Meet Me In The Bathroom (And Please Hold My Hair)

I saw it at the library and so I picked it up. Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzie Goodman. I liked a lot of that music, and I'm a sucker for a lightweight music oral history. I'm only about halfway through it, but the book's fine. It's entertaining enough, even if it does have all the drawbacks that come with an oral history (limited POV, context, etc.). For example, no one mentions the privilege involved in sustaining that kind of lifestyle, or the advantages that said privileges gave the ambitious privileged over the ambitious underprivilege. There's also some rough spots early on where people talk about how the only thing going on in NYC during the early 90's was hip-hop. Public Enemy and De La Soul are mentioned, but we never hear anything about Wu-Tang, or Jay-Z, or Nas. Just a weirdly jarring line about NYC white kids sitting out the 90's. Apparently, when Jonathan Fire Eater (I'm not looking up where to put the asterisk) started around 97-98, it was a revelation to NYC people that an indie rock band could be in NYC, to which I immediately went wait a second, and off the top of my head thought of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Luscious Jackson, and Soul Coughing. And wasn't Yo La Tengo in Hoboken the entire decade? And didn't Pavement live there?

Whatever. We're not here today to write a book review, or pick apart the holes in people's coked-out memories. We're here to make fun of James Murphy, the master-mound behind LCD Soundsystem. Back when he's still house producer for the nascent DFA Records (the seeds of which were planted when a wealthy NYU undergrad asked his dad to buy him a building in Manhattan so music and film people would be friends with him--I obviously went to the wrong college).

So Murphy is working on this album with some hot shit UK guy, who according to Simon Reynolds (who apparently is this blog's favorite punching bag this week--no hard feelings, Simon!), was like, really into movie soundtracks. Hold on, let me go find the quote.

David Holmes is one of those guys who is obsessed with soundtracks.... And David Holmes, even though he is from Northern Ireland, was part of that crate digging, and creating-a-soundtrack-without-a-movie scene. All these people are film buffs, too, but for the soundtracks.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of laughs. Anyway, so Holmes is working on his album in NYC with Murphy when Holmes has the audacity, the FUCKING AUDACITY, to tell Murphy he wants to do a record that sounds like Can. Murphy is having none of that shit in his goddamn studio. Says the Murph:

I was really offended by that. Can were people who worked at the Musee Arteum and the keyboard player won the best young conductor award in Europe and as his reward he traveled to New York and met the Dream Syndicate people (blogger note: La Monte Young, not Steve Wynn) and John Cale and it blew his mind and he went back and formed a band with the best free-jazz drummer in Europe and they payed together eight hours a day in a house with no distractions. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Now beyond the stunning lack of punctuation, everything about this is complete and total hilarious horseshit. If Holmes had said to him, I want to do what Can did and create a type of music that sounds like nothing ever heard before in the history of recorded sound, then yes, he would have to do something like that. But as far as sounding like Can, he doesn't have to do any of that. He can just, uh, put on a Can record. Can you imagine recording with Murphy and saying, I kinda want to try to do something Beatles-esque here, and having him start screaming WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?, and then going on this rant about how you have to go to Liverpool and start a skiffle band, and your mom has to get run over by an off-duty policeman, and then you go to Hamburg for two years, before coming back to Liverpool and waiting for a gay businessman to catch your lunch time set--like what the actual fuck? Wouldn't you just be like, nah James, I was just thinking I'd plug into this Vox amp and maybe do some cool harmonies instead.

This could actually be a recurring sketch on a TV show that nobody on earth would want to watch. Great Studio Moments With James Murphy. Next week, he could have a guitarist who wants a tone "like Kurt Cobain had on Nevermind." Murphy starts screaming at him to go sleep under a bridge a couple of times and befriend the tall goofy kid in high school class. The guitarist is like, how about I just get a distortion pedal and mix it with a little chorus?

What's most amazing about James Murphy's Theory On How Art Is Made, is that I'm fairly certain that when Murphy recorded Someone Great, he didn't form a post-punk band, wait for the singer to hang himself on the eve of their first US tour, then form a new band with the surviving members, and then embrace electronics. He just went, I think on this one I'll sound like New Order. What a fucking weirdo. And just so we're clear, at no point in this story does Murphy sheepishly go, "Yeah, I was kind of a stupid dickbag when I was younger." He is telling this story in recollection, as a grown person reflecting on his past.