What? Music? 20

What? Music? 20

This particular song ties so many things together. During the last century there were juke boxes in all the bars full of 45 RPM singles. The place where you interfaced with the Juke box might be all full of mirrors and you could see the little records mechanically take their place on the turntable. Kids in pizza joints used to get quarters from their mom and go pick the same song over and over. I used to day drink in this place where I occasionally worked as a door guy. Iowa City is kind of a famous writer town. One day I met this guy who, when I walked in the door was hanging his face over the juke box with a pitcher of beer in one hand, playing old country tunes and crying, and swaying. He eventually came and sat at the bar where I had posted up and told me who he was. He was a little older than me. He’d had a newspaper career and then published a book that had done pretty well. His literary agent had talked him into coming to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop to make connections with people who were going to be the famous novelists of tomorrow. He hated it. Years before that I had worked at this restaurant/bar that tolerated the staff staying locked in all night to drink and listen to records. We listened to this record called Maxinquaye by this British dude who went by Tricky. Built into some of the beats was what I assumed was the scratchy middle of records. When the music is over on an LP if you have a player that doesn’t return the stylus to the start it stays in the middle of the record and spins and spins the same little set of dust bunnies and scratches over and over until you get to it and lift the needle. There were these scratchy bits buried in the beats on that record that I assumed came from that spinning phenomenon. Anything takes on a groove you can rock to after a high number of repetitions. The skips are the time. There was a revelation in there about the distinction we probably all make between music and noise and how it was arbitrary- the distinction was arbitrary. I bought records of bands I liked and played them and drunkenly scratched the ones I liked to play the most, because drunkenly. But I loved some of the less interuptive scratches. They became part of the music. I imagine a couple both putting their drunken heads into the window of the jukebox and seeing each others faces reflected from odd angles, picking something sweet to listen to and swaying there. And the thing they pick to listen to is a 45 that is a little beat from living in a jukebox in a bar where people bump around it dancing or heading to the pisser. In a perfect world all the scratches on a 45 like that are the result of pristine timing guided by nothing but the music itself, like a landscape scalloped with the evidentiary trails of dancing human traverse. A 45 with Every Skip in Time Are there things you wish you’d left to do? Are there things you’d left undone? ‘Cus my life begins and ends with you and I have just begun a 45 with every skip in time. Well it’s ring around we used to do til the lights of closing time. And the juke box mirror shows me you and we play it one more time- a 45 with every skip in time. I had at the time of recording this just started playing with Ryan Bernemann. He was out of college and starting to get things going for himself and he had this recording gear, nothing too fancy, but he had it, and I was writing so I asked if we could do some recording at his place. We recorded this one and then his girlfriend [now wife] and one of her friends were recruited to put on a string part that he wrote. Laura Goddard and Laura something else. I no longer have any copies of this record. I purchased the recording off the Internet this morning. I bought and downloaded the whole album. It was cheap for me because the money I spent on it mostly just deposited back in my account. It will be more expensive for you, but if you are touched by this recording, and I mean.. how couldn’t you be… you should go to the Bandcamp link on this page and buy yourself access to the whole thing. The first one is always free kid. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com [https://samknu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

What? Music? 40

This one is from the cutting room floor. Ten years ago, I had started this project. It was big and musical and it was a group of friends and we traveled and played and it ran out of steam, and I chose not to continue to push, for many reasons. I had started working on what I was determined would be a record. It became Donkey Island. We recorded on and off for more than a year before letting it languish in digital silence for a decade. There are a bunch of songs that didn't make the cut for one reason or another-feelings at the time, changes in the metaphorical wind that might blind one to goodness. I wrote some advicey and explainy songs and some funny ones. If Andrew Brockman had got to choose what songs were on that record. This one would have been on. There were a number of things that, given the lense that is the passage of time, although I disagreed then, Andrew was right about. When someone is fussy it's the absolutely wrong time to tell them to calm down. You may have noticed this as well. A thing you can do is step back and process and then write a catchy little song about it, as a friendly reminder a body can carrying their mind's ear. I wrote this for one person to hear, but it is for everyone really. Here, take it Ain't often enough said, but it's not he less true. It's the worry that get's you, not what's worrying you. So pull your hair back. Get the sun on your skin cuz the day's about over. The night's about to begin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com [https://samknu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

