This particular song ties so many things together.
During the last century there were juke boxes in all the bars full of 45 RPM singles. The place where you interfaced with the Juke box might be all full of mirrors and you could see the little records mechanically take their place on the turntable. Kids in pizza joints used to get quarters from their mom and go pick the same song over and over.
I used to day drink in this place where I occasionally worked as a door guy. Iowa City is kind of a famous writer town. One day I met this guy who, when I walked in the door was hanging his face over the juke box with a pitcher of beer in one hand, playing old country tunes and crying, and swaying. He eventually came and sat at the bar where I had posted up and told me who he was. He was a little older than me. He’d had a newspaper career and then published a book that had done pretty well. His literary agent had talked him into coming to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop to make connections with people who were going to be the famous novelists of tomorrow. He hated it.
Years before that I had worked at this restaurant/bar that tolerated the staff staying locked in all night to drink and listen to records. We listened to this record called Maxinqway by this British dude who went by Tricky. Built into some of the beats was what I assumed was the scratchy middle of records. When the music is over on an LP if you have a player that doesn’t return the stylus to the start it stays in the middle of the record and spins and spins the same little set of dust bunnies and scratches over and over until you get to it and lift the needle. There were these scratchy bits buried in the beats on that record that I assumed came from that spinning phenomenon. Anything takes on a groove you can rock to after a high number of repetitions. The skips are the time.
There was a revelation in there about the distinction we probably all make between music and noise and how it was arbitrary- the distinction was arbitrary. I bought records of bands I liked and played them drunkenly and scratched the ones I liked to play the most, because drunkenly. But I loved some of the less interuptive scratches. They became part of the music.
I imagine a couple both putting their drunken heads into the window of the jukebox and seeing each others faces reflected from odd angles, picking something sweet to listen to and swaying there. And the thing they pick to listen to is a 45 that is a little beat from living in a jukebox in a bar where people bump around it dancing or heading to the pisser.
In a perfect world all the scratches on a 45 like that are the result of pristine timing guided by nothing but the music itself, like a landscape scalloped with the evidentiary trails of human traverse.
A 45 with Every Skip in Time
Are there things you wish you’d left to do? Are there things you’d left undone? ‘Cus my life begins and ends with you and I have just begun a 45 with every skip in time.
Well it’s ring around we used to do til the lights of closing time. And the juke box mirror shows me you and we play it one more time- a 45 with every skip in time.
I had at the time of recording this just started playing with Ryan Bernemann. He was out of college and starting to get things going for himself and he had this recording gear, nothing too fancy, but he had it, and I was writing so I asked if we could do some recording at his place.
We recorded this one and then his girlfriend [now wife] and one of her friends were recruited to put on a string part that he wrote. Laura Goddard and Laura something else.
I no longer have any copies of this record. I purchased the recording off the Internet this morning. I bought and downloaded the whole album. It was cheap for me because the money I spent on it mostly just deposited back in my account. It will be more expensive for you, but if you are touched by this recording, and I mean.. how couldn’t you be… you should go to the Bandcamp link on this page and buy yourself access to the whole thing.
The first one is always free kid.
