Tag: groupie

I’ve mentioned the Library of Congress Tape Player for the Blind in a handful of other pieces but I decided that the machine deserves a story that it can be the centerpiece of. I’ve owned at least four of the things but for whatever reason only the first one I bought remained functional for any length of time – whether I found the others at thrift stores or cheated and went to eBay the motors would always quit on me after a couple weeks. They are durable and well built machines so the only compelling explanation I have is superstition.

Some things can only be experienced once in a lifetime and are impossible to replace. It’s what gives mere objects the type of value that is generally referred to as being priceless.

I can’t remember exactly when I got my hands on that first one but it was in a thrift store somewhere around Hayward that Rian and Joel Pickell drove me to. It had to have been after the Living Hell bus tour because that’s when I first remember meeting Rian. Most likely it was around the same time as the Purple Haus Mardi Gras king cake story – early Summer of 2008.

I had never seen or noticed one before this but I suspect the situation is similar to W123 Diesel Mercedes Benz cars where I had to fall in love with the machine to begin noticing when other people had them. It’s too perfect of a noise instrument for nobody to have been using one somewhere in the endless shows and parties of my early twenties. I wasn’t the type to geek out about the different pedals and electronics an artist might be using every time I watch a memorable performance.

I should probably get into detail about the features that led to my obsession. Like the name would suggest it is a cassette player created by The Library of Congress to help people with vision issues listen to books on tape. A normal audio cassette has four channels of audio – left and right for dual, or stereo, on both sides. While most players only read both channels of one side at once it is possible to use all four channels simultaneously which is how cassette four track recording stations work.

If you’ve ever recorded music on a four track and then tried to listen to the source tape without mixing it down you’ll know that you can only hear the first two tracks, or separate instruments, and then if you flip it over you’ll hear the final two tracks but in reverse. Any time you play tape in the opposite direction to how it was recorded you get to hear it backwards. When The Library of Congress makes audio books they record the second side backwards to begin with so flipping a switch let’s you instantly switch between two different recorded programs.

The design purpose was to fit more of a book on one cassette but for someone using the player to record or perform music it means there is an easy way to reverse audio. Audio is easy to reverse on a computer but there aren’t a whole lot of ways to do it in a live setting. The Boss DD-7 digital delay pedal has a reverse function and I’d imagine a lot of digital samplers also feature it but the Congress is the only instrument I know of that does it analog with the flip of a switch.

The advantage for anyone interested in experimental or noise music is that reversed audio sounds really, really freaky. If you’ve ever watched any of Twin Peaks with the dwarf character his distinctive speech style is created by having the actor phonetically read out what a reversed phrase would sound like and then reverse that audio a second time. The words are recognizable but human speech has natural rhythms and cadence that are immediately and conspicuously absent.

If we want to get really technical it’s all in the attack, sustain and decay of the different syllables. A spoken word usually starts loud and tapers down toward the final vowel or syllable as we subconsciously mute our voice boxes. The reversed words start quiet and end loud instead. We often modulate our pitch upward when speaking but for English speakers a downward shift is far less common.

I think it’s essentially the uncanny valley for sound. We recognize the characteristics of a human voice in reversed audio but the rhythms are just different enough to strike us as unnatural and otherworldly. It’s almost like an insect or another organism with completely different mouth anatomy is trying to mimic what humans naturally sound like.

Simply playing a song backwards, and creating similar effects with all the different instruments, can make it sound like an entirely different song and genre. I was doing this as part of a haunted nacho stand during a rave in a famous former brothel in East Oakland when somebody told me the music was the evilest sounding thing they’d heard in their life. It was Weird Al’s Another One Rides The Bus – something about that main accordion riff given the backwards treatment did come off decidedly sinister.

It’s funny to think about all the Christian parents panicking over backwards Satanic messages in their children’s Rock records really losing their shit if they heard what their own polka and Muzak records sounded like when played in reverse. I’m almost certain they’d think it sounded far more demonic than any indistinct phrase on a Led Zeppelin song.

