Mark Richardson

Stevie Wonder attended the Michigan School for the Blind in...

Sat, 26 May 2012 23:26:06 -0400

Stevie Wonder attended the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing. One of his music teachers there later went on to teach piano at East Lansing High School, my alma mater. I took her class. I hoped she would see some kind of innate, undeveloped musical talent in me, but it never happend. I was awful. But one of her students went on to do this.

“I couldn’t find the words and then I found the...

Sat, 26 May 2012 22:37:09 -0400

“I couldn’t find the words and then I found the words.” Destroyer, “Untitled”, 1997.

I think we can agree that Dr. J is the greatest sports nickname...

Sat, 26 May 2012 21:00:53 -0400

I think we can agree that Dr. J is the greatest sports nickname of all time. The elegance, the simplicity—fit his playing style so perfectly. You might not know that in 1981 Julius Erving changed his nickname to Dr. Chapstick. I saw this on TV at the time and found it very confusing.

"You have to understand that they’ve lived a life of complete insular indulgence by the nature..."

Sat, 26 May 2012 19:14:00 -0400

“You have to understand that they’ve lived a life of complete insular indulgence by the nature of their success. From a very early age, they were enormously successful and they’ve never really had to contend with street level human problems except as relates to life and death matters. They were perfectly comfortable for me to work with, and I got along with them and I liked them as people, but I also think that their life experiences have been so different from everyone else’s in the world that I don’t think you can really evaluate them on the same standard. Like saying “Is Queen Elizabeth a nice lady?” Who knows? No one’s ever said no to her!”

- Steve Albini interview

On working with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

B Michael Tumblr: David Berman's "The Summer Before the Night Ecstasy Became Illegal In the State of Texas"

Fri, 25 May 2012 19:24:50 -0400

B Michael Tumblr: David Berman's "The Summer Before the Night Ecstasy Became Illegal In the State of Texas":

MY FRIEND KYLE always had a lot of money and could get me into the expensive kind of trouble without the trouble sticking. He didn’t mind paying for me if it meant raising hell with loyal company. We were seventeen. You only needed one reason to be friends at that age. I figured we had at least…

“A skyhook for the mind” is a phrase I won’t soon forget.

I guess Star Wars came out 35 years ago today. I saw it in the...

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:29:00 -0400

I guess Star Wars came out 35 years ago today. I saw it in the theater, probably later that summer. I remember it vividly. It was like a life in black and white was now in glorious color. Many of my friends have the same story. I could not stop thinking about it. My best friend, Justin, had this poster on his wall. We would sit on his bed and look at it sometimes, talking about the movie and replaying it in our minds (the only widely available moving image playback medium at the time.)

David Berman's "The Summer Before the Night Ecstasy Became Illegal In the State of Texas"

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:55:00 -0400

MY FRIEND KYLE always had a lot of money and could get me into the expensive kind of trouble without the trouble sticking. He didn’t mind paying for me if it meant raising hell with loyal company. We were seventeen. You only needed one reason to be friends at that age. I figured we had at least three. So we broke the law every day in every way and laughed our asses off at the fucking stupid world.

In late April we began to hear rumors about a new drug in the Metroplex. It was in the gay bars. Kids at the Arts Magnet were getting it. Certain people at certain parties had it and it was magical.

They called it X. It was supposed to make you unaccountably happy and tolerant of everyone from headbangers to rich fucks. Even “douchebags.”

Psychiatrists had been using it in therapy for years, we were told. It was legal and local product (it was still special to Texas at that time). It would make you love and accept anyone. Even yourself.

This was a complicated promise for the teenager roiling with hate and confusion. I hardly believed it. But one night Kyle pulled out some foil holding four tablets, we each swallowed two, and went to a party where a lot of people were going to be doing it.

Coming around the corner of that house, I’ll never forget the scene. Every high-school rule was being broken before me. The lions were chatting up the lambs. I saw sworn enemies talking like longtime companions; a prickly society bitch on her knees sifting white garden pebbles through her hands with happy eyes; a brutal wrestler from my school with his arms wrapped around the trunk of a pecan tree, saying his first words to me ever, “Hi David,” sweetly, as I walked by.

I rolled my jeans up to my knees and sat at the edge of the pool. Maybe for the first time I felt like no one was going to try to push me in. The stereo was playing “Blues for Allah” instead of the customary “Eliminator.” Nearby, two linebackers were confessing how much they depended on each other “on and off the field.” I felt myself giving in to all the kindness, not caring if it was a lie or not. By the time a hot Fort Worth Jewess sprang into in my lap and began running her fingers through my hair, I was sold.

