“When I was in high school, my best friend lived next to two Johns Hopkins grad students in a townhouse complex in North Baltimore. They would buy us beer and let us hang out into the wee hours in their living room if nothing was going on. They were amazingly tolerant of a bunch of 16-year olds, unless they were holding onto some particularly gruesome favor they will ask of us some day. What they weren’t tolerant of, however, was our music taste.”
“Listen, I don’t want to use the h-word in the year 2013, particularly since I am basically a member of the tribe, but these guys were hipsters. Well, proto-hipsters (it was the ’90s.) At the time, I was an aspiring musician, and I thought I had good taste for a teenager…until I voiced my opinions to them. Within five minutes, I was told that OK Computer was a rip-off of a Roger Waters solo album, Pavement were sell-outs, and Syd Barrett-Floyd was actually inferior to Saucerful of Secrets-Floyd
While these guys were berating me they would break out their supporting arguments in the form of vinyl records. For me, this is the most important quality of vinyl: the communal aspect. I’m not an audiophile, so I couldn’t write about the “warmth” of a vinyl recording without sounding like I’m transcribing off a cliff notes page. The real distinctive vinyl experience was the ritual of taking a record off of the shelf and putting it on.
There’s inclusivity to this otherwise mundane process: the size of an LP means everyone in the room can see what you are about to play. It creates this unspoken rule that the person who puts on the record must give a brief explanation as to why they are putting the record on and why it’s worth our time.
And for this particular group of proto h-words, explanations were in abundance, and I always associate the covers of the LPs with their words in support of them. I recall the bizarre sun-faced figure on the cover of Guided By Voices’ “Mag Earwhig!” because I was being given a lecture on why they were superior to Pavement. The washed-out blue cover of Coltrane’s self-titled LP made me a jazz fan before I understood a single word of what our alcohol-benefactors were saying about jazz.
I became a fan of both of these artists, and it was probably due in part to the allure of the vinyl packaging and the passion in which these guys spoke about the records, a passion which would not always be coherent depending on which hour of the morning it was.”
—Scott Hesel, Bass
“Fastest” is taken from Eureka Birds’ forthcoming release Strangers, in stores on October 29.
