Many diehard music listeners today continue to curate a substantial collection of vinyl LPs, or else went back to vinyl after it began to resurge a few years ago. Not me. I am firmly of the digital age — in fact, the primary reason I became so finicky and exacting about my music was the sense of empowerment digital music grants you. It’s not that I can carry nearly my entire collection in a device the size of my wallet; I’m so used to that I expect nothing less. It’s that all this wonderful stuff is lying supine and exposed in iTunes, where I can manipulate it at will. A vinyl record is fixed, a physical artifact; a digital song is an assemblage of bits, malleable and subject to whim. Most people who buy songs from iTunes or Amazon probably don’t even stop to consider the awesome power literally at their fingertips. You can name anything anything you want, sequence it in any way you want. You can put Sergeant Pepper in its original running order, so that side 1 ends with “She’s Leaving Home,” or reconstruct Infidels to include “Blind Willie McTell” instead of “Neighborhood Bully.” Whether you’re the type to take such liberties or not, programs like iTunes allow you to get your music right — to tend it with as much care and respect for detail as you like. As I suggested above, how far you take this practice depends on, and reveals a lot about, who you are. To illustrate, let me show you a few of my common MP3 hoarding practices.

1. Always set Sort Artist to “Lastname, Firstname”It amazes me that more people don’t do this. Well, actually it doesn’t amaze me because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to alter nearly every single thing that goes in your music library. I guess what amazes me is that not doing it doesn’t bug everyone else as much as it bugs me. Johnny Cash should not appear under J, he should appear under C. That’s so fundamental that to flout it feels like spitting in the face of logic itself.

2. Add cover art to my imported tracks

This is pretty obvious, and a lot of people probably do this. I believe iTunes will even do it for you, though I would never entrust iTunes with so exacting a task. But here’s something not everybody does:

3. Add separate cover art to mono and stereo releases

Well, because they’re different, goddamn it.

4. Add individual years to every track in a multi-year compilation

To be honest, I’ve only done this with a few such compilations in my library so far, because as pains in the asses go, this one is on a par with re-grouting your bathroom, which I have never done and which sounds only slightly less bothersome than simply replacing the entire bathroom. Even if I know the artist’s work pretty well already, I usually don’t know it enough to reel off the year each song was released with perfect accuracy, necessitating many, many visits to Wikipedia to fill these little tags in. What makes it worthwhile? The fact that I can generate a smart playlist of songs from a given year and know with certainty that each of those songs came out in that year, regardless of when some record company decided to slap them together and reissue them for a quick buck. Don’t you wish you were me right now?

5. Maintain consistent spellings of artists’ names

Anyone with even a few, er, alternatively acquired music tracks understands that people who share music files don’t spell any better than anyone else who uses the Internet. Fixing them sounds like a no-brainer, but I’m constantly surprised when I look at friends’ iPods and see that in addition to, say, the Rolling Stones, they’ll have tracks by Rolling Stones (no definite article), Roling Stones, Rolling Stone, Stones, or the subtle but ever-popular “Rolling Stones ,” wherein an unobtrusive extra space at the end registers in iTunes’ primitive cerebrum as a distinct artist. This kind of stuff can make an iPod damn near unusable to my mind. How do people stand it?

6. Distinguish between albums by Paul McCartney, Wings, and Paul McCartney and Wings.

Goddamn it, they’re different.

(At this point, our hypothetical FBI profiler is jotting in his notebook: Low anxiety threshold. Feelings of lack of control, helplessness.)

Now, lest you think I’ve gone completely off the cliff, there are some organizational behaviors that are too nit-picky and anal retentive even for me. These include:

1. Filing Ram under “Paul and Linda McCartney”

The only reason Macca gave his wife label credit on this one is that he was being sued by Allen Klein and his assets were frozen; giving Linda half the album was the only way to bring any money into the McCartney household. As fun and quirky a bit of trivia as this is, I don’t see the need to enshrine it in my album collection. (Side note: at the last Paul McCartney concert I attended, he dedicated “Too Many People,” the lead track from this album, “to all the Wings fans.” Does McCartney really not remember, or care, which of his albums were Wings and which weren’t?)

2. Filling in the Composer tag

This is no less geeky a thing as a lot of other things I actually do, but I’ve just never gone here. Maybe one day I’ll think to myself, “I wish I could make a smart playlist of all the Holland-Dozier-Holland songs that begin with a hard consonant.” Until that day, this field can stay blank.

3. Filing Elvis Costello’s King of America under “The Costello Show”

What am I, crazy?

4. Filling in the Beats per Minute tag

I guess this is a big thing for people who exercise. I wouldn’t know anything about that. I think I might get around to something like this if the day somehow became four or five hours longer.

So there you have it. Don’t be afraid to stick your head down the music-nerd rabbit hole for a while. Take control of your music. Sort it, catalog it, clean it up and fiddle with it. Just remember: Band on the Run is by “Paul McCartney & Wings.” That’s very important. Don’t ask me why — it just is.

Mastered for iTunes means these albums have been specially tuned for higher fidelity sound on your computer, stereo, and all Apple devices. Browse a range of music across all genres below, and keep checking back as we add more music that is mastered specifically for iTunes.

What this means is anyone’s guess, at least until people prod Apple for details and if Apple deigns to respond. Most likely they’re just compressing the tracks to make them sound louder and punchier. This would make them sound worse rather than better, especially on an iMac or a pair of pack-in iPod earbuds, but that does seem to be where modern tastes have landed us. I don’t suppose I will ever know, as I’m not going to re-buy any of my (relative few) iTunes purchases to compare old and new versions.

What caught my eye was the categories of music available in this new format. You have your Jazz, your Classical and whatnot. And then you have this:

Tastes come and go, but any format meant to appeal to serious audiophiles has to have the Floyd catalog. One day, music players may be able to stream music directly into our brains, leveraging the mind’s extraordinary sensory powers to make you feel as though you are within and surrounded by the music, inhabiting it in every fiber of your being, every nerve ending ablaze with it. And no one will buy it until you can play Dark Side of the Moon in it.

Edited the title to improve the Floyd reference. I can’t believe I got that wrong.

One thing I was expecting to find, and did, was this:

There are lots of pictures of the Beatles clowning around with Cassius Clay, as he was still known then, and this one and the variations of it are the best known. It might not occur to you on seeing it that the Beatles and Clay had no idea who each other were. The photo opp was arranged by their respective handlers, who had some inkling of what it might mean to bring these two phenomena together: the British invaders who were taking over American popular music, and the African-American dynamo who, not content to redefine the sport of boxing, went on to create the template for mass-media sports celebrity — he had already started doing it when this shot was taken.

We see this photo now and marvel that it happened, that these five people ever occupied the same space together. It’s like an improbably real version of those cheesy prints that show Bogart, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe hanging out in the same pool hall. The Beatles and Muhammad Ali, to give him his proper name, are titans, figures who stand outside of popular history. It looked a little different to viewers back then. The Beatles were a teenybopper fad in February 1964, when they went to visit Clay as he trained for his first title fight. No one, perhaps not even the Beatles themselves, realized how pivotal their presence would be as the 60s took their strange, epochal course. And Clay was something of a nine-day-wonder himself, a braggart expected to have his clock cleaned by Sonny Liston. Probably a lot of people simply wanted it to happen, wanted to see the loudmouth get his comeuppance, just as a lot of people waited, and waited, for the Beatles to fall on their faces and prove how shallow and fleeting their presence in the culture really was.

But the Beatles went on to prove that rock music could expand beyond anyone’s preconceptions, taking politics, manners and culture along with it. And Ali proved not only that he was a great fighter — indeed, that he was as great as he said he was, which hardly seemed possible — but that a sports figure could be just as culturally radical, just as transformational, as any artist, politician, philosopher or pop musician.

It hadn’t happened yet. No one was seeing it coming. This is a photo of the moment before the plunge — before everything changed.

