I’ve decided to move my blog over to blot. I’ve been trying to simplify things and with a relatively slight learning curve, I can get myself settled in with blot. WordPress has served me well for a long time but I’ve come to feel that it’s too much a platform with too many options and too many plugins. I like markdown and although it can be dowloaded and installed on your computer, there are so many markdown-compatible apps and platforms that I’m not sure why one would do that. blot is one such platform.
It does away with any kind of CMS and uses a folder directory in Dropbox or Google Drive to store .txt files (or .docx files, maybe others?), each file of which is a post. Nothing could be simpler, nothing could be more future-proof. There aren’t any plug-ins to lean on and the inclination to muck about with scripts I don’t understand or the like. I just make the file, link to an image if I want to include one, and up it goes. Or just drop an image in the Posts folder and it becomes a post on its own.
No more worrying about which writing app to use on which device or which writing app to use at all. I can kill a couple of subscriptions I’ve been clinging to because their products integrate so easil with WordPress. So we’ll see, I guess, if I stick with it as plannned but the older I get and the more I get into steering clear of social platforms, the better something like blot starts to look.
I’m not moving the whole blog over quite yet. It’s a long process given my past reliance on some WordPres plugins but I’ll try to get the more poular stuff taken care of before too long. If you have any questions in the meantime, you can drop me a line at mail@zachbarocas.com.
I’ve skipped around a bit and might take a moment here to return to 1986 for narrative qualification less than influence.
Remember my friend Chris from [Part Three](https://zachbarocas.com/my-life-with-peter-gabriel-part-three/)? In addition to providing the theater (car) for our forays into Peter Gabriel’s and other music, he was the first of us to catch wind of the imminent *So* tour, which was slated for November. I can’t remember when he got our tickets but we definitely had them in hand by August and were most excited for the show. Rochester, NY was a notable first warm-up stop for arena tours, sometimes utilizing only half or two-thirds of the [Rochester War Memorial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Cross_Arena) to ensure the feeling of a full house. “Sledgehammer,” however, had been on Billboard’s Hot 100 since May, eventually climbing to number one that summer, so there was no risk of a half-empty venue. And we had our tickets, which weren’t great seats, but they were seats and we were stoked.[^1] There was some personal turmoil between getting the tickets and attending the show that made it all the sweeter when we got there. I remember three things about the show, all of which are as true as any story:
[^1]:I should add here for posterity if nothing else that Chris and I attended the show with a third person who had slipped, until recently, almost entirely from memory. I imagine Chris picked up the third ticket for someone who bailed out and not the individual who joined us.
1. The stage set included several of what looked like giant desk lamps that occasionally assaulted PG during especially paranoid or agitated moments.
2. Chris and I started the crowd wave. Unbelievable as it sounds, it started with us alternating standing and raising our arms and putting our arms down as we sat, a two-person wave. It took a while but eventually the wave went all the way around the crowd, as the era demanded.
3. “Lay Your Hands on Me” was astonishing.
Things had otherwise gotten hairy around that time. I went to rehab again, quit high school. I worked a few different jobs briefly. My life was mostly without direction, at least as that term was generally understood. But I was drumming quite a bit, with friends and by myself, and I was beginning to reach outside the songs we covered, looking for ways into the music, ways to bring in those rhythms that captivated me so. But as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I wasn’t ready yet.
When sessions for New Blue Sun began, he was still figuring out how to operate the digital woodwinds that feature heavily on the album. As it turns out, it’s precisely this aspect that makes New Blue Sun so appealing as a live show.
One of my favorite music writers and creative music thinkers, Hank Shteamer, wrote this terrific piece for NPR. He had a companion piece looking more broadly at the current spiritual jazz renaissance (“spiritual-jazz-aissance”) in his newsletter which is also worth a look.
I’ve cut myself off from such meaningless digital stimuli but preserved my ability to answer texts or phone calls if necessary. (I’m too much of a millennial to actually leave the house without any phone.) I find myself looking more at my surroundings, which are particularly enjoyable in springtime, and I am more relaxed when I return from the excursions. When I switch the sim card back into my iPhone, the device seems momentarily absurd: an enormous screen filled with infinite entertainment and information that follows me wherever I go. Then I open all my usual apps in quick succession—e-mail, Instagram, Slack—to see what I’ve missed.
The rationale behind dumbphones isn’t lost on me but it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t appear to reach Generation X as a point of serious interest or concern, which is not to say it shouldn’t be of great concern but simply that it isn’t. Oh, well, whatever. Never mind.
Kimberley sent this to me earlier this evening. I’ve been waiting to stream TANGK until we tear the shrink from the LP but that’s starting to seem like unnecessary depravation. What a wonderful song!
I’m an outlier with regard these statistics, which is to say they don’t really apply to me. It’s probably the way I seek music, which is usually to come upon a style or genre or artist and then dig in exhaustively. Another factor is determined by what kind of music I want to make myself. So, for example, the last 10 or 15 years, roughly ages 40-55, have been a time of breathless discovery, ranging from West African and high life music to Salsa to the drone compositions of Lamonte Young and Tony Conrad to creative and improvised music of all sorts. I listened to almost none of this stuff prior to my 30s, a decade spent in discovery of other kinds of improvisation, jazz, americana, post-rock, and more. What does ring true for me is “From 30 onward, we listen to more music outside the mainstream.” I think the statement originally refers to listening to music from mainstreams past, but in my case its application is my journey into much farther out territory than I used to occupy.
