Justine
I’m not going to tell you exactly how I got these files.
The Internet is a collaborative effort, and someone in the ether reached out and told me how to download complete classic albums. Well, maybe not classic when it comes to those calcified, putrefied terrestrial radio stations playing "Stairway To Heaven" and "Free Bird", but albums that are in my personal pantheon that I’ve never ever been able to get complete MP3s of, that are unavailable online legitimately, that I own the vinyl of, like the Pousette-Dart Band’s debut.
I guess they were just one soft rock act too many. Too far removed from that debut Crosby, Stills & Nash album, or maybe their label was moribund, but the Pousette-Dart Band’s debut has got some keepers, most of which I’ve downloaded online eons ago, but not all. The version of the opener, "What Can I Say", had a skip in it. You remember vinyl, don’t you? Well, this album was ripped from that. And it turns out that the original product was defective, or someone mishandled the record or… Who knows. But I do know when I hear CD versions of certain tracks I listen for the skips from my vinyl albums.
And "What Can I Say" is a good track.
But the second is a killer.
And the third is the classic.
The third is "Freezing Hot". I first heard it in the chapel at Middlebury College, during my senior year, in another live entertainment-starved semester. If you hear something once and you never forget it, you know it’s a keeper.
But I’ve come to love "Dancer" even more, the aforementioned cut two. It’s wistful. That unrequited love from years ago, the woman you spoke to, but never got the courage to ask for a date? "Dancer" sounds like that, it evokes that feeling.
Then there’s the Steve Albini version of Cheap Trick’s "In Color". Arvind sent me a CD with ten of the tracks. Looking for the other five, I found a zip file in a Website. Maybe this stuff should never be released legitimately, maybe it’s truly for fans only. The sense of adventure, the search, the ultimate discovery, it’s so fulfilling. Listening to the songs pour out of the computer speakers is about as satisfying as sitting on the couch looking at the liner notes while you listen to an LP.
But the album that got me to write this, that made me EXUBERANT, was the Cretones’ debut, "Thin Red Line". Oh, I had a bunch of the tracks, but only in 128. This direct rip from vinyl is in 320, just like that Pousette-Dart Band album.
Actually, as I write this I’m downloading the second Cretones album. With no cover cuts, nothing Linda Ronstadt made famous. I haven’t heard it since the eighties, since the last time I fired up the vinyl.
The famous tracks off the debut are "Mad Love" and "Cost Of Love". "Real Love" is the opener, the killer with no radio traction. But the classic sits deep in side one, it was also covered by Linda Ronstadt, I’m speaking, of course, of JUSTINE!
Not only Englishmen with long hair played power chords. The chorus of "Justine" is positively ANTHEMIC!
This is the one about the girl. The one who exhilarates you, but leaves you. The type you can never really hold. The type you think you’re living for, but being subservient to another human being is not really living. We’ve all experienced this. The person who seems to have walked out of a magazine, that makes our heart flip when we just hear their name, the person who smiles at us and renders us speechless.
What does that feel like? Not only that intellectual excitement, but the rush of blood to your genitals, throughout your entire body?
You get your chance. You’re not only worshiping from afar. But, just when you start to relax, she’s gone. All you’ve got is your records. You go home long after midnight, put on your headphones and fire up a record. Usually not the one on the hit parade, but the one only you think you know, the one made by the band that you saw at the Roxy, one of only a handful of people in the audience.
Actually, I saw the Cretones at the Roxy. Not many people were there. Mark Goldenberg became a journeyman, he ultimately became Jackson Browne’s guitarist, but back in his past, in the rearview mirror, is this artifact, his reach for stardom, when he not only wrote the songs, but performed them. And no one enunciates, no one feels a song like the writer.
I wanted love explained
I had to know what you knew
We’re drawn to the flame. We believe if we just get close enough, we’ll get answers. But we never get the answers, only wisdom, if we accept the losses along with the victories, if we keep soldiering on.
My past is encased in these records. To hear them via my computer now not only elates me, it makes me feel that life is worth living, that in some crazy way it all makes sense.