He is young, almost child-like, with round cheeks and curly close-cropped hair. Dressed in jeans and a coarse denim shirt, clutching a guitar with unclipped strings winding off the tuning pegs like whiskers, he might be mistaken for a roadside ragamuffin, but the grin gives him away, even more than those babyish cheeks do: a grin of knowing impetuousness, a charmer’s grin, a grin that knows luck is on its side, or fate or destiny or whatever you choose to call it. Yet how to account for the contrast between the puckish demeanor and the voice? How does someone barely distinguishable from the average small-town twenty-year-old — for it is apparent to the keen observer that the hardscrabble mannerisms are an affectation, given away with a subliminal wink — sing so forlornly, so emphatically and so unaffectedly of things he could never have experienced? The words he sings are infused with the morality and vision of an Old Testament prophet, strained through the vocabulary of an itinerant brakeman. He chides and insinuates and accuses and finally takes it all back onto himself: Ah, but I was so much older then. Always his voice prowls among the words like a hunter nosing for prey in the rocks, investigating dark corners, overturning and exposing hidden things, ignoring what lies in plain sight. It remakes old sayings and never utters the same word in the same way. Not a conventionally attractive instrument, but one that seems to say, Would I be saying these things, in this way, if they weren’t true?

This performer soon gives way to a new face — and the transformation is shocking. In place of the fresh-faced, Jimmie Rodgers-like troubadour now stands a dandified Mod in a tight-fitting striped suit, a wild nimbus of hair radiating from his head like sunbeams, his sallow face guarded by a pair of dark glasses. But the most noticeable transformation — before he starts to sing, that is — is the Fender Telecaster guitar slung high on his chest. He begins to pick at it tentatively, his long-nailed fingers not quite used to the guitar’s weight and action. From the shadows, he is joined by four other musicians, and this ensemble explodes into a roaring barroom blues, tough and loose and fearless, that batters the walls of the club. The gangly singer steps to the microphone and cuts loose in a voice like a police siren amplified through a Marshall stack; he howls, wails, croons, giggles, moans, an unfathomable conviction undergirding everything and holding it together. The words are as arresting as the voice — in fact, the words don’t seem as though they could be delivered any other way. There are torrents of imagery, as though a hundred years of newspaper headlines, shared memory and tall tales were compressed into some cultural singularity before bursting out again, coalescing into a fractalized landscape where Beethoven, Jack the Ripper and Ezra Pound rub elbows with gamblers, old widows, strutting commanders-in-chief and the unnamed lost and lonely. There is jarring silliness, surprising pathos and mystifying juxtapositions of time and place. And most piercing and memorable is a question, thrown out to the audience like an unanswerable taunt: How does it feel?

The audience who are witness to this onslaught — the club is now packed — are left breathless as the performer rushes off stage, irrepressibly energetic to the last. Now nursing a pale drink, the old man near the stage nods, though the gesture is at least as much in wonder as in approval or sympathy. His attention seems to waver a small degree as the next performer comes up. Less sallow-looking, more contented than his predecessor, this singer leads a lean country ensemble through a series of weird, off-kilter parables that give way to more conventional, even mawkish ballads. The audience is intrigued but not quite with him; a few spectators begin to trickle out. The next performer galvanizes the crowd with searing, heartfelt songs of breakup and loss: If you see her, say hello. After him, as the evening lengthens into deep night, a succession of new singers ascends the stage, each one a bit older than the previous, a bit more undirected and less compelling. There is the Christian singer, at first accommodating and then increasingly strident and condemning; the hopeful ’80s pop star, sounding lost amid reams of dated arrangements; an aging folk-rocker delivering almost willfully inconsequential songs; and, in a strange echo of the day’s first performer, an older man with just an acoustic guitar, scratching out folk songs and ballads with a voice from which nearly all the contours have been shaven away. These are performances without irony, taking each song’s outlandish truths and fanciful occurrences as read. I rode all day and I’ll ride all night and I’ll overtake my lady. Whatever he is channeling, it fails to reach very far — the club has grown mostly empty now, and many of the people still present are lost in conversation, reliving and debating what they have already heard earlier in the evening.

The stage light dims, the last performer shuffles off to scattered applause, and for a long time it seems as though there will be no more music here.

Then the old man rises from his table. He adjusts his hat, fiddles with it some more until it’s nested back in the same spot before he started fussing with it. And then he climbs onto the stage.

He sits at an electric piano. From behind him a lonely electric guitar picks a frail chord on every beat. He leans into the microphone.

I’m walking … through streets that are dead.

The audience, distant at first — they have heard much tonight that either disappointed or baffled them — gradually allow themselves to be taken in, surrendering to the words, and to this music that sounds piped in from some juke-joint of the subconscious, every dive bar anyone ever imagined rolled into a single place. The sound as it unfolds picks up and reconciles most of what was great from everyone who came before on this stage: the snatches of quasi-remembered standards, the competing stories telescoped into one fractured narrative, the unabashed humor, the taint of Biblical judgment and overhanging doom. Your days are numbered and so are mine. The loss within these songs is overwhelming, every turn of a corner revealing another ghost, yet despair never overtakes them — or the singer. The man plays on, crouched behind his keyboard, barreling through one song after another, untwisting each one in new and unexpected directions. The playing has taken on a new meaning, here in the waning minutes of night: the act of performing itself, the perseverance to faithfully deliver these words and these melodies is an ennobling one. The perseverance and devotion are the antidotes to despair. As the set at last winds down — I feel a change comin’ on, and the last part of the day is already gone — the man finally brings his gaze from some indeterminate point in space to rest on the faces turned to him. “Thank you.” And out of nowhere a grin, wicked and impish. And then he’s gone, the final chord still ringing in the air.

The sun has returned to the solitary window overlooking the floor, revealing seats that are nearly full again, with both new listeners and those who have sat here stubbornly for what must feel like ages, accepting the mediocre and the execrable as the occasional, and inevitable, price of the sublime. The stage light once again dims. All that remains is the audience, restive yet still miraculously willing to keep their place as they watch the empty stage for whatever is going to happen next.

I bought this iPod, my third, shortly after the “classic” designation was first introduced. I was thrilled: this was the first iPod large enough to hold the entirety of my music collection, freeing me from the burden of curating playlists and trying to second-guess what my tastes would be on a given day. (I have largely re-assumed this burden with my 32 GB iPhone, but that is another matter.) It did not trouble me at the time that, merely by calling its former flagship product a “classic,” Apple was signaling that the iPod’s glory days as a music device were behind it. A classic is something beyond the need for evolution or change, something that provides the same pleasures over and over, something — if I may get momentarily pretentious — more associated with memories than hopes.

So, back to my ailing iPod classic. I had some extra money and, what’s more, an impeccable justification for replacing my current model. Except I dragged my feet. I looked at the refurbished models on the Apple website and noted with approval that I could save quite a bit of money buying used. Gradually it dawned on me that I didn’t want to buy a new iPod. Not because of sentimental attachment to the current one — though I love Apple technology, the devices themselves are completely fungible to me, and I have no hesitation in dumping my current object of affection for something new and improved. The problem is that the current iPod classic really isn’t improved from the model I bought in 2008. Today’s classic supports Genius playlists and … I’m not really sure what else. There is certainly no difference of any substance. I can’t think of another Apple product so little improved over so long a time. But then, why improve a “classic”?

I see the logic. Apple is about iOS devices: the iPad, the iPhone and its bastard offspring, the iPod touch. The iOS platform is Apple’s chance to directly influence the evolution of an entire new computing paradigm, in a way they didn’t quite do with the Macintosh. They’d be crazy not to put all of their eggs in that basket. And let’s face it: mp3 players are so five years ago.

Let that sink in for a moment. In 2004, the iPod was so wondrous and improbable that Newsweek put a shot of an iPod-bedecked Steve Jobs on its cover. The implications of a device that allowed listeners to carry their entire music collections (or at least listeners without 25,000-song libraries) on their person at all times had still barely begun to percolate. Pundits debated the ethics of walking around in a constant, private aural fog; newspapers told lurid stories of people mugged, and in one ghastly instance murdered, for their iPods; and some folks seriously believed the iPod’s shuffle function was secretly rigged to play the same songs over and over, proving definitively that most people don’t really understand what “random” means. The Walkman changed the way people listened to music; the iPod, by allowing people access to essentially everything they might want at any given time, changed how they thought about music, and how it could more meaningfully accompany your life.

