Let me start by saying that I have no memory of how I ended up with this record in my collection. I tossed all of my jewel cases not long ago in favor of thin plastic sleeves, so there are no price tags or other stickers to offer evidence of whether I spotted “The Best of the Carpenters” at a WFMU Record Fair $3 table and thought why not, or if I actually sought out the Carpenters section at Amoeba or some other record store because I felt my music selection wasn’t complete without “Rainy Days and Mondays.”

I do know that the Carpenters were on my musical radar early, and why. From the time I was a baby, my parents were playing me The Beatles, as many parents everywhere were doing at the time with their own children, and that would be the bulk of my musical diet for my first decade on Earth. At some point, my Saturday morning TV viewing led me to also getting some Osmonds records — I was a little too young to pick up on the Monkees or the Archies, and thankfully the Harlem Globetrotters never recorded an album — but that was about the breadth of my tastes.

Part of this was no doubt thanks to my dad, who was happy to have his musical explorations start and end with the Beatles and whatever classical music he could eke out of Columbia University’s radio station with a rabbit-ear antenna. (We lived just over a mile from Columbia, which speaks to both the weakness of the station’s signal and how hard it was to get FM reception in skyscraper-dense Manhattan in the days of only over-the-air broadcasts.) My mother, however, was a different story: She listened to popular music all the time, even playing it as musical accompaniment to the modern dance classes she taught around our neighborhood, including occasionally at the Ansonia Hotel of Babe Ruth fame. My own record player may have been permanently weighted with a stack of Beatles LPs, but her collection was far more diverse: Helen Reddy, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, Mac Davis, Gladys Knight, Bread.

Okay, maybe “diverse” isn’t the best word for it: She was stuck firmly in the early-‘70s light rock canon, as conveyed by an FM station whose call letters I’ve forgotten, but whose playlist seemed to require at least three John Denver songs per hour. And first among those many equals were the Carpenters, who I can remember as my household’s 1b to the Beatles’ perpetual 1a from a very young age. It didn’t hurt that they covered the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” though an equal influence on me may also have been their recording of the Sesame Street staple “Sing” — I was as devout a viewer of Sesame Street as I was of Scooby-Doo. Either way, Richard and Karen were as big a presence in my life as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, or, for that matter, Ernie and Bert.

The Carpenters, in case the two cover choices cited above weren’t a hint, were seriously weird in their choice of material. They had 12 top-ten hits, and those included: a Burt Bacharach song that Richard Carpenter rewrote from its original version performed by Richard Chamberlain; an early Motown hit that the Beatles had covered as well; a much-covered song that was once recorded by an early version of the Guess Who; a song based on an idea that Bonnie Bramlett stole from Rita Coolidge (though not as blatantly as Eric Clapton stole “Layla” from Rita Coolidge) after Richard saw Bette Midler singing it on Johnny Carson; two songs by Paul Williams, one of which Richard adapted after hearing it as the jingle for a bank commercial; a song co-written by two members of Bread that Richard lifted from the soundtrack to the movie Lovers and Other Strangers; the Sesame Street song; and four Richard originals. Once filtered through Richard’s brain and production manipulations, they all came out sounding roughly the same: tuneful, hooky, and drenched in enough plinky piano and schmaltzy strings to kill a roomful of pancreases.

The secret ingredient that saved it all, obviously, was Karen’s voice. She may have started as the band’s drummer, but that soon became secondary — Hal Blaine played drums on many of the Carpenters hits — as her singing took center stage. It takes a lot for me to prefer someone’s cover over Bob‘s original, but it’s fair to say that Karen knocked it out of the park, as she did with whatever song her brother laid in front of her to do magic with.

Which may be why the Carpenters managed to retain, dare I say, an element of cool that, say, the Captain and Tennille could never hope to approach. Sonic Youth put them back on the radar of the young and hip with their beautiful and chilling ode to Karen and her life with and death from anorexia; then there was the “If I Were a Carpenter” tribute album that featured Shonen Knife doing an even more dramatic reconfiguration of one of Richard’s songs than he’d ever done to something he’d discovered while watching TV. And, of course, there was that movie about Karen with the all-Barbie-doll cast, which I still haven’t watched all the way through even though it’s now out of litigation hell and available, like everything else, on the web. Everyone, for a while it seemed, was retelling the story of the biggest pop band of the early ’70s as a tragic tale of abusive family members and fat-shaming, which weirdly gave its sibling duo some element of depth that their wall-of-violins arrangements had denied them.

