John Vanderslice: Welcome to the Machine
By: J. Niimi
If Plato were still alive today, he’d probably get around to telling us that the primary form of rock music is the Love Song. As usual, he would be right on the money. Love songs bridge the gap between Joe Recordbuyer and an imaginary character, Bob Rocksinger, who in real life is a Bowery junkie or a London sybarite, or maybe just some nebbish in a moldering garden apartment. In any case Bob and Joe share this belief in a vague notion called "love." This is the relation by which rock songs become universal. This is how they enter the cultural canon one set of ears at a time. It’s what we agree upon. People will never have enough of Silly Love Songs. It’s our common currency.
The higher form of the "concept album" might seem like one obvious departure from this rule. Concept Albums can be cloaked in metaphor and soundscape at times, but they’re usually just big fuzzy love symphonies in disguise. Pink Floyd’s bombastic use of English postwar imagery blurs their real heartache – the loss of their mentally snafu’d partner Syd Barrett (the ostensible subject of both The Wall and Wish You Were Here). Now, Tommy, on the other hand, is head over heels in love – but he’s crushed out on a pinball machine! That weirdo! Sounds pretty "conceptual." But in fact it’s part of another deep tradition in rock n’ roll: love songs about machines.
Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one particularly sublime example of machine love. On the surface, it appears to be a concept album about, uh, Nebraskans. But at heart, it’s about automobiles, and the people who love them. There’s a car reference weaved into the narrative of every single song. There are a billion tunes out there about cars, obviously, but Nebraska is brilliant in the way it treats the image of the automobile, as though it’s a Kodachrome from a family album we’re scared to pick up. In Nebraska the automobile functions not as an icon, but as a living character imbued with psychology, a real entity that hovers around our day-to-day existence like a creepy relative. This inert hunk of Detroit iron is part of the family, and like all family, it radiates a powerful psychic gravity, sometimes good, sometimes inscrutable. Far from being Silly Love Songs, these are painfully realistic love songs, "America’s love affair with the automobile" as dissected in divorce court.
The point here is twofold. First off, the Love Song is such a central archetype in popular music that concept albums usually fail when they abandon it. I don’t have any Styx records handy to quote from at this point (domo arigato). And I would reach for a Radiohead CD, but electricity in general makes me feel so dehumanized that I can barely make eye contact with my hi-fi these days. So I’ll just be all analog about it and cut to the chase, which is that a good love song about a machine is both as conceptual and as human as a rock song can hope to be.
John Vanderslice has a thing or two to say about machine love. Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, his most recent release, suggests concept album just by the title alone. But on this CD (his third), Vanderslice again demonstrates his wily expertise in songs that not only hold their own as pop creations, but bind together as understated and eminently listenable "albums" in the grand old, pre-CD sense of the word, when the mere act of making an album was itself both conceptual and modest. And of course, a labor of love.
What unites this with other memorable concept albums is that it’s the personal succeeding at being universal by being personal. It’s a record about the subculture of home recording, but not exactly. This wonderful ambiguity is reflected in the "FOUR TRACKER" badges given away at John Vanderslice’s most recent Chicago appearance. Its imaginary political overtones radiate: I’m a four-tracker, and I vote! Vanderslice’s conceptual ambitions are aided by his choice in subject matter: the recording of music. The topic lends itself organically to conceptualizing. On this album, the medium truly is the message - literally, the medium of magnetic recording tape. It’s a sublime proposition, really: a musical document about musical documentation, love songs about the love of recording songs.
Let’s consult the manual for a little background. Up until TEAC introduced its 4-track reel-to-reel machine in the ‘70s, home recording was mostly relegated to the primitive technology of the Panasonic cassette deck, a device that, while cheap, portable, and widely available, was ultimately designed for voice dictation. Even this modest application was hampered by its tinny, built-in condenser mic and vexing mechanical noise.
The TEAC " presented three major improvements over the cassette deck. To begin with, it had much better fidelity. It could more accurately reproduce musical sound, thanks to its high-quality tape heads and a doubled signal capacity over the 1/8" tape medium that cassettes employ. It was also compatible with industry-grade microphones, but its watershed feature was the capability of multitracking, i.e., layering multiple instruments on discrete tracks, a small-scale version of recording studio practice. The early decks were cumbersome, temperamental, and expensive contraptions that required a lot of maintenance and care. Still, they enchanted amateur musicians and whetted their appetite, setting the stage for the next era of home recording.
