Once upon a time Thomas Pynchon was my world. (Need I remind you of my disgraceful Honors Thesis?) This was about the same time music meant something to me—surely you remember? Before you bored of life and its trappings? Back when everything radiated raw, brittle vitality?
(Of course you remember. You were young once too.)
So you can imagine my elation when I discovered Pynchon had penned liner notes for some band I'd never heard of. Music and Pynchon? What could be better?
Nothing.
Nothing could have been better.
So I spent the better part of two months tracking down Lotion's Nobody's Cool. (This was before the Internet was the Internet we know and love. The only available options were CDNOW and a plane ticket to someplace with a decent record store.) I finally landed a copy through a book distributor I'd befriended who lived in New York but was passing through Baton Rouge on his way to a family wedding in Bunkie. This septuagenarian ventured into some independent shop in the Village for me.
Only now do I understand his sacrifice.
Point being, eventually I landed a copy of Nobody's Cool and, in my unbiased view, it was the best album ever. I listened to nothing but it for months and months and then I fell for this girl hard.
You know the rest of the story. I lent her the album in a sad attempt to impress.
She declined my bait.
I never saw the album again.
In the years since, I've longed to hear it again. Was it everything I remember it to be? (Surely not.) Was I suckered into love by Pynchon's imprimatur? (Most certainly.) Is the thing any good?
I didn't know ... until my best friend from high school visited a few weeks back. Said he had a surprise for me.
Can you guess what it was?
Of course you can. (My readers are no fools.) (Although they waste too much time here to be taken too seriously.) What does it sound like?
I'll refrain from commenting on the album, if only because you'll find Pynchon's comments below the fold ... but if "Dear Sir" or "The New Timmy" seem draped in '90s alternative cliché, try listening to "Juggernaut" or the lyrics to "Sandra." I'm making no grand claims about the quality of the album other than to say I love it ...
... but I'm all attentive and nostalgic and without fail would.
Thomas Pynchon's liner notes for Lotion's Nobody's Fool
The name of Lotion's first album is Full Isaac, which besides getting instant screams of recognition from Love Boat rerun watchers everywhere, shows an attentive nostalgia at work—not to mention some dream of an endless cruise, upon which Nobody's Cool is the next leg of the band's creative itinerary. As beneath the austerities of twelvetone music may lurk some shameless piece of baroque polyphony, so, throughout this album, beneath the formal demands of rock and roll as we have come to know it, between the metal anthems and moments of tonal drama, the darkest of surrealist lyrics, the most feedback-stricken, edge-of-chaos guitar passages, may also be detected the weird jiving sense of humor of a cruise combo, even an allegiance to the parameters thereof, the lounge chords on "Namedropper" and "Rock Chick," the bass line of "Juggernaut," so forth.
But ... it's supposed to be the Millenium here—the Apocalypse, right?—worse it's New York in the middle of a seasonal charm deficiency—and these guys are smiling? Well, not exactly. If it's a cruise gig, it sure runs through peculiar waters, full of undetonated mines from the cultural disputes that began in the Sixties, unexplained lights now and then from just over the horizon, stowaways who sneak past security and meddle with the amps causing them to emit strange Rays, unannounced calls at ports that seem almost like cities we have been to, though not quite, cityscapes that all converge to New York in some form, which is after all where these guys are from.
The recording studio is half a block from the subway. Times Square is being vacated and jackhammered into somebody's idea of an update. Next door to Peepland, up in a control room out of The Jetsons, the band, between takes, are discussing Bobby "Boris" Pickett, on whose 1962 hit "Monster Mash" it turns out Rob's substitute music teacher in elementary school played saxophone. Everybody here knows the record, not necessarily the Birth of Rap, less an influence than something trying to find a pathway through to us here in our own corrupted and perilous day, when everybody's heard everything and knows more than they wish they did. It's never certain how these things will be carried on, but mysteriously it happens. Every night, somewhere on the outlaw side of some town, below some metaphysical 14th Street, out at the hard edges of some consensus about what's real, the continuity is always being sought, claimed, lost, found again, carried on. If for no other reason, rock and roll remains one of the last honorable callings, and a working band is a miracle of everyday life. Which is basically what these guys do.
And here they are, now. Find the remote, get out the Snapple and Chee-tos, and like the Love Boat staff always sez, welcome aboard.
Not exactly germane to this post, Scott, but I've occasionally wondered what prompted your turn from Pynchon to the 19th century. If I recall correctly, there was even some early interest in Joyce, no?
Posted by: Mike S | Sunday, 02 December 2007 at 03:33 PM
Comment the first:
People must really have hated the Lotion.
