Digital Dump

TR: Do you think something like SST could operate today?

JC: You have to assume anything is possible. Watt used to say regarding finding greatness in unlikely places or formats, ‘It's down to the dudes’. But then you can easily think up alot of reasons why nothing could ever happen again like that. Musically we'll never come off the same twenty year, or even 80 year period we were in 1975. It was a world-historical meeting of a post-African black American music that had incubated for three hundred years before the civil war, and unlike in the Caribbean and South America, in North America the slave drivers took away the slave's drums. That probably accounts for the starker more rhythmic use of string instruments here than elsewhere. Then they ran into Spanish and Scots-Irish and English forms, the hymnals and the bawdy ballads, story songs etc. And finally the broadcast and phono media began to move the music out of its folk circumstance and into other places where it could be taken as pure music. Just that was a process that took the twentieth century. None of that and nothing like that will ever be a launching base for a new music again. Now the bottlenecks of those media are gone under the hammer blows of the internet revolution. Its not that major label help is necessary; we had none of that. But it does help if great musicians can be launched at a large audience that takes what they do as important. The web works against that. Even so, where do you find the dudes we had crawling out of the woodwork? Even given all of them I think if you subtract Greg Ginn from it the only thing that happens is those early bands on SST just go new wave like everybody else.

TR: You think The Minutemen or Overkill would have gone New Wave?

JC: (snipped) ...But Husker Du, Firehose, Meat Puppets in particular wasted everybody's time at the end of the eighties.

Dogs and cats play in the long grass. You run with them, and then continue on to the Land of Comfortable Beds. You jump on all the beds to try them out. You bump into your favorite teacher of all time, and the two of you have a heartfelt talk about philosophy, poetry, and peanut butter. The kids at the Floating Treehouse have begged you for souvenir, so you bring them back pillows from the Pillow Tree. A faraway light appears, like a comet falling to earth. You cross lagoons and prairies and come to a glowing crater. You see the face of someone that you used to know, confused and wandering. You run to them. THE END