Listening Histories: Shawn

Oh here was the first time. Here was the skin of my hands caught in the needle of the phonograph, the cowlick of my uncut hair twisted in my hands. There was your brush, your stick, your foot-thump, the thwock of your hands on your neck, you and your greasy hair wailing on everybody who had ever fucked you over. Wailing on yourself.

Listening Histories: Geena

When I was a little girl, in the apartment above us there was a woman who played the cello. I mean, beautifully. You couldn’t predict your neighbors in my neighborhood, because there was a constant turnover of college students, and visiting professors from all over the world and their families, and single women who carried cans of mace, and the occasional divorced man in his forties. But when I was little I would sit in the kitchen and listen to her practice. That was when I first thought about music.

Listening Histories: Al Way’s and Jack Smart’s Historic Collaboration

Alice:

I didn’t even know he had made a record. I suppose I knew he had to have, by then. I don’t think he needed to. But I don’t know what went on in his head, I can only guess, I was only a girl when he came home.

28 years ago…

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 19__ 

Connor Harding came home from work every morning at six a.m., Tuesday through Sunday. He got a blessed Sunday night off, and when he finished work early on Saturday morning, around three a.m., he made it to the middle of the 2:30 mass at Epiphany Church.

Shawn Goldberg’s Lost Legends Project (1)

It was easy to accept that great writers were going to fall away, Faulkner and Hemingway and all those twisting vermouth-soaked drones that high school English teachers didn’t even bother assigning anymore, not when they had to worry about making slow kids hip to reading with stuff from Oprah’s book club, nobody argued with the steady drowning of white-elephant turkey-neck literature in its own juices, but Shawn Goldberg had always had trouble with the Death of Jazz.

Tomorrow Night

You are scheduled to meet in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with Tam Holthorpe, who was a jazz DJ in New Orleans for 30 years before he left his station in white-knuckled anger. Throughout the eighties, he hosted “Tam in the AM” from 5-9 in the morning. He dutifully ignored Herbie Hancock and spun every record Jack played on. He even tracked down and bought out the tracks that were part of records that never got cut because of a cocaine-addled pianist, a missing manager or Jack’s own shattering breakdowns. He paid under the table for these semi-records before any inkling of the mp3, and played them as early in the morning as he could, to avoid the ire of the slick-fingered executives. Nevertheless, he got telephone calls on commercial breaks threatening his career and Jack’s.

You stretch out your bare legs in your hotel room and wish you were meeting him in New Orleans, where you could watch the thick air, infused with the coarse dust of so much music, settling around him as he drank a beer in a nothing bar. Did he do that sort of thing? You are relieved to be away from New York and the scene of “discovery”–here in Lake Charles you are in a place where they have known just a few things for a long, long time, and have no reservations about repeating them into a tape recorder.

Dear Diary,              can hear better now what I’m sounding like when I’m banging on shit. got so excited playing a beat for Alice yesterday that I broke a window with a teaspoon.

my head

Dear Diary,             

my head isn’t the same. hasn’t been like it was since the blast toward the end of tour. Mother called the hospitals, and they won’t take me, they’re full of legs and stomachs and shit. “psychological problems are serious, but we’re up to our necks in limbs, that can’t be our priority” they said something like that.

The 7-11

Dear Diary, 

Walked all the way to the 7-11 today and picked up a box of cigarettes. Some milk for Alice and mother. put them on the counter and put my hand in my pocket to pay, but the kid behind the register couldn’t look me in the eye, kept looking over my shoulder like there was someone behind me, like the twinkies on the shelves were going to pay. look at me I said I’m giving you money.

Dear Diary 

Alice is ten.