“As a child of the ’70s, I grew up on vinyl. The first full-length album I ever bought was Harry Nilsson’s Son of Dracula. I think I must have been 8 years old, and had no idea what I was getting into—particularly when “Jump Into the Fire” came on. Bass detuning, drum solo, a likely intoxicated Harry Nilsson screaming his balls off. Holy crap it was great.”
“Other major albums with which I developed an early obsession included Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, to which I used to perform concerts for my family (sewing the seeds for my later career as a competitive air guitarist); Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf conducted by Leonard Bernstein; and Cheap Trick’s Dream Police—who definitely lived inside my head, and came to me in my bed. Oh no.
My brother and I would get our vinyl fix at The Music Disc, run by Karen, a grizzly and wrinkled chain-smoker with the nicotine-stained teeth to prove it. Smoking—in a record store. Imagine it. I remember the day I asked Karen for other albums that sounded like Pink Floyd (I had all of them already) and she suggested Procol Harem’s Whiter Shade of Pale, which I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as Floyd’s Ummagumma.
I’d sneak into my older brother’s bedroom when he wasn’t around, plug in his brown KOSS headphones, and crank his cornucopia of classic rock: Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, the Stones, The Who. Tommy totally blew my mind and I recall my parents actually taking us to see the movie when it came out. Anne Margaret writhing around in a living room covered in Heinz baked beans? Tina Turner as the Acid Queen? What the hell were my parents thinking? As an alienated suburban kid in Denver, living in my own quiet vibration land, I totally related to the album’s titular deaf, dumb, and blind boy.
In 6th grade, I started a primitive form of Napster when I launched “Tapes Unlimited” at my middle school. I wrote out and photocopied lists of all the albums in my brother’s and my cumulative collections, and offered to make tapes of the albums for anyone, for a mere $5 (double albums like Tommy fetched $8). I suspected it might be illegal, but who cared? I was saving up for a kickass Lloyd’s stereo.
In the early ’90s, after graduating college, I moved to San Francisco and one of my housemates had a great vinyl collection, which I coveted. (I had ashamedly moved on to CDs at that point). We’d sit on the floor of the living room listening to Superchunk, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Guided by Voices. We were probably high. The music made a massive impression on me and got me through a pretty dark post-adolescent period.
Twenty years later, I found myself joining forces with a singer with an incredible voice who was the same age as I was when I discovered those albums, and the two of us started recording covers of some of those songs that spoke so directly to me back then. Somehow, we managed to get Kim Gordon and Stephen Malkmus in our “Gold Soundz” video.
There was a moment when we were shooting the cameo with Kim Gordon where she told us we should lip-synch the entire song in one take while looking at her – just in case we needed it for editing. (“We did that in one of our videos once,” she said). So, we stood there, lip-synching our Pavement cover, staring into the eyes of one of the hottest, and coolest bassists ever to walk the earth. It was hard to separate this real life version of Kim Gordon with the blue-tinted photo I stared at on the cover of the Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star vinyl from ‘94. When the song ended, I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “I just have to tell you, that was one of the more surreal experiences of my life!”
Looking back at what an impact all that music had on me, I’d have to paraphrase Nilsson (covering Badfinger) and say, “I couldn’t live, if living was without it.”
—Dan Crane
Ray & Remora’s 6 song EP, “1994” is on store shelves right now via Aeronaut Records.
