BONUS Marc's Record Collection - Looking for an Answer
How are you, people?
Welcome to the bonus content.
There's two things going on with me right now.
There's me trying to assess and understand my compulsive record buying.
I'm not going to call it a problem because I've pulled back from it.
The problem is really when you get involved with something like that and you go hard for a while and then all of a sudden you're surrounded by vinyl records, hundreds of them.
In my case, I've probably got about 3,000 of them now.
And every once in a while, I'll go through a flurry of organization and purging.
It's just a management thing.
It becomes literally a problem of space management.
This is why...
If you have a big record collection, you better have a big house or you better have a place where you can house that record collection.
Now, mine isn't completely out of control.
It's probably too many.
And when you have all these vinyl records, you can understand how CDs were very exciting outside of the push to get people to buy the new format with the idea that it was better somehow, even though in retrospect, not so great.
For many reasons, source material, just digitization in general.
But I am confronted with the idea that someday this will pass.
Someday my record obsession will pass.
And it's not even that deep an obsession.
I'm not a full on nerd.
I'm not looking for grails.
I like having all the stuff I have, but there is no fucking way I can listen to it all.
And so I've just got all these records and now I've got to figure out, you know, who gets my records when I die.
This is the real thing that's going on.
I have to rewrite my will and make some decisions.
It's strange being childless and debtless.
All of a sudden, you got to really think about the people in your life who are here now or were there or what family can use what to be specific about leaving stuff.
Sadly,
I think I will probably leave my records to the guy I got most of them from.
Just return them to the source.
I think Dan, over at Gimme Gimme, is going to be willed my collection.
So, you know, he can sell it again.
But in talking about music, which is really, I guess, why I wanted to do this, I've been...
You know I've been playing in a band.
I've been playing with some guys occasionally, and I'm terrified to play anything too complicated because I think it would take more work than we're really putting in.
I like simple music.
I like music that's immediate.
I just listened to Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen because I'm reading a yet-to-be-published book by Warren Zanes about Nebraska.
I think there's something very earnest about Nebraska.
I have to reassess it in a much deeper way because I'm reading this book.
But I'm also always trying to figure out playlists to play with these guys when we do play.
And some of that has led me back to my, I'm not even going to say guilty pleasure, because I have no shame about owning the first five or six Skynyrd records.
Let me rephrase that.
To owning all of the Skynyrd records, including the live one.
And the one that came out posthumously.
And enjoying them a great deal to the point where I'm considering covering Give Me Three Steps.
So I've listened to Give Me Three Steps a few times.
I've listened to some of those songs off that first album and that second album.
And Give Me Back My Bullets, which I think people disregard.
But there's a couple of great songs on there.
And I'm trying to correct the past in a way.
There were a few attempts at a band.
when I was younger, that never really stuck because I didn't have the discipline to become the guitar player I could become, to sort of deal with the talent I might have had, or at least focus it.
I just liked being able to play things, not well, but how I understood them.
But there were a couple attempts at bands.
There was a band, the first band that I was in, I may have put together just to do a couple of songs
for a student talent assembly when I was in, I believe, eighth grade.
I'm going to go with eighth, though it might have been ninth.
I'd written a song called Jessica about a girl I had a crush on.
Her name was Jessica Jameson.
And I was very taken with her.
She was older than me.
And I wrote this song called Jessica, which roughly has the same chords as Ringo Starr's photograph, I think, give or take.
And that was my I didn't even sing it.
My singer was a guy named Eric Tittman out of Denver.
My drummer was Dean Hines out of New Mexico.
I can't remember if we had a bass player that night that day.
I assume we did.
I'm trying to remember who it was.
It might have been this guy, Ralph.
Not positive, but I feel like it might have been.
And, you know, we played this song at this assembly, this song, Jessica.
The band tentatively was called the Midnight Ramblers, which was a bad name that I really wanted to keep.
But when I moved on to another band after the Midnight Ramblers, another three-song band that never really played out, that guy, Dave, who's dead now, dead Dave, who was my best friend in high school, refused to...
Call the band Midnight Ramblers because he said it sounded like a country band, which might have been true.
But but he so we went with change.
Yeah, change.
That's what we went with change.
We had the business cards made.
I think I might have made them in graphics class.
Graphics class was an important place for me to express my my kind of early on silk screening art ideas.
You know, I was once I got the hang of silk screening, but we had to do business cards and do practical things with the with the presses.
So I made the cards for change.
It might have not been that.
It might have been another band.
I can't remember.
I remember doing doesn't matter.