And then all of a sudden, a few scant years later, none of that was really a big deal anymore. For one thing, people bought iPods so rapidly and in such quantities that they quickly became ubiquitous. During the 2003 Christmas holiday, Apple was pleased to sell three quarters of a million iPods; four years later, that figure had grown to more than 22 million. Today they move at a rate of about nine million a quarter — still pretty good for a product category now regarded as a technological afterthought. Which brings us to the second reason why the iPod lost its luster: in January 2007, Apple revealed the iPhone. The iPod had been a curiosity when it made its 2001 debut (“It costs how much? It only works with Macs?”); the iPhone was recognized from day one as a game-changer, and everything else looked dull by comparison to it. Especially mp3 players. “You mean it only plays music?”

Once the iPhone came to market, it quickly grew into Apple’s flagship product, pulling the bulk of Apple’s resources in its wake. The iPod’s signature dancing silhouettes disappeared from TV, replaced by simple, point-and-tap demonstrations of the iPhone’s incredible capabilities. The iPod, which had already settled into a comfortable pre-Christmas upgrade cycle, became something like a relative who appears at rare but predictable intervals at family functions, always with some new affectation to gossip about, like a blonde dye-job or a conspicuously young new girlfriend. A peculiar randomness came to dominate the iPod nano, the flagship of the iPod line. The year the iPhone debuted, the nano was remade into something like a miniature console TV, the better, it was thought, to allow people to watch iTunes video content on it. A year later, that design was scrapped entirely in favor of a return to the previous slender, vertical design; no one at Apple now seemed to mind if you had to turn it on its side to watch video on it. A placeholder update the following year added a shiny aluminum finish and new colors, while the most recent iteration seemed to test the definition of the word “update”: an almost perversely small device with no on-board controls, no video camera (added several generations prior) and a clip borrowed from the iPod shuffle. It is hard to discern a vision behind these lurches from one form factor to another. I wrote a few years ago that Apple should simply ditch the nano and start over with a new, re-conceived mass-market iPod, and this last iteration in particular confirms for me that I was right.

A Note on the iPod Touch

You will have noticed I am not including the iPod touch in the bloviating above. That is because I am considering devices whose primary purpose is to store and play music. Being simply an iPhone with the telephony hardware removed and a little extra storage in its place, the iPod touch is not a dedicated music player, more of a handheld, general-purpose computer. (Apple distinguishes it in the market by positioning it as a gaming device.) What makes something a dedicated music player? In my view, you need two things:

1. A display large enough to show many album tracks in a single view
2. Hardware controls that allow you to operate the unit without looking at it or with the display asleep

This already disqualifies every non-classic iPod Apple makes. (Apple tries to satisfy the second requirement by bundling headphones built with simple click-remotes to enable users to pause, play and skip. Needless to say, this is not what I’m looking for. Apple’s pack-in buds are uncomfortable and don’t sound very good, meaning that I never use them. Besides, unless you’re jogging, which I never do, it’s easier and more natural to simply click a button on the player itself than to thread the cord with your fingers looking for the button. I’m not even going to dignify Voice Over. A talking mp3 player is something Bill Gates would think up.)

I would add to the above a third requirement:

3. Enough storage to fit a library of tens of thousands of songs.

So the iPod classic is the only Apple mp3 player that suits my need as a more-dedicated-than-average music listener. But I am reluctant to reinvest in a device that has evolved so little in the years since it was released. Assuming Apple were inclined to invest the time and resources to make the iPod fresh and exciting again, what would a new iPod classic look like?

Well, before we even get to that, that name has to go.

Introducing the iPod Macro

As we discussed above, a “classic” is something that no longer evolves, something whose primary appeal is nostalgic. That should end. There is room for the iPod to advance, and its name should reflect that. I propose the iPod macro as the music device I want Apple to sell to me. The name communicates its primary appeal: this is for people with a lot of music, and it’s designed from start to finish with their needs in mind.

How could the iPod macro be designed for hardcore music lovers? The basic form factor would carry over from the touch: for navigating long libraries of songs, touch-scrolling beats the click wheel any day of the week. It would have two volume buttons on the left edge, just like the touch does. It would have an additional rocker switch on the right: a play/pause control in the center and forward and back buttons on either side. (I am sparing you my primitive Photoshop skills here. You’re welcome.) And leave the headphone jack on the bottom — it’s one of the best design decisions Apple ever made with the iPod line.

So is making a worthwhile new iPod simply a matter of putting another set of buttons on the side? Not quite, though I wouldn’t say no to it. There are other capabilities Apple should build into an iPod macro, such as:

• A SoundHound/Shazam-like audio recognition service, built into the OS and tied into iTunes
• The ability to make smart playlists directly on the device
• Intelligent shuffle options, similar to what you find in the Groove app. You can rather inelegantly replicate this functionality with smart playlists, but it’s much more simple and Apple-like to simply be able to tap something like, “Play three songs each by my favorite artists” or “Play five-star songs I haven’t heard in the last month.”
• A refined album track display that lets me see song ratings along with song titles. Seriously, doesn’t this bother anyone else?
• Advanced search functionality — basically like the current search but with more granularity for searching by year, title, etc.
• Local music sharing. Not the “squirting” that the Zune was originally supposed to do — christ, I threw up in my mouth a little just writing that clause — but a simple Bluetooth bridge for sending an iPod-toting friend nearby an iTunes link to a song from your library.
• And the biggie: storage. I’m thinking this sucker would debut in two capacities, 160 and 250 GB. I really don’t care if it’s flash-based storage or not. I just want the room.

Would this iPod macro, you ask, have the same capabilities as the iPod touch? On the one hand, there is no reason it couldn’t; on the other, releasing two so similar products might be confusing to the marketplace. Would I buy a touchscreen iPod that was artificially blocked from installing apps? Probably — after all, it’s not like my current iPod can run apps — but I am likely in the minority here. Instead, I am thinking that an iPod macro really wouldn’t be as confusing as all that. If Apple can help people choose between otherwise-identical WiFi and 3G-enabled iPads, I think that few people would buy iPod macros who didn’t really, really want the extra storage and the convenience of the on-board controls; the storage premium alone would ensure that only hardcore music listeners would spring for them.

So this, more than an iPad 3 or an iPhone 5, is my current dream product from Apple. If there is little likelihood Apple would actually build it, there is even less that a competitor would; other music player vendors seem to have got the message that innovation is now for smart phones. As it happens, my current classic somehow recovered from its bought of battery flu and is behaving reliably again. I’m grateful. Until something genuinely exciting and new comes my way, from Apple or anywhere else, I’m in no hurry to buy my next mp3 player.

I find myself wondering though: will kids too young to remember 45 records understand that the second song is supposed to suck?

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
By Bob Dylan

Driving my broke-down ambulance down Highway 9
Johnny with a bullet wound strapped in behind
The preacher on the radio asked me for the time
And directions to your carnival attraction

The newspaper reporter came down from Bootblack Hill
Said “How’m I supposed to tell any of these Jacks from Jill?”
Then passed me an empty jug and said “Buddy, drink your fill;
Before I have to go and file this retraction”

Oh, I can’t get no satisfaction
No I can’t get no satisfaction
‘Cause I try and I try to get you to sign up for any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

When you poured the wine and said “Let me get this right
And tell me how that shirt you’re wearin’ could be so white”
And I told you every shirt’s the same color at night
And you turned so fast I couldn’t see your reaction

Nancy on the shore bidding her sailor goodbye
Came back home to find no one had ever told her why
A sailor would just as soon kick dirt in your eye
As he ever would confess his attraction

I can’t get no satisfaction
I just can’t get no satisfaction
‘Cause I try and I try to get you to sign up for any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

The regimental chief on his way back to the ball
Talked me into giving up my peg and my awl
Gave me a card that said “For a good time, call”
Then ran off to join the rest of his faction

We were throwing dice with a nine-toed freak
Who explained he’d need to see me later that week
“You see, Bob,” he said, “I’m on a losing streak
And the judge, he sent me down for another infraction”

Yes, I can’t get no satisfaction
I can’t get no satisfaction
Because I try and I try to get you to sign up for any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

I woke up in the parlor of Widow Casey Jones
Who gave me a blanket for my back and whiskey for my bones
Took my biscuit roller and traded it for a bag of precious stones
Then went to visit the minister, all laid up in traction

