carrboro at the Cat's Cradle which, as my livejournal confirms, was Jan 30, 2001. He covered this song that night, and I remember being super-psyched to hear it. Forever coincidentally between us, this was the first time i officially met you, although neither of us can remember and it wasn't the first time we were 'together'!

(ps - did you piece together that at this show the pixies opened for U2 and the next time we were 'together' was when you opened for Frank Black? THEN we met again because of U2... how's that for fate, sucker?)

The B52's - Love Shack

I am a gypsy. Although I have spent the majority of my life living inside the Beltline, I have moved every year for the past oh…. 6 or 7 years to a new apartment. A break back to my folks’ house once after a break-in at a house I once lived in off of Gorman Street.

This Gorman street house, although I didn’t make it there a full year, holds some of the deepest, darkest, most insane memories for me. Mostly these memories are centered on parties that reached epic proportions. This song, while played to death on most pop radio stations and holds a special place in the heart of everyone on earth for some reason or the other, makes me think of drag queens and Goths raging at 4 in the morning in that little green house.

What had happened was: I was living in Cary with my ex. We split up a year or two after we probably should have, and I decided to purge myself out of that apartment. (I basically pulled a Peaches.) I put out some feelers and much like every random hook-up I’ve ever received in my life; my mom’s mastery of word-of-mouth at her hair salon came through. I cannot tell you how many jobs, piano teachers, boys, apartments, cars, etc. I have gotten through my mom’s shop. A client of my mom’s, Ms. Hazel, had a house for rent. It was 3 bedrooms, old and busted, and only $500 a month. It took my dad and I a few Saturdays to paint, clean and fix it up to a livable condition (leveling the toilet, lying carpet, lining cabinets, you name it.) We finally got it move-in ready and filled that house with a bunch of adopted furniture and salvage from the NCSU lot.

I wasn’t there long before I realized I needed to have a housewarming party. I did. Not much longer, in the midst of a horrific depression, I realized I was broke, so I got a part time job. I wasn’t working the part time job long before I realized I needed to have yet another party, a New Year’s Eve party. Yes friends it’s THAT New Year’s Eve party. There are some people who have been in the scene long enough that *still* talk about this party. I used every connection in every scene and clique, getting the word spread, even handing out flyers at the store. 3 bands played. Every scrap of furniture or anything that wasn’t nailed down got shoved into a locked back room. I got a keg. I even bought chips and a veggie tray.
This is an excerpt from my long-lived and still kicking livejournal (began in 2000! Keepin’ it oldschool!) about the evening:

“…so alot of sh*t got f*cked up. one of my nicest turtles got broken. my coat rack got ripped off the wall. tons and tons and tons of beer spilt on the floor. assholes outside kept dropping their cigs on the ground on my front porch so theres like a million scorch marks in the outdoor carpet. im still not done cleaning up... not anywhere near done. im too tired.”

So many things happened that night. I met my first drag queen. Liquid acid was rampant, people still come up and tell me new stories about that night involving acid that I didn’t know anything about. (Talking to azalea bushes?) Lots of sexual deviances. Troops of hippies, Goths, punks, rock stars, frat guys, supermodels and pre-hipster-hipsters came through there. I managed to stay sober the entire night and the cops only came once to tell people to move their cars to the other side of the road. It went on until dawn and at one point there was a count of about 300 people inside and around the house.

My crowning achievement… my glory and hopefully my legacy in Raleigh will be this party and what happened after the bands played and the CD player got turned over to the PAs set up in the living room. The microphones were still on and ready for the loudest most ridiculous 3am karaoke jam in existence. After much Olive, Vengaboys and the like, the real “party” music started. I very vividly remember a goth friend of mine, one of what I would have at the time considered queen of the Über-goths, took the mic and sang this song at top volume while Babs, the S&M drag queen, danced with the hippies.

When I hear this song I think of New Year’s 2001.