The typical “Behind the Music” arc (success, collapse, redemption) has become a cliche at this point, but it’s just one part of a broader attraction to stories that reveal what we think of as the dark underbelly of straight white conventional America. Nobody would have watched “Breaking Bad” if Walter White had just stayed a chemistry teacher, and there’s a similar arc at work for other public falls from grace — regardless of which demons people fall victim to, stories like these both confirm the corruptability of the American dream and maintain the image of the dream itself, which is kind of the point of dark underbelly narratives going back a century or more.

Anyway, there it is, the Best of the Carpenters, sitting on my CD shelf right between Care Bears on Fire and the Carter Family. Am I going to take this opportunity to give it a listen with fresh ears, now that I’ve spent more time looking into Richard and Karen’s strange backstory? Probably not. Am I going to take this opportunity to finally watch that Todd Haynes movie? Probably. Once you’ve gotten a glimpse at the dark side of mainstream success, it’s hard to look away.

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.

For most of the bands in my music collection, I have a clear memory of the first time I heard them, or heard of them, or decided they were someone I needed to know more about. Hazeldine is not one of those bands.

I know which album of theirs I heard first: Orphans, their covers-of-deep-cuts LP that included stellar folk-country-inflected versions of songs by everyone from Hazel Dickens to Peter Gabriel to Neutral Milk Hotel. Orphans came out in 1998, which was right when I was diving deep into what was coming to be known as alt-country, the white-punks-on-roots genre that first got on my radar via Uncle Tupelo and later exploded with the founding of Bloodshot Records in 1993.

Hazeldine wasn’t on that label, but they did have a song on Straight Outta Boone County, a Bloodshot compilation album that was my intro to a bunch of other musicians as well (Robbie Fulks, the Grievous Angels, Waycross). I don’t remember running out to buy Orphans after hearing Hazeldine covering the Stanley Brothers’ “I’m Lonesome Without You,” but clearly I did — or maybe I just happened by the “H” section of some giant record store like Tower or J&R, as still happened back then, recognized the band name, and figured they’d be worth checking out.

And that they were. Like a lot of roots-oriented bands at the time, the three women and one behind-the-drumkit dude in Hazeldine were taking indie-rock guitars and introspective lyrics and mixing in old-fashioned three-part harmonies. Listening back now to “Apothecary,” the first song on their debut LP How Bees Fly, I hear echoes of Bettie Serveert, Geraldine Fibbers, Madder Rose — a whole mini-universe of women on the edge of country, folk, and rock, mostly all just a bit too late for the Year of the Woman before rock radio turned its attention back to bands like Pearl Jam and (checks the Billboard listings) Hootie and the Blowfish. The next song, “Tarmac,” features the lyric “Hold me close/and kiss me low/and fuck me like Batman,” then launches into a jangle-guitar solo that would have ruled the airwaves a couple of years earlier. (In a radio edit, presumably.)

Hazeldine were more memorable musicians than songwriters: While they had a few memorable songs of their own, when I go back for re-listens, it’s mostly to Orphans, which borrows some obscurities from other songwriters and turns them inside-out to wonderful effect. And by the time I discovered Hazeldine, they were already fizzling out: They went on to release one last record in 2001, then split up. (Like many American alt-country bands, they seem to have had a bigger following in Europe than in the U.S.; How Bees Fly was released on the German label Glitterhouse, which I otherwise knew for putting out a rare live LP by Freakwater, another U.S. band melding old-time and new.) Guitarist and backing vocalist Tonya Lamm went on to join Tres Chicas with Caitlin Cary, who I also first discovered through her appearance (with Whiskeytown) on Straight Outta Boone County; lead vocalist Shawn Barton mostly dropped out of the music business; bassist Anne Tkach died tragically young in a house fire in 2015.

Until now, I hadn’t listened to Hazeldine in years, though they were absolutely formative to many of my musical tastes. For that matter, I also forgot about Madder Rose for a good couple of decades before they turned up at Dromfest this year. Musical taste, and taste in general, isn’t a progression, it’s a series of meanders and loops and eddies, and you never know when you’ll find yourself back upstream where you started, or where your course will end up leading you from there.

I’m trying to remember how I first heard of Tall Dwarfs, and I’m drawing a complete blank. I remember when Tall Dwarfs co-founder Chris Knox suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009, and the subsequent benefit album, and the hilarious video he did afterwards with the New Zealand band Rackets. But I already knew of Knox by then, at least as the guy whose four-track recorder was used for many of the New Zealand indie releases by bands like The Clean and Snapper that I later discovered through covers by musicians like Barbara Manning and Yo La Tengo. Tall Dwarfs, though, sauntered into my consciousness through a side door, there before I had even noticed them or how or when they’d arrived.

