Touch & Go 25th Anniversary (mini) Documentary

Long-triumphant Midwestern-friendly indie Touch and Go seems more like a very publicly curated record collection than a label, as it’s been sculpted by the tastes of founder Corey Rusk. He’s brought to attention the likes of Slint, Steve Albini, Calexico, Ted Leo and TV on the Radio, and he’s given his due in this short, well-made mini-doc (big) (small) as a part of the T & G 25th anniversary celebration (part of Rusk’s busines model: “I don’t want to work with assholes.”). The occasionally shrill but typically pretty on-the-money performer/producer/rock ethnographer Albini gets a lot of screen time here, and he naturally makes the most of it. He’s the perfect talking head for an indie rock documentary—he’ll get specific about the topic in question (here, T&G’s awesomeness), but quickly spoke off into broader orbits of discussion, including:

the lameness of the greater music industry: “most traditional businesses operating on traditional business models, where they’re behaving defensively at every decision point, go broke…if instead, you treat everybody fairly, you have no reason to presume that they will fuck you.”

Artist/label relations: “if there’s no contract between a record and a label, both parties are obliged to behave honorably.”

And a sepia-toned recollection of the “record-store experience” as holy quest: “While I’ve been in record stores, I have never seen anyone come through the door and say ‘give me anything that’s brand new.’ The novelty of a record doesn’t really matter that much. I have seen an awful lot of people come into record stores and say ‘there’s this band that I just found out about, I don’t remember their name, but the song sorta goes like this, it may be a few years old.’ And the oral history within the record store allows somebody to answer that question.”

I’m aware that what my specific online endeavor here pretty well goes against that bricks and mortar magic, even if I’ve never personally experienced Albini’s version or really come anywhere close. I’m also pretty sure that Albini would venomously oppose music blogs for this reason. Regardless, I’m carefully weighing the possibility of hitting up T&G’s 25th Anniversary Block Party (pluggged at the end of the doc), taking place from September 8-10 in Chicago. There’s a pretty stellar lineup (!!!, TL/Rx, Cocorosie, Big Black et al) for 35 bills, so we’ll just have to see.