All of the buttons and switches on the tape deck are oversized to make them easier to use by touch. Quickly flicking the one that switches between sides back and forth makes a sound that is virtually identical to the record scratches that became a fundamental part of early Hip Hop and Trip Hop. The addition of pitch and volume sliders meant you could essentially remix electronic dance music on the fly.

I had a dubbed copy of the first Justice album I used to do this a lot with and got pretty good at adding “scratches” in time with the beat. I can’t remember what was on the opposite side from it but it didn’t really matter for snippets of reversed audio less than a second long.

The other unique feature on the players is three different kinds of variable speed and pitch controls. Longer audio books would be recorded at one half the standard playback speed in order to raise capacity – a 60 minute tape becomes two hours long instead. A second big switch that toggled between regular and half speed meant that any song could be instantly “chopped and screwed”. YouTube has added a popular playback speed button but in the early 2000s a Congress player was the easiest way to hear a song slowed down without using digital editing software.

A big speed slider near the top meant you could also speed anything up or just play with the slider to create interesting effects. Finally there is a smaller tone slider just above the volume slider. I always thought it controlled playback speed as well but the Library of Congress website says that it alters pitch without changing speed to correct what it calls “Donald Duck” voice. I just remember it sounding cool to rapidly slide it back and forth.

I should also mention that most tape players mute volume while fast forwarding and rewinding but this one doesn’t so if you wanted to listen to something really fast either forwards or backwards that was an option.

The C-1 plugs into a wall and doesn’t have a slot for conventional batteries so for the first couple years after buying it I assumed it had to always be plugged in. It has a pretty loud built in speaker and a quarter inch output jack so I had used it as a boombox and noise instrument a couple of times but I never bothered to bring it traveling with me. It was mostly an odd curiosity that I might play with during the short periods when I was with all my stuff in years where I was perpetually in transit.

Just like I can’t remember the exact time that I bought it I also don’t know when I got the tiny piece of information that changed everything. My best guess would be mid-2010 after moving to Los Angeles. I remember spending my thirtieth birthday walking all the way from Downtown to Hollywood while listening to a copy of the Top Gun soundtrack I had just bought from Goodwill. That walk made me fall in love with both the city and every single track on that stellar album.

I’m also fairly certain that I was using a small grey battery operated player so the discovery I’m about to describe would have happened some time after this.

Somewhere on some day I saw somebody else with the same kind of Congress tape deck and when I mentioned that I had one too they asked me if the rechargeable battery in mine still worked. I had seen the sticker on the back warning of the danger of electric shock but I had never put it together that it meant there was an internal battery. As soon as I got home I tried playing a tape without plugging it in and discovered that it still played just as loud while unplugged.

The players are actually outfitted with an especially powerful nickel cadmium battery that allows eight hours of high volume playback on a full charge. It’s common to find them with this battery either broken or missing but it turned out to be flawless on mine. From that moment forward until the events at the end of this story I never went anywhere without my Congress again. I charged it more religiously than my cell phone and brought it on every bike ride, US tour and International trip.

I honestly think I spent more waking time listening to it playing at full volume than I did with it off. I’ve never owned an iPod or any other type of mp3 player but the feeling I see in the marketing campaign was exactly what it was like for me to discover that I had a boombox with unlimited free batteries that I could hang from my bicycle handlebars and take everywhere I went.

I needed a bike as well. Fortunately my brother in law had a heavy beach cruiser that he didn’t want to bring with him to Northern California. I would spend my entire time in Los Angeles living in small niches that had never previously been used as rooms. In Women of Crenshaw I discovered that it was possible to fit a folded futon mattress through a doorway on a tiny landing leading to the basement. I hung a curtain at the bottom of the stairwell and made it my room.

I had been outgoing and social for all of my twenties but when I turned thirty and hit Los Angeles things went into overdrive. I was always either at work, at a social function or biking in between. The Congress player made twelve mile rides across the city feel breezy and relaxing because I always had my music. The big buttons made it easy to flip a tape and keep it playing even while negotiating rush hour traffic. If I got bored of the tape I was carrying I could always listen to it slowed down, backwards or both.