And that’s how Tall Dwarfs still functions in my music collection. I own one best-of compilation, which I must have bought off Bandcamp, though I don’t recall when. I don’t know that I’d ever listened to it all the way through before now, but its songs show up on shuffle every once in a while, and I always go “Who is this?” and then am surprised and impressed by the answer.

I’m trying to come up with a way of describing Tall Dwarfs’ music, and I keep coming up with rock-crit verbiage like “lo-fi” and “quirky” and “Syd Barrettesque” and other things that can’t really tell you if you’re going to like it, or even if I like it. Which I do: It’s clearly the sound of two genius madmen with a home recording setup and a ton of ideas, so many that there’s usually only time for two minutes or so before it’s on to the next one. “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die” has a great two-chord guitar riff and a catchy melody, and incessantly repeats both of them until they collapse into wordless doo da doo da das; “All My Hollowness to You” consists mostly of hand claps and some kind of vintage organ and the sing-chanted refrain “They want to screw you/I wish I could get through to you,” and you could base an entire music genre on that, and plenty of people have. Other songs are gently alluring in various ways, all fitting comfortably into the broad category of late-20th-century lo-fi quirky indie post-punk rock, though that’s probably in large part thanks to all the other bands, New Zealand and otherwise, that were inspired by Knox and co-conspirator Alec Bathgate.

This is a somewhat unsatisfying entry in this series, for you and me both, I realize, and I was sorely tempted to cheat on the “let iTunes pick” format and spin the wheel for another musician. (It’s even more unsatisfying since I already went through this once before with another band I listen to even less.) But I’m sticking with it, in part because there’s an importance as well to music you don’t listen to, or don’t listen to much, or don’t listen to yet. Also, writing this has led to my longest, hardest listen to Tall Dwarfs to date, and I keep spotting more songs of theirs that I want to pay closer attention to — what are “Road and Hedgehog” and “The Severed Head of Julio” about, have I even listened to those? Figuring out what music you love is a lot of work, but I guess at least it’s work I’m glad never to be finished with.

We’ve already covered the Feelies and how I fell in love with them following their return from a 16-year hiatus. But as I soon discovered, the Feelies’ road has been long and wandering, and has led down many side paths and cul-de-sacs. During their long break, there was Wake Ooloo, a band with many Feelies members that played Feelies-esque songs but which was not the Feelies; concurrent with the Feelies’ first heyday, there was Yung Wu, which was the Feelies lineup but with percussionist Dave Weckerman singing on songs that he had written. (One of these, “The Empty Pool,” ended up being covered by Yo La Tengo on their first record, which was how I first heard of it, and them.) There were the Willies, who were the Feelies performing all cover songs. And before all of this, during an early, antediluvian hiatus following the departure of the Feelies’ original rhythm section following their first album, there were the Trypes.

Pinning down exactly what the Trypes were, when I first heard their name back in the early days of Wikipedia, was no mean feat. They were some kind of band that was formed in the early ’80s by a group of New Jersey musicians — keyboardist John Baumgartner, flautist and vocalist Toni Paruta, bassist and vocalist Brenda Sauter, drummer Stan Demeski, guitarist Marc Francia, possibly a few others — and somehow accrued surviving Feelies guitarist/singer/songwriters Glenn Mercer and Bill Million after the initial version of that band fell apart. They released one EP, which by the time I learned about it was long out of print, and then promptly split in two, with Mercer, Million, Sauter, and Demeski bringing back Weckerman to form the Feelies 2.0 (and Yung Wu), while the original Trypes (more or less) simultaneously continued as Speed the Plough. It was all dimly documented prehistory, more music trivia than anything I could ever reasonably hope to hear for myself.

And yet, no music history ever remains buried for long, especially not since the rise of Bandcamp. Soon enough, that long-ago EP had been packaged with some other rarities into an LP reissue called Music for Neighbors, and suddenly the Trypes had been elevated from myth to become another real band on my CD shelves.

So what do the Trypes sound like? They were not unlike the Feelies, moody and precise and melodic; but also not exactly like the Feelies. There were keyboards, for one thing, courtesy of Baumgartner, and woodwinds, courtesy of Paruta (latterly Toni Baumgartner after she and John married); and seemingly everyone joined in on vocals at one point or another. They similarly chose fascinating-verging-on-bizarre covers, outdoing the Feelies’ famed version of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey” with three of the closest things to deep cuts in the Beatles catalog: “Love You To,” “The Inner Light,” and “Blue Jay Way.”

