What album took you the longest to learn to love? I think about this a lot now with all the music being made and put out there automatically, and hardly any time to absorb it. For me, I am often resistant to my favorite records at first. When The Clashs three-LP Sandinista! came out in 1980, I even resisted buying it, due to all my punk friends throwing up their hands and snarling, Who do they think they are? The Grateful Dead or something? But by early spring 1981, I was staying in my grandmothers attic, working on the last issue of my fanzine, visiting my comrade Denys Howard, corresponding with Punk Lust fellow pubber Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, and playing the hell out of Jimmy Cliff, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Gil Scott-Heron, along with my Cure, Stiff Little Fingers, and Poison Girls. So I was ready to try the deep six sides of dub, funk, and political rants that made up Sandinista! I bought it at Standard Hi-Fi, and it was like all your Christmas presents given to you all at once -- such a heavy package, you felt guilty for owning so much music all at one time. I took it back to the attic, and played it over and over as a I edited the interviews with science fiction writers that I knew, reviews of hardcore punk 45s and LPs I was sent, libertarian beatnik poems submitted via the Post Awful, along with LOCs (letters of comment), including a vicious battle between author F, Paul Wilson and artist Terry Beatty about The Shining (book vs. movie). And wow, Sandinista! wasnt working for me at all the first week. It sounded overproduced, scattered and too ambitious, a luxurious playground of appropriated sounds from more authentic cultures. I admit, I suspected wealthy rock stars being dilettantes with genres, and the less than visceral sheen of the whole thing seemed more like a pop culture museum than an act of widescreen subversion. The second week, I was bouncing off the walls to Police In My Back, loving the hell out of Washington Bullets (which reminded me of my hero, Phil Ochs), pondering the extended Stagger Lee metaphor of Somebody Got Murdered (which I think about every time I go into Pioneer Square and remember a friend who got his brains kicked in one night there around this same time), and actually enjoying the last discs frenzied flailing at B-side reggae weirdness. Over and over, finally catching all the jokes and engaged in the Internationalist drama. By the third week I loved it, saw how brave the band was for releasing it (and never knowing they were still broke after London Calling), and stopped talking about it to my hardcore mates for fear of persecution. But damn, three weeks of steady rotation it took -- does anybody do that with albums anymore?
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 14:00:14 +0000
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