Once upon a time, I and some of my college classmates went to St. Louis to attend a conference of honors-type English students. For our part of the conference, my fellow students and I hosted a panel discussion about “the canon” and what might or might not belong in it. If you’ve even so much as been within ten feet of a literature class, you know that this topic is one that gets officially-sanctioned nerds like professors and grad students all hot and bothered.
While I was working with my chums to dream up this panel discussion, I scooped up the fun part for myself – the contrarian position. My argument was essentially that anything can be canonical for an individual, that people build their own canon of “essential works” over time and it’s only when something makes it into most everyone’s personal canon that we start to consider it a “classic” or an “essential work.” Mind you, this is a position that I actually hold. I wasn’t merely trying to piss people off. However, this point got a bit “lost” when the discussion got into full swing.
At some point during the discussion, I said the “ess-word” – Shakespeare. I believe I was specifically arguing the Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo and Juliet did more to enhance my understanding of that particular play than the hours of hushed reading and phonograph listening I did back in Mrs. Woodell’s Honors Frosh. English at Marian Catholic High School. My blasphemous utterance soon sent the whole shebang into an orgy of baby-throwing and mouth-foaming. People (many of them teachers of literature) lost their shit. Words were exchanged. I compared what Marilyn Manson was doing at the time (he was a hot topic in the late 1990s) to Poe’s sensationalist romanticism. In short, folks lost their cool because they REALLY, REALLY liked particular pieces of literature and didn’t want it mentioned in the same breath as other, “lesser” works that weren’t part of *their* canon.
Why tell this story to all you fine folks reading from the Record Desk? Because I don’t think that a person can be wholly objective about the cultural products that one likes and dislikes, but I think that people *THINK* they are being objective when they make a case for appreciating one type of art over another – that Born to Run really *IS* measurably better than Blizzard of Ozz or vice versa. My take on this is that people have a lot of their identity wrapped up in what they like and what they purchase and what they prattle on about endlessly via their blogs or their myspace. Such is being and selfhood in a society that relies on consumer spending for its daily bread.
Yes, yes. I know that positing contemporary society as nothing more than a colossal Beatles vs. Stones match is hardly “new thinking.” But I suppose this extended prelude is a way of saying that I firmly believe that sometimes you can like something so much that you quit making rational sense. You may think you’re objectively right about something at the time, although in reality you’ve just fallen for it.
Rock criticism – partly because it really isn’t hard criticism and partly because it flourishes in the hormonal slough of adolescent enthusiasms – is particularly susceptible to non-rational flights of infatuation. Band X becomes “the greatest thing ever” because some bespectacled Elvis Costello lookalike has a crush on the singer or the chorus or the font on the band’s website. And not long after, Band X is the “worst sellout of all time” because they sucked on Letterman or wrote a cola jingle or it turns out the bassist wasn’t really married to his sister after all. Basically, the whole process of falling for a band is non-smart. It’s immature. It really doesn’t suit anyone over the age of 16.
So all hemming and hawing complete, I’m going to make a confession. Back in 2001 I totally fell for this local band called Wolcott.
I went to a ton of shows between 2001 and 2004. I was super excited about rock and roll at the time. Wolcott caught me in the right spot. They were friends of friends of friends from where I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago. The singer had years before been in a local teen punk band called Winepress that wrote one of my (still) favorite songs of all time. I was writing rock crit for some coworkers’ online arts and culture “zine” and I did a long, slightly ridiculous and certainly pretentious interview with the band. My first lousy band played our first gig opening for Wolcott’s (unplanned) last show together. I’ve played shows with the members’ various new bands. I’ve had dinner with these folks. I think I may have even had fallings out with some of these folks. In short, the members of this band have become part of “the folks I know” – and all because I happened to see them at the best show they probably ever did at one of the greatest, dirtiest rock venues I’ve ever been to.
Live at the Fireside Bowl – March 31st, 2001 documents the band’s first show with lead guitarist Eddie Jones. The band is a bit rough around the edges – either because they went on last and had time lube up before playing or because they hadn’t yet gotten too comfortable or bored with the material. They were great. When I read a week later that they were going to be selling a recorded version of that show, I dragged my wife out to some VFW hall show in the wilds of northwestern Indiana to purchase it. It is the best thing the band ever put on disc – and I know because I have it all somewhere in the mound of crap that threatens to overtake the Record Desk.
Anyway, like most local bands, Wolcott was doomed to get progressively less interesting – failing to write any new songs while letting small successes and personal pettiness get the better of them. They eventually put out a self-released album with all the jewel case trimmings. I thought it was good when it came out, but subsequent listenings have revealed it to be overdone and not nearly as good as the simple no-frills tracks I watched them record at a friend’s project studio. Wolcott never “made it” – though the bass player did go on to compete in some sort of hair cutting reality competition on Bravo!
Still, let us not remember Wolcott in their surly last days wherein they tirelessly and tiresomely covered Journey whilst attempting to set a world record by playing every single tavern in Calumet City in one night. Let’s remember them when they were great – when they were enthusiastically pulling unironic rock star poses, drunkenly making out with my friends in regional airport bars, and sloppily rocking the crumbling, cockroach-infested stage at the Fireside Bowl.
Wolcott, Live at the Fireside Bowl – March 31st, 2001
01. Teardrops
02. Buried in the Suburbs
03. Saw You Through It
04. Fiending
05. Indiana
06. All Aboard for Love
07. Stay Awhile
08. Somewhere in Shanghai
09. All That I Have Learned
10. Halsted Market Days
11. Can’t Stop Body Rock
Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get yet to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.
Oh, and I also prefer Marilyn Manson to Poe.
[...] Wolcott’s ickily recorded, over-mussed-with, full-length because I was still enamored with the earlier, messier, better band they had been. It probably didn’t help that I knew the recording’s primary engineer and had heard [...]