If you had told me that Music For Neighbors was a lost experimental Feelies album, I might have believed you, and you might have almost been right in a way. But it’s also arguably the first, inchoate Speed the Plough album. And, at the same time,p a glimpse of another band that never completely came to fruition, a road not taken that ended up leading in unexpected directions.

But then, everything is transitional, ultimately. For me, the mystery of the Trypes led to me discovering not just Speed the Plough but Sauter’s spinoff band Wild Carnation. I even got to see the Willies eventually, or some form of them, at an immediately legendary show in Jersey City where the band sat in armchairs and were lit by desk lamps, and which was interrupted by the fire alarm going off mid-set and the entire audience and band alike having to go stand around on the sidewalk for 20 minutes or so. A few weeks from now, I will be going to a double bill of Speed the Plough — with Glenn Mercer back in the fold, if “back” is the right word for a band he was never quite a member of in the first place — and something called Brenda+1, which is almost, but not quite, Wild Carnation. Some of my favorite art, it turns out, consists of side paths and cul-de-sacs.

It’s December 2018, and I’m waiting, as I have for the seven previous nights, for the doors to the Bowery Ballroom to open. After 12 years at Hoboken’s beloved Maxwell’s, Yo La Tengo’s annual Hanukkah benefit shows relaunched the previous year at the Bowery in Manhattan, and I’ve taken advantage of the straight shot on the F train to be in attendance for the entire run, the better not to miss any special guests, as invariably happened when I only went two or three nights across the river. (Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan always used to promise, “If there’s someone you really want to see, we guarantee they’ll play the night after you go.”)

Since tickets went on sale months earlier, and there’s no way of knowing who the opening acts, comedians, and encore guests will be until you get to the show, I’ve ended up with stray tickets for some nights, and this is one of them. So when a guy comes up to the line and asks if anyone has any extras, I’m happy to oblige.

“Thanks,” he says. “I actually may be playing with them tonight, I’m not sure.”

This is not the response I expected, though random people off the street performing as special guests isn’t exactly foreign to the Yo La Tengo Hanukkah spirit. “And who,” I ask, “are you?”

“Jeffrey Lewis,” he says. “I’m a musician and I also make comic books.”

Lewis, it turns out, does end up playing during the night’s set, accompanying primordial weirdo-folkie Peter Stampfel on a Fugs song. It is decidedly odd, but given that Stampfel later duets with Ira’s mom on his song “Griselda,” not anywhere near the oddest moment of the evening.

I wouldn’t say that I forgot all about Lewis after that, but he wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my mind. Until, that is, I stumbled across his song “LPs,” I no longer remember how. (WFMU compilation? Best-of mp3 mixtape from Brandon? Either is a reasonable guess.) The song is an equal parts hilarious and poignant travelogue of the evolution of record collecting, all delivered in Lewis’s patented torrent-of-words-falling-down-the-tenement-stairs East Village yelp. (My spouse would eventually come to refer to Lewis as “the guy with the songs with all the words in them.”)

And then. And then! When I bought the Jeffrey Lewis and the Voltage album with “LPs” on it, it also turned out to be a treasure trove of equally hilarious and poignant songs, including “Take It for Granted,” a testimonial to the importance of the cherished mundane, and “Exactly What Nobody Wanted,” which is practically a how-to guide for the kind of anti-success that I’ve valued all my life:

You had a vision that was clear and directed
And the way the words were all unexpected
You were unbelievable and you were undaunted
You were exactly just what nobody wanted

But to me, it was so awesome, so awesome, so awesome
So awesome, so awesome, just awesome

Thus launched my surprisingly arduous mission to try to see a Jeffrey Lewis live show — surprisingly because, as noted, he lives just a subway ride away from me, and he plays locally all the damn time. Unfortunately, I always seemed to find out about his shows right after they happened, or before they’d happened but after they’d sold out. (Discovering him right before the COVID lockdown didn’t help.)

Finally, in late 2022, I was able to catch Lewis’s band at a tiny, cramped club in Bushwick; a few months later, I caught him again in more comfortable confines at Union Pool after racing there from another show earlier in the evening. Between the two, I got to hear some of my favorites — including “LPs” — and see him play musical accompaniments to some of his comic books — his multi-part “The Complete History of Communism” is especially memorable, at least the two segments I’ve caught so far (Chile and Cuba). Plus at the second show he played “The Complete History of the Development of Punk on the Lower East Side of New York City (1950-1975),” which fortunately someone has captured in its full glory on YouTube.