This was realized in the ‘80s with the unveiling of the "four-track": a self-contained little machine that combined the cheapness and ease of cassette recorders with the fidelity and flexibility of the reel-to-reel _" decks, at an affordable price. It was the audio equivalent of the slant-six engine crossed with the Gutenberg press: so simple, reliable, and foolproof, you could become a recording artist within an hour of unpacking the box. You could trade homemade albums with your friends, beat the shit out of the thing and it keeps ticking, and all at the cost of a half a day at a professional recording studio.
The four-track incubated the ‘90s indie-rock revolution in basements across America. It produced home recordists like Sebadoh and Pavement, as well as current entities like The Mountain Goats and Elliott Smith. It gave a generation of aspiring songwriters their identity. It’s at least partially due to the 4-track’s invisible hand that we have now come to take for granted the giant leap the Beatles made with Revolver, when they crossed the glass control-room barrier and took the mixing console faders (and the destiny of the indie rock aesthetic) into their own hands. The Beatles’ DIY attitute toward recording technology posited a fork-in-the-road for future songwriters: reclaim the tools of the epoch, or go the way of the dinosaur.
This living-room history provides the context for Life and Death. Its centerpiece, "Me and My 424," is a love paean to the ubiquitous Tascam four-track. This tune is only the most recent example of Vanderslice’s talent for creating austere rock songs that use humankind’s sticky relationship with technology as the backdrop for private dramas. Vanderslice’s first release, Mass Suicide Occult Figurines, contained great pop songs about the lonely underworlds of internet porn ("Bill Gates Must Die") and clandestine drug manufacture ("Speed Lab"), narrated by complex, Faulkneresque characters resigned to the baffling era they were born into. His next album, Time Travel is Lonely, retreated from modern society altogether, using the ongoing saga of a pal stationed beyond the Arctic Circle as a metaphor for everyday loneliness. The only weathervanes in the drifting whiteness are his email and his wavering GPS unit. Which would you rather have while stranded in Antarctica, if you had to choose: a compass or a telephone? Vanderslice’s universe is an existential one in which we find solace in our machines, and sometimes redemption.
The latter prospect is what makes "Me and My 424" genuinely touching. His previous ambivalence toward technology is gone, replaced with the giddy crush of high-school romance. And when it comes down to it, lonely guys are ultimately better suited to writing love songs to technology. They genuinely feel an unconditional love in their relationships with their machines. When they start using their machines to sing about real people, the soft machines, they resort to projecting and idealizing, and then they’re not really singing about love, but about pain, frustration, and failure. When your love is returned by a real person, you do the backstroke in the limpid pools of your true lover’s crystal blue eyes. When you love a machine, you relish its features, too, with lusty detail. You can get rubber in all four gears, and you just have to tell the world about it, as in the Beach Boys’ "My 409," this song’s obvious reference in title and spirit. Some of the best love songs are not about tits and ass, but tires and gas. The greasy passion of gears in a transmission box. The faithful four-track that not only listens to your fears, but transforms them. Spurred by his electric cupid and pounding piano chords, Vanderslice croons, "Say goodbye to Model II / they discontinued you / I got parts and I got spares / unlimited repairs / for my 424 / me and my 424…" He has found a soulmate in the ugly duckling, like the zit-faced gearhead from Christine. She’s real fine, my 424.
Curiously, while this album is about analog love, it’s not necessarily of analog love. That is to say, it’s unmistakably hi-fi. No tape distortion here. Contrary to the dogmatic overtones of the album’s title, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker is not a sonic Luddite’s exercise in lo-fi conservatism. Recorded at Vanderslice’s own Tiny Telephone Studio in San Francisco, the album is as stunningly rich in texture as a fairground carnival. Vanderslice’s charming melodies are deftly arranged in 16-track splendor, with a heightened awareness of chord structure and pacing. These are considerations that are too often discarded with last year’s model when home recordists upgrade to the glimmering menagerie of gear in a modern recording studio.