What? Music? 39

I wrote this song when I was 25. For the record, I got carded for cigarettes until I was 29. I was by all accounts a kid when I was 25. I did not have financial goals or complex responsibilities. I had to make rent and I needed beer money. The rest of my head space was taken up with dreams. Kids dream differently from grown-ups. The way you imagine the world as a young person is similar to a dream. You don't know enough to understand the world with any depth and you deduce the rest. It seems fully fledged but it will be decades before you realize how half hatched it all is. And your limited understanding makes your dreams seem almost as real as real stuff. Young people maintain that sense of whimsy and pass it around. Some people seem stodgey from the onset. This song is the story of an accidentally successful messianic figure. I knew enough to know I wouldn't want to continue to be observed as an authority about anything in the spring of my adulthood. I recently put the album this song was first on onto Bandcamp and decided to learn it and make a recording with gear from the 21st century. Mudfence Turnaround has songs on it, recodings that are more than 30 years old. It has promise. I found myself liking it. It's funny to look back and find yourself astute. Thirty years gives a piece of art long enough to lose the relevance of being “contemporary” in a specific time. This one still works. well I waited and waited for the word to come. I got tired of waiting so I started to hum. I came to a thought.wrote me a line. gave it significance and called it a sign. maybe it's me. I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all. now people come around just to hear me give 'em that line. I got fat I got settled. I get laid all the time. I know I believed it when i first wrote it down, but now I don't go over to that side of town. maybe it's me.I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all. they built me a city and they built me a road, and they built me a wall around the truth I had told, and I got three squares and a chair and the details are out of my hair. they call me an institution and say that you gotta go there. maybe it's me. I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all. now, I don't wanna tell 'em that I changed my mind or that this kind of thing happens to me all the time, but truth as a vehicle has called it a day. now show me to the hole in the wall and thanks anyway. maybe it's me. I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all. Ultimately, I escaped. Here's a link to the Bandcamp: https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/mudfence-turnaround And a video link- https://youtu.be/pYflZR6WT8s?si=9z69T00JF_CxKfvU This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com [https://samknu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

What? Music? 38

I'd say well over 90 percent of the time I'm entirely unaware of how much of a self satisfied, egotistical prick I am. I think if I knew it all the time I'd be crippled by the notion. Oh, and I am well aware that that's a deprecating limiting description intended to keep me from going on as I am that I regurgitate from having heard humans, trusted loved ones and or strangers describe each other that way. I know I'm not one, but for how I could be described as such, and only by me. That is to say, you can't call me that. You'd be wrong, but… I mean… we all know who we are dealing with here. A cool thing about art is we get to distill things with it. An even cooler thing about art is that we are all artists doing art all the time. Regardless of how regimentedly you present yourself, at a fundamental level we are all winging it out here. Trying to be present and process all the stimulus is too much. It won't be tried. So we build ourselves an artsy little style of perception with limits and guidelines and processes from within ourselves as a result of how we have understood what we've been through so far. We dress and go out and maybe try to be normal with only a passing understanding of what that means and we paint it as we think it should be. It's an art. Everybody out here is different from everybody else out here and some of us are faking it that we’re not. What does this have to do with ‘If I Leave’? I have no recollection of putting it together, and it's well pulled off, I think. It's a thing I did one time. I can hear the cigarettes and it feels both speedy and sloppy. I bet aderol and bourbon and weed and beer and cigarettes were all involved. I had the good sense to press record, but it has a sort of accidental and stumbly quality that I find (found) charming about myself and that- all of it is so unselfconciously gloriously blues-prick which is a thing that was wrong with me, a thing I have stepped out of and now shake my head to look at… But it's beautiful. Like finding a picture of some cute 80s rocker boy and not immediately realizing it is yourself. Narcissis snapping out of it. If I leave I ain't never coming back t stay again. If I leave I ain’t never coming back to stay. cuzThere ain't enough whiskey to keep that woman off my mind. Ain't enough whiskey to keep that woman off my mind. So there ain't nothin left to do but go away my friends. Ain’t nothin left to do but go away. See the moon is a key to every woman's heart see that big old February moon up there in the day. You can hide from the moon in a pint of whiskey. You can hide from the moon in a pint of rye.if you run from the moon you hafta keep on running, and whistle a happy tune while your life goes by. Cuz if I leave I ain'tna come back to stay again. If I leave I ain't never coming back to stay. Cuz there ain't enough women to keep that whiskey off my mind. Ain't enough women to keep that whiskey off my mind. Ain't nothing left to do but just go away my friends. There ain't nothin left to do but just go away. There ain't nothin left to do but just go away. The first collecting of musical things I made after the band Shame Train had ceased to be a thing was Re-inventing the Wheel which is available exclusively on Bandcamp at the other end of this link. https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/re-inventing-the-wheel It is a nice collection of mostly me playing acoustic instruments with a few helpers and Circle Dance which is 100% the band Shame Train in the studio. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com [https://samknu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