Point is.
We play Jessica at the assembly.
And I think we might have tried some other song.
Had a little fast end part with some guitar lead.
Was there another guitar player?
I don't remember.
So we played it, and obviously Jessica was very moved, but not as moved, I think, in the other direction as her boyfriend, Ted Allen, who after the show came up to me with a weird smile on his face and punched me in the stomach.
And I dropped to my knees and he said, just leave my girlfriend alone.
And they were like years older than me.
He has since emailed me.
I don't know if I responded recently within the past decade to apologize for that, because apparently he's working with.
Kids who who have bullying problems, something like that.
Look, I might be getting the story wrong, but that's where my music got me early on.
That might have been a deterrent.
That is not the response you want to playing music.
But but nonetheless, I've been going back.
I've been going back and I've talked about this on the podcast proper.
to sort of find something back there.
But I needed to correct some things.
We did try to play Gimme Three Steps and the band Change, and it wasn't good.
We did Taking Care of Business.
We did Sweet Emotion badly.
Needle and the Spoon.
Oh, that's the one.
I got to write that down.
It was a needle and a spoon and a trip.
To the moon, gonna take you away.
I think it was about Gary Rossington, who recently died.
Skinner guitar player.
The last one.
But on the treadmill the other day, I was going through the old records and listening to ZZ Top for something maybe I could do.
Thought maybe the band could cover Tush.
Is it time for a Tush cover?
by a 59-year-old Mark Maron.
I think it's unexpected.
I think that if I whipped out Tush at Largo, that would be something.
It's sort of like when I played ACDC on my little bit part when I did guest DJing on Morning Becomes Equlectic.
It's like, hey, this is part of me, man.
This is the townie part of me, man.
I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
All right.
I went to Van Halen, the Van Halen concert on their first tour and threw up and passed out during the opening band, man.
That's who I am.
I saw the Nuge three times and I don't even like the Nuge, but my buddy did.
I drove fucking 10 hours from Albuquerque to Denver to see Richie Blackmore's Rainbow with my buddy Dave.
I didn't even like Rainbow, but I saw John Cougar Mellencamp open for Rainbow when he was just John Cougar and thought, this guy's good.
Yeah, I did that.
I drove 10 hours.
in two cars, my Datsun B210 and my buddy Chris's Maverick, white Maverick.
And we'd stopped at the place I worked, the Posh Bagel, and loaded up on all kinds of sandwiches and sauces and had food fights between the cars to the point where we had to stop at a car wash and spray the Thousand Island dressing off the cars before we got to Denver to Sunday Jam 2, which was UFO, the cars, the rockets,
Hart and Ted Nugent again, I believe.
Is that possible?
Hart, Ted Nugent, the cars, the rockets, and UFO.
Is that possible?
Someone check that.
My buddy Andy, who wasn't really my friend, he didn't really like me, but we were both friends at Dave's.
He took acid and watched the horse on top of Mile High Stadium trot around the parameter of that stadium.
I think he might have been one of three people who saw it.
So I've been going back, going back into the files, trying to find these songs that define my youth.
As some of you know, I've been playing songs that were put in my head by my father on the A-track in the station wagon, the Capri station wagon that the family used to drive around in.
My dad used to listen to the soundtrack of American Graffiti.
I've done several of those songs, the ones he liked, some part of my father that I can hold on to.
I don't think he can hold on to them.
We had Buddy Holly's greatest hits.
We had the American Graffiti soundtrack.
And we had Hocus Pocus by Focus.
We had that.
We had Abbey Road by the Beatles.
But we did The Stroll.
I like the Peppermint Twist.
I can do that.
We did Slippin' and Slidin' from the Buddy Holly thing.
I used to like get a job.
Get a job.
Anyway.
getting back to it, going through the past, trying to find things, but oddly to sort of loop around on the record collection business.
And I know I said that I may have may read from some of the journals, um,
that I found up in my attic.
These were written specifically during the separation, after my wife left me.
And I told you about them.
I'm going to have to really figure out what I can read from this.
Because when I look at it, there's stuff in it that's pretty important stuff, and I think helpful stuff.
But I have to go through it.
I can't just start reading this stuff.
It would be too heavy without some editing.
I don't know.
I think the point of it was that that past that's 2007, you know, the one thing I realized about that, those events is that how long does PTSD last, man?
You know,
After Lynn's death, I mean, I don't know.
I don't even know if I'm really all the way through it.
But after your wife leaves you, I mean, that's another shattering thing because what went on in these journals, my memory of it is not great.