When I met Ryan Riehle on the Living Hell tour he told me that we’d actually met at least three times before that: outside the Locust and Lightning Bolt Oops! Tour show at Hollywood’s short lived Knitting Factory, at a Friends Forever show in the movie theater by Amoeba where somebody stole a rare print of Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization Part Three and on the street in San Diego the day before he used dynamite to break out of a Mexican jail cell. I remember the first two events vividly but I don’t remember him at them.

I’m shitty like that, it takes a lot to get me to notice and remember people unless they make a huge impression the first time. Now that Ryan was living back in Los Angeles we started spending a ton of time together and had one of those best friend bike riding Summers people usually have when they’re twelve or thirteen. Some real Stand By Me type shit. People started thinking we were brothers and sometimes we’d pretend we were.

I know it wasn’t Ryan who showed me that Congress players have a nickel cadmium battery because I showed him. He had a couple of them that were decorated with psychedelic Hindu religious stickers from one of the import shops on Venice. At one of the first Mojave Raves we plugged a charged up Congress directly into one of the giant subwoofers when the generator was off and it sounded like it actually powered the speaker and got some amplification.

I had been doing Bleak End and Ryan had been playing solo shows as Ms. G but we thought it would be fun to try doing music together. We just wanted to jam and improvise stuff using different tapes and our Congress players so I decided to name the project Gentlemen By Act Of Congress. It’s a reference to something a character says in Naked Lunch that seemed to describe both our libertine lifestyle and our shared primary instrument.

Before I ever lived in Los Angeles the experimental music scene seemed to be centered on The Smell and after that Women of Crenshaw was a hub but by 2011 the really happening venue was a tiny basement gallery in West Hollywood called Dem Passwords. It was run by two super nice, charismatic and attractive long haired guys: Sebastian was Lil B’s manager and Ethan had made a documentary movie about Lee “Scratch” Perry.

My first time in the venue was an exhibition of Perry’s paintings where I stole a hundred bill off one of the canvases. I rationalized it as a complex discourse on whether or not recontextualizing an object as “Art” could override it’s fundamental nature but mostly I was on the edge of being blacked out drunk. I had come from a party at Tit Mouse Studios with an open bar where people were encouraged to smash old TV’s and similar objects for the alleged purpose of creating a library of foley sounds.

I’ve never been much of a habitual drinker but I was definitely in the habit of pushing things to the point that I would see colored trails and act out. On the walk over to West Hollywood I had already decided to try to hide in a jacuzzi on the back of a stretch limousine while it was stopped at a red light. There wasn’t any water in it but the driver either heard or saw me climb in and came after me like an Eastern European ogre:

“Which motherfucker it was?”

I hopped back out and returned to my laughing friends, protected from an ass kicking by the light suddenly turning green. After tearing the money off the painting at Dem Passwords I went and hid underneath some stairs at a nearby school. I tried to hide my crime by breaking the hundred at Oki Dog but they refused to accept such a large bill. I drunkenly wandered the streets of West Hollywood until I found a house party that my friends had moved on to.

I passed out on a couch and Jacki stole the hundred dollar bill from my pocket and replaced it with around sixty dollars in change. She and Brian from Narwhalz of Sound dared and egged each other on to do it. I think it was the opening salvo on a mutual flirtation that fizzled out before it went anywhere. I wasn’t angry about the partial theft – it seemed like turnabout was fair play as they say.

Not too long after that I started setting up shows at Dem Passwords and booking Ryan to play some of them. I felt guilty about my previous vandalism but it would be at least another year before I came clean about it. Sebastian and Ethan were characteristically superhumanly nice about it and refused to let me pay them back. One night when me and Ryan were both at the gallery Ethan asked us to come back during afternoon hours to have a meeting with him in the Gallery’s back room.

I had stopped smoking weed a couple of years earlier when it started giving me crippling anxiety but when he offered at the meeting I was nervous and wanted to seem “cool”. Ethan told me and Ryan a little more about the movie he’d made with Lee “Scratch” Perry and said that he’d been intrigued by our shared energy and wanted to make a film with us as the subjects. He was sitting in front of an illuminated motion painting of Shiva and had a large medallion of Shiva on his chain.