Comment the second:
Mike, I came to graduate school with the Pynchon/Joyce interests, inasmuch as I was one of those Pynchon/Joyce/Foster Wallace people -- you know, the people who enjoy long, ambitious novels written in difficult prose. (I don't know why, but Big Difficult Novel people have very predictable tastes. I mean, most people could nail my favorite books, only they'd throw Delillo in there, which would anger me.) So, the short version is that I came to grad school to study Joyce more than Pynchon, but have written about both. (Joyce for three seminars, Pynchon for Derrida, then again for Katherine Hayles' Big Books seminiar.) (Not that I wrote the same paper twice, as that'd be cheating.)
THEN! (Dramatic, ain't it?) THEN! (Now not so much.) I TA'd for Laura O'Connor's Irish Modernism course, at the end of which she invited me to dinner with her and her husband, James Olney, with whom I'd take a course on Theories of Memory my second quarter here. During the course of this dinner, they were very frank about the job prospects for people who do Big Books: "There aren't any," she said. I'd either need to work the Irish or American angle, but I couldn't do both.
THEN!
She said there aren't that many jobs for Irish modernists, since Joyceans abound, so I'd have to be a modernist, and if I wanted a job, I should focus on the British side of the pond. But much as I liked Joyce, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life teaching Pound and Eliot, so I drifted for a bit, took a course with Michael Szalay, and decided to hitch my wagon to his star. (Mostly because he was the biggest, most-demanding asshole I'd worked with since Pat McGee as an undergrad. Lest you think that an insult, I don't intend it as such: he's a harsh, exacting critic who doesn't pull punches or coddle you when you write crap, as I frequently do. I'm a far better writer and thinker for working with him and am, in fact, quite embarrassed by what I would've become had I not.) But yes, so anyway, where was I?
Yes, I was working on C20th American stuff -- race and literature, in the '30s and '40s, and dabbling in the socialist literature of the period as well -- when I started preparing for my exams. Over the course of them and the dissertation prospectus workshop, I discovered I was much more interested -- and therefore far more motivated to work on -- the influence of evolutionary theory in literature. (There's a connection there, and yes, it's eugenics. But I couldn't just start writing about material in the '30s and '40s without having read what came before, and then I realized that's where all the excitement was.)
Thus endeth the story.
Posted by: SEK | Sunday, 02 December 2007 at 08:36 PM
That's quite the academic autobiography tucked away in a comment here. Which time did you go to Hayles's big books seminar? --- I know a couple people who took it one go-round; very cool class.
So most people don't change their field of study based on the same reason I did: the need to color-coordinate the paperback books with the bookcase?
Posted by: Sisyphus | Sunday, 02 December 2007 at 09:25 PM
That's quite the academic autobiography tucked away in a comment here.
All the information's been related before, just never in the same place. It was sort of gratifying to write in a look-how-far-I've-come kind of way.
Which time did you go to Hayles's big books seminar?
Well, me and my classmates only "went" to one ... then Hayles, one of the most generous people ever, decided to drive down to UCI, through rush hour traffic, to teach us UCI folk as soon as she finished teaching the same exact material at UCLA. There's a post in that story, if only so one day, while vanity Googling, Hayles stumbles across it and knows that her efforts were as appreciated as they were arduous. (More so, even.)
So most people don't change their field of study based on the same reason I did: the need to color-coordinate the paperback books with the bookcase?
All of mine are that Penguin puke-green ... so yes, I suppose I did.
Posted by: SEK | Sunday, 02 December 2007 at 10:03 PM
Wow, I feel so sorry for you lit folks now. I mean more so. My bookshelves (in various shades of blonde and brown target/ikea faux wood) are a veritable rainbow. The only consistent color even within publishers is Cambridge's longtime insistance on bright white spine, saying "You know that we're worth $50 for a paperback." OK, looking again, Ohio and James Currey's co-published series did the same thing for a while at more reasonable rates. Both have thankfully stopped.
Posted by: JPool | Monday, 03 December 2007 at 09:16 AM
Not a bad album! I'd read those liner notes ages ago and been all like 'There's no way this band is anywhere near as good as these liner notes' - God almighty I'd give my legs to be able to write like Thomas Pynchon, my legs and maybe an arm or a lung - and now I know, re: this album, that though I was not fair, I was not wrong. But not a bad album at all; nice workin' music. And not quite measuring up to Pynchon is no shame either.
Posted by: Wally | Monday, 03 December 2007 at 04:38 PM
Pynchon interviewed Lotion in an issue of Esquire back in the mid/late 90s. That's how I came to know of the band.
I too was a "big book" fan and at the time was obsessed with reading or hearing anything Pynchon wrote (including book blurbs.)
Lotion was a damn fine band through 2 CDs and the Agnew Funeral EP. They lost their way a bit with the Telephone Album but even that was an above average effort.
My band has played "La Boost" and "Juggernaut" live before.
One last thing: I'm a nobody, so I guess that means I'm cool.
Posted by: Shawn | Friday, 21 October 2011 at 07:35 PM