The Undead: Your Favorite Records Live

For so many musical acts, there's usually THE record, that one album where vision and execution lie together as the comfiest of bedfellows. To us listeners, these are the records that just make so much sense to us they are just a given. This specified kind of worship can sometimes be so extreme as to obscure artists' other achievements in their careers, where later works just doesn't seem as impressive as their masterful predecessor (like Nas after Illmatic), or in hindsight, earlier work is seen merely as a mis-step along the way to a perfect album (My Bloody Valentine?).

I'm sure there're artists who'd agree that their careers have either built up to one album, or that their creative juices were never more focused and potent than on their breakout record, but very often, it's us fans who are making the judgments. In most cases, it's only because of that one album that anyone might remain a fan (would anyone really be listening to any late Dylan if he wasn't DYLAN?). Really, there's nothing that compares to that first time, the momentous occasion when you actually "get it," when a melody or a voice opens the psychic floodgates to your central love organs. Years later, you wish you could relive that sacred moment when you and the music symbiosed to form a single, perfectly symmetrical SOUL.

Thank God for record labels.

Roused and ready, the labels are here for us, always poised to feed our need for reimmersion in the ecstasies of our younger years, pumping tons of cash into reformatting, remastering, repackaging, and reissuing our favorite records. Throughout the 70s, cassettes ran slightly behind records as the preferred music format for consumers. In the 80s, their popularity grew with the advent of portable cassette players. Starting in the late 80s, with the advent of CD's, labels encouraged music listeners to repurchase their music libraries with smaller, "higher quality" compact discs. And throughout the last two decades, labels have been releasing special edition reissues of classic albums.

Time and again, we consumers oblige in kind (witness a third reissue of Love's Forever Changes), and we shell out the duckets, hoping somehow to come at the record with virgin ears and have our minds blown again like they were however many years ago by our favorite artists. Or else we're looking to be the uber-completist. Often, in addition to reissuing (and often remastering) records, these repackaged albums come stocked with bonus tracks, if not bonus discs, of b-sides, alternate takes, and never-before-released songs. There's usually some extended liner notes, penned by a doting music journalist or by an artist fessing up to how much they've stolen from said band's sound. On so many of these re-releases, there's the prestigious "Original Recording Reissued and Remastered" sticker pasted on, which I guess means the recording deserved to be reissued and remastered – either because it was so poorly recorded the first time around, or because the material is so damn good, the technological limitations of the era precluded the album from being listened to in its most lucid, digitally-enhanced incarnation. Never mind the possibility that maybe we loved these great records for exactly what they were – the warm-as-womb, wah-wah-ed squalls of distortion punctuating the first track on Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me; the mysterious, funny, (and disturbing?) "You Fuckin' Die" interlude on the Pixies' Surfer Rosa (deleted off some re-pressings) – these are parts of a whole that gestalt their way into our souls and make us weak in the fecking knees. Maybe we want them there for eternity (even if we sometimes skip over them).


But businesses have the distinct power of creating demand, and the truth is this is a business. Selling us our youths over and over again is nothing new. The Woodstock generation has made much of its tie-dye-stained bills by relentlessly reliving the experience of the 60s, charging $150 a ticket for reunion shows and selling original posters for who-knows-how-much. Everyone's got to make a buck, so I'm not knocking our parents' ventures, especially if this is how they're paying for us to have a comfortable living. And besides, this nostalgia-fest has its perks, not just for the record labels, but in a less monetary sense, for the artists themselves. This expansive, full-disclosure business model allows creators to involve interested fans in their creative process, if they're brave enough to put some of their sketches and flubs on display.

Take, for example, The Stooges' The Complete Fun House Sessions – a box set that culls together every single piece of audio material recorded during the sessions that led to the great paean to sleaze that is Fun House. Fans get the chance to hear Iggy fuck up his words, laugh at the tight-as-all-get-up band go through a ton of false starts, and soak up a little recording studio atmosphere as band, producer, and engineers discuss the merits and blemishes of each take. You get to feel like a part of the band in a way you might not have when all you had was the finished record in all its glory and intrigue. It's an illuminating advantage to the excess it takes to be a completist.

You still have to think, though, that however thorough and enlightening the box set may be, it's an investment, one that pits music fans against their wallets, having to decide whether to purchase something they're already familiar with vs. something new that's potentially amazing/horrible (unless of course you're going the download-everything-for-free route, in which case: NEVERMIND).


