Let’s say you’re a young
musician in the early 70’s
with big rock star ambition.
First, you need a schtick,
a look, something glammy,
something preposterous.
Yeah, Cooper did the make-up
thing, but you could go
bigger, and you watch as
some fellow musicians from
neighboring New York City
go the whole hog
on the face-paint, so you
gots to do something different.
What if, instead of going
for Halloween scary, you
reach for the opposite of that?
You find really talented
musicians into the hard rock,
a guitar player who calls
himself Punky,
you add a keyboardist,
one who can really play,
and you dress the whole band
up head-to-toe in flowing
white robes and boas and
tight white pants. Even the
shoes have to be white.
You call the band Angel.
Everybody has long beautiful
hair and each dude in the
group must be incredibly pretty,
so that your teenage boy-fans
are a little bit confused.
The band turns out to be
really quite good and you
get signed to the same label
as the guys with the face-paint.
You think it’d be funny
to tour with a band called
The Godz, and you do,
and that’s the concert
that Michael Jarmer goes to.
He buys all your records,
but remember, in 1987 he will
have sold them all, will have
practically given them away,
and years later, he will find
them in the used bin for
five dollars, three dollars,
On Earth As It Is In Heaven,
for ONE dollar. He will
buy all those Angel albums
again, listen to them all
once or twice, and then put
them away, until several years
later, when he decides to play
every single one of his records
from A to Z and is pretty joyful
when he gets to this part of
the alphabet to play
all those albums again.
Notes on the vinyl: Helluva Band, Casablanca Records, 1974; On Earth As It Is In Heaven, Casablanca Records, 1977; White Hot, Casablanca Records, 1977; Sinful, Casablanca Records, 1979. All purchased used. All original, early pressings. Covers in various stages of heavy use. All of them play near perfectly, minimal crackle and pop!
Postscript in Bullets:
- This is the 7th poem in a series of poems about records in my collection, a response to the attempt to listen to every record I own, A to Z, and write a poem thing about every artist represented. This may take a long time.
- All the poems in this series will have dumb titles to make these pieces easy to distinguish from other kinds of poems.
- The poems may or may not be a direct response to the listening, might be tangential, discursive, journal-like, or, like this one, speculative. I’m finding I am less satisfied with the output when I end up writing purely descriptive pieces about the music. I prefer the associative approach, even though it is less obvious that I have actually listened and not just remembered. But that’s not really the point, I think, is it? The listening is just for me. The writing, however, hopes to find an audience. So I want to try to do what’s best on the page, what’s most engaging or artful. I will try to do better.
michael jarmer 