A LIST OF THINGS WE LOST
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
LIKE A RECORD, BABY, RIGHT ROUND, ROUND ROUND
A while back I stumbled upon this in a box of random buys - you know, the kind where you're thumbing & thumbing, thinking, over & over again, "Why did I buy this huge lot of crappy records?" until you pull out the one that has all these weird-ass Fluxus folks doing spoken word, recordings of semiotic theory lectures & out pieces like "Typewriter in D" and "How To Make Love To A Sound." It's got William Borroughs and Buckminster Fuller. It's called Revolutions Per Minute (The Art Record) [Charing Hill 1982]. That sounds promising. There are gnomic, philologic-philosophic pangyrics scattered among post-punky musical selections & even some country. So you think, "Hm... this isn't so crappy..." Then you see that it's signed by the producers, Jeff and Juanita Gordon; then you check up on it & you see it's worth a good couple-a Benjamins.
What, you mean you never have those kind of days?
This was about two years ago. Then, just this summer, my good friend Christopher Z. Gordon (you might know him better as the manager of the fiery Randall, he of deep, unending animal observations) sent me a press release for a gallery show that his dad was curating. It was based on the similarly-assembled Andy Warhol tribute titled 15 Minutes, which was released as an art-and-music multi-disc set last spring by Sony (and which, coincidentally, I reviewed briefly in conjunction with the opening). That set was co-produced by Jeff Gordon, the same one (I assumed) who'd produced Revolutions Per Minute.
Wait - Chris Gordon... Jeff Gordon... I'd always known his dad was an artist. But such a common last name that I never made the connection. A few emails later, & it turns out I'd been drinking & smoking & playing punk rock with Jeff Gordon's son for the last decade. Crazy, man, crazy.
Also turns out that Jeff doesn't have his own copy of R.P.M. and isn't so hip to turntables any more, but the request came through for a CD copy - one I was more than happy to oblige. In so doing, I figured there was no reason not to help spread the brilliance & include it on the List.
True to form, there are indeed many revolutions - as well as devolutions, evolutions and convolutions - every minute on this behemoth of a collection. Thanks to Jeff & Juanita Gordon for assembling 30 years ago, & to Chris for helping me get it together in the 21st Century to post!
Turn the beat around.
What, you mean you never have those kind of days?
Wait - Chris Gordon... Jeff Gordon... I'd always known his dad was an artist. But such a common last name that I never made the connection. A few emails later, & it turns out I'd been drinking & smoking & playing punk rock with Jeff Gordon's son for the last decade. Crazy, man, crazy.
Also turns out that Jeff doesn't have his own copy of R.P.M. and isn't so hip to turntables any more, but the request came through for a CD copy - one I was more than happy to oblige. In so doing, I figured there was no reason not to help spread the brilliance & include it on the List.
True to form, there are indeed many revolutions - as well as devolutions, evolutions and convolutions - every minute on this behemoth of a collection. Thanks to Jeff & Juanita Gordon for assembling 30 years ago, & to Chris for helping me get it together in the 21st Century to post!
Turn the beat around.
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