As Scarce As It Gets

Mark Richardson, today’s column:

A friend of mine used to have a tape made by his college roommate’s band. They were from Lansing, Mich., they were called the Smalls, and as far as I know they played only a small handful of gigs years ago. I am not even sure if they considered themselves a real band, but they wrote some songs, and at some point they thought to put them down on this demo tape. And since I once spent a lot of time driving around with this friend, and there were only a few tapes in the car, I wound up listening to the Smalls. And I grew to really like this tape. They were in some ways a pretty typical early-1990s band, indebted to R.E.M. and college rock, though they had a much better sense of humor, with a flair for absurdity that Beck would be known for a couple of years later. “Give me your telephone number, I’ll fax you the story of my life,” went one line, which was a pretty sly nod to technology at the time. Fax machines seemed futuristic.

Since this was a demo tape, and there were probably five or 10 made, and very few people ever heard this band, and the copy of the tape I once had is long gone, this music exists only in my head. There is literally one person in the world, my friend who originally pointed out the Smalls to me, that I can talk to about it. Every other time it came up, it would be in the context of describing what it was like, the story of this tape, like I am explaining to you now. I can’t play it for anybody. So for me, as music goes, it’s as scarce as it gets. And the Smalls tape is my most coveted musical artifact. Anything “good,” that I know other people care about, I can get in a couple of clicks, no problem. But the Smalls is harder to find, maybe impossible. This is why people say they will grab old photographs first if fleeing a burning building.

I have one of these too!  There was a guy I met junior year of college (around 1997)–a friend of Spencer, my roommate’s boyfriend.  Named Dave Something.  I only met him maybe once or twice, but I sure heard about him a lot.  He was an audio freak and total collector–he worked the soundboards for big university productions, had a massive and massively weird LP collection in the apartment he lived in by himself, and most important for this story, and this memory, he made his own music, too.

Weird, fun, catchy, and in its own way “smart” music.  This is a guy, mind you, that auditioned for and performed during IU’s yearly fraternity/sorority “hot bod” competition, despite being about 5′7″, scrawny, and really hairy.  This is also a guy, mind you, who was confronted by his two roommates on the Charles Perez show, after getting caught peeping on them having sex, perched in their closet.  Dave was a total jerk on the show, smirking and wearing a long leather jacket, assailing crowd members as they each stood up and tried to put him in his place.  And of course, it was all made up.

That particular episode comprises the entirety of side two of Police Beats (and Locations), a tape Dave made under the moniker Heavy Vegetation.  It’s about 45 minutes long–the magic duration favored by cassette sides and hour-long TV shows with commercials. On side one of the tape, however, was actual “music,” including the song Spencer originally brought up in conversation enough times that it felt legendary before I’d ever heard it.

Dave had been working part-time at a local townie bar, see, and one night Night Ranger played.  Or the guy from Night Ranger played with a new band–I can’t quite remember the details.  Either way, the Night Ranger guy comes up to the bar and asks for a shot of Wild Turkey.  Dave tells the Night Ranger guy that they don’t have Wild Turkey, and would he like Jim Beam instead.  The night ranger guy goes somewhat apoplectic at this state of affairs, but Dave–quiet and calm–just keeps doing his job.  Then he goes home and writes a song about it.  Spencer called it “No Turkey For Night Ranger,” because that’s the hook, but that’s not what was listed in the liner notes.

The tape hit me right where Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! and We’re Only In It for the Money did a few months earlier.  It was weird music, made by a weirdo, with interstitials disguised as “suites,” funny things that weren’t funny as much as, you know, weird.  It was smart, but playfully so.  The rapped parts were very much MC 900 Foot Jesus.

I met Dave soon after that, and he gave me a copy of the tape. I played it for my select fellow stoners, and we loved it for about a year.  Dave himself would only be a minor presence in my life–he’d show up quietly at parties, standing off to a side; I ran into him after a Bill Cosby performance at the IU Auditorium, which he recorded for the university. The tape, and that song in particular, and the story, would stick around much longer.  I can still say “No Turkey for Night Ranger” to a few friends 13 years later, and they’ll totally laugh.

That song had a biography, as songs will, but the biography circulated much more than the song (as biographies will).  In much the same way as Mark’s story above, I didn’t play the song for people as much as I told them about it, and about Dave.  I was a doofus at the time; I thought I was creative and weird and funny around my friends, but I wasn’t anything compared to Dave.  I sort of aspired to be more like him, but never really cared to put the time into it.  He was more a less a cipher to me as well as the people I told about him, which made the stories cooler.  We passed around the Charles Perez VHS tape for a few months.

I hadn’t had the energy to tune up my old cassette deck–dormant since about 2001–until a few weeks ago (that’s the sort of time-kill dissertation-writing will create).  After getting it up and running again, that meant searching in storage for my old box of cassettes.  And there it was, relatively well-preserved and everything, in an old crate of tapes that had been collecting dust forever:

I haven’t re-listened to the tape yet.  I guess I’m waiting until the exact right time to do so.  I’m ambivalent about posting it here, taking the chance of it breaking loose and circulating widely, separating it from its biography (and my memory).  Maybe it should be one of those things I keep to myself.