I went to the Union Hall to redeem my ball and chain
And sign the papers to keep you out of the rain
I hung my coat above a portrait of Calamity Jane
And headed out to join the chain reaction

Oh, I can’t get no satisfaction
No I can’t get no satisfaction
‘Cause I try and I try to to get you to sign on the dotted line
For any kind of reaction
Oh I just can’t get no satisfaction

***

Mr. Tambourine Man
By Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Let the chips fall where they may, my dear
Because I can go all night
The reason is a friend of mine
Standing there beneath the light

He’s a gentleman of grace and class
And blood beneath his nails
He reads the secrets scratched upon
Your scabby needle trail

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Shake that wheel for me
I’m not sleeping, and there ain’t no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Cop a feel with me
In the haze of a drum-skin morning
I’ll keep it tight with you

You strolled in here, a bitch in heat
With Leather Jackie on your arm
And you ditched him in thirty seconds flat
Before he kept you safe from harm

You came aboard the swirling ship
A tar eager to please
Your hands too numb to grasp the rope
That kept you on your knees

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Shake that wheel for me
I’m not sleeping, and there ain’t no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Dance this reel with me
In the haze of a drum-skin morning
I’ll keep it tight with you

You’re ready to go anywhere
You’re willing to be lead
They way you lead those ragged clowns
By their tiny little heads

So stand up tall, my wilted rose
For a gentleman with flair
He’ll blow the leaves right off your bed
And leave a smoke ring in the air

He’ll take the diamonds from your sky
And set them on your dainty wrist
Your weariness becomes his mill
Your love will be the grist

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Shake that wheel for me
I’m not sleeping, and there ain’t no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Crack a seal with me
In the haze of a drum-skin morning
I’ll make it right with you

I’ve been following this story — what very little there has been of it to follow — for about three years now, ever since the Apple Computer/Apple Corps trial, when the secretive Neil Aspinall was forced to admit in court proceedings that he was, in fact, supervising a total revamping of the group’s catalog. Questions that had been fruitlessly batted back and forth are now finally answered. Yes, the mono Sgt. Pepper will come out; in fact, all of the albums will be available in mono (except for Abbey Road, which was never released that way). Yes, the music has been cleaned up in a way that, we are assured, adds the punch expected of contemporary rock while still being true to the original mixes’ ambience. Yes, even the original, oddball stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul will come out, which most people will likely not bother to listen to more than once. And while no details of packaging have been released, we know we can get all these goodies in two fell swoops: all of the stereo albums and all the mono albums will be available in two separate box sets.

It was that last detail that really brought it home to me, that illuminated what should have been a patently obvious fact: they are going to sell a shitload of discs.

I think the reason I never bothered to think of it is that parallel to the tantalizing prospect of remastered Beatles tracks has run the story of another, long-delayed, Beatles milestone, the availability of the tracks for online purchase and download. Every imminent Macworld Expo or iPod announcement brought a fresh crop of rumors that this, finally, would be the one where Jobs could make the announcement that, so we all believe, he has been so eager to make: that the world’s greatest band was coming to the world’s biggest music retailer.

Except, honestly, I never gave much of a shit whether or when the Beatles went digital. Five years ago, before iTunes had cemented its grip on the digital music market, the Fabs’ presence might have made a difference; had one of the upstart services like MTV managed to lure them with a sweetheart deal, it would have given iTunes a serious black eye and, possibly, some worthy competition. As it is, despite some grumbling in the Beatles’ camp about not seeing eye-to-eye with Apple on prices, there is no viable third-party alternative for the Beatles in going online. Amazon, despite running a very nice digital download service, barely has double-digit market share, and going with an also-ran service would cheapen the Beatles’ image enough to not be worth whatever concessions the band could get. If the Beatles don’t go with iTunes, they’ll open their own storefront; right now I’d say it’s even money either way.

But whether the Beatles sell their music through iTunes or from their own servers doesn’t really matter, anymore than whether you buy your CDs at Borders or Best Buy. What really counts — all that really counts — is the music. People are going to want it. Just as the Anthology albums did ten years ago, it will give people an excuse to fall in love with the Beatles again — and it’s going to be a pretty damn good excuse. The albums will be impeccably packaged, with liner notes, photos (the inserts on the current CDs are comically paltry) and even QuickTime documentaries on the making of each album. They are also, from everything I’ve heard so far, going to sound great. Everyone is going to want these.

The L.A. Times quoted a Beatles expert named Martin Lewis:

“There will be cynics who will point quite accurately to the vanishing CD marketplace,” Lewis said. “There’s no doubt it will not do as spectacularly well as had they reissued them in 2001 in the wake of the ’1′ [hits compilation] album, which has sold 31 million copies worldwide and 8 million in the U.S. But any cynics who say the Beatles have missed the boat will be wrong. This will sell exceedingly well and will be a huge boost to the recorded music industry.

“And if the CD is going to die,” he said, “the Beatles are going to give it a superb wake.”

I think Lewis is wrong and right. I don’t think releasing the albums in the wake of 1 would have helped them sell better. Part of the reason 1 was such a hit was that it was the first high-profile Beatles release people had had a chance to buy in a long time. Releasing the albums after that would likely have led many to think that, actually, 1 was enough for the time being.

But in his second point, Lewis is dead on. EMI and Capitol are going to have a very nice Christmas this year thanks to the Beatles. And I think his point about the death of the CD is a good one — perhaps better than he is aware.

The reissue of the Beatles catalog is, in a way, the ultimate shoe-drop, the event that the music buying public has been unconsciously awaiting since shortly after the CDs first came out (and earned criticism for their mono mixes and overall un-dynamic sound). The first Beatles CDs were issued 23 years ago, and except for some low-key reissues here and there (the White Album anniversary release, Let It Be … Naked), the CDs on store shelves today are the exact same ones that were on the shelves at Sam Goodies or Tower or Virgin back in the late 80s.

I remember how, once the Beatles were out, CDs seemed to have arrived, beginning in earnest their irrevocable shift from yuppie status symbol to a true format for the masses. (I’m old enough to remember when people used to be ridiculed for buying and listening to CDs. Well, at least for buying and listening to Brothers in Arms.) Now we’re witnessing the tail end of that cycle. People are growing more accustomed to the realization that music is information; audiophiles still have the option to buy their black shiny discs, but the fetishization of the music delivery vehicle, whether the vinyl LP, the cassette tape or the CD, is ending. When every CD you buy goes straight onto your iPod anyway, it’s only natural to wonder why you’re bothering with the shiny disc in the first place.

But the Beatles, I predict, will be a special case. The remastered Beatles CDs will be the last music that people will actually want to own on CD. (A friend of mine, in fact, told me they were “probably the last CDs I will ever buy.”) They may not realize it consciously, but buying the Beatles on CD one last time will serve as a tacit farewell to an entire era, when we helped change the economics of the music industry by happily buying our favorite music again and again, each time with a promise of improved fidelity, of more sumptuous packaging — of somehow being closer to the music we cared about. Cynics have always derided this, seeing the industry’s treadmill of reissues as nothing more than a ruse for parting nostalgic music lovers from more of their money. But there was always more to it than that, wasn’t there? Re-buying an album in a better edition was a small act of devotion, a conscious renewing of ties with a work of art that gave your life a little extra meaning. Loading up your player with the stereo mix of Pet Sounds or the 5.1 version of Dark Side of the Moon was both thrilling and familiar, a batch of impending surprises you knew you were going to love. All that for, what, 12 bucks? A bargain.

So it will be with the Beatles. People will once again savor the experience of viewing the new packaging and photos, reading the new liner notes, hearing the opening notes of “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Help!” or “Back in the U.S.S.R.” as though for the first time. What ensuing CD purchase, what classic album reissue, can live up to that? Once the definitive Beatles CDs are safely on the shelf, why bother with music on shiny discs again?

And also, truth be told, because I have an unfailing sympathy for the uncool. And McCartney, no matter how cool his various achievements, will always, personally, be uncool. As many a sardonic wag has remarked, The Beatles are dying in order of coolness. Ringo’s next.

