Author Archives: Jon Chaisson

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About Jon Chaisson

Author, blogger, music collector, cat wrangler. May contain trace amounts of sugar and caffeine. Books available at Smashwords!

Walk in Silence 2

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We all go through that weird phase when we’re kids — you know the one, where we get that feeling that we don’t quite fit in, that we’re scared of our own individuality, even more scared of having it seen by others who are quick to judge us.  We do our best to fit in the best we can, in our own ways, to varying levels of success.  Some of us easily fit in anywhere and with anyone, we have a healthy sense of being in charge of ourselves.  Others don’t worry about it and take everything as it comes.  And some of us are all too aware of who we might be, but can’t quite find a niche to place ourselves in.

I’d say I was the third case, because from a relatively early age — probably first grade, come to think of it — I was aware that I wasn’t quite on the level with the other kids in my class.  Intellectually I was probably a year ahead (and I don’t mean that in an egotistical way — in retrospect I feel I should have been a year ahead, for reasons I’ll get into later).  Socially, maybe on the same level, maybe a few leagues behind.  There was also the name recognition — I was the son of a well-known local historian and reporter with three older sisters, so I already had an expectation to live up to.  I also joked that I could never get away with anything growing up, because my parents would find out before I even got home.  [This actually happened a few times in my teens.  News travels fast in a small town.]  So there I was, mid-80s, feeling just that bit out of place — getting along with almost anyone, irritating some and annoying others, a do-gooder that couldn’t get away with anything, an average-grade student who was expected to be better, who was easily influenced for good or ill, out of boredom and impatience.

Still, that didn’t stop me from being the go-to person when someone needed to talk music.  I still went to all the school dances and moved around on the floor like a total idiot to my favorite songs, and completely failed to get any slow dances (mostly my own damn fault for not asking in the first place).

So with that, and with a few years’ worth of MTV and radio in my brain, I was ready and rearing to go.  I started listening to American Top 40 on a frequent basis, taping songs onto ‘radio tapes’ that I could listen to at a later time.

Socially, I wasn’t quite sure where the hell I was, to be honest.  I floated from one group to another over the years.  Like most people, The kids I hung with in elementary school had long ago moved on.  New friendships upon hitting fifth grade and a new school, where I met up with other kids from different neighborhoods.  Then junior high (seventh and eighth grade) with even more new faces.

It was in seventh grade that I met up with one of my buddies that I’d spend the next few  years hanging with.  Kevin was a kid from Royalston, the small town north of us that we shared upper grades with.  He and I met basically because we were often one right after the other in homeroom and other classes.  We were both music nerds and, well, nerds in general, so we got on swimmingly.  We were both well-read in the MTV department and knew most of the popular songs out there in the mid-80s.

There were two other people I met that year that would leave an impression on me as well.  One was Scott, who I knew tangentially through a kid named Bobby who lived around the corner from us when I was younger.  Scott and I kind of knew each other in sixth grade through band, but by the next year we were hanging out now and again.  H ewas the one who decided we should become writers, and set about stealing random sheets of lined paper from the front of the class so we would write our stories.  It was during this time that I’d come up with a ‘what if there was a war in my home town’ story — started right about the same time Red Dawn came out, but actually inspired by the ongoing Cold War news of the day.*  Out of those study-hall writing sessions came what would eventually be called Caught in the Game, and more recently referred to as the Infamous War Novel — I’ll be referring to it as the IWN from here on in.

The third person was actually someone a grade ahead of me — Chris, who I quickly found was interested in music almost to the obsessive level I was.  We had no classes together, but we shared a couple of study halls and also helped with the junior high newspaper (such as it was).  He also had a hankering for the occasional story telling, writing one or two short stories that I still have in my files.  But as he was a year ahead, he’d vanish out of my sight for a couple of years until a fateful meet-up in early 1986.**

 

But…that’s pretty much my entire life up to that point.  Not muc to mention other than some good friends, and not much else to report in this small town of mine.  Hang out with the last few remaining kids from the neighborhood, that’s pretty much it.***  In a small town of about ten thousand people and nearly ten times as many trees, one made do with whatever was on hand back in those days.

By 1985, however, I was getting itchy.  At fourteen, I was at that age where I felt I had to start moving on.  I’d grown out of the immature humor and the friendly roughhousing. I was starting to lose interest in the subjects I had to focus on.  At first it was thought it might have been eyesight and a need for glasses (slightly clearer vision, but no real improvement), and then suggested maybe it was just immaturity and too much focus on frivolous things.  No one in the area had any idea what ADHD was, so that wasn’t even brought up.  It wasn’t until a few years into my high school years that it wasn’t any of this — it was a much simpler issue.

I was bored.