If you’ve clicked through on one of the links above, you probably have already come to love Lewis as much as I do; either that, or you have no idea what I’m going on about and can’t wait for the next installment in this series. And that, I have to say, is just awesome.

Nina Simone is a fairly recent arrival in my music collection, though I had known her name, and at least a little bit about her music, for years before. For much of that time, she was one of those figures from just before my time or just outside my musical spheres of influence, like Wanda Jackson or Billie Holiday, who I figured I would learn more about someday. I vaguely recall tributes following her death in 2003, providing me with a hazy image of her as a bad-ass Black woman who was around in the 1960s. Sometime since then, her song “Mississippi Goddam” entered my consciousness, though whether it was because Mississippi was in the news again for doing something awful or because I was watching something about the civil rights movement, I no longer remember.

I do clearly remember when Questlove’s documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, “Summer of Soul,” came out a couple of years back. And I looked at the artist list and thought, “Okay, I’m finally going to get educated about Nina Simone.”

I had known that Simone was seen as a great singer and great activist, but I had no idea until seeing her performance from 1969 that she was such a force: Fixing her eyes on the crowd, crashing on the piano keys, schooling the audience about Lorraine Hansberry, absolutely grabbing the moment by the throat. Watching her too-brief appearance in the documentary — if ever there’s a movie that calls for an expanded edition, or just an expanded soundtrack release, it’s this one — you can’t look away, and it makes you think that music, and the world, can be something completely different.

At the same time, I am not precisely the ideal target audience for Nina Simone. Much of her music is in the wide expanse between jazz and blues, and there are only a few odd corners of jazz that I enjoy. And while I appreciate messages of Black empowerment plenty, that’s still different from being Black; when Charlayne Hunter-Gault tells Questlove that Nina Simone’s records got her through the racism she faced as one of the first two African American students at the University of Georgia, it’s not a relationship to the music that I can ever hope to fully appreciate.

Not long after watching the documentary, I found myself at Amoeba Records in San Francisco, which is one of my go-to places for grabbing up music I’ve waited too long to check out. (The other main one, needless to say, is the WFMU record fair.) I came away that day with, amid my stack of new purchases, a pair of CD reissues encompassing four mid-’60s Simone albums: In Concert, I Put a Spell on You, Pastel Blues, and Let It All Out. They’re good, if very geared toward a certain kind of audience — her version of “Sinnerman” is rightly viewed as a classic, but as someone who was introduced to it by the later Peter Tosh renditions, I can’t say that my favorite is one that features an upright bass solo. And none of the four albums managed to grab me quite like her performance in the Harlem festival movie did; there’s a difference between appreciating and being transfixed.

Nina Simone is probably going to be one of those artists who I respect the hell out, but who I don’t listen to that much, and that’s okay. There are other people who are following in her footsteps, or expanding on them with some of the same power — Rhiannon Giddens and Amythyst Kiah come to mind — who are more my speed. I’m still hoping to one day find the right Simone album that captures what the excerpts of her performance in Harlem did, but it’s entirely possible that I never will; it was a moment, and it was for the people there, and that’s enough.

The One Rule for this site is that the topics are selected by the iTunes shuffle function from my music library, and I try not to deviate from that. So it sometimes comes to pass that I arrive at a band like Times New Viking, about which I know precisely three things:

1. They are named, in one of the most ill-advised plays on words in music history and that’s saying something, for a typeface.
2. I saw them open for Yo La Tengo once.
3. Georgia from Yo La Tengo put one of their songs on a mix CD that the band sold as a charity fundraiser during one of their Hanukkah runs.

There’s not much more to be said about item #1. As for the others, Times New Viking is exactly the kind of band I have grown used to seeing open YLT’s Hanukkah shows: obscure to me at the time, but clearly a significant presence in the band’s ever-expanding musical universe. I recall them from their opening set mostly as impossibly young, but this was in 2007, so presumably they’re older now. I do not remember much of anything about their music, and it’s entirely possible I spent most of their set avoiding the crush of the Maxwell’s back room and instead wandered out to the front room to get some dinner.

(A review of my concert notes reveals that I also saw Times New Viking opening for the Feelies in Prospect Park in 2011, but I don’t remember this at all. The disconnect between my ticket stubs and my memory is disconcerting at times — I have a torn stub from a 1988 Sugarcubes show that I have zero recollection of seeing, and you’d think that would have been memorable, especially given how into the Sugarcubes I was at the time.)