Reading my essay over now, there are a few things I would change: I’d tone down the Yoko bashing, for one thing. (The creepy, unhealthy psychodrama of the Lennon/Ono marriage rests more with the groom than the bride.) For another, I actually think I could’ve made my case stronger. Forget for a moment the fact that, in 1966, McCartney was among the handsomest, most interesting and most sought-after (read: cool) figure in arguably the most culturally significant city in the world at that moment. He went where he wanted, slept with whom he wanted, did whatever the fuck he pleased; no one would turn down a chance to trade places with Paul McCartney. But forget all that and just stick to what you can quantify. McCartney was the first of the Beatles to write his own songs, the first member of the fledgling Quarrymen who actually knew how to play. (Lennon played the guitar with banjo chords until “Paul taught [him] to play properly.”) Unlike Lennon, who before meeting Ono deeply mistrusted anything avante garde, McCartney eagerly absorbed the musique concrete of Stockhausen or Glass, and was the first of the Beatles to rip the eraserhead out of his tape recorder and begin making tape loops in his home studio. Without McCartney, “Tomorrow Never Knows” would have consisted of John Lennon banging out C on his acoustic guitar, and the world might have been spared “Revolution #9″ altogether. It was McCartney who pushed the Abbey Road engineers to overdrive the trebly guitars of “Nowhere Man” and who had the idea of recording his bass through another amplifier instead of a conventional microphone. Critical opinion has swung between either Sgt. Pepper or Revolver as the Beatles’ masterpiece — and both are dominated by Paul, from behind the desk if not always behind the mike. This is something beyond cool; there are maybe a dozen people in 20th century popular music who can claim achievements of this rank.

And yet.

I will defend McCartney’s creativity and experimentalism to the end. Yet my heart-of-hearts favorite Beatle?

John.

John Lennon was a deeply wounded man, a man for whom braggadoccio and cruelty served as a mask for an insecure boy who never stopped resenting all the grownups who thought he was worthless — and who he must have at least occasionally suspected were right. Lennon’s earliest efforts at “honest” songwriting were exercises in formulaic self-pity, no more or less fundamentally honest than the likes of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But somewhere around 1965, Lennon figured out how to tap his inner conflicts without resorting to sad-clown poses. He presented the tangle of his psyche with all its contradictions intact, grounding his songs in uncertainty, hesitancy, confusion. Lennon’s finest songs — “She Said She Said,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus” — are snapshots of a tumbling psyche in mid-churn.

The usual critical line is that McCartney, by contrast, was shallow, preferring to pander with a smiling face and a thumb perenially turned upward. That’s an oversimplification. McCartney aired his share of emotional dirty laundry, most famously in “We Can Work It Out,” positively Lennonian even before his partner added its rather impatient middle eight. But McCartney, ever the forward-thinking optimist, tended to present his emotional dilemmas post-facto, their tensions already resolved. If Lennon’s songs were the work of a skeptic, McCartney’s were the product of a believer. Think of “Let It Be” and its famous opening lines:

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me

No sooner is the crisis introduced than the solution arrives. Lennon could have handily written an entire song about finding himself in times of trouble — indeed I seem to recall a song called “Help” written in 1965 or so — but for McCartney, it is merely the precursor for the dramatic uplift, the consolation that is the song’s true message. “Hey Jude” of course is an anthem of consolation, a plea for optimism that is both cannily calculated and wholly heartfelt. Both “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” are gorgeous songs, and the former is among the Beatles’ very finest, but unlike Lennon’s finest, they begin after the crisis has taken place, not in the middle of it.

So I will always admire Paul’s amazing abilities, his drive, and his belief that the ordinary and the positive are worth celebrating. But it’s John who, briefly and wonderfully, speaks to me.

John Doe: What drew me to the project was working with [director] Ulu Grosbard and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham, and it being a great script. But I think it is accurate, to a bar band. Luckily, that’s the only time I’ve played “Hava Nagila.” Guaranteed. And I hope it’s the only time that I play it; not that it’s a bad song, it’s …

[Laughing throughout] It’s of a situation you’re not often in …

Yes. It sort of has a certain … je nais se quoi. [Laughs] But … the only thing that I don’t think a movie has ever captured in the music world is the speak that musicians have, the way that people are constantly capping on each other, and the banter that goes back and forth at rehearsal and just as they’re hanging around. I think that would be really difficult to script; you’d have to record it and then transcribe it. Even in Spinal Tap, it didn’t have that. I think of that sometimes in rehearsals and stuff.

The sickest part about doing acting is that then you find those same situations coming up in your real life. And then you’re wondering what’s real and what’s not.

Flashing back …

It’s just weird. Right around that same time when we were promoting Georgia, I was doing a tour on my own, and there’s this one place in Cincinnati called Sudsy Malone’s, which is a Laundromat-bar-gig.

One-stop shopping.

And it’s very popular with a certain level of musicians, because then they know that there’s one place they’re going to have clean clothes. And you can put your laundry in between soundcheck and the show and have it pretty much done. I’m sure that someone has probably gotten offstage while they’re playing so they can put it in for the …

[Laughing throughout] Put the fabric sheet in the dryer …

Right. [Laughs] I don’t think they’re worried about fabric softener with their jeans and t-shirts.

Your character had a line in that movie, something like “Look Sadie, things are really happening for us, and I don’t want you to fuck us up.” And to most people, for this band, nothing’s really happening; they’re playing bowling alleys. But for that band, to be able to just make a living playing is probably a pretty big deal.

Right, right.

They don’t have to worry about the day job anymore.

I think a lot of people would be better if they did have a day job. And in a way, acting has provided that for me, to do it for the right reasons; to do it because I love it, and because I need to do it, for creativity and stuff. And you can get—when you have a major label contract, you can get distracted, or you can get too far away from the reason you’re doing it. Because it becomes a job. And I think I was there—I was there with that Geffen contract, and I was there with kind of losing the reasons to write songs, or writing songs just for X, and it kind of came back after doing that Rhino record [Kissingsohard, 1995]. I’d collected a bunch of songs to do that record and then toured that, and then, just through personal life and things that happened, I realized I’d lost a sense of discovery, and a sense of searching for something and trying different things. Doing that Kill Rock Stars record [For the Rest of Us (EP), 1998) was—I tried to be innovative and tried to do different things, and carried it over into this one. It's important.

Do you feel that you're still "paying your dues"? Is there a point in your career where you thought "OK, I'm here; this can now be my job, I don't have to worry about where the next paycheck's coming in"?

Everybody has to worry about where the next paycheck's coming in. Because everyone extends themselves over and above what they actually make. [Laughs] Everybody does.

This being America, after all.

Yes. Not just because it’s America, because you develop a lifestyle. I’m still having character-building experiences, let’s put it this way. [Laughs] You know, once you accept the fact that life is struggle, then you can embrace it a little bit better. My priorities are not security and comfort, although it’s nice to have in moderate amounts.

Well, you do have a family to help keep up—

I do.

—and that’s always a consideration.

It’s a great source of love, it’s a great source of happiness, and also it can take you away from what you really need to be paying attention to, which is a difficult balance. My wife is finishing school, she’s been going to school for five years, and so I’ve been taking the kids to dance classes and Girl Scouts and crap like that, and sometimes I have to turn down auditions, and say “I can’t do that, because I’ve got to be home.” And that can be really frustrating. Because you’re not paying attention to what you’re supposed to be doing. But that’s part of the tradeoff.

I was going to ask how the family has affected your songwriting, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge shift in the early X stuff to what you do now; it’s the same kind of themes and a lot of the same subject matter.

[Pauses] My kids have provided me with some great lines, in the way that they would mix up words. [Pauses again] It’s kind of separate. And I would be a better poet if I could write simply about day-to-day things, and the kind of pleasure they might give you. I’d be a better writer if I could do that. But you end up being drawn to similar subjects, and those being when things are not right, when things are upside-down and confused, and then writing sort of makes you feel better or helps you sort it out or something. Those moments of change.

Now about the new record [Freedom Is ...], I was reading that you originally released it on the Internet.

Yeah.

I was wondering what brought you to that decision, and are you happy with the results of it?

I don’t know what kind of downloads they’ve had on that … I think until the technology catches up with it, until everybody has a CD burner in their computer, which is becoming more popular now—you can buy computers that have CD burners—I believe that people will pay for it. I don’t think that everybody needs to steal it, or wants to steal it. They need faster download time, and the ability to take it away from their computer; you may store the file there, but you need to be able to put it in your car. Until you can do that, it’s not going to be substantial, but I think that’s maybe a few years away.