Then I think about what happened after on Jan 21, 2001. (Made public for posterity. Please note I was 23 at the time. My head is hung in shame.) Needless to say, it wasn’t very much longer after that I moved out of that house.

(note: livejournal is now basically hidden to anyone not on my flist, so all you'll get to stalk of me there is a bunch of random youtube videos and other vague such things. enjoy!)

Daft Punk - TEACHERS

One October, many years ago after working by day as an accounting clerk for a local university for several months and finding the transition to a once-a-month pay schedule a bit of a purse stretcher, I decided to seek out a part time job. I knew I didn’t want to do anything that required a nametag or a training video. I casually applied to several locally owned independent books, video and music stores, one of which was a now non-defunct indie store called “the record exchange” at mission valley shopping center. I wasn’t expecting much of a response. Applying for “cool” jobs so close to a major university is a total crap shoot. It shocked me when I got a call for an interview a few weeks later. It was, in fact, my favorite interview of all time. All my soon-to-be-boss and I did was sit and talk about music for over an hour; favorites and shows we’ve seen. I got the job.

For the next 4 years or so I worked 20 hours or more a week, but I use the term “work” loosely. It was your standard retail store for all intents and purposes. We had daily checklists (pull old flyers from the windows, empty trash cans, etc…) but the majority of our time there was spent talking shit with customers and ourselves, going to shows with free tickets, hoarding vinyl, and scoping out promos. Some of the friendships born from the people to whom I sold music we mutually liked are still going very strong to this day, 10 years later.

When I left the store, it wasn’t pretty and isn’t relevant to the story. It wasn’t long after I left that the store sold out to a chain in Virginia and closed up and turned into a comic store, which failed after a year. The store sits empty to this day.

Over the years that I worked at the Record Exchange, a number of coworkers came and went, and there were about 3 of us that remained the entire time I was there myself, my boss and another part timer included. One of these gentle music obsessed souls that floated in and out of my life was a kid named Jade. He was Pilipino and a local house DJ. I can’t remember why he worked there for so short a time, I think he was one of those that just randomly didn’t show up one day. I don’t hold this against him, he was a cool kid. He was the one that told me about the edit of Phantom Menace that had JarJar Binks completely eliminated. This kid still has to be around town here somewhere, but it’s been so long, I wouldn’t probably know him if I saw him.

There was an order to the way things worked at TREX. We had a wall behind us that had a “now playing” rack. The rules were that we were supposed to pick 5 very different cds and put them on shuffle. If Jeff, the boss, was in store, then this is what you did. If he wasn’t, then the rules changed. They became, "whoever came on shift first had dibs." So say I come in at 4 and you came in at 5, I had enough time to scour the used cds and find every U2 and Erasure cd or something and you were screwed until close. I got stuck with a lot of crappy music that I eventually came to really like in this way. I would have never given Dave Matthews or Mindless Self Indulgence a chance before they were forced on me. Now I know to give any band 2 minutes to impress me.

However, when working with Jade (we called him Jader, as in Darth,) as he was a DJ, he was one of the few, if not only coworkers with whom I had a total rapport with musically. We spent a lot of time playing house music and bopping around the store, flashing the lights off and on, faking raves.

Daft Punk’s homework came out in January of 1997. We got an advanced copy a few months eariler that Jader and I literally fought over. We compromised by not shuffling the disc-changer at all and playing this album back to front, over and over for our next few shifts together. Jader was the only other kid I knew who knew the DJs/Artists listed in this song.

For example:
Jammin Gerald
Little Louie Vega
Green Velvet
Joey Beltram
Derrick Carter
Armand Van Helden


When I listen to “Teachers”, I think of the first person I knew who knew what I knew: Daft Punk is king and Homework is perhaps one of the best albums EVER.

I also think about this weird/awesome dance Jade did to this song across the store once, no idea how to describe it, so I’ll just say what I said and leave it at that.