I’ve always hated bloggers (at least I think that’s the proper term for them) who try to act the part. The part for this story is about being “so avant-garde that I’m an authority on the subject.”

I’m not referring to myself, just someone I ran across while doing research on the internet. About a month ago I was working on a project for class about David Lynch. It was to be a retrospective on his career and life. While doing some research I ran across someone who claimed to be an authority on avant-garde because of all these individual things they’d heard/read/seen.

While I didn’t read the whole essay I came away with one little bit that stuck in my head when they said: “I even listened to Trout Mask Replica twice last year. On purpose!” It was written as though this was some grueling task that required nerves of reinforced steel beams to endeavor.

Why this particular comment stuck in my head I don’t know. I run across people like this on the internet quite a bit, ones who want some sort of award for being stranger than you. It irks me, but usually I just gloss over it. There was probably something about the name Trout Mask Replica that made it stick.

So I obtained the album without any prior knowledge of what it could possibly sound like just to see what a trout mask replica could possibly be. The album is fantastic. It is a bit difficult to listen to, yet nothing that someone who’s familiar with traditional jazz would have a problem with. It’s so bizarre that it paints some of the most vivid pictures with words that I’ve heard. At this point I’ve probably listened to the album a dozen times, every sequential listen is more rewarding than the last.

More recently I tried to figure out why, when I listen to Trout Mask Replica, it started to sound more and more familiar. Heading to the source of our instant collective knowledge—Wikipedia—I figured out why. Apparently in the early 1980’s Tom Waits was introduced to Captain Beefheart (the band behind Trout), which influenced his future work quite a bit. It all clicked together at that instant and I realized that I had heard the inspiration across Tom Waits’ albums.

Then I began looking into Tom Waits a bit in hopes of finding a new album of his that I may enjoy. One album I ran across was titled Night on Earth. Something about the title seemed familiar (probably from the similar named Night on the Sun, an EP by Modest Mouse) only to find out that it was the soundtrack for a film of the same name.

Looking into the film, it turns out that Night on Earth is a movie I’ve been trying to remember the name of for many years. The thing that made remembering the name difficult was that I only remembered one of the five stories that takes place in the movie. Because of this I thought I was trying to remember a TV show, something similar to Taxi Cab Confessions in the 90s. I saw the film with my parents somewhere after the movie was released in the mid-90s. I remember the one story in the film because it was hilarious and absolutely unique.

The vignette that I recall involved a taxi driver in Rome who picks up a priest of some sort. Even though it is night the driver is still wearing his sunglasses, which the priest asks him to take off to ensure his safety as a passenger. The driver, riddled with the weight of a disturbing sexual past, proceeds to confess to the priest as he drives him to the church.

The confession included many stories of sexual acts performed on fruit—large ones like melons with holes cut in them—and then how his friend introduced him to sheep. The sheep part gets more disturbing than the fruit. As he grows older he’s become ashamed of his past and finds a nice woman to marry. On the night of his own wedding there’s an earthquake (or some other natural catastrophe) during the reception, which causes one of the bride’s maids to become overturned on a piece of furniture, her rear unclothed, posterior in the air. After the initial shock of the event passes he looks over to the bride’s maid and instantly recalls his favorite sheep from adolescence and he proceeds to act as he did with the sheep.

Yeah, ok, here’s the weird part. I remember all of that even though it’s been about 15 years since I saw it. While this may be a slightly inaccurate recollection, I’d wager that it’s at least 90% correct. That’s how vividly I remember the movie. I’m going to try to track it down now; Netflix is the first stop.

And now I’ve come full circle. Two gifts have been presented to me through a series of strange events resulting from research. It’s funny how things end up sometimes.

What happen to Sonic Youth?

The honest answer is nothing. They’ve been releasing albums like clockwork for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. The last album of theirs I bought was Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, though this was after Washing Machine had been released. In the span from about ‘96 to ‘98 I managed to convince myself they’d vanished.

Throughout my adulthood I’ve  never once ran across another person who use to love Sonic Youth. Many people seem to know who they are yet so few actually can name a song or album of theirs. Even my friends who are musicians haven’t ever owned an album of theirs. With this being the case it blew my mind to see that after nearly a decade of only listening to the few albums I owned that they keep creating and releasing music.

There must be a hidden underground fan base somewhere. Perhaps in the mountains of Arizona, I don’t know. Wherever they are I want to both thank you and reach out to you.