The way it happened was eMusic did a benefit record for the refugees of Kosovo, and through my management they asked me if I’d donate a track to it. And then we were sending some tapes around to record companies and they weren’t, you know, beating down our door, so it was an obvious way to have something released. And then spinArt came through and said “You know what? We really get this, and we’d love to put it out.” And they were the most logical choice.

Are you committed to any label, or is that just for that one record? You’re working through spinArt and the next one will be through someone else?

Yeah. But if things go well with spinArt, then I may do another record with them. If things work, I like to continue doing it, like to try to be loyal. But you know … if there was a bigger independent, I doubt if I would ever sign to a major label; I doubt they’d be interested. At this point, I think major labels really have their heads up their asses. I kind of hope that they crumble under their overhead and their desire to get the next hit. I think they’re blowing it, because they’re not developing catalog; they’re not developing people that are going to have careers in two years, or certainly not ten years. Maybe a few. But I would love to see them …

Yeah, they just got slapped for price-fixing CDs, I don’t know if you read about that.

I heard about it.

Five of the labels got hit for—

Really?

—yeah, artificially keeping the prices inflated.

Wow. That’s great.

‘Cause [prices] haven’t gone down since the mid-80s. There was all this talk saying, “Well, they’ll eventually go down once the medium gets more popular,” but they never did and people just kind of forgot about it.

So what’s the repercussions of that? Do they have to—

Well, the consumer might get a couple of dollars off; I don’t know if they reached a settlement agreement yet.

Well that’s the most frustrating thing about retail stores as well. Because they’re just as guilty of that. When I released that record on Kill Rock Stars, we sold it for like four dollars, so if they double the price it would be eight. We’d walk into a record store and it would be 16! A couple of other friends of mine released EPs, and I would go to get their records and they’d be 16 bucks. For five songs. Well of course they’re not going to sell very many of them!

I think what made the labels so mad was chains like Best Buy selling CDs for nine dollars, as a loss to get people into the stores—

Right. And buy a refrigerator.

—and they took extreme exception to lowballing.

But they can do that.

Yeah. Stores like that certainly can. While we’re talking about downloading music, I assume you know Metallica’s suing Napster, and other artists are suing Napster. What’s your feeling on that?

I don’t care. I’m not at that level. I give away tracks for benefit records, or just do it for small fees, things like that, because at this point I’m still establishing who I am as a solo artist. It sounds crazy, but people still think that I play roots music. Certainly Rhino, Kill Rock Stars and this record is not roots music; I mean, maybe it is because it has a verse and a chorus, it’s not drum n’ bass, but I have more in common with Aimee Mann than I do with Dave Alvin. Just the way the music sounds.

I know in the case of Metallica, a lot of the fans are saying “You let fans trade tapes in the early days to get your name around, and now that you’re famous, you’re cutting everybody off.” Is that valid? Or is stealing stealing, no matter …

Stealing is stealing, but I think Metallica … they’re still going to sell records. You are not gonna … that 300,000 records that supposedly got downloaded, people are still gonna go out and buy a physical record. Maybe not all of those. They should just—I don’t know. They should do what they want. I could care less. I understand the concern. I can empathize with them, but at the same time, they should try to put a better spin on it or something, so they don’t look creepy.

Just a bunch of greedy corporate …

Yeah. But I don’t know; that is a question I can’t answer easily. I don’t think anybody can. But I believe that people will, like I said earlier, that people will buy stuff. And they won’t just steal it.

If you’re devoted to an artist, you won’t begrudge them their fifteen bucks for a CD, or you shouldn’t.

The only thing that’s worrisome about downloading to me is that it encourages just getting one or two songs, and not to say that every record is … as one thing, worth it, but still … there may be one song that you don’t get at first. And then, three or four or five listens into it, then it becomes your favorite song, and then you go back to the one that was originally your favorite, and then it shifts around. There are few records that, as a whole, really hold together. But there’s certain records that I still listen to that are new or old, that, as soon as the second song is finished, I start hearing the third one. And then when you hear them out of order, like if someone makes a mix tape and you hear that second song, and then this other song comes it’s like “No no no no no, that’s not right!” [Laughs] “That’s not supposed to be there!”

Maybe what the future has in store is that the whole idea of the self-contained album might fall by the wayside. People just release a batch of songs.

That’s why I love EPs. Twenty minutes is perfect; it’s a perfect kind of—you know our limited attention span these days. [Laughs]

But it’s hard to release those, isn’t it? Store don’t want to carry them.

Stores don’t want to carry them, record companies don’t want to release them, writers don’t want to really write about them because they don’t consider them valid.

I wanted to ask about X. I don’t quite know the status of X today; I heard you broke up …

No no no, we’ve been playing together with Billy Zoom for, like, two years now. Maybe even longer.

I mainly ask because I was reading a few interviews with you semi-recently, and you were mentioning getting together with Exene [Cervenkova, fellow co-founder and Doe's ex-wife] and talking about where you wanted to take the band, and agreeing that it wasn’t what you were both into heart and soul, so maybe it was best not to revive it as a full entity.

Right, right, as far as a recording band, that kind of thing. But when we play, we play the first four records, and have been going back to those records, the catalog of those, and putting new songs in the set. We played two nights [in Chicago] a few months ago, and did two nights at the House of Blues in L.A. just, like, three weeks ago; played that benefit for Dennis Darnell down in Orange County with Social D and Pennywise and Offspring. Man, Pennywise just tore the place up. They’re like Black Flag squared. It was crazy. But you know, the status of X is that we play for people who never saw it and want to see it again. Those two groups. And it’s loads of fun. There’s not a whole lot of pressure; I mean, there’s pressure to play well and to really do it, and do it right.

You just kind of do it when the four of you feel it would be a good time?

Yeah, when we can get the right place and it makes sense, yeah. For fun and profit.

In that order.

Right.

Playing the old songs, does it feel the same? Singing the songs that you wrote upwards of twenty years ago now. Do they mean the same?

Some of ‘em. Once that engine starts, then you’re in it. You’re in it and you’re not intellectualizing about it. And I think once you are singing a song, or playing a song, it kind of defies time; it just creates its own reality and you’re feeling and hopefully projecting that song right.

I was laughing listening to the guy yesterday [at Doe's Noise Pop performance] yelling for “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” over and over. [Doe laughs.] I kept waiting for you to tell him, “Look guy, this isn’t really the place.”

I wondered why he wasn’t at the House of Blues two months ago. We played it both nights!

There’s a song on the [new] record I wanted to ask you about, “Too Many Goddamn Bands.”

Yeah.

Which I liked, but I assume that my view of it as a writer who’s trying to keep up with the music and failing, because there’s just so much of it—

Yes.

—must be different from your view of it as a musician—

No!

—is it like competing with all these people, or …?

Well part of it is the competition, but it’s … it’s too much everything. On the back of the Freedom Is … CD, there are little parentheses, like one- or two-word descriptions of the song. And for that one, it’s like “And everything else.” Because we’re just overloaded, completely, so it’s incredibly hard to focus on a film, to focus on a scene, a direction in music, because everything’s happening simultaneously and everybody’s vying for people’s attention and people’s attention span is shorter and shorter, and so you don’t want to do anything.

There’s kind of two songs in that song. One is the experience of being in a band, which is the verse, and then the chorus is more like what we were just talking about, the overload everybody experiences. It’s kind of fucked up the way that you have to buy shelf space in record stores, and if you’re stuck in the bins you can forget about selling anything, really, or getting to the people who might want to. Unless you’re going in and specifically requesting a record.

I go into those used record stores, and there’s always that bin of dollar CDs, with all these bands that made CDs and went nowhere; it’s heartbreaking to look at it all.

I know, I know. Or there’s—how many times have you gone to a movie, and you’ve walked out and … “What’d you think?” “It was OK.” [Laughs] To take two years of someone’s effort and all these people’s hard work: “It was OK.” Just sort of—[snaps fingers; both Doe and PCC laugh] gone! I’m sure that those people, if they could hear that, would go “Well wait a minute! Did you see this thing—”

“Didn’t you see that one shot?”

But that’s the way it is.