This subtle balance between basement and studio is the key to Life and Death’s likeability. It doesn’t sound like a Concept Album. This is a baroque construction that also recognizes the basic sanctity of the holy bass-drums-guitar trinity that created it in the first place. The expected guitar-solo breaks are replaced with organic strings, samples, and sounds, themes and saturnine variations fluidly arranged. The guitar solo did fulfill an arranging duty at one time, way back when, and only became clichéd when producers started taking it for granted. But Vanderslice finds space between verse and chorus that we didn’t know existed, and proceeds to fill it with a reverie of fictitious instruments. He is resourceful where other songwriters are gratuitous. After absorbing this album you realize what the term "psychedelic" really means when it’s attached to indie rock’s second-rate George Martin-worshippers: hookless. Vanderslice has more pop hooks in his tacklebox than a weekend angler.
Still, there’s a pointed irony in singing the virtues of tape hiss with the assistance of ProTools (digital editing gear) and other modern geegaws that make a technically competent album like this one enjoyable, let alone possible in the first place. But is it any more ironic than the blues-fanatical Rolling Stones using their unlimited largesse to book recording time at the sub-sub-tech Chess Studios, or for that matter, building a half-assed recording studio from scratch to capture that "raw," "authentic" sound on Exile on Main Street? These are ironies, for sure, but they’re also techno-forget-me-nots, romantic odes to rough-and-tumble technology that was a straight-up pain-in-the-ass from time to time, like Tom Waits’ old ’55 Ford must have been, but which in memory never lose their talismanic power. Just like any first love. Just like any good love song.
At one point Vanderslice makes a lyrical connection between the fourtracker’s daily descent to the basement den-cum-Abbey Road and the image in Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Behind the plastic buttons of the 424, our hero becomes the subject and object, the naked model, the apprentice, the abstractor all in one. He understands the palette of the cassette four-track in Cubist terms. "It’s not really four tracks / ‘cause you can add and you can subtract," presenting the tape deck as the Ginsu that slices up the soundtrack of his reality. Take a look under the hood. Four tracks, four dimensions. The tape reel crawls forward in a vector of time. Dimension is math and math is destroyed. A bare light bulb swings. The artist is "Shell-shocked and pale gray / with a box of TDKs," like poor Vincent in his dingy Arles garret, portraiture in rented paint. But it’s true love, no martyrdom or longing, just modest fulfillment, magnetic communion. True, the garret did have a wonderful afternoon sunlight. But when your subject matter is your own hands, you can paint in the dark.
By: J. Niimi
If Plato were still alive today, he’d probably get around to telling us that the primary form of rock music is the Love Song. As usual, he would be right on the money. Love songs bridge the gap between Joe Recordbuyer and an imaginary character, Bob Rocksinger, who in real life is a Bowery junkie or a London sybarite, or maybe just some nebbish in a moldering garden apartment. In any case Bob and Joe share this belief in a vague notion called "love." This is the relation by which rock songs become universal. This is how they enter the cultural canon one set of ears at a time. It’s what we agree upon. People will never have enough of Silly Love Songs. It’s our common currency.
The higher form of the "concept album" might seem like one obvious departure from this rule. Concept Albums can be cloaked in metaphor and soundscape at times, but they’re usually just big fuzzy love symphonies in disguise. Pink Floyd’s bombastic use of English postwar imagery blurs their real heartache – the loss of their mentally snafu’d partner Syd Barrett (the ostensible subject of both The Wall and Wish You Were Here). Now, Tommy, on the other hand, is head over heels in love – but he’s crushed out on a pinball machine! That weirdo! Sounds pretty "conceptual." But in fact it’s part of another deep tradition in rock n’ roll: love songs about machines.
Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one particularly sublime example of machine love. On the surface, it appears to be a concept album about, uh, Nebraskans. But at heart, it’s about automobiles, and the people who love them. There’s a car reference weaved into the narrative of every single song. There are a billion tunes out there about cars, obviously, but Nebraska is brilliant in the way it treats the image of the automobile, as though it’s a Kodachrome from a family album we’re scared to pick up. In Nebraska the automobile functions not as an icon, but as a living character imbued with psychology, a real entity that hovers around our day-to-day existence like a creepy relative. This inert hunk of Detroit iron is part of the family, and like all family, it radiates a powerful psychic gravity, sometimes good, sometimes inscrutable. Far from being Silly Love Songs, these are painfully realistic love songs, "America’s love affair with the automobile" as dissected in divorce court.
