Hot Snakes & Amy Grant

Slow Listening with Walker #1 and #2

Hi! I’m talking about (and taking pictures of) LPs below, but quickly:

• 🗣️ I’m telling you first: Issue Nine of Little Engines will feature Bethany Ball, Kevin Morby, Bob Hicok, Kyle Siebel, and paintings by artist-in-residence Kami Baergen. It’ll be out next month. For now, you can get a free print copy of the most recent issue, and hit that tip jar 😇 at littleengines.pub.

• 📚 If anyone’s reading Alexandra Auder, Brautigan’s The Abortion, The Diary of a Young Girl, Geoff Rickly, Claire Keegan, or re-reading Azerrad, I’m down to discuss.

OK, record stuff below. Best to you!
Adam

I sold most of my LPs a few years ago. I became embarrassed by them at the same time a friend needed extra money and something to do to kill time. My guy hauled the records home and handled all the bullshit. He set up an eBay shop and shipping station in his house, and we split the proceeds.

I’d sold off a giant chunk of my collection before. At the end of college, I was saving up money to move west, and I brought stacks and stacks down to Roscoe’s, the record store in Bloomington where Ben & Chris Swanson were working. They were giving me decent coin for my treasures, and definitely keeping some of the good stuff for themselves rather than putting it out in the used bins. Recently, Ben kindly returned some Bedhead albums he got off me back then.

The last sell-off came after I got married. My house had been serving as a men’s recovery project for divorcees. My nephew checked in for a while. When he moved on, in love again, his childhood friend, whose wife had fallen out of love, replaced him. When I remarried, the place needed a rebalance, some downgrading of dude-ness. The record collection—rebuilt over two decades, filling half the den in dumb black Ikea shelves—was an easy target.

My idiocy is recurrent, so I was confident I wouldn’t regret selling this stuff, some of it for the second time. I replied to my new business partner’s “Are you sure?”s with “Dude I do not give a fuck about records anymore, like, at all. And besides, I’m keeping the best shit.”

I came up with a system to determine what stayed. For each record, one (1) of the following had to be true for me to keep it around:

• I listened to and loved the record on vinyl originally. This meant that most of my core shit from the ‘90s survived. Lots of punk, emo, indie, diet hardcore, etc.

• The artist is/was a client. According to my count, I’ve had just over 100 clients, so that’s a lot of LPs.

• It’s Petra or Amy Grant from the ‘80s.

My shit was so bloated that this resulted in ~70% of my LPs going on eBay. We timed the market badly, so the money was modest. We opened and closed up shop before the bonkers bananas batshit price hikes of the last few years.

While the culling still left me with plenty of stuff, my indifference toward the format led me to put what was left in a closet along with my turntable. There the records sat for several years until I pulled them out last summer, when our new baby arrived.

I wanted to play her records. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My teenager and I don’t share much in the way of music, and never really did. Not the end of the world—I certainly didn’t listen to music with my dad—but I had a gut feeling that our new baby girl was gonna be super-duper into listening to LPs with me. I bought some cooler-than-Ikea shelves from a dude who makes nice stackable cubes in his garage in Ohio, and I filled them up with what was left of my collection.

Now, I hear your sighs and visualize your eyes rolling. Old dad chains new daughter to chair and forces top tier East Bay punk records on her and calls it a special connection.

I get it, but I swear to you she loves Rick Fork’s yelling, gets hyped on the Sonic Youthy melodies in Deerhunter songs, and is most definitely down with Brooks Nielson’s smokey pipes.

All the clichés are true, again. I love the crackle and pop, the listening without skipping, and having to stay tuned in to flip the record over halfway through.

When you’re holding a baby or chasing a toddler around, it’s a workout to put an LP back into its sleeve, file it away, and ferret out another one, so we end up listening to these albums over and over. Sometimes a record won’t leave the turntable for a week.

I fuckin’ love album art, my god. These big-ass panels and sleeves are so fun to look at. The credits?! A revelation having them back. I love lyrics! Love seeing what I’ve been singing wrong.

So, I’m back to listening to, buying, and re-buying records, and I wanna write about some of these. I’ll pick a pair to cover now and then, and take pictures of them. The limiting factor on what records I can write about will be whether Mal and Walker can tolerate the tunes one thousand times on repeat.

Here’s slow listening with Walker, #1 and #2.

Hot Snakes Suicide Invoice

SLOW LISTENING #1

WHY DO I HAVE THIS?
I didn’t have any Hot Snakes LPs. I guess when I last sold stuff, I declared them non-essential. I thought I might not be Hot Snakes’ biggest fan. When Rick Fork recently passed, I listened to both Drive Like Jehu records a bunch. Two of my all-time faves. Then, while record shopping in Seattle, I saw Suicide Invoice in the bin. When I flipped it over, I asked myself whether I knew it. I certainly haven’t heard it in a long time.

I recognized a few tunes. I could sing “I Hate the Kids” and “LAX” from memory, so I must’ve had the album at some point. With Rick gone, untapped records from his discography deserve my time, and the opportunity to have more of his art around pulled me in, too. Rick designed all of his bands’ records, and that body of work itself would have him in the Serious Motherfuckin’ Artist category even if he weren’t involved in the music on the wax. I put Suicide Invoice in my pile to buy.

Of course the record rips. I know it better than I’d thought, but I’m finding more to love about it now. I gotta get the full Hot Snakes discography. There are two records I’ve definitely never heard.

Artwork Easter Egg: If I didn’t have this LP and couldn’t look at the sleeve, I wouldn’t know that there was (is?) a recording studio called Drag Racist! Also, look at that “ART: Rick” credit at the bottom. So bitchin’.

Amy Grant Age to Age

SLOW LISTENING #2

WHY DO I HAVE THIS?
There was little music in my house growing up, but there was every single Amy Grant album. These songs soaked in deeper than my skin, down into my little-kid bones. I know every second of all her early albums, and while I mostly keep these records because they remind me of childhood, I stand by several of the tunes today.

I’ve tried to get Mal into early Amy Grant before. She knows the crossover hit “Baby Baby” note for note, but that one came much later. She is unfamiliar with the first several records, but when I play one of those, she’ll always guess, “Amy Grant, right?” I ask how she knows. “It’s the only thing you listen to that sounds like this.”

Something happened, fucking finally, when I was b-l-a-s-t-i-n-g “I Have Decided” over and over with Walker the other morning. Mal popped out of the kitchen where she’d been sipping coffee and making breakfast and said, “Uh, this is a jayyyy-uuuuummmmmmm!” I saved my ‘told ya so’ for a later date, and simply enjoyed that she was feeling it while the three of us danced around. I also got her hooked on “Sing Your Praise to the Lord”, which is proto-HAIM, by the way.

Lyric Easter Egg: I don’t know how else to say this, but I think there’s a dick joke on this Amy Grant record. From 1982. When she was like 17. It’s in the song “Fat Little Baby”.