I guess it’s incentive to try to rise above the pack, but that can provoke a lot of healthy responses and a lot of not-so-good responses, as people try to get seen and get noticed.

I think all you can do is just to be true to yourself and try to … you know, whatever goals you have in a song or in a record or a movie or something like that is to do that the best you can, and then just forget about it. Not to overthink it, not to overintellectualize it, and to realize that as you’re doing it, that’s the best part of it. All the rest of the stuff—the touring, you have to be in the moment for that, enjoy that for what it is, but if the record or the movie doesn’t do well, then—it didn’t do well! For whatever reason. You can be pissed off for a short period of time, but it’s really dangerous to read reviews and to believe them. Because then if you read something good, you think “Oh, well they got it,” but then you have to read something that’s bad. So I tend not to.

Do you listen to your old stuff ever?

Songs? Sure. I don’t listen to much X. You listen to a record so many times, you’re kind of done with it. And you’re thinking about new stuff.

Originally published on Pop Culture Corn in June 2000.

For a number of reasons; obviously it’s a lot less expensive to record that way than having to go into the studio. Aside from that even, most of the Spankers’ recordings that we’ve released have been live recordings. There’s only been [recording] in the studio on two occasions, for Spanker Madness and for Hot Lunch. Even our first CD release, Spanks for the Memories, although it wasn’t recorded in front of a live audience, it was recorded essentially live around one microphone. We’re just real comfortable recording like that. So much of what the Spankers do is the live experience, and hopefully that comes across a little better in a live recording than it does in a studio recording.
You’re more comfortable in that setting than going into a studio and dealing with amplifiers and mikes and all that stuff?

It’s not that the studio intimidates us. It is wonderful to be able to go into that studio, especially we did do so many live recordings, to be able to take that time and overdub some vocals and get everything the way we want it, it’s a luxury that you don’t have when you’re recording live. I guess it’s just that we are comfortable recording live, and I don’t know how many bands are comfortable doing that, but for us it’s kind of old hat.

Why only the one original Wammo tune? Why not some more typical Spankers’ out-there sort of humor for the Christmas songs?

I don’t know. Maybe because it’s a slightly more reverent subject? I don’t know. It’s not something I would automatically think about—if someone told me I had to I could probably write a Christmas song, or a holiday song, but I just don’t think that the subject matter is something that inspired us to write a slew of Christmas songs. I don’t know if the world needs more Christmas songs! (laughs)

So when the idea to do the album, there was never really a question of, “Let’s write something original for it,” it was more “Let’s just pick our favorite tunes and do those”?

I don’t even know that it was ever really conscious. From my side, I was personally just concentrating on finding tunes in that genre that I liked to do. I like singing other people’s songs, you know? (laughs) I don’t have to write all my own songs and only perform those. Wammo’s been going through a lot of that in the last couple of years, where he doesn’t really like singing other people’s songs anymore, he wants to do all his own stuff. But I still say there’s a lot of fun to be had in taking a song that you know and breathing your own life into it. I really enjoy doing that.

Were there any songs that didn’t make it into the album or into the shows that you would like to do for the Christmas project?

There was a couple things that didn’t make it onto the record. We did a version of the Pogues’ “Christmas in New York.” There’s something about it, I think was just … it didn’t make it on the record. (laughs) I don’t know; I think part of it was we didn’t feel we were doing the song justice, and there was another glitch in that every live recording we had of it had something wrong with it, to the point, you know, that it just didn’t make it on.

I think we did a lot of cool songs, we found some other cool songs in the process that we didn’t end up recording for one reason or another. I think there was a song that we discovered and thought, “God, what a great song, this is so great, I can’t believe I haven’t heard anybody do it,” and then found out shortly afterward that the Squirrel Nut Zippers had, in fact, covered that song for their Christmas record. So we were like, “Well, you know, we don’t really need to follow that up.” So, you know, it’s a pretty natural process for finding tunes we like.

It’s pretty much the album you intended to do from the start?

Yeah, I think so. It’s just another theme record for us, and we’re pretty familiar with that.

To get back to songwriting: where I first came to notice you guys was with Hot Lunch, which I believe was all originals.

I think it’s got a couple covers on it, but it’s mostly originals, yeah. And Spanker Madness was the next record and that’s all original with the exception of one song, but that had been in the Spankers’ repertoire for many years so we kind of felt obligated to get it down. (laughs)

So, given that this band is so big, and so fluid in its membership, how do you “assign” the songwriting duties? Do you write when you know you have an album due, or do songs just accumulate?

It’s a little bit of everything, really. Wammo and I are the principle songwriters, and Stanley Smith and other people in the band in previous years also wrote, so we’ve always had a lot of songwriters in this band. The songwriting process I guess is unique to each individual and it’s also unique in each situation, how it comes into the band. When we recorded Spanker Madness we set out a goal of each person to write a couple of reefer tunes. When we had enough work to do an EP – originally we were going to do an EP – I think the subject was so inspirational to some of us (laughs) that we ended up with more songs. We said, “Well let’s make this a full-length record,” and I had to go back and write two more reefer tunes. So I ended up writing four and Wammo ended up writing three, and then Stanley wrote one and Korey [Simeone] wrote one and Guy [Forsyth] wrote a couple, so we did have a lot of input there.

We do write sometimes when we know we’re going into the studio and we have a purpose in mind. But a lot of times songs accumulate. We all live so spread-out that when we get together it’s usually at the start of a tour, and that’s the time when the new material gets worked up. “OK, I wrote a couple songs between this tour and the last one, we need to get ‘em going.” So it’s a little bit of everything really.

Does stuff ever come out of improvisation or stuff you just toss out at rehearsal?

Yeah, it certainly does. We’ve had songs that were entirely improv’ed. We have songs that we did on a lark and ended up being our most popular songs.

Was “Hot Lunch” one of those?

No, I think that was a piece that Leroy [Biller] and Eamonn [McLaughlin] – Leroy being our guitar player, and Eamonn being the violin player – they got together and specifically wrote that. And that’s just another example of someone in the band who’s not a singer, another collaboration. So there’s a lot of creativity in this band, there always has been, even as the members come and go.
We get our material from a lot of different inspirations, and it comes together in a lot of different ways. Wammo and I just wrote a song recently that—we joked about writing a country song, a ballad with the catchline “If you love me you’d sleep on the wet spot.” It was a running joke for a couple years, and I finally wrote it down to a melody and wrote the bridge, and then we got together and wrote a verse, and then I think six months later we got together and wrote another verse and a bridge (laughs), and it was just this evolving process where the song is finally ready.

Is it difficult to be in a band with, as you said, so many people that come and go? Are you and Wammo kind of “in charge” when all is said and done?

I guess what it comes down to is it’s not exactly a democracy, but as far as decisions about people coming into and leaving the band, we try to involve as much as input from other people in the band as we possibly can. At any given time in the Spankers, there’s Wammo and I, who’ve been here all along, we’re in our eighth year, and Stanley, who’s been with us almost since the very beginning. And then there might be someone in the band who’s only been with us for three months, or six months or a year. So you can’t really have a true democracy where you put everything to the vote when you have the varying levels of seniority. Certainly [with] major decisions I at least like to get input from the other people; these are the people that you have to work with, and we like to have kind of a feeling of family and for everybody to feel like they have some kind of say and involvement in what goes on.

I noticed that Pops Bayless isn’t on the Christmas record. Is he away for good?

Pops Bayless hasn’t been in the band for a couple years now. He was on Spanker Madness; he quit the band before we’d even mixed the few songs that we had. It was after he left that we decided to turn the EP into a full-length, so we had two different sessions for that record, and if you look at that record there’s two different bass players on it. (laughs) One did the first session and one did the second session, and I think each session produced five or six songs. We actually ended up cutting one of Pops Bayless’s songs because he quit in the middle of it all. It was the first time that the split from the band wasn’t the most amicable one (laughs), so we did cut one of the songs he’d written and sung on the album, and I think he does a banjo track here and there. Nothing real major, but his name is still credited on that record although he’s just playing a rhythm instrument or two on a couple tracks. Him and Mysterious John quit at the same time, and they have another band in Austin now called Shorty Long, and that’s what they’ve been doing for the last couple years.