The point here is twofold. First off, the Love Song is such a central archetype in popular music that concept albums usually fail when they abandon it. I don’t have any Styx records handy to quote from at this point (domo arigato). And I would reach for a Radiohead CD, but electricity in general makes me feel so dehumanized that I can barely make eye contact with my hi-fi these days. So I’ll just be all analog about it and cut to the chase, which is that a good love song about a machine is both as conceptual and as human as a rock song can hope to be.
John Vanderslice has a thing or two to say about machine love. Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, his most recent release, suggests concept album just by the title alone. But on this CD (his third), Vanderslice again demonstrates his wily expertise in songs that not only hold their own as pop creations, but bind together as understated and eminently listenable "albums" in the grand old, pre-CD sense of the word, when the mere act of making an album was itself both conceptual and modest. And of course, a labor of love.
What unites this with other memorable concept albums is that it’s the personal succeeding at being universal by being personal. It’s a record about the subculture of home recording, but not exactly. This wonderful ambiguity is reflected in the "FOUR TRACKER" badges given away at John Vanderslice’s most recent Chicago appearance. Its imaginary political overtones radiate: I’m a four-tracker, and I vote! Vanderslice’s conceptual ambitions are aided by his choice in subject matter: the recording of music. The topic lends itself organically to conceptualizing. On this album, the medium truly is the message - literally, the medium of magnetic recording tape. It’s a sublime proposition, really: a musical document about musical documentation, love songs about the love of recording songs.
Let’s consult the manual for a little background. Up until TEAC introduced its 4-track reel-to-reel machine in the ‘70s, home recording was mostly relegated to the primitive technology of the Panasonic cassette deck, a device that, while cheap, portable, and widely available, was ultimately designed for voice dictation. Even this modest application was hampered by its tinny, built-in condenser mic and vexing mechanical noise.
The TEAC " presented three major improvements over the cassette deck. To begin with, it had much better fidelity. It could more accurately reproduce musical sound, thanks to its high-quality tape heads and a doubled signal capacity over the 1/8" tape medium that cassettes employ. It was also compatible with industry-grade microphones, but its watershed feature was the capability of multitracking, i.e., layering multiple instruments on discrete tracks, a small-scale version of recording studio practice. The early decks were cumbersome, temperamental, and expensive contraptions that required a lot of maintenance and care. Still, they enchanted amateur musicians and whetted their appetite, setting the stage for the next era of home recording.
This was realized in the ‘80s with the unveiling of the "four-track": a self-contained little machine that combined the cheapness and ease of cassette recorders with the fidelity and flexibility of the reel-to-reel _" decks, at an affordable price. It was the audio equivalent of the slant-six engine crossed with the Gutenberg press: so simple, reliable, and foolproof, you could become a recording artist within an hour of unpacking the box. You could trade homemade albums with your friends, beat the shit out of the thing and it keeps ticking, and all at the cost of a half a day at a professional recording studio.
The four-track incubated the ‘90s indie-rock revolution in basements across America. It produced home recordists like Sebadoh and Pavement, as well as current entities like The Mountain Goats and Elliott Smith. It gave a generation of aspiring songwriters their identity. It’s at least partially due to the 4-track’s invisible hand that we have now come to take for granted the giant leap the Beatles made with Revolver, when they crossed the glass control-room barrier and took the mixing console faders (and the destiny of the indie rock aesthetic) into their own hands. The Beatles’ DIY attitute toward recording technology posited a fork-in-the-road for future songwriters: reclaim the tools of the epoch, or go the way of the dinosaur.
This living-room history provides the context for Life and Death. Its centerpiece, "Me and My 424," is a love paean to the ubiquitous Tascam four-track. This tune is only the most recent example of Vanderslice’s talent for creating austere rock songs that use humankind’s sticky relationship with technology as the backdrop for private dramas. Vanderslice’s first release, Mass Suicide Occult Figurines, contained great pop songs about the lonely underworlds of internet porn ("Bill Gates Must Die") and clandestine drug manufacture ("Speed Lab"), narrated by complex, Faulkneresque characters resigned to the baffling era they were born into. His next album, Time Travel is Lonely, retreated from modern society altogether, using the ongoing saga of a pal stationed beyond the Arctic Circle as a metaphor for everyday loneliness. The only weathervanes in the drifting whiteness are his email and his wavering GPS unit. Which would you rather have while stranded in Antarctica, if you had to choose: a compass or a telephone? Vanderslice’s universe is an existential one in which we find solace in our machines, and sometimes redemption.