As for the mix CD, this is one of my favorite traditions of the Yo La Tengo Hanukkah shows: Each night, a member or friend of the band puts together a playlist that is then played over the PA before and between sets, and which can be purchased from the merch table for a nominal fee. (All proceeds from all of the Hanukkah shows, dating back to 2001, go to charity.) My collection of Hanukkah CDs now includes discs curated by a bunch of people including members of Antietam and the Feelies‘ Dave Weckerman, and they’re always interesting, if nothing else.

I don’t listen to them all that much, though, except when they pop up on iTunes shuffle. So this particular Times New Viking track, “Devo & Wine,” is pretty much entirely unfamiliar to me. I have a handful of other Times New Viking songs in my collection from other sources, none of which made much more of an impact.

Most of my time writing this site is spent explaining how I became a fan of bands, but this raises a parallel question: Why did I not become a fan of Times New Viking? They certainly fit into plenty of the categories for other bands I discovered opening for Yo La Tengo at Hanukkah and fell in love with, so what did they do to get on my bad side?

Could it be the “lo-fi” thing? I’m not exactly sure what “lo-fi” is supposed to mean — sometimes it means cheapo production values, but here it seems to mean “everything is recorded well but then layered with so much distortion that it sounds like it’s playing through blown speakers.” It’s tuneful enough underneath all that, with overtones of bands like Pavement — but then, after loving the first Pavement album to death when it came out 30 years ago, I’ve had very little interest in that band ever since as well, for reasons that I similarly can’t put my finger on.

And by this point some readers who are Times New Viking fans (or Pavement fans) are probably shouting at their screens, “OMG, you don’t know what you’re missing!” Except I do know what I’m missing; it’s right there in my iTunes “Compilations” folder. What I don’t know is why I’m choosing to miss what I am.

This may seem a weird rabbit hole to go down, but then, “Why do we like what we like?” is kind of the mission statement of this site, so it’s frustrating when I’m not able to answer it. Times New Viking’s music is abrasive, certainly, but I like plenty of other music that can be abrasive: Sonic Youth and the Ex, to name two. It’s sing-songy in places, but much less so than, say, Kimya Dawson, who I like. What’s the line dividing pleasantly unsettling from unpleasantly so, and is there any way for me to define it without launching into impenetrable rock-crit verbiage?

I have a clear memory from around 25 years ago of my friend Pete making a mixtape from my R.E.M. CDs, for which his process was to listen to the first four or five seconds of a song, go “Nope,” then skip ahead to the next one, then repeat. (About every sixth song he’d hit a keeper.) I probably ridiculed him for it at the time — really, you’re going to make a snap judgment on whether you will ever enjoy a song based solely on the opening chords? — but in retrospect I kind of get it: Even more than TV shows or movies, songs tend to either click right away or not, and while I can spend (and now have spent) many paragraphs trying to figure out why, it’s not going to change that gut reaction when the music kicks in and I’m either pulled in or pushed away.

I’m going to keep puzzling over this, probably for as long as I listen to music, or consume culture in general. (Don’t get me started about why I can’t watch “Breaking Bad.”) Meanwhile, if your gut works differently, by all means check out Times New Viking, they seem to be good at what they do, even if it’s not for me.

Seriously? I’m supposed to try to explain how I first learned about Joe Walsh? I grew up in the 1970s, when the air was literally saturated with Joe Walsh; even now, it’s hard for me to think about anything from the decade without picturing those aviator goggles. It would be like asking me where I first learned about “All in the Family” — it was just there, man.

But I suppose not everyone who grew up in the 1970s has any Joe Walsh in their record collections. So, on to the investigation:

In the beginning, there were the Eagles. Not literally, obviously, and I do remember a time when I had not yet heard of the Eagles. (It was a time when I’d only heard of the Beatles, the Osmonds, and Josie and the Pussycats, and two of those were because they had their own Saturday morning cartoons.) But the Eagles somehow took over FM radio when no one was looking, much like and in parallel with Fleetwood Mac, to the point where their records ended up in my parents’ record collections (which were not extensive) by some sort of cultural osmosis. Dinosaur Rock was not yet a thing, I wasn’t old enough or sophisticated enough to be a punk aesthete, and I accepted the Eagles as part of the cultural landscape just as I did Pink Floyd and Stevie Wonder and John Denver.