See, if you recall when my iPod broke down you may remember that I lost a lot of music.  Some of that music was most of one of the two remaining albums I have of theirs: Experimental Jet Set. Since I was still moving into my new place I hadn’t unpacked everything when this happen so I decided to hold off re-ripping a few albums until I was unpacked, and that was one of them. Well, I finally got around to ripping a whole pile of CDs that took the entire day to complete (in flac).

At the bottom of the pile was Experimental Jet Set, I was saving it. When I opened up the case my heart sank. The disc was in there but it was damaged beyond readability. Rather than get upset I did what most people do now on the internet and found a torrent. I handpicked the first few albums that I could find in good quality, then went to a decent quality discography to fill in the gaps. The next morning they were all on my computer and I had already shared them with other people.

I’ve since been listening to these albums over and over, when I’m alone mostly. Not even my wife can get through a whole album without asking me to skip one or more tracks on it. But I love it, every track of it. OK, granted the earlier stuff isn’t as well focused or organized as it could be, everything from ‘85 on is pretty much gold.

A few of these albums I hadn’t heard in nearly a decade, and yet I found myself remembering everything. Even the lyrics to a few songs. This music brings back such strong and vivid memories once long lost. The strange thing is that many of those memories are fogged over with a colored haze. I’ve heard before that some people dream in specific colors (like red, or black and white) but that always seemed like a completely ludicrous thing that I’d written it off as urban legend. Then, while listening to Washing Machines I had memories return entirely in one color of green or purple (not at the same time though).

This moved me emotionally. I now feel like I never missed a day of listening to Sonic Youth. I know that I’ve worn this maroon t-shirt from a concert of theirs since High School and it’s barely hanging together. It was a shirt that my friend picked up for me when I couldn’t attend said concert. It gives me a strange comfort to know that I no longer have to hold onto the memories of enjoying the band, but that I can still enjoy them now.

Now I’ve picked up albums that I’d never heard before, or I thought never existed.  Why didn’t anyone tell me about these. Yes, I’m pushing this off onto others because it’s only within the last few years that I’ve gotten back into music. So many of the albums and artists I loved in the 90’s haven’t aged as well as I wanted. Then Sonic Youth comes along and proves an amazing band can survive coming out of that decade unscathed. It’s even possible that I enjoy and understand them more now than I ever could in High School.

I won.

Yes I finally crawled out from underneath the gigantic task of restoring a 40gb iPod that was pretty much wiped clean.

See, some people reading this may not know that I’ve had this 40gb iPod Photo for about 3 and a half years now. The only real panic I’ve ever had with it was when I leaned over into a ice cooler to grab a soda and it slid out of my pocket and into the ice water. It didn’t work for about 48 hours, but then it worked no problem. I’ve had some slowdown with the device before and always knew it needed to be formated, but by that time I realized it was such a gigantic task I always put it off.

Starting back at the beginning: last night. I don’t know what happen, but I connected my iPod to my PC to get some music off it and every program I used said the iPod was empty. Nothing. I even restarted my PC to try to get it to work. I ended up extracting all the audio I could off of it, but out of the 35GBs that use to be on it I only managed to get off about 70% of it at 22GB.

I don’t know what happen to the rest of the music, but it was eaten. It was really weird to start relabeling and organizing all this music only to slowly learn what was missing by only finding one track of a whole album that use to be on there.

I didn’t really do the math or look at the numbers until I noticed quite a few of my most listened to artists suddenly missing more than half their songs. That’s when I realized that somewhere I lost 13GB of music.

Most of it was stuff that was just taking up space. Others are things that are going to be impossible to remember the name of, let alone find them.

I did make a backup a while ago of some of my music on an external hdd, but that ended up only being about 3GB worth of it. I thought I had a lot on my laptop too, but it turns out that none of the stuff on there disappeared.

So, at about 6 am this morning–after staring at my pillow for about an hour–I decided to start this whole mess. As of right now I basically have my new program (seriously, screw anaPod, That program messed up my iPod more than it helped it), MediaMonkey, set up with my whole track list. I have exported it to html in case this ever happens again. I’m going to run the library program one more time to get the couple of albums that I stuck in there last minute registered, then I’m going to connect my freshly formated iPod to it like a virgin. If you’re interested I put the list up here.

So, 15 hours of this and I’m nearly done. I’ve trimmed a lot of fat off my track list, and I have a few things downloading right now that I need to add and don’t have the originals any more (or don’t feel like ripping). The things that have come out of this whole mess for the good:

-Finally found a better mp3 program that interacts with my iPod.
-Got a spare 160gb HDD installed on my PC.
-Connected up my external HDD
-…

Yeah.