This one is gonna be a long walk, so let’s get started:

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, I loved zines. I loved reading them, I loved making them, I loved talking about how they were the antidote to mass culture, a way for regular people to talk about all the things important to them that weren’t covered in the mass media. (This was a time when there was still a mass media.) For a while I was the moderator of the Zines conference on ECHO, New York’s early internet discussion board, which in retrospect is fairly ironic given that the internet and online discussion boards had soon pretty much entirely displaced zines as an alternative outlet for regular people to create their own culture, counter- or otherwise.

I could go on all day about my favorite zines, like Dream World News, which offered straight-faced reporting on people’s dreams as tabloid stories. (I rediscovered an archive of Dream World News stories a while back, but it seems to have been resubsumed beneath the internet waves.) One that I kept coming back to, possibly in part because I’d picked up a few copies from its creator Paul Lukas at a zine event, was Beer Frame.

A “beer frame” is a bowling term, but names of ’90s zines, much like names of ’90s indie-rock bands, never bothered much with making literal sense. Beer Frame‘s mission was spelled out in its subtitle: “A Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption.” This was a zine about products and their packaging, basically, but only the most innocuous and under-the-radar products: toothpick dispensers, the shoestore-staple Brannock device, a product hyped with the slogan “America’s favorite banana milk,” which raised more questions than it answered. Making the quiet parts of consumer culture loud is a Paul Lukas speciality: He also spent decades writing the column and website Uni Watch, which does for sports uniforms what Beer Frame did for the wrappings placed on other commodities.

Somewhere along the way, Paul got it into his head to commission a Beer Frame CD. Object Lessons featured songs about inconspicuous consumer products, by equally inconspicuous bands: The best-known was probably the Mountain Goats, who in 1998 weren’t exactly household names.

I cannot for the life of me remember where I got this record. I don’t think it was from Paul’s stoop sale when he moved to another part of Brooklyn, though I did grab a cherished copy of Denny McLain’s album of pop and rock covers there. (No, one doesn’t have to listen to a record to cherish it.) The best bet is that it was a WFMU record fair, likely on the $3 table, where I’ll pick up pretty much anything interesting on the grounds that at worst, I just donated $3 to WFMU in exchange for a chance, however unlikely, at finding a future favorite.

One of the entries on Object Lessons is by Vehicle Flips, a band that elicited no recognition from me at all. It’s not the song about the Brannock Device — that’s by Men & Volts, a band about which I know this one fact and no others — but rather “Honeywell Round Thermostat,” which is about, well, you can probably guess. It’s an amiably pretty tune, set against off-kilter drums, that lays out the story of the unassuming object in question in surprisingly poignant terms:

Essentially unchanged in function and form since 1952

How many things can you say that about

That you can still buy new?

I would be lying if I said it instantly became a future favorite, but the band name stuck somewhere in the recesses of my brain. Years later, I was looking over the lineup for the upcoming Dromedary Records festival, and lo and behold, there was Vehicle Flips. I ended up seeing them — or at least their successor band, the Ekphrastics — playing a set of mostly Vehicle Flips songs, in a brewery backyard in Catskill, New York. One table over from Paul, who reported that he had requested “Honeywell Round Thermostat” but been rejected. I ended up liking them enough that I bought an early Vehicle Flips compilation, which is what landed them a winning spot on the spin of the iTunes wheel.

Does this make me a Vehicle Flips fan? Kinda? I still don’t listen to them much, but when I do I like them, their music at the more tuneful end of the ’90s lo-fi indie rock spectrum, with songs about the gamut of human experience from romantic (or possibly employment) breakups to getting lost near obscure New England rivers. Same with their live set in Catskill, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but which I mostly remember for a song they played about a township in New Jersey where the entire population voted 2-0 in 1997 to dissolve itself after a proposed dam project led most of it to be abandoned. (A dam project, coincidentally, that I’d written about for one of my zines.) They feel like a small but important part of my life now, and that’s enough. I’m starting to understand Paul’s affection for thermostats and Brannock devices.