(An aside: My friend Brandon recently tipped me off to the existence of archival episodes of the live music show “Midnight Special,” and it is an absolute trip to see the diversity of music styles that are crowbarred into a single episode — the one featuring Ray Charles, Billy Preston, Steely Dan, Fanny, and Waylon Jennings, and hosted by Bill freaking Cosby, is enough to break your brain. By a couple of years later the music was far more regimented, but the early-mid ’70s really did embrace breaking down genre barriers, at least for a hot minute.)

Then came “Life’s Been Good,” which devoured FM radio whole in 1978. On the surface a novelty song along the lines of those popular in those days (good lord, “Convoy“), it told a self-mocking tale of rock star excesses, all delivered in a tone that let you know it was clearly a joke even as it wasn’t. And it was accompanied by some ferocious guitar playing, sounding a bit like, hey, isn’t that the guy on “Hotel California”? Huh.

Jump forward in time six more years. I am living in Berkeley, California, after an ill-advised decision to attend college at UC-Berkeley, mostly under influence of the leftover fumes from the ’60s. (Political fumes, that is, not cannabis. I did manage to attend one Free Speech Movement 20th anniversary rally during my one semester there before fleeing.) While I found the campus unexpectedly packed with business majors, the surrounding city still had a fair bit of detritus from the preceding decades, including a ton of record stores selling off the collections of those who had gone before.

One in particular where I spent a lot of time was a place on Telegraph Avenue whose name I’ve long since forgotten, if I ever knew it. It had a normal collection of records (we didn’t yet call it “vinyl”) downstairs, but upstairs was the treasure trove: an enormous room with bins and bins of used albums, all in no particular order and all for $1 apiece.

If UC-Berkeley’s massive intro lecture halls were a disappointment, this was why I had been drawn to the campus. I don’t know how many records I bought at this store, but it had to be in the dozens, mostly early-album-rock era classics like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. I recall dozens if not hundreds of copies of Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus, though I never risked a dollar to actually buy one. And it was where I bought my first Joe Walsh albums: So What?, You Can’t Argue with a Sick Mind, and the perfectly titled The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get, the last title a perfect expression of Walsh’s uncanny blend of absolute mainstream rock and resolutely weird. My closest companion during my four months of Berkeley exile was my record player, and it spent a lot of time playing “Rocky Mountain Way” and “Turn to Stone.”

More time passed. I transferred to a less ill-fitting college, my record collection expanded, and Joe Walsh found his way to the back of the vinyl crate. I had barely thought about him in decades when I finally got around to seeing Tom Petty in concert (on what turned out to be his final tour), and lo and behold, the opener was Joe Walsh. This should be interesting, I thought.

I didn’t know the half of it. From his opening greeting of “How ya doin’?” to the incomprehensible call and response, it was the Joe Walshest performance possible; as I wrote to Brandon afterwards, “Walsh both talked and sang like he’d forgotten to put in his teeth, but was hilarious and played guitar as brilliantly as ever.” There is a magic trick to Joe Walsh, which is that things that might come off as creepy and self-indulgent for anyone else of his age and classic rock legend status instead somehow feel charming and funny — probably because it’s clear that he doesn’t take himself seriously, or his persona doesn’t, at least.

Did I go home from that show and immediately put those Joe Walsh albums in heavy rotation? Maybe for a day or two, then i forgot about them again. The true joy of Joe Walsh is that no matter how much time you spend forgetting about him, he’s always there.

I first learned about Dean Schlabowske via the Waco Brothers, of course. I’m pretty sure the first time that band came to my attention was via a Village Voice (R.I.P.) concert ad that read “WACO BROTHERS (feat. Jon Langford of the Mekons),” though somehow I didn’t run right out and see that show, instead waiting several months before I discovered Bloodshot Records, whose second full album release was the Wacos’ first album, and the whole country-punk nexus came into full focus.

But that’s the Wacos’ story, and this is Dean’s item, so we’ll get to that another time.

Dean was, from the beginning, The American. Despite being an “insurgent country” band that wore its Hank Williams and Johnny Cash influences on its sleeves, the Wacos then consisted mostly of Brits: Langford, mandolin player/singer Tracey Dear, bassist Alan Doughty, and drummer Steve Goulding. But there at the front, generally holding down the middle of the stage with guitar crunch and a sweet drawl while various lunacy exploded around him, was Deano, with his curly hair and Buddy Holly glasses, quietly churning out instant classics like “If You Don’t Change Your Mind” and “Red Brick Wall,” earworms with subtle political bite. In one of my favorites, “Lincoln Town Car,” Schlabowske sang of the eponymous vehicle rolling by with mirrored windows, bringing to mind both the workers who built it and its unreachable occupant with “angry, squinting eyes”:

Where we go, we go together
Some will pull, some will get dragged

Schlabowske was a child of the Midwest, a Milwaukee lifer who had been in a punk band called Wreck and ended up drawn into Langford’s Chicago orbit. He eventually started a spinoff band called Dollar Store to make use of the torrent of songs he was writing that wouldn’t fit on Wacos albums; I saw and enjoyed that group a couple of times at Bloodshot’s annual New York barbecues, where artists and fans could eat tacos and watch bands together for a long afternoon of music and rabble-rousing.

