Slept On: Yum-Yum, Dan Loves Patti

The kids (especially the Chicago ones) love to hate on this album.

Back in the day when I was a teenager, with no status, and no pager, I was working as a music director for the nascent OSU student-run radion station, KBUX, later to be known as The Underground. The kids working there, we had no freaking clue how to run a radio station and we didn't have anyone to tell us how to do it--the whole situation was so MacGyver. Everything was trial and error. And it was fucking great. We pretty much just assigned ourselves titles and taught ourselves how to use the equipment. We weren't capable of wreaking too much havoc, though, because the signal (91.1) was so weak; you could only get it from maybe Lane avenue to 12th avenue, in good weather, during the vernal equinox. The broadcast, out of the Ohio Union basement, was heard mainly through something called UNITS--the dorm information channel (channel 41). There was never any way to know how many people were listening. We did some marketing and promotion, but nobody on campus, this enormous campus, smack in the middle of one of the most fertile college-music scenes in the country, seemed all that interested. All the same, we were happy simply to be this band of music freaks, living out the music freak's greatest fantasy: free records.

Most of what the mainly labels sent me was junk (Perfume Tree or Gastr del Sol? Anyone? Bueller? Kula Shaker, maybe?), but every now and again, I'd get something great, something that I wanted to share with everyone. Dan Loves Patti was one of those albums. I couldn't play it on my show, London Calling (I know, how clever!), as it was devoted to UK music (surprise!), so I tried to get the other DJs to slip it into rotation. When it became clear that Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and Guided by Voices were the golden children of the station and more or less setting the tone of the regular programming, I ferreted this gem away in my personal collection. Nobody missed it.

Songs like "Apiary," "Ring," and "Words Will Fail," were sweet, little confections. Near perfect in their twee, pop construction, and resplendant with French horns (Dan Folgerberg? Are you in there?), Chris Holmes crafted the best stoner heartbreak album in the vein of, I don't know, "Pet Sounds" that I'd ever heard. (And, before I get any High Fidelity, loser, music-critic types leaving comments like, "Dude, that's fucking stupid," may I remind you that A) I don't care, and B) Blogger is free, so get one of yer own.) The music had emotion and depth and catchy melodies and melancholy lyrics! The liner notes came with guitar chords for each of the songs! Fun! Cute! So what happened? Why wasn't this album at least as big as Pavement's Crooked Rain Crooked Rain?

Maybe it was a little too twee, a little too polished; all I know is that everyone, EVERYONE hated this record. I don't know a single person who will own up to liking it. Even Chris Holmes, according to a Harper's article about him, claimed that Dan Loves Patti was some sort of send up of indie pop music, that it was a farce, that it was irony.* Par example:

"Yum-Yum, as the group was called, would be an ironic pop band--ironic, that is, if you understood 'pop' as the softest, most openly sold-out, most compromised, most manipulated music ever produced. [The] music industry had been assiduously falsifying Chris's world; now he would do the same to theirs. He would fake fake itself." [emphasis mine]

Yeah! You get 'em, Chris! You're gonna be a big star! A BIG star. **

And ... scene.

Obviously, this didn't happen. I mean, have you ever heard of Chris Holmes? Something like, only 10,000 units of Dan Loves Patti were sold. A few months after I got my copy, I started seeing them in the bins and on the shelves at Johnny Go's and Used Kids. They were going for $0.99. Ouch.

Yum-Yum, Dan Loves Patti
Promo copy from TAG/Atlantic, May 1997

*And, if I may editorialize for a minute, one thing I've always hated about the indie music scene is the pervasive cooler-than-though attitude, the repulsion at the possibility of the hoi polloi liking "your" music. What's wrong with liking the some of the same things that "mainstream," Anytown USA people like? If I have to do a fucking Google search to figure out how to pronounce your band's name (i.e., !!!) or send away to some P.O. box for your band's cherry-red colored 7", I'm going to pass. And it's not about being average or common or lazy or fat or unfashionable--it's about liking what you like and not being so goddamn judgmental about what other people like.

** Here's a link to a well-written article in response to the Harper's article. It's pretty much saying what I said above, only with much more eloquence.

Slept On: Camp Lo, Uptown Saturday Night

Camp Lo, anyone?

