Dropout Boogie

Casa d'Chernaik
Portland, Oregon

Keep on walkin', don't look back... boomtown record store politics: the peoples' politics, the peoples' music, the peoples' people... the editing process and the half-life of prose...

Morning broke uneasily in the Chateau, the CO-OP where we were staying in Berkeley. We slept on the floor in my friend Ben's room. The hard wood combined with the rising heat moved me in and out of sleep all morning. Walking out of the room, I made camp for a bit on a ripped out car seat placed in the graffiti-strewn hallway just outside. I've ended up in a few places like that over the course of my trips this summer -- peoples' floors, uncomfortable couches in boiling rooms, and the like.

There was almost always the prospect of comfort looming just on the horizon, however: a real bed in a cheap motel room, a shower and a shave, a good hot meal, or even just slipping into the air-conditioned comfort of Loretta (where I've probably spent more time than any other single place this summer). On this morning in Berkeley, though, things seemed a little bleaker. It was hot, humid, and there was no where else to go. I was happy to be there, granted, it just didn't seem like there was an end.

We walked a block over, past the People's Park, and right into the heart of downtown Berkeley. Ben commented that this is what he saw as the real legacy of the Haight. I didn't stay long enough to form an opinion one way or the other, but I'm inclined to say that he's probably right. Throughout the town proper, which seemed thankfully free of bland chain stores, there seemed to be the proud sense among the people that whatever was going on was absolutely right. People seemed to relate to the environment around them in a more unconsciously conscious way, if that makes any sense at all.

An example of this, I suppose, is the ongoing rivalry between Ameboa Records and Rasputin Records. I don't know too much about it, but I've been told the stores are virtually enemies. Rasputin, for examples, owns a vacant lot across the street from Ameboa which they are deliberately leaving vacant so that Ameboa does not expand across the street. As confirmed music addicts, Jon and I have spent a lot of time this trip hunting down cool record stores and plundering them. Ameboa and Rasputin were both extremely fine institutions, well-stocked with helpful staffs.

On the most obvious level, it's incredible that these two stores are in such heated competition. More, they both seem to be thriving while still continuing to carry an extremely eclectic selection of music (though, for my money, Ameboa came out on top). They're not in competition with Tower or Borders or Amazon or anything else. The bland chains aren't even an issue. Walking into a fair amount of independently owned record shops, one immediately gets the sense that the store is under attack and it knows it. There's an ugly kind of nervousness that carries the day and seems to inform the way the place functions.

People at Rasputin and Ameboa just carried on, seeming to know full well that what they were doing was damned well the correct thing to do.

***
Later in the afternoon, we headed over to Bay Records, where my friend David was hard at work mixing down a record he's producing -- an a cappella disc of Grateful Dead material recorded by the Persuasions. He invited us in to chill in the peanut gallery and soak in some of what was going down. Recording studios are an interesting place to me. It's such an alternate way for music to be made.

Where live music is born fully formed (mature or not), studio music is truly sculpted. In many ways, creating a piece of music in the studio is more about editing than it is about performing the music itself. Though having the right notes there is definitely essential to making a good final product, it's knowing where to place all of the sounds that makes something work. Every writing teacher I've ever had has said that the bulk of writing is editing. This is true.

Knowing how to say something is important, but so is knowing when it's not necessary to say it. In terms of writing, I talk too much. With the journals I've been posting for the past month and a half, I haven't had too much time to edit in the proper sense, so I've tried unsuccessfully to keep myself from being too wordy. In a perfect world, less is infinitely more. By all accounts, any one of these journals I've posted should probably be about half the length, if not less. I would like to begin with a block and carve it down to what's important.

I'm extremely interested in this process and how other people go about approaching it. I've always loved reading early drafts of favorite stories and comparing them to the final product, or listening to alternate takes or mixes of material from albums. I especially find interest in songs that didn't make the final cut. All of these things are products of the process. Watching David work on this album was an interesting glimpse into the heart of editing.

While we were there, we saw two songs being mixed - the tail end of One More Saturday Night and the very beginning of Sugaree - and got to listen to the final mixes on another small handful of tunes. The music was a cappella with a variety of accompaniment ranging from surprisingly boisterous piano work by Vince Welnick on Saturday Night to some wonderfully understated guitar by David himself on Sugaree.

Listening to Saturday Night as we came in, it was obvious the song was still in the middle of being sculpted -- though it was also obvious that it was only one or two steps away from being done. In the mixing that we saw, David had to decide how to emphasize the piano against the vocals so that the maximum impact could be gotten out of all of them without swallowing the other voices and, most importantly, staying true to the direction of the music. All of Vince's piano parts were perfect, as were the electric guitar overdubs David performed before we arrived. However, the center of the music was neither of them, it was the Persuasions absolutely lush voices. In places, things sounded almost a little too cluttered, but it was soon ironed out.

By contrast, Sugaree sounded perfect to my ears in its initial form. The voices were drawn together by a gentle arpeggiated acoustic guitar part in the background and supplemented by a guest vocal by Peter Rowan. On the first playback, everything sounded as if it fit together naturally. This leads to an interesting conundrum. If something sounds perfect at first, should he fuck with it? I suppose he can always go back.

Here in Portland, I picked up a copy of Lou Reed's collected lyrics. Set off at the back of the volume is a piece entitled the Bells. Below it is a comment from Reed: "This came to me while we were recording in Germany in the late '70s... We had a beautiful instrumental track with no lyric. On mike I found myself singing this lyric. Unchanged it remains my favorite to this day."

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Previous tour journals are located here.