I didn’t really fully appreciate Deano, though, until he released Deano Waco Meets the Purveyors, a collaboration with The Meat Purveyors, another Bloodshot signee that had fast landed on my short list of bands that I would throw myself in front of a train for. When I say “released,” I mean that in large part euphemistically, as “Deano Meets the Purvs,” as it was sometimes known, was a free online download that wouldn’t take physical form outside of home-burned CDRs for years.

(This was in 2009, which was for me the year when the music industry got weird: My three favorite albums of that year were the Deano/Purvs record, a tribute to Paul McCartney’s RAM that was a WFMU fundraising premium, and a playlist of the original songs covered on Yo La Tengo’s Fakebook that was compiled and shared by fans, none of which were “albums” in any traditional sense. But I digress.)

This record, with Deano stepping out front and backed by TMP’s hot-wired punk-bluegrass devotees, was a revelation even for someone like me who was already a fan of everyone involved. The opening song, “Taken,” is a slide-guitar-drenched musing in the wake of a disaster, natural or otherwise, eventually leading up to the bone-chilling refrain: “I feel like the next wave is meant just for me.” Or take “Box Store” — which I’ll always think of as “08-Box-Store,” the name of the track as I received it in the homemade download — an exemplar of Dean’s particular view of America through the prism of its everyday victims:

I work (I work)
In a box store (in a box store)
Stand beside you on most days (on most days)
I love to hear you talk
I just can’t stand the things you say
If I could fly (if I could fly)
So high, and look down upon this place (upon this place)
I would blow out all the walls
And wake up feeling different each day

Flash forward to the year 2020, by which time Schlabowske had issued several more brilliant records to no particular commercial acclaim, including two in his mock-folk-troubadour persona, Ramblin’ Deano, plus another couple more with members of the Meat Purveyors, one of which trickled out only belatedly and turned out to be perhaps my favorite of any of his releases. When lockdown started, Dean started passing the time by airing daily live webcasts where, sometimes joined by Meat Purveyors singer Jo Walston — the two had married the year before — he chatted and told stories and sang: songs he’d recorded, songs he hadn’t yet recorded, songs by forgotten country stars and reggae legends and Amy Rigby and the Kinks and George Jones and more George Jones and everyone else in his voluminous record collection. Deano’s Coffee and a Song became a lifeline, where a handful of his friends and fans, usually no more than 20 of us at a time, gathered to listen and join in the Facebook chat and take a tour through American music and culture and politics that we hadn’t known we needed so badly.

When live shows resumed in 2021, one of my first trips out of the house was to see Dean play two shows in New Jersey, each a 25-plus-song-long extravaganza that still barely scratched the surface of his repertoire. Here in 2023 as I write this, Dean and Jo, newly transplanted to a house in Lafayette, Louisiana whose fix-up has its own Facebook group, just put out yet another great album, with cover art (by Langford) of their two dogs, and recently visited my neck of the woods for a terrific live show that was seen by a wildly appreciative audience of maybe 40 people.

Whenever I write about seeing a great musician like Dean (or Antietam, or Barbara Manning, or lots of others in my iTunes library) before way too small a crowd, I have mixed emotions. I know that Dean would love to sell more records and play to bigger audiences, and I would love that too — if nothing else, it would mean more money to record that insane backlog of songs that he showed off on his livestreams, not to mention more chances to see him (and Jo) live than an occasional weekend jaunt. But there’s also something special about being one of a few dozen people to be clued in to a hidden gem: It feels not just like a badge of honor, but less like mass consumption and more like a club of friends, especially when some of them literally greet you by name.

Which, given that much of what I love about Deano’s music is that it’s a trip through the secret corners of both everyday American life and musical history, is probably appropriate, if not entirely fair to his bank account. I’m not going to be able to resolve here all the mixed feelings about popularity and success that underlie so much of “indie” music fandom — entire books have been written about that — so the best I can do is appreciate it for what it can be in this particular commodity culture. So long as there are only two sides to the Town Car window, I know which one I’d rather be on.