Ethan’s hair is a fiery red color that is more suggestive of Indra but his facial features aren’t too far off from how Shiva is often depicted. I had only taken a single hit but it got me so hopelessly stoned that I thought he was acting as an avatar of the God. I stared into the pulsing aura of the wall piece and thought:

“Wow, Shiva wants to make a movie with us. My heart is a burning ground…”

I don’t know as much about Hindu theology as I probably should. I know Shiva acts as Destroyer to end cycles of creation and sometimes lives in caves as an ascetic where He wears animal skins and eats snakes. There are probably other aspects and manifestations that are at least equally important that I don’t know about. Anyway me and Ryan were both excited about the movie thing.

The problem was that it was never quite figured out if we were working on a documentary or art film or narrative film or something in between. We probably should have spent more time talking about things and getting on the same page but we decided to just hit the ground running and start shooting. Ryan had this huge military armored truck that he’d converted to run on veggie oil and was basically living out of called the Deuce and a Half because it weighed one and a half tons.

He’d been parking it on residential streets in Silver Lake and needed to move it so it wouldn’t get a street sweeping ticket. We decided to film something around moving the truck and without any clear direction Ryan and I improvised a symbolist tableaux revolving around us being rival witches. He put on a black dress and huffed ether from an American Flag. I had a white dress and was carrying a lot of oranges or something like that – there was probably more to it but that’s what I remember.

We had a show set up as Gentleman By Act Of Congress at this little Silver Lake venue that Manny from Glitter Death was running at the time. We arranged with Ethan for this to be the second place we would film. I don’t know why I wasn’t riding my bike but I walked to the venue from some where and wandered past this paisa Mexican bar that always had people fighting outside it on the way there.

I had a problem for the first half of my adulthood where I never knew how to tell people no. It got me into some regrettable situations sexually but the other part was that I’d never refuse if some random person on the street thought I looked cool and wanted to follow me. A few months before this incident I had been in Chicago and a drunk guy on the El asked if he could come with me when I was headed to a free Steve Reich tribute concert in Millennium Park.

He was being obnoxious and wouldn’t stop talking during the minimalist music and started aggressively hitting on women so I ended up just ditching him and sneaking away through the crowd and I felt bad for bringing him and inflicting him on everybody. On this night it was a very drunk, middle aged and overweight Mexican woman who was standing outside the paisa bar. She had most likely just gotten kicked out or in a fight with her boyfriend or something.

She asked me where I was going and if she could come with me and I still hadn’t learned the art of saying no.

The walk to the venue was mostly uneventful. She kept asking me to slow down and I told her that I was in a hurry and then she’d rush to keep up with me. She kept asking if we could stop to smoke or drink something and I would tell her that I did neither of those things. I think this might have been during Lent and I wasn’t using any drugs, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol or even eating sugar. Every time she would assure me that she didn’t actually do those things either and then ask again if we could smoke or drink about five minutes later.

My future wife saw us walking up the street toward the venue holding hands so that must have been true. She probably reached for my hand and once again I didn’t know how to say no. I totally understand how any outside observer would think that I am misrepresenting this situation and had less noble intentions toward this woman but that wasn’t the case. I really was just cartoonishly accommodating.

I can’t remember whether or not she actually came into the venue but either way she wasn’t around for very long. Between this experience and the Steve Reich thing I finally started to realize that if an annoying drunk person that I didn’t want to be around asked if they could follow me to a public event I could just refuse. I can’t remember any other similar situations after this one.

Ryan was late to our show and pretty drunk when he showed up. Ethan had arrived around the same time as me but strictly wanted to record the synergy between both of us so he’d been waiting around. Ryan and I only played together as this project a couple of times and only one of the sets was any good and managed to capture the subtle features that make improvised music worth watching. It wasn’t this one.

I think there were some problems with the mixer but mostly me and Ryan weren’t on the same page. The performance ended with me trying to make everybody in the audience eat wedges of these painfully sour tangerines that I picked from a tree next to the Sleeping Beauty style cottage in Culver City. I still haven’t found any other citrus fruit on the same level in terms of full on offensive to life sourness. Most people ate the piece of tangerine but there was one fancy rich girl who wasn’t having it but I forget which one – maybe Ashley Huizenga or Lauren Avery or something.