I imagine that some of the despair the author faces stems from listening habits and streaming as one would have listened to radio, from trusting the algorithm(s) to do the legwork.
But it’s still interesting to think about, to consider how much of what we’re after sticks with us from earlier and more formative times. I’m doing this myself in a way with My Life with Peter Gabriel, following a single artist through my own life and music, examining the formation and extension of that influence.
The fact that we’re still arguing about O.J. shows that we haven’t come as far as we should have, in part because too many white people misunderstand the reaction among many Black people to his acquittal in the first place.
What they miss is that if Black people cared about Simpson’s trial and the way it exposed cracks in the criminal-justice system, they never cared much about Simpson the man.
I joined Jawbox in 1992. It wasn’t my first band but it was my first mature band, the first group that was already on its way, touring, making records. It was not only a new practical level for me but a new social one as well. The band was known and popular. It was a breakout situation for me and I was anxious. My first couple of months with the group were spent learning the songs. Our singer and leader, J. Robbins was touring with his friends in Pegboy and we used the time at home to get me settled in with Kim (Coletta, bass) and Bill (Barbot, guitar and vocals).
I knew the songs as a fan so playing them, learning them, was more a matter of getting a handle on the arrangements than finding my place in them, a goal we postponed until J. got home. By that time, nine weeks later, I was ready to run through the set. Looking back, I established myself quickly, and if memory serves my first show in the band was in July of that year and we left for tour immediately after that.
Me and Bill, St. Andrew’s Hall, Detroit, MI, 1992
We wrote, in those short months, two songs as a group, a new and exciting turn for the band. Previously, J. more or less wrote the material and presented it to the band fully formed and arranged. One of the new songs, “Jackpot Plus!” was, in some ways, as much of a straight-up post-hardcore song as we ever played. Like many young players, I was creating my parts to suit the genre as opposed to molding the genre to suit my playing. Two relevant drummers in particular, Peter Moffett from Government Issue and John McEntire from Bastro were on my mind, and though I no doubt failed to rise to their level, I think my beats are a short step away from “Jaded Eyes” and “Recidivist.” What I wanted was to sound like them.
The other song we wrote was called “Motorist.” It was a new kind of song for the band, a new feel. It marked my first effort to rip off Manu Katché, Peter Gabriel’s drummer from So onward. It was, like many such efforts, a failure. I was hoping for something along the lines of “Digging in the Dirt,” which was released the month before on Peter Gabriel’s Us the eagerly anticipated follow-up to So.
There was a lesson in this failure: not sounding like Katché led directly to a reliance on my own voice and feel on the drums. And I noticed it. Whether or not I sounded like anyone else became immaterial and even something to be avoided. That is, I think “Motorist” was the first time I sounded like myself. From that point on, I brought influences I knew I could not reproduce, just to see what would happen in the group.
We re-recorded the song (“Jackpot Plus!,” too) for For Your Own Special Sweetheart and the sort of refinements we were looking for individually and as a group are audible. The production is more focused, more in tune with the kind of energy we sought in our live performances. And the feel of it is shared, common among us. By the time we recorded FYOSS we were functioning much more as a single unit, feeling our performances together instead of playing by rote.
I found that almost anytime I introduced one of Peter Gabriel’s or Manu Katché’s rhythmic strains into the band, it warped or escalated or shifted into a new and original feel. To reiterate at the risk of redundancy, the distinction between influence as a site of imitation and influence as a site of creation changed everything. I don’t think I quite knew this before. And as our music became increasingly reliant on the drumming, these strains came to guide much more of what we were writing. As was true for the band as a whole, this was the moment I transitioned from being a musician who sought to make sounds like those I loved (imitation) to one who sought to make sounds that originated in my own playing (creation). Like PG says in “Sledgehammer,” paraphrased: I shed my skin. This was the new stuff.
Today is my maternal Grandmother’s birthday, and although she died in 1996, I keep the date on my calendar.
She and my Grandfather, known as Gram and Grandad, lived outside of Buffalo, about an hour away, and throughout my early life and adolescence I seemed to be there regularly, often enough that it was always a joy and never a surprise to see her.
As a teen I smoked cigarettes in her house, in the living room with her and Grandad if it was just the three of us, or downstairs from the kitchen if there were other adults around. It was a matter of decorum, I think, a way of accepting me for who I was (a delinquent who smoked cigarettes) while acknowledging that it wasn’t altogether acceptable.
My grandmother and me, Christmas 1981
She was a complicated person, I think, in and of a time when women were supposed to be simpler, and deserves greater consideration than this post can provide. I’ll no doubt write about her more in the future but for today, I’ll just say as I always do on this day, happy birthday, Gram! I love you!
We made our way through The Gentlemen which was fine and enjoyable but didn’t have much of a tail like that of a truly great show (e.g. Perry Mason, Fargo, Atlanta). I know it’s not fair to compare a routine series to a great one but that’s what came to mind when we wrapped it up.
We made our way through The Gentlemen which was fine and enjoyable but didn’t have much of a tail like that of a truly great show (e.g. Perry Mason, Fargo, Atlanta). I know it’s not fair to compare a routine series to a great one but that’s what came to mind when we wrapped it up.
Kyle Chayka, 
Jim White, 
Lizzie Borden, 