And there was a lot going on.
But anyways, maybe we'll get to that.
On another bonus conversation.
So back to the records, you know, now I have to kind of I've gotten completionist about a lot of stuff like I did replace or get all of my Skinner records, all my Aerosmith records, all my records.
Tom Waits records.
I got all of the ACDC records.
I have all the ZZ Top records.
I have records that were important to me when I was younger, both townie and non-townie, both townie and art records.
But I do.
The great thing about collecting vinyl is just how many records you have that you've never seen before.
And artists that have been around forever or were at a different time have many records out that
I didn't know anything about, or I just knew two songs.
So all that to say recently, and this happens with artists occasionally in my collection, I've decided that some of the big answers might lie in the canned heat catalog.
I'm not sure what I'm thinking.
It's probably, I run a little weird about my own playing and the guys I'm playing with.
Like there's part of me that wants to take it seriously and try to understand the sound that I'm trying to get or define better the sound that I think represents me.
And then I go like, come on, dude, you're a comic.
Don't, you know, fucking don't pressure yourself.
But I had this moment
Where I was watching, I was flipping through the Woodstock movie.
And because I don't I maybe in my recollection, look, that's not my era.
You know, I saw it as a midnight movie when I was in high school.
And that would have been in the, you know, late 70s, probably.
And I don't remember it at all.
I just remember it being too long and there was a lot of filler.
So about a month ago, I was just kind of moving through the Woodstock performances and I got to Canned Heat and I was like, what the fuck?
These guys are playing the shit out of this stuff.
These guys invented something.
These guys might have invented blues rock.
Yeah, that's what I'm going to say.
If they didn't, there's no more.
They were purists, yet they updated it somehow.
Like, they don't sound like a bar band playing blues.
They sound like fucking Canned Heat.
And they fucking rocked the shit out of that stuff.
And that guitar player, not Wilson, not Blind Owl Wilson, the other guy, what's his name?
Vistain?
Why not look this shit up?
The Bear?
I'm not even sure what that guy's name.
The bass player?
Why not look it up right now?
Okay, so I looked it up.
It was Alan Blind Owl Wilson, who died very young, guitar, harmonica, vocals.
Bob the Bear Height, vocals, harmonica, who died much later of, not a hotshot, but he thought something was coke and it was dope.
Harvey the Snake Mandel, guitar.
Wild, dude.
He fucking played the shit out of it.
Larry the Mole Taylor.
I like how everyone has nicknames.
Bass.
And Adolfo Fido de la Para drums.
Now, I'm watching this thing, and I'm like, I knew these guys were kind of blues purists, but they just took it to this other level.
But there was a moment...
during their performance at Woodstock, where I guess a crowd member gets on stage and just starts talking to Height, the bear, and the other guys are soloing, someone's jamming, someone's doing something.
And if you listen to fucking Alan Wilson...
You know, what's the name of that?
Mississippi Records put out an album of just his stuff.
His falsetto was flawless.
And his harmonica was beautiful.
He was like a cypher.
He was a channel for something well beyond him and before him.
Kind of amazing.
He died pretty fucking young.
But he was something else.
Uh, but I, I've just decided that the answer to the sound I'm looking for is somewhere in can't heat anyway.
So this guy gets on stage and just starts talking to height and then, uh, bums a cigarette off him and lights a cigarette.
This is on stage.
Um,
At Woodstock.
And I was just so amazed that they're all playing up there and height handling it like they were just like not even in a bar, like playing a house, a house party.
It was crazy.
So that's the benefit of,
of having a lot of records is now I can really zero in and just listen to canned heat, all of it and try to figure out what I am looking for.
God damn it.
I'm always looking for something, but it's always the same thing to feel whole, to feel relief, to feel abandoned, to feel, uh,
Peace of mind to feel elation.
Is that all the same spectrum?
Is that all the same spectrum?
Can't music do that?
But also to feel the electricity of some fucking rock, man.
But I'll figure it out.
You ever listen to that Hooker and Heat record?
That's Ken Heat backing John Lee Hooker.
It's crazy.
Why am I a blues guy?
Out of all the things, that's where I come from.
That's the source.
I don't know.
I guess it's that strange, shattered sense of Jewish self.
There's something about that specific thing.
There's a lot of Jewish bluish guys.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
I mean, I listen to everything, but for some reason, I've returned to that.
And right now, I'm looking for answers in the Canteed catalog.
Enjoy yourselves.
Be careful.
Yeah.
I'm not going to do Boomer Lives.
That's not for bonus content.
We'll be right back.