At sunrise, I came in through the sliding glass. I woke my father and his new bride, apologized for staying out all night, and pulled a chair up beside the bed. I continued to sit there and smile down on them. I said, “I just want you to know how much I love you, Dad.” Incredibly, he did not kick my ass. That morning was never mentioned again.

AS I SAID BEFORE, ecstasy was still legal and as such carried virtually no stigma. Kyle’s uncle kept a jar of tablets on his desk at his car dealership. Law-abiding adults were taking them at North Dallas cocktail parties. They were even sold behind the bars like cigarettes and openly hawked on street corners downtown.

That summer, I crushed two sports cars with my homely Buick, received six speeding tickets (three in one day), two tickets for public urination, impregnated a Collin County judge’s daughter, and had a bottle of MD 20/20 broken over my head. Approximately none of it registered with me. A very real fault of the drug. I’m going to skip the scenes of me chasing daisies and singing to stray dogs from still bulldozer cabs. I was exercising horses that summer for cash, and X hangovers were A-OK for barreling over the dull scrubland.

Sometime in August, the lawmakers in Austin finally got around to outlawing ecstasy. What a gift for the dealers! The price of ecstasy immediately quadrupled and the production costs plummeted as the manufacturers began cutting the pills with all manner of horrible stuff.

The night the law went through, I went to a concert at the Bronco Bowl and snagged two of the newly illegal pills for a dear price. I had never seen them in capsules and had no idea it was a sign they were crushing the old “legal” pills and mixing them with laxative, mannitol, low-grade speed, whatever.

Once inside, I spent a half hour wiggling my way to the front of the floor. Unfortunately, when I got there I had a big problem. Not only were the drugs not kicking in, they were causing me to have to shit real bad. Michael Stipe was singing “Moon River” (hey!) a cappella and I knew I was going to blow if I didn’t part this shoulder-to-shoulder crowd and make it to the restroom. The audience was frozen in place and dead silent as I plowed through, “Excuse me, excuse me, emergency here, please, please” ( I think I even yelled “gangway,” such was my ambition to get through), completely stepping on the vocalist’s Ethel Merman star turn and nearly getting shhhhhed to death.

I passed the rest of the concert in a nasty stall gritting my teeth, sweating and coming to terms with what was clearly the symbolic end of a spaced-out summer.

Fifteen years on, I can honestly say I’m glad it was outlawed. After three months of its use I had lost all discretion and was prepared to trust just about anyone. Worse yet, it was turning me into a joiner. That’s not who I am. Anyway, ecstasy was not to find its true customer base until years later, when the strangely passive kids who grew up in the child protectorate of the U.S. eighties and nineties came of age, craving depersonalization. Apparently it helps them dance. They’re a very attractive lot. Have you seen them dance?

"…if disco has taken the stars off the stage, it has put them back on the dance floor. If rock..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:36:00 -0400

““…if disco has taken the stars off the stage, it has put them back on the dance floor. If rock artists have grown self-indulgent playing their virtuoso solos more for aficionados in the band than for themselves, so much the worse for them. Disco has given popular music an energy transfusion, returned it to the people, made them all feel that they’re the performers.””

- Resonant Frequency: Eight Fragments for Barry Gibb

Quoting this bit from a 2002 column I wrote about disco, mostly about the gap between how I remember it and how it was being portrayed in the then-current critical landscape. The quote comes from the booklet to a K-tel box set called Night Moves, which is an instructional set to teach disco dancing. Thinking of this re Donna Summer and Robin Gibb and want to read Nitsuh’s piece later.

The Richardson family, early 70s (me in my mother’s arms).

Sat, 19 May 2012 20:36:32 -0400

The Richardson family, early 70s (me in my mother’s arms).

My mother, late 1950s.

Sat, 19 May 2012 15:18:31 -0400

My mother, late 1950s.

“Russian students are not rocking and rolling”

Sat, 19 May 2012 15:01:49 -0400

“Russian students are not rocking and rolling”

My father meeting Ann Landers in Chicago, late 1950s.

Fri, 18 May 2012 12:36:04 -0400

My father meeting Ann Landers in Chicago, late 1950s.

My father in 1953.

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:38:07 -0400

My father in 1953.