The latter prospect is what makes "Me and My 424" genuinely touching. His previous ambivalence toward technology is gone, replaced with the giddy crush of high-school romance. And when it comes down to it, lonely guys are ultimately better suited to writing love songs to technology. They genuinely feel an unconditional love in their relationships with their machines. When they start using their machines to sing about real people, the soft machines, they resort to projecting and idealizing, and then they’re not really singing about love, but about pain, frustration, and failure. When your love is returned by a real person, you do the backstroke in the limpid pools of your true lover’s crystal blue eyes. When you love a machine, you relish its features, too, with lusty detail. You can get rubber in all four gears, and you just have to tell the world about it, as in the Beach Boys’ "My 409," this song’s obvious reference in title and spirit. Some of the best love songs are not about tits and ass, but tires and gas. The greasy passion of gears in a transmission box. The faithful four-track that not only listens to your fears, but transforms them. Spurred by his electric cupid and pounding piano chords, Vanderslice croons, "Say goodbye to Model II / they discontinued you / I got parts and I got spares / unlimited repairs / for my 424 / me and my 424…" He has found a soulmate in the ugly duckling, like the zit-faced gearhead from Christine. She’s real fine, my 424.
Curiously, while this album is about analog love, it’s not necessarily of analog love. That is to say, it’s unmistakably hi-fi. No tape distortion here. Contrary to the dogmatic overtones of the album’s title, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker is not a sonic Luddite’s exercise in lo-fi conservatism. Recorded at Vanderslice’s own Tiny Telephone Studio in San Francisco, the album is as stunningly rich in texture as a fairground carnival. Vanderslice’s charming melodies are deftly arranged in 16-track splendor, with a heightened awareness of chord structure and pacing. These are considerations that are too often discarded with last year’s model when home recordists upgrade to the glimmering menagerie of gear in a modern recording studio.
This subtle balance between basement and studio is the key to Life and Death’s likeability. It doesn’t sound like a Concept Album. This is a baroque construction that also recognizes the basic sanctity of the holy bass-drums-guitar trinity that created it in the first place. The expected guitar-solo breaks are replaced with organic strings, samples, and sounds, themes and saturnine variations fluidly arranged. The guitar solo did fulfill an arranging duty at one time, way back when, and only became clichéd when producers started taking it for granted. But Vanderslice finds space between verse and chorus that we didn’t know existed, and proceeds to fill it with a reverie of fictitious instruments. He is resourceful where other songwriters are gratuitous. After absorbing this album you realize what the term "psychedelic" really means when it’s attached to indie rock’s second-rate George Martin-worshippers: hookless. Vanderslice has more pop hooks in his tacklebox than a weekend angler.
Still, there’s a pointed irony in singing the virtues of tape hiss with the assistance of ProTools (digital editing gear) and other modern geegaws that make a technically competent album like this one enjoyable, let alone possible in the first place. But is it any more ironic than the blues-fanatical Rolling Stones using their unlimited largesse to book recording time at the sub-sub-tech Chess Studios, or for that matter, building a half-assed recording studio from scratch to capture that "raw," "authentic" sound on Exile on Main Street? These are ironies, for sure, but they’re also techno-forget-me-nots, romantic odes to rough-and-tumble technology that was a straight-up pain-in-the-ass from time to time, like Tom Waits’ old ’55 Ford must have been, but which in memory never lose their talismanic power. Just like any first love. Just like any good love song.
At one point Vanderslice makes a lyrical connection between the fourtracker’s daily descent to the basement den-cum-Abbey Road and the image in Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Behind the plastic buttons of the 424, our hero becomes the subject and object, the naked model, the apprentice, the abstractor all in one. He understands the palette of the cassette four-track in Cubist terms. "It’s not really four tracks / ‘cause you can add and you can subtract," presenting the tape deck as the Ginsu that slices up the soundtrack of his reality. Take a look under the hood. Four tracks, four dimensions. The tape reel crawls forward in a vector of time. Dimension is math and math is destroyed. A bare light bulb swings. The artist is "Shell-shocked and pale gray / with a box of TDKs," like poor Vincent in his dingy Arles garret, portraiture in rented paint. But it’s true love, no martyrdom or longing, just modest fulfillment, magnetic communion. True, the garret did have a wonderful afternoon sunlight. But when your subject matter is your own hands, you can paint in the dark.