But hark! There is hope!

A healthy and generous antidote to this muddled, mostly commercial practice can be found on the most glorious of homo sapiens' innovations – the internet. And perhaps the most healthy and generous proponent of this internet-based, direct "artist-to-audience" model is a most innovative homo sapiens named Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound notoriety).* On his sprawling blog, Cox walks us through the evolution of his songs, with demo mp3's, moment-by-moment accounts of his thought process (both technical and emotional) while recording, and even proofs of some of the album art that he and his bandmates went over before putting out their records. In the history of recorded music, this is the kind of complete access that is restricted to a holy few. Of course, Cox has complete control over what is put up on his blog, and so we're not privy to EVERYTHING that's going on in the studio, but it is still significant to discuss that not only is this a direct, money-less enterprise - it is also IMMEDIATE. Now, the mystery of an album's creation doesn't have to wait a decade until its reissue to be uncovered. For those especially devoted to watching the life of a song, the process can be reversed, where we can now hear the demos BEFORE THE COMPLETE VERSION. And there's something to be said for "democratizing" the creative process, even if I'm partial to the notion that boundaries and mystery belong in art.

Still, you've got to appreciate Cox's generosity (and prolific work habits!). And to his credit, he doesn't reveal ALL the demos of ALL his tracks, but he certainly shares enough of himself to make you wonder what exactly constitutes "private" to him. His good-natured posts are generally reciprocated in the comments sections, which makes the dynamic all the more interesting. Now, we not only have a deluge of information coming from the artist about the art during its creation, but we also have the artist getting almost immediate feedback from its listeners. Cox even welcomes assignments from his listeners, for example asking fans to request songs to cover and offer their impressions of the results. I haven't yet seen him heed any of these requests, but I don't hold it against him…I'm sure he's busy….


Even in this age of two-way communication between artist and listener, where the potential to engage with new art as it evolves is at its peak, it seems we're still suckers for the old days. In recent years there's been a spike in the number of artists performing their classic albums live, in their sequential entirety, often at the behest of the UK festival group Don't Look Back. The list of albums being performed is ever-growing, but to name just a few milestones being rehashed –

Spiderland – Slint
Daydream Nation – Sonic Youth
Only Built for Cuban Linx – Raekwon
If You're Feeling Sinister – Belle and Sebastian
Millions Now Living Will Never Die - Tortoise
Liquid Swords - GZA/Genius
Vs. - Mission of Burma
It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back - Public Enemy
Perfect From Now On - Built to Spill
Meat Puppets II - Meat Puppets

It's endearing, on the one hand, for so many of us so-called "adults" to have our souls still stirred by these organized noises that were put together when the other Bush was in the height of his reign of idiocracy. It's also a testament to the artists themselves, their ability to have crafted full-length recordings that are with every passing year accruing "timeless" status. These are albums that have touched us, amazed us, and influenced legions who came after.


But on the other hand, is it really all that necessary? I guess those of us who were too young to see these songs performed live finally have the chance to, and those of us who were actually there can do it all over again. But the obvious tragedy is that it just isn't the same. Does a live show need to adhere to the rigid confines of an album's sequencing anyway? Having these artists be paid to go up there and play their songs exactly the way they were on record feels a bit like asking Dave Chappelle to do his Rick James line – it's pretty awesome, but there's so much more we could be enjoying together.

And even though the act of revisiting these albums could be seen as a celebration of the work of an artist and the bond forged between us and them, it can also be seen as strangely selfish. In a weird way, we're demanding that the artists celebrate these records on our terms. I'm assuming, too, that these artists don't really want to spend time talking about what they did decades ago, especially when many of them are still making new music. But then I consider that some of these artists wouldn't be making new music now if, at some point in the last ten years, people didn't continue clamoring for them and attending their reunion shows....

In the end, I want the artists I love to make a living, and in all honesty, I really do love when an album is played in its entirety, so I can't be all upset. It's just that there are times I wonder if I can be okay with not having the world exactly as I want it to be. Will I ever get that same fuzzy feeling again I had when I was fourteen listening to the second Meat Puppets record? Will I ever accept that my later years will never compare to the ones previous? Will I ever, ever grow up?


~ Ashraf

Nas - It Ain't Hard To Tell.mp3

* I could talk about Radiohead here, but really who hasn't already?