The other thing was that Ethan’s camera style that night wasn’t quite vibing with the low key energy of the show. We hadn’t ever figured out any significant parameters for the thing we were making but I felt like the camera was a bit too intrusive and demanding on the audience members. I started getting flashbacks to the Living Hell tour and the feeling of subjecting innocent strangers to a questionable documentarian. I started to have misgivings about the entire project.

It probably goes without saying but my impressions of those two things are highly subjective and may not reflect any other person’s experience of the night. It’s totally possible that I had just found myself in a highly critical and irritable mood and most people thought our set was fine and the camera was chill. I’d be curious to hear Ryan and Ethan’s takes on this particular night if they still remember it – none of us ever talked about it again.

After our performance we wanted to get additional footage so we took a walk to check out a Botanica down the block. Ryan and I were both very into these kinds of spiritual stores but this one was of particular interest because of how dark it’s window display was – it had menacing statues of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies and the generic Christian devil side by side. Now that I think about it this was one of the only Botanicas I never met the owner of because I only ever passed it at night.

Ryan and I both felt like we had to put on a bit of a show because of the camera. I grabbed the edge of the awning and pulled myself upward to do a little flip about seven feet above the sidewalk. Ryan spit some kind of alcohol against the glass in what could be interpreted as either an offering to or rebuke of the devil statue. A large guard dog that neither of us had noticed suddenly threw itself against the inside of the glass and we both broke into nervous laughter.

Ryan and I didn’t try to play any more shows under that particular project name – we went back to either playing solo sets or performing in other shows with other people. Ethan didn’t try to record any more footage with us – the main thing was that he’d been driving all the way from Ojai and if the project wasn’t quite clicking it wasn’t really worth the time or gas expended in the process.

This is probably the first one of these stories where I feel like my emotional state at a particular point in time is actually a hindrance to the things that I honestly believe are worth documenting. One way of looking at it is that for every iconic and celebrated live album there must have been at least one person at the recorded show who was just tired and wanted to go home.

What I’m trying to get at is that I absolutely appreciate the fact that Ethan was interested enough in what we were doing to want to make a movie about it and the time and energy he put toward doing that. I’ve never seen any of the footage but it would be exciting if any of it still exists especially considering that Ryan’s truck was stolen away from the Mojave Rave ranch. Now that I think about it the Mojave parties were something we both worked on that would have made a perfect subject for a documentary but for whatever reason Ethan never made it out there.

Me and Ryan continued to hang out for the rest of that summer and brought Congress tape decks nearly everywhere we went. Two distinct snapshots immediately come to mind: listening to Kate Bush on Venice Beach while tossing chunks of bread to a crowd of seagulls who managed to hover in place against the wind as if they were frozen in time; and the two of us walking our bikes across the bleakest parts of Skid Row late one night while some of Alan Vega’s solo recordings perfectly encapsulated the overwhelming sense of paranoia and despair that surrounded us.

My Congress player never stopped working but it did begin to develop a litany of minor issues. The plastic handle broke off and I was able to create a makeshift one by putting two knots in a length of rope. The play button stopped staying down so I figured out a way to wedge a quarter between the buttons and keep it depressed. The cassette door started popping open and I figured out that a wooden match stick was the perfect size and shape to fit in somewhere and keep it closed.

Somehow I managed to position all of these things while riding my bike and continued to have music every time I rode it.

Finally we reach 2012 and the climax of this story. I had moved out of Women of Crenshaw and found another niche all the way in Mar Vista with a former roommate of my sister’s named Linda. Linda was a lot of fun – she taught some kind of STEM subject at one of the Orange County colleges and was a champion axe thrower. She had an oversized coffin left over from a theatrical production in her living room and had figured out a way to buy groceries without including plastic packaging of any kind.

The spot I was sleeping in was intended as a laundry room – a square room that was only five feet on each side. I’m 6’5” but by using the Pythagorean Theorem I was able to fully stretch out along the diagonal. There were a couple of brass spigots sticking out of one of the walls. I suppose I could have quickly filled a cup with water if I got thirsty in the middle of the night but it felt safer to never touch the things out of fear that a dripping faucet could quickly inundate all of my belongings with water.

