Who My Friends Are
In High School, I worked at Seattle’s best Coffee in a Borders Books and Music in Simsbury, Connecticut. Neither of those businesses exist anymore. And I visited that shopping center a few months ago—it was like someone told me my childhood is just a vacant store front.
But that Borders, even before I worked there, was the nexus of my musical growth.
At the high point of its existence, this store was the epicenter of after school and weekend activity in my town. It was big enough to permit different cliques in different corners: stitch-and-bitch clubs in the café armchairs; teenage loves contorted together in between the stacks; groups of boys darting from section to section causing some kind of harmless but annoying mischief along the way.
If you mapped it out, there were basically two zones I occupied: the music magazine section and the CDs. No vinyl resurgence yet, just CDs. And listening kiosks where you could listen to five albums on rotation, or eventually when you could scan the album barcode and you weren’t limited to the prescribed selections.
Here I bought two albums that would leave me permanently starved for more music.
Quiet Kid Listens to Loud Music
In hindsight it’s a little strange to start a personal collection of Jimi Hendrix with the BBC Sessions compilation, but that’s what I had first, and I knew, even though I listened to it a lot, that it wasn’t very stimulating.
I was probably a freshman in high school, playing guitar a lot, and trying to emulate someone rather than creating anything original. The BBC Sessions felt sort of boring to me. But I was invested in Hendrix’s myth, and even though he played a Beatles cover on that album, he represented something anti-Beatle to me, and throughout high school I was ardently anti-Beatle.
I didn’t see The Beatles or something resembling them on Guitar World covers.
Some random day, I picked up a copy of Axis: Bold as Love, the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s second album. Where Are You Experienced was sort of poppy, Axis was hard. More psychedelic, louder, and sometimes eerie.
The way I listened to music was through my Coby discman I got at the local CVS. It didn’t have any skip protection to speak of so it had to sit perfectly still on whatever flat surface I could find. So that meant I usually listened to music when I was going to sleep.
My older sister would walk past my bedroom door and hear the reverse-tracked guitar in “Castles Made of Sand” at probably a few volume wheel clicks before max and I would be dead asleep in some Hendrix psychosis.
Once I started working in the café at Borders, I had a 15-minute break where I would usually buy a discounted stuffed pretzel, a new issue of Kerrang! or walk around the CDs for a little bit. I was a Junior in high school at this point, and I was on a steady diet of Epitaph’s Punk-o-Rama compilations.
Quiet Kid Gets a Job
I probably glimpsed the name Fugazi in one music magazine or another. On one of these breaks, I was scanning around the Pop Rock section, because that’s what it was in the early 2000s, Pop Rock. It encompassed so much music.
The CD kiosks were organized by artist name, and there would be I guess what you’d call the “featured” CD at the front, sort of offset from the other albums in its respective letter column. For whatever reason, some bookseller (Borders had café employees and booksellers) featured Fugazi’s second to last album End Hits.
I bought it using my employee discount, not really expecting anything. But I judged it by the cover and title. The album artwork is split roughly in half with a skyline of Hong Kong in the lower row and some satellite image of a river delta above it. The album title and band name spelled out with gold letters like the ones used for street address.
Probably later that night I put the CD in my stable Coby discman and heard “Break.”
I think I owe it to this song for my accumulating interest in angular and hard music. The muted tremolo picked guitar segueing into Ian MacKaye’s mumbled lyrics accompanied by strange jazzy chords transitioning into the cathartic shout “BREEEEAAAAK” through my cheap Coby headphones may have physically affected my hearing but left me wanting more, stranger, harder sounds.
The intro to “No Surprise”? Stunning and terrifying.
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
HERE TO LISTEN LLC
PO BOX 725
BRATTLEBORO, VT 05302
You can listen to the radio show on Brattleboro's community station WVEW every Sunday at 12pm EST
Here to Listen show archives are available here
You can buy Here to Listen merch here