Added to the fact that I was seen as a student of intellect when I was younger, why was I slacking off now?  It was because I was confined.  I didn’t figure it out right away, but I knew something was there.  I was smart, I just hated to be confined to an education track that was too slow for me.  Why did I not say anything at the time?  Well, even that was confining.  Expectations, really.  As a kid I was all too willing to do what was expected of me.  Call it Catholic guilt, call it not wanting to rock the boat.  There were all sorts of rasons.

But really — it was all becoming old hat.  Stuck being the goody two shoes out of honor and expectation.  Wanting to strike out and doing something completely unique and unexpected of me.

But what?

 

* – This story was also inspired by the Cold War-themed music out there at the time.  Music was a huge inspiration for my writing even then.  My writing attempts actually started earlier, around 1980 or so, with at least a dozen ideas that were fleshed out in my head but never expanded upon.

** – I should also mention that Chris and I are related distantly, which was part of our impetus for meeting.  I’m not entirely sure of the connection, but I believe his grandfather and my grandfather were cousins or something like that.

*** – I was one of the youngest kids in the neighborhood growing up, so I was usually the annoying tag-along kid brother.

Being There

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I was thinking the other day about how all our musical heroes, however big or small, have passed away in the last few months…Prince, Bowie, Lemmy, Maurice White, etc…and even in the past few decades, like Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, George Harrison, and so on.  It’s sad and it bothers us when they leave our realm.

At the same time, however, I started thinking just how incredibly lucky I am to have been there when they were huge.

So many important composers and songwriters over the centuries, performers and writers whose fame while they were alive took place well before we or even our grandparents were born.  Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, and so on.

One can only wonder what it was like to hear their most famous pieces when they premiered.  Pieces that are still known to us centuries later.

Me, I was born the year after the Beatles broke up so I never experience their chaotic live shows or the unveiling of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Sgt Pepper to a gobsmacked audience.  Or hearing “Hey Jude” the day it came out.  The closest I ever got was hearing “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love” as new songs during their Anthology documentary in 1995.

And yet…being a teenager in the 80s, I was there when MTV arrived.  I remember seeing the relatively new video for Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” and being floored by the nightmarish visuals.  Or the incredible hype behind the then unheard-of fifteen minute video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.  Or the unveiling of multiple charity songs in the mid 80s: Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, USA for Africa’s “We Are the World”, Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City”…hell, even Hear ‘n Aid’s “Stars”.  All those Big Famous Names in one room!

I was at college in Boston in the early 90s when grunge and Britpop were insanely huge, and got to see Radiohead’s very first US show on Lansdowne Street.  I got to meet Robyn Hitchcock during a college radio presser.  During my HMV years I got to go to a few meet n’ greets with various bands, and got to see many more live.  And I met a few musicians in the store itself.  And over the last few years my wife and I have been going to Outside Lands, where we’ve seen a ridiculous amount of great bands.  This year’s line-up plans to be absolutely amazing.

 

Do I feel sorrow when my favorite musicians pass away?  I suppose in a way I do…I’ve never been one to completely fall apart, and there is that quite sobering realization that this musician won’t be around anymore to write or record anything else.  Their oeuvre has a finite end, and we fans are loath to admit that will ever happen.

I feel absolutely blessed that I live in a time where I’ve been entertained by so many creative minds in the last thirty-plus years.  Absolutely fucking blessed.  These are the creators that have inspired me, entertained me, and made my life that much happier.

So to all the musicians living or passing in 2016:  I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

 

Walk In Silence 1

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I’d say the music that I connected to most at the time was classic rock.  I’d grown up listening to it, and started my music collection with the Beatles.  Not to say I didn’t enjoy other genres or station programming…I had a passing interest in the poppier Top 40 sounds, especially from about 1983 onwards, when it updated its sound and included multiple genres.  But thanks mainly to WAQY 102.1 FM out of East Longmeadow and WAAF 107.3, originally out of Worcester, I found myself listening to a lot of classic and AOR rock.

Looking back, I think part of it may be due to the quality of the production and the creativity of the music.  It didn’t necessarily need to be a genius creation, it just had to have something that caught my attention somehow.

That would mean John Bonham’s thunderous drums and John Paul Jones’ synth strings on the epic “Kashmir” — the first rock song to completely blow my mind — or the Beatlesque* sounds of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Can’t Get It Out of My Head”.  Or it could be the countrified twang of Eagles.  Even the bubblegum fun of Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” and “Fox On the Run” counted, thanks to their catchy guitar riffs and high-pitched harmonies.