I referred to my tenancy as an “Anne Frank Situation” which is a bit tone deaf but only means that it was important for the landlord to never discover my existence. I locked my bike on the back stairs so it wouldn’t be noticed and generally tried to make myself inconspicuous. Much like my previous niche I only ever went there to sleep.

I had been biking long dinstances my entire time in Los Angeles but now that I lived on the West Side I was covering at least thirty miles a day. I just scrolled through Facebook to try to figure out the exact day and I’m thinking it was probably June 16th after a Dem Passwords show with Nautical Almanac, a band I had with Beej, Dalton and Kyle Mabson called Sexting and Stunnaman from Wolfpack. It would have been after two in the morning by the time I was heading back to Mar Vista.

I was listening to the White Zombie album called El Sexorcisto – I wish I had gotten more time with this album because when I think about White Zombie I don’t have a clear mental picture of what they sound like. You know that trend in ‘90s rap and alternative albums where songs would start with short samples from older movies? Just as I crossed Centinela I heard this one:

“Meanwhile, behind the facade of this innocent looking bookstore…”

It was that tiny moment of silence after the sample ends but right before the distorted guitars kick in. In a tiny way I was bracing myself for the distorted guitars because of the way that the sample and short pause create tension. Instead of distorted guitars I heard a loud impact and the sound of my Congress player exploding as I was violently flipped onto my back. I saw tail lights zoom into the distance as the car that had just hit me decided to do the “and run” part for good measure.

I was lying on my back in pain and it took a minute to sort out what had just happened. My Congress was nowhere to be seen but there was a new looking black rear view mirror in the gutter next to me. I kind of wish that this had been a contemporary television show or movie so I could watch the collision in slow motion from a novel angle of some kind – maybe from the inside of the vehicle.

My thumb was bleeding where it usually rested on the scrap of rope I used as a handle. I realized that the rope had been yanked away so violently that it left a rope burn deep enough to leave a scar to this day. Finally I figured it out – whoever hit me had their passenger window down and the tape player had flown into the interior of their vehicle.

Once I realized this simple fact I wondered several things I would never have the answers to. Had my Congress harmed or injured anybody in the car? Was the driver also listening to music? The whole thing had happened so quickly I didn’t have time to listen. Most importantly I wondered if my cherished tape deck could continue to play music after such a traumatic impact. It didn’t actually matter as there was no way I would ever see it again.

Either way it was clear that the Congress had taken the brunt of the impact. I imagine that it would have hurt a lot more if the point of impact had been my back or shoulder. Later I would tell this story to friends who were already familiar with the device’s many features:

“And it saved your life? What can’t that thing do?!”

It was a time of many intense changes in my life and the universe at large. I had cut my hair uncharacteristically short during my performance at the last Mojave Rave and taken to wearing black masculine clothing instead of my usual colorful stuff drawn mostly from the Women’s Department. I had stopped using opiates for a large window of time and taken to going to church instead. Soon I would connect with my future wife and abruptly end my lifestyle as a hyper-social single nomad.

Of course it was just a few months away from the event generally referred to as the “2012 Mayan Apocalypse”.

I’ve written other pieces about Magical Thinking and losing my talismans but the Congress was probably the most powerful of all my talismans. I had been using it directly in all of my performances and rituals and the countless hours I had spent playing it back and forth across the sacred architecture of Los Angeles made for some heavy sympathetic magic. Most importantly it had literally offered itself up as a sacrifice while repeating a cryptic incantation about bookstores…

I tried to replace it but every subsequent one I found stopped functioning after a few months. The prices were going up on them online and the supply of them in the secondary market was affected by the fact that they are technically the property of the United States Government. Even though The Library of Congress had switched over to digital audiobook players there were government employees contacting anyone who posted one on eBay and warning them that it was illegal to sell.

The first auction that I won for one was even cancelled at the last minute by the seller because they had received one of these warning emails.

I still go straight to the electronic section every time I walk into a thrift store but deep down I know the truth.

I am no longer, and may never again be, a gentleman by Act of Congress…