Once in a great while, the Greatest Generation and the Silent...

Wed, 16 May 2012 22:08:00 -0400

Once in a great while, the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation found themselves in perfect agreement with Baby Boomers who also happened to be tripping on acid. The Free Design’s “Kites Are Fun” was one of those moments.

Covers of the first 10.

Wed, 16 May 2012 21:24:00 -0400

Covers of the first 10.

You wrote the review of Teen Dream, so I'm curious, how do you feel about Bloom?

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:56:42 -0400

I think it’s very good. The records are pretty much equal in my mind, in terms of quality. For one reason or another I haven’t been in the mood to play it as much as I did Teen Dream, just not quite where my head is these days.

"I’m a Roman, and to me, the expanse between Waveland and Addison on Chicago’s North Side..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 23:15:42 -0400

“I’m a Roman, and to me, the expanse between Waveland and Addison on Chicago’s North Side is Carthage. The struts and concessions, the catwalk where the late broadcaster Harry Caray once greeted me with all the fluid liquidity of an animatronic Disneyland pirate—Hello, Cubs fan!—the ramps that ascend like a ziggurat to heaven—it’s a false heaven—the bases, trestles, ivy, wooden seats and bleachers, the towering center-field scoreboard—all of it must be ripped out and carried away like the holy artifacts were carried out of the temple in Jerusalem, heaped in a pile and burned. Then the ground itself must be salted, made barren, covered with a housing project, say, a Stalinist monolith, so never again will a shrine arise on that haunted block. As it was with Moses, the followers and fans, though they search, shall never find its bones.”

- Why Wrigley Field Must Be Destroyed

This is still my favorite St. Vincent song (not actually a huge...

Tue, 15 May 2012 23:03:03 -0400

This is still my favorite St. Vincent song (not actually a huge fan) and this is the video that brought it to my attention. She’s come a long way as a performer in the five years since, but this captures a nice early moment.

I have a list of banned words too.

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:41:00 -0400

maura:

A few phrases that will rarely escape my delete key:

highly anticipated

-esque

infamous (unless you’re talking about someone who killed another person)

everybody knows that

on acid

there is nothing like

random

“shared” as a post-quote verb

“What do you think?”

There are more, but I can’t think of many right now. See also!

(via countcenci)

an oldie but goodie. adding “it’s no secret that…”

—It’s no secret that my name is Mark.

"One Sunday night in May 1976, Hughes’ idea would accidentally come to fruition. Needing a..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:51:14 -0400

“

One Sunday night in May 1976, Hughes’ idea would accidentally come to fruition. Needing a last-minute substitute DJ for the evening, she brought in Melvin Lindsey, a Howard journalism student, WHUR intern, and her babysitter, to boot. Lindsey grabbed some Isley Brothers, Delfonics, and Spinners LPs from his family’s collection and hurried to the studio. Somehow, despite Lindsey’s complete lack of experience behind the mic, it clicked. Lindsey’s silky, youthful voice was an appealing shift from many of the more forceful black DJs of the day, and his smooth soul-song selections coupled with the Sunday-evening slot to create something bigger than he or Hughes could have imagined: ‘The lines were flooded with calls. There must have been some kind of natural knack.’ The next morning, Hughes came up with the perfect name for Lindsey, and his show: ‘The Quiet Storm’. Lindsey left the station to finish his bachelor’s degree, but upon returning in November 1977, ‘The Quiet Storm’ quickly became a WHUR weeknight staple, and Lindsey became a local celebrity.

The format was simple and effective, not too different in structure from what album-oriented rock stations had been doing for years. During his evening shift, Lindsey would play long stretches of uninterrupted medium-to-low tempo soul and R&B music— at times for up to 40 minutes straight— only occasionally intervening to guide listeners along. In a very real way, Lindsey’s Quiet Storm was doing exactly what radio does best— since its earliest days, radio has brought faraway voices of musicians and on-air personalities into private homes, creating a sense of intimate community amongst listeners. ‘Lindsey’s on-the-air personality [is] that of the soft-spoken alter ego for some 220,500 listeners each night,’ wrote The Washington Post, ‘not all of whom want to distinguish between radio and real life.’ It was common for listeners to call in and complain if the tempo sped up too much.

”

- Really psyched that my Quiet Storm retrospective is up on Pitchfork. Thanks to Mark Richardson and Ryan Dombal for letting me do it. (via marathonpacks)