Record Sunday #2: The first records
Joy Division, Vivian Girls, Portland and Brooklyn
DECEMBER 2006: JACKPOT RECORDS, PORTLAND, ORE.
When I was graduating high school, I ranked my favorite bands in an order that I felt would be permanent (3-5 might have been in a different order):
Sonic Youth
Joy Division
Modest Mouse
Lightspeed Champion
Polar Bear Club
Obviously, this hasn’t held true. Hello, Cloud Nothings; hello, Real Estate; etc. I think the proper framing of the list would be either “favorite high school bands” or “most formative high school bands” — we’re going to be talking about that F-word a lot in this series — but I was a teenager who thought he had a fixed view of the world.
I don’t remember much about buying this record. It was a rarity to visit Oregon for Christmas, and this is the only time I can ever remember doing it. But on one end of the trip, we stopped in Portland, and Anna directed some record shopping. I was a freshman in high school, and I was deep into Sonic Youth and Joy Division, considering them the only two bands that really needed to exist.
The Grey Assembly wasn’t Unknown Pleasures or Closer. It seemed cooler. It was a bootleg. It had “Digital” on it. There was a ramshackle quality to it that I don’t think is normally associated with Joy Division’s studio records. It opened my eyes to the discography beyond “She’s Lost Control.”
Later, I would get the Substance compilation and Unknown Pleasures on CD. I named a two-piece band that Benn and I had “Interzone” because of the Joy Division song, not the William S. Burroughs book. Benn got me a Joy Division shirt, and when I wore it to school on a dress-down day, our pre-calc teacher asked me if the man on my shirt was having a seizure, which led to perhaps the best “Well, actually…” moment I’ve ever experienced.
Though this was the first record I ever bought, it would be a couple years until my collection actually started. But The Grey Assembly serves as a good reminder of a “time and place” and the type of music that shaped where I am today.
AUG. 2, 2009: EARWAX RECORDS, BROOKLYN, N.Y.
There are two weekends from high school that shaped how I would view music for the foreseeable future (maybe the rest of my life?): Whartscape in Baltimore in mid-July 2008 and a long weekend in Brooklyn in late-July/early-August 2009. Everything was different from then on. I wrote about that second weekend here back in 2019.
In hindsight, this day was a shitshow. We were supposed to go to the Pool Party to see No Deachunter in the afternoon and then I was supposed to get the MegaBus back to White Marsh afterward. I had summer school at community college the next morning. I had all of my stuff with me, including my bulky laptop. But it rained, the show got postponed and canceled and postponed, and fast-forward a couple hours, we were sitting outside of Brooklyn Bowl listening to Deerhunter and Dan Deacon and No Age and waiting to get let in for our late show.
There are a couple days like this in my memory where time becomes unstuck and I have no idea how everything could have happened.
We had all afternoon to kill in Williamsburg, which was a playground for a 17-year-old in 2009. Everything was obviously the coolest thing I had ever seen, including Earwax at its old location at 5th and Bedford.
Two nights earlier, we had seen Vivian Girls play at the Whitney. The night before, we had seen The Babies (and a host of others) at Death By Audio. The Vivs self-titled felt like an appropriate purchase to commemorate the weekend.
It’s pointless to wax nostalgic about 2009 because I was not “there” for it — I was an interloper — but if you say the words “Brooklyn 2009” the first thing that comes my mind is Cassie Ramone’s album art. The line drawings, the color palette, the water towers, the warehouse windows, etc. All of that comes back to my head. And then the sound of “Tell The World.”
That’s the weird era for me. At different points, I’ve had the album cover hanging in a frame in different rooms and apartments, and it’s a very comforting piece of art. That goes for the record, too.
When I got home from this trip, I immediately tried to write a bunch of songs that resembled Vivian Girls, Wavves and No Age (I was not talented enough to attempt to write Deerhunter songs). They mostly fell flat, but entering my senior year of high school, I felt I had found a key piece of my identity.
Previously on RECORD SUNDAY:
Happy Sunday, and I hope you enjoy RECORD SUNDAY today and in the future.
—D.G.