 

I often say The Beatles’ 1967-1970 compilation is ‘officially’ the first album I ever owned, but that’s not entirely true.  I will admit that claim actually belongs to Shaun Cassidy’s Born Late, which I’d gotten for Christmas in 1977.  I kind of consider that a trial run, though…in December of 1977 my music collection was pretty much a reflection of what I thought album collecting was about at the time: pop music and buying whatever was popular at the time.  Why did I have my mom buy that Shaun Cassidy album?  Who knows.  I think it was because he was one of the Hardy Boys on TV at the time, and he was all over the covers of teen magazines at the time.  David’s little brother, also a musician and an actor and a heartthrob!  Buy it now!  Hell, I was six years old at the time, I didn’t know any better.  I didn’t even know I was breaking a perceived gender role at the time by liking a young pop star’s music.  My parents may have side-eyed me (more on the quality of the music than the gender role, that is), but I didn’t care.  Even then it was about the music.

All that changed in 1978, when two things happened.

First, the much maligned movie Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, featuring the insanely popular Bee Gees (another favorite band, thanks again to an older sister) and Peter Frampton (a huge pull, thanks to the fantastic Frampton Comes Alive album and his mindblowing use of the talkbox guitar effects on “Do You Feel Like We Do”).  I originally went because I liked the singers, but my mom had hinted that I’d enjoy the songs they’d be singing here.  It’s painful to watch now, but at the time it was silly and a lot of fun.

Second, I was made aware of an annual tradition on WLVI, channel 56 (6 on our dial), one of Metro Boston’s independent television stations (decades before it became an affiliate of The CW).  On a summery Sunday afternoon they’d play Yellow Submarine, the 1968 animated Beatles movie.

I knew the Beatles in passing, of course.  In the 70s, who didn’t?  They’d only broken up a few short years before and were enjoying healthy solo careers at that point (especially Paul McCartney).  Their music was still getting heavy rotation on the radio at the time.

[I should probably interrupt here and state that there was a third event that took place in 1978 that changed everything, even though I wasn’t quite aware of it at the time.  That event is the overwhelming change in radio listening habits in the United States.  It was this year when people began listening to music on the FM dial rather than on AM.  There are many and varied reasons for it — the acceptance of rock radio as a valid genre rather than an underground interest, and even the fact that home stereos were becoming more affordable.  By the time 1978 rolled around, we’d had a stereo in my parents’ bedroom that as soon moved to my sisters’ bedroom, where it got much higher use.  I ended up with a cheap hand-me-down kids’ record player where even to this day, I can still remember the loud nasally wrhirrrrrrrr of the motor.  I’d get the old stereo when my sisters upgraded, and finally getting my own sometime around 1983.]

So yes, it was in 1978 when I finally, officially, owned my first record, and also picked up on my first musical obsession.  Over the next four or five years, I searched and found all the Beatles-related records I could find.  Some of the albums I purchased were new (usually bought at Mars Bargainland, the department store outside of town), but many were found used at garage sales, town fairs and elsewhere.  First came the albums, then came the singles.  I believe I got Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road early on, because I was already familiar with most of those songs from the Sgt Pepper movie.  Revolver was another early one, thanks to familiarity with some of its tracks as well.  Imagine an eight-year-old  hearing “Tomorrow Never Knows” for the first time — I had no idea what I was listening to, but it certainly was amazing!

 *

I’m explaining all this, even though it has nothing to do with college radio, because this early obsession is a major reason why I latched onto it as closely as I did.

Even as the pop music of the seventies and eighties slowly morphed from one genre or style to another, I found myself irrevocably obsessed over it all.  I knew bands and their discographies almost as well as other kids my age might know who played on what NFL team and for how long.  Their stats were performance ratings and signature moves; my stats were release dates and what labels released them.

 

* – Beatlesque: usually means evoking psychedelic melodies of 1967, dreamlike whimsy, three-part harmony, and often attempting to sound like something from either Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Abbey Road.

Walk in Silence 0

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PROLOGUE:

I’ve been listening to college radio and alternative rock for thirty years as of this week.

Currently, I’m kind of cheating and switching between the XMU station on SiriusXM, RadioBDC, and a host of college stations via their streaming feed, but the point remains — the singer here (Paul Westerberg at his alcoholic best/worst on Let It Be) is barely making it through the song without stumbling.  You can hear the liquor in his voice.  It’s a classic song of generational discontent, as Wikipedia points out.  I heard the same thing back then, in my bedroom, late at night, and I felt the same thing: who the hell let him close to the mike?

But truly, that was exactly what endeared me to the alternative rock genre, and still does to this day.  The fact that studio time was given to a musician of middling proficiency and questionable talent amused me then, and impresses me now.  Well — at this point, anyone with a laptop, a few microphones and some cheap recording and mixing software can lay down their own music.  And thanks to the internet, they no longer need to jockey for position at the local radio station or bar; they can upload their latest song on Bandcamp hours after making the final mix, and let their small tribe of listeners know it’s out there.