I was thinking how remarkable it was that all of you not only share musical interests, but similar humor interests as well. It seemed to me that a sense of humor would be a must-have if you wanted to be in the Asylum Street Spankers, as well as being a good musician.

I think that’s certainly true. We always seem to find the right people, and I think it’s remarkable that we do; it seems like we always find just the right person. “This person’s a born Spanker; they were meant to do it.” It gives the band some solidity; we always seem to manage to recreate ourselves in our own image. At one point it was just Wammo and I left after five years of consistency in terms of the key personalities; we had quite a lot of changes in terms of bass players and we’ve had quite a few lead guitar players come and go, but for five years it was essentially the same front people. And at one point the whole band just fell apart, to the point that we were just assuming we were disbanding. It was just Wammo and I left; Stanley had even quit the band. But when Pops and John quit the band, Stanley came back on board, so Wammo and I kind of said well, we have Stanley, we have you and me, we’ve proven before that we can always find another bass player, we can always find another guitar player and a drummer, and there’s always gonna be the right people out there. It’s just a matter of finding them, and we’ve been really fortunate.

Do you tend to find them all within the Austin community?

We try to, but in the past couple years we have had to look outside of Austin, and even outside of the state. We have a guy in the band now who lives in New York and a guy who lives in Seattle. Our new guitar player, Mike Veteri, and I both live in Houston, and there’s only three members of the Spankers left in Austin.

I noticed that you guys are on Bloodshot now. Is that working out well?

So far it looks like it’s gonna be a really good thing for us. It’s just a distribution deal, so we still have to pay for our recording, but they pay for manufacturing, which is nice. We have our own record label, but we don’t have a ton of capital. Every time you put out an album you have to come up with 15 grand, 20 grand, [it] puts a strain on an operation like ours (laughs). We have to find that money somewhere. So that helps a lot. And mostly it’s just nice to know that your records are a lot more available to people who walk into a record store, and that’s really hard to do when you’re not on a major label or an indie label with good distribution. So that’s where the Bloodshot thing is really going to help us; it just helps get our music out there. Also they have a good reputation, so it turns people onto us that may not have known about us otherwise. I know that quite a few writers have contacted us that may never have before.

Your performances are famous for the no-amplifier, “music as God intended it.” Did that start by accident, or was that a dogmatic thing: “We will not have amplification!”?

The stories vary. (laughs) The legend has it that the PA was forgotten at the first gig, that the person who was supposed to bring the PA forgot, so we played anyway, and we said “Wow, this worked fine.” For me, the Spankers was my first band; I’d had possibly as little performing experience as you could have to be fortunate enough to step into something like this. So for me, using a mic/not using a mic, I was probably more comfortable as a singer not using a mic; I hadn’t done it a lot. So it was very natural for me.

I think for almost everyone else in the band who were working musicians at the time, it was a treat to get up there and not have to set up a PA, not have to deal with the sound guy, and not have to go through that extra three or four hours’ work that setting up and breaking down a PA system entails. So for them, that was just a novelty, like “Wow, this is great performing like this; we can all hear each other, it’s not too loud”. I think the bottom line is that, whether it’s true or not, whether it’s intentional or not, I can’t recall the discussion, if we ever had a discussion about PA or not; my role in the band at that point was … it wasn’t even something I would have thought of, a PA, you know? (laughs) So I don’t really know, but the legend has it that it was forgotten and it worked so well that we decided to make a habit of it. I think for our second gig we did bring a PA out, and it was kind of an experimental thing, and it was decided that, yes, definitely, we don’t want to use the PA.

Do you ever see yourself getting popular enough where you’d be playing bigger venues, and you would need to [play with a PA]?

Yeah, we do see that in our future. Obviously being able to play in front of more people or having large crowds at your show, I think that’s something every band strives for, and we have seen our audience grow quite a lot over the years. But on the other hand, the idea of having to compromise that in any way is kind of disappointing to us. There is just something so truly magical in the sound of wood and wire, not amplified in any way other than natural acoustics. It’s just a sound that people aren’t accustomed to hearing all the time, it’s a sound that instantly takes you back in time; it reminds you of a different time, even if you’re not old enough to remember it. It’s like hearing a player piano for the first time, or hearing Hank Williams played on a hand-cranked Victrola; that’s a sound that’s so completely unique, especially living in the time we do now, where for 50 years now, we’ve become so accustomed to hearing electric guitar everywhere, electric bass and all kinds of synthesized sounds, and it’s just a real treat to hear that actual sound of wood and vibrating strings that you just don’t get to hear. I think any time that you amplify that, it changes it, it distorts it somehow.

We’ve been experimenting with very ambient amplification, kind of like bluegrass bands would do, where you have sparse mics set up, and [it’s] just a matter of placing yourself a little closer to the mic if you’re soloing or singing or whatever. And that’s worked real well for us: I think that’s a technique that allows you to be louder and still sound like an acoustic band. We did a very sparse mic setup at Rosskilde Festival; that was in front of about 5,000 people, and I think we used four or five microphones for an 8-piece band. That’s pretty great; that’s a lot better than having every single vocal and instrument close-miked. You get into that kind of situation with us, you’re looking at 12 mics, you know. And that’s just too much. (laughs)

Does it affect the performance at all, if you know you have to play amplified?

It does if the mic placement is such that we’re not free to move around. For me especially; to be able to hold an instrument like a ukelele or a banjo or some smaller instrument precisely where it’s going to be picked up by the mic, and singing at the same time, it means you can’t turn your head and look at the person sitting next to you or have any kind of interplay with them, because you have to think about staying on the mic. It’s kind of restrictive, kind of like being bound to one spot, and that’s so not what the Spankers are about. But with the ambient miking, it’s just like playing the way we normally do; we don’t have any kind of mic interference, so it works out well. There are some great omnidirectional microphones out there, so it’s not that difficult to do. Obviously we can’t stand up there and say we’re an all-acoustic band without any amplification if we have some amplification. I don’t think you can expect people to be absolutely quiet. Once they see those microphones, the spell is broken a little bit. It doesn’t seem to hurt us; we can still play in front of 5,000 people amplified and still have ‘em like us. It’s not quite as intimate, but it still works.

Tell me how you started to play the musical saw.

We had someone come to one of our [gigs] in Austin years and years ago, when Olivier [Giraud] was still in the band; he was one of our guitar players in the early years, [and] also a guitar player for 8 1/2 Souvenirs, a great, great Austin band for many years, a really amazing band. But he did the Souvenirs and the Spankers simultaneously for a few years. And we had this guest come, he said he played the musical saw so we let him sit in with us. Well … he was definitely making noise on it, but he wasn’t really playing it. I’d never heard a musical saw at that point, so I didn’t realize at that point you could actually play distinguishable melodies on one; I thought that’s just what you did with a saw.

Well, Oliviet saw this guy do that, and he said, “I can do that!” So he goes and buys a saw, and within a few weeks he was playing some really amazing stuff on it. I thought, “God, that’s just so amazing.” I picked it up once, I couldn’t get it to even make a screech; it looked like the most impossible thing in the world. Guy Forsyth went and bought himself a saw, so then at one point we had two saw players in the band; Guy started playing around with it. They both quit the band at around the same time, Guy and Olivier, and for a while we didn’t have a saw player and I thought, “This isn’t right; we’ve gotta have a saw player!”. (laughs) You get used to it, you know? When these guys left I tried to encourage Pops Bayless and I tried to encourage Wammo, “Somebody please learn how to play the saw.” Nobody ever did, so that’s when I said OK, well, I’ll give it a shot. And I did, I’m really glad that I did; I sure enjoy it. It’s not like we use it a lot, I may play saw once during the whole show, but it’s still nice to pull it out.

What’s the most important thing that you need to know if you’re going to play the saw?

It’s basically the same principle as shortening or lengthening a string on an instrument. The shorter the string, the more tension on it, the higher the note’s going to be, and the same applies to the saw. If you look at that blade as a string, the more curve you have in it, the more tension you’re putting on it, you’re effectively shortening it. So the more curve, the higher the note; the less curve, the lower the note. Most important I guess: the saw is not a very precise instrument. (laughs) It doesn’t have frets or keys or anything, so it’s all just playing by ear, and it’s real easy to make a mistake. (laughs more)

So be fearless, I guess.
Yeah.