What? Music? 37

Sometimes things become more than what they were created to be. Maybe more often than not. That’s a tough one to guage… in a general sense… about created things. Lets go with songs. I’m not certain Bob Dylan wrote, Blowin in the Wind to be performed as a hymn for a generation in flux. I think he was just a kid who thought of himself as a man that was tired of being looked at as a kid. All he really wanted was a pepsi.* This song takes place in a real bar and describes real events. But like all bars the events that go on within this one have a serial quality like an ongoing television drama, a soap opera. The characters are the same. The roles they play have the same events but they are played by successive generations of bar people- regulars. You can go through any life in the bar, or from nealry any theater of events and select some hapennings that caught your attention or seemed worthy of it and nearly everyone will have had some connection to said event. A bar that the same 30 people go to every night has -24 degrees of separation. It’s an incestuous pit of repeating events. The song describes getting kicked out of a place you used to go, that you have returned to to see if someone you used to know is there. The bar itself is now gone. Kicked out as it were. It had been a car dealership and service place, then a restaurant bar with music in the back- a venue I saw folk club legends in before I even knew there was such a thing. I saw Eddy Adcock and Paul Geremia and Jaimey Maysfield in there. I saw Greg Brown in there dozens of times. I eventually saw some killer indy rock shows there. Things turn. In truth I was never kicked out of the Mill, but I certainly could have been. I got to be a rock star in there, and a total degenerate. And the hotel is not that far. And this song is now, to me a touchstone to a place that tons of people loved like a forever love. Once it was a story about some things that happened in a place that you could go. But now that that place is gone it's like a magic trick like a beacon so you can see a place that's not there but is still real… and not just to me. I can’t play this box of wood the way I usedta could in the history of this bar, plus it’s no longer where you are. In a minor way, I’m glad I stopped in there today. Bartender set me up again. Treat me like a friend. Here’s eight dollars. keep the change. Boy if our lives were rearranged, would you still be fine if you exchanged your world for mine. Yes I burned one in the john, but the fan was on so it seemed alright to me. Now you say it’s time for me to leave. Well, here’s a dollar more. I’ll just make my way toward the door. No one even bats an eye while some wasted guy pours himself into a car. I hope the hotel ain't too far. Ain't the moon a sight. I’m glad I stopped in there tonight. I can’t play this box of wood the way I used to could in the history of this bar plus it’s no longer where you are in a minor way. The funny thing is this- I have played this song regularly since before I quit playing and I always play it out since I started playing out again, but there are (were) no recordings of it and it’s not on a collection of any sort so here- The definitive one, I guess and a nice video: https://youtu.be/Jh7cvQJvOmQ?si=xnBRS73_ZQ8iKgT7 Crackle crackle It's free! *https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AdUBTE9JpgI&pp=ygUxc3VpY2lkYWwgdGVuZGVuY2llcyBpbnN0aXR1dGlvbmFsaXplZCBtdXNpYyB2aWRlbw%3D%3D This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com [https://samknu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]