There’s a lot of excellent indie rock out there if one chooses to actively look for it.  Some listeners like myself spend far too much time and money on it, but we love it just the same.  Again with the internet: many college stations stream their shows on their website, so someone like myself, now living in San Francisco, just over a mile from the Pacific Ocean and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge just outside my window, can listen to the broadcast of Boston College’s WZBC.

The only thing missing, in my mind, is having a blank cassette at the ready, in case one of my favorite songs comes on.

That’s one of the original facets of alternative/indie rock, really…the ability to look in the face of popular culture and loudly and proudly profess that you’re not going to play that game, at least not by those rules anyway.  One of the whole points of the genre, harking back to the original UK punk wave of the late 70s (and much further back, depending on which rock genre you’re thinking about), was to make sounds under one’s own rules.

It was about a certain style of anarchy –a personal anarchy, wherein one fully embraces who they are and what they want to be, where one stops trying to fit in where they obviously don’t belong, where they find their own path without outside influence.  Be what you want to be, and fuck ’em if they can’t deal with it.

*

Every music fan has that story:  where did you first hear that new song, that favorite band, discover that new genre?  Every fan has a story where they heard a song or found a new radio station or a new genre for the first time where it just clicks: YES!  This is the thing that has pierced my soul, has connected with me in such a deeply personal way that I will never hear it the same way again!

Okay, maybe not in so many words: often it starts out with a distraction.  Yeah, I kind of dig this track.  It makes you stop and notice it.  You may not know exactly why just yet, but you’re not going to dwell on that right now.  But its primary job has been fulfilled: it’s gotten your attention.  You may be intrigued for the moment but forget it a half hour later, or it may stay with you for much longer, so much that you’ll end up looking for it the next time you’re at the local music shop.

Or, if you were like me in the middle of the 80s, you’d have a small ever-circulating pile of half-used blank tapes near your tape deck, and if you liked the song that much, you’d slam down the play and record buttons and let ‘er rip.

This is the story of how I got from there to here.

*

 Let me start with this: I was part of the inaugural MTV generation.  I was ten going on eleven.  I remember when I first saw the channel when it was offered on our newly-minted Time Warner Cable system, the first cable service in my hometown.  I remember the beige-colored box with the light brown label on top, listening all the channels we’d be getting.  I remember seeing MTV for the first time.  [For the record: my first MTV video was .38 Special’s “Hold On Loosely”.]  And most of all, I remember it was channel 24.  Even before we got cable, I’d already made plans to park my butt in front of the television and soak in the musical goodness.  Any music I heard from about 1982 onwards was considered Something Awesome in my book, especially if it had a video.  But even if it didn’t, that one network opened up something within me that turned music from a passing interest into an obsession.

Around the same time, I had pilfered the radio that had been gathering dust in the kitchen (an old model I believe must have been purchased at one of the local department stores a few decades earlier), and it was now at my desk.  I’d made little marks on the dial where my favorite stations were.  I’d fallen in love with rock radio.

Was it different from the sort-of-occasional listenings of records from our family collection, or the albums we’d take out from the library, or whatever was playing on the car stereo during family roadtrips?  In a way, yes.  Even then I’d gotten into the habit of listening to certain radio stations, but not to such an obsessive extent.  I’d gone from ‘now and again’ to ‘every single morning’ to ‘pretty much all day long’.  Other boys my ages were probably watching sports or playing outside or whatever it was we supposed to do, but I was perfectly happy sitting right next to the radio and enjoying each new song that came on.

The obsession with countdowns started around this time.  That was the fault of one of my older sisters who’d taped various songs off the radio at the turn of the decade, and had recorded part of the year-end countdown on the rock station we all enjoyed, WAQY 102.1 out of East Longmeadow.  A year or so later the torch was passed to me (well, more like I snagged it as she headed off to college).  WAQY had a contest in which, if you sent in the correct countdown list, they’d pick a random winner and give away every album that was on it.  Who was I to turn that down?  With an insane amount of focus and intent for a preteen, I wrote each artist, song on lined paper and duly mailed it in.  Never won, of coure, but that didn’t stop me from listening with rapt attention.

Thinking back, that’s probably what fueled my music obsession the most — between the countdowns and MTV, as well as radio in particular, I was glued to my desk or the living room couch, wondering what song or video would come next.

That went on for most of that decade, really.  From about 1981 or so onwards, I would always have a radio on, or I’d watch a good hour or so of MTV, just soaking everything in.  I really wasn’t too choosy about what songs came up, as long as they caught my interest.  That was partly due to listening to whatever my sisters were listening to in the 70s.  I could take Chicago’s easy-listening comeback albums the grandiose prog rock of Rush, and the guitar jangle of early REM.  A lot of the rock stations back then were more adventurous in their playlist, mixing past and present genres