This album was the soundtrack to Spring Break NYC 1997. Skinny Marie and I flew in to the city with little more than $100 a piece, because we forgot to deposit our loan checks before we left. It was only the second time I'd been to New York; the circumstances of this trip were a little sketch. Victor and I had recently broken up. I think the final straw was when Victor read my e-mail and found all the messages to and from Matthew. He (rightly) accused me of having an affair with Matthew. I pulled off the Best Actress Oscar Performance of 1997 by convincing Victor that Matthew was just a friend (wrong), that he was gay (wrong), and that the things he'd read were material for a book I was planning to write someday (less wrong, but still wrong at the time). And so, he moved out of our place, making a huge mess of everything in the process--and I don't just mean that in the emotional sense; I was way ready to have him leave after five years of drugs and OCD and chaos. I mean he literally wrecked our room, knocking over the bookcase and throwing stuff all over the floor. It was quite a shock to see, given how unbelievably neat Victor was; there was nary a thread out of place, under normal circumstances. It was a "fuck you" kind of mess and he got his point across. After all that drama went down, I cried my little 20-year-old heart out. Thirty minutes later, I was on the phone with Matthew ... Matthew invited Skinny Marie and me to come to New York and stay with him in Brooklyn.

Up until then, I'd only known Matthew as The Guy with Whom I Was Having an Affair. I'd rarely seen him during the day. We'd spent more than a year sneaking around and doing all the bullshit things one does when one is having an affair. Here's a sampling of the rediculous things we did: We would meet up in Cleveland and hang out in Little Italy. We drove to Powell, Ohio to eat at the Galaxy Cafe. We would walk around Gooddale Park at night (back then, anyway, Gooddale was like, the worst-lit park in the history of, uh, lit parks). We both worked in D_____ H___, so he would meet me in Professor _______'s office after she left so we could make out. And you know, thank Baby Jesus that this was pre-the widespread use of Caller ID because Matthew would call me at the apartment when Victor was still living there. Matthew, knowing about Victor's drug problem and my own problem with drugs (and yes, there is a difference), begged me, pleaded with me to leave Victor and "start doing the very hard things people need to do to truly be happy." He knew how unhappy I was--because I told him as much--and couldn't understand why I'd want to be with someone who was causing me so much harm, both emotionally and physically. I didn't have a satisfactory answer. Matthew said he thought I needed a whole new social scene, new friends, that everyone around me didn't care about me. I always felt that Matthew was overly judgmental of me, my life. He said he only judged people on:
A) whether they knew that life was hard, and B) tried to be happy anyway, and;
A) whether they knew that life tried to put them in a box, and B) tried to escape it anyway.

That made sense. I needed to escape to be happy.

So when Victor confronted me about the e-mails, even though I lied my ass off about it, I was so, so relieved, knowing that this would be the end and that I didn't have to lie anymore. Skinny Marie and I booked tickets that night.

The week before we left, I went into World Record for my monthly CD-buying binge and picked up Uptown Saturday Night. Immediately, I totally dug this record. My favorite track was "Luchini AKA This Is It," followed by "Krystal Karrington" and "Rockin' It AKA Spanish Harlem ." The samples were fantastic, the beats were tight, and the cover art, well, I don't have to tell you twice why it was the shit. An all-around solid album, I never understood why the Lo never hit it big. Especially since the same guy, Ski, who produced Jay-Z's classic Reasonable Doubt produced this record. Skinny Marie, Matthew, and I played this record on repeat while we were in Park Slope, smoking the carton of Marborol Lights she bought on her Buck ID, sitting on the stoop, watching the endless parade of characters ambling down Vanderbilt, and feeling like I never wanted to forget how I felt at that moment.

Strangely (or, given how much better I now know myself, not so strangely), I found that I was less attracted to Matthew once I had complete access to him. A whole cornucopia of misunderstandings and bullshit drove our relationship off the rails not too long after that New York trip, and as of this date, though I know where he lives, I have no idea how Matthew is doing, if he's happy, or if he even remembers any of this.

Camp Lo, Uptown Saturday Night
Purchased at the beginning of March 1997
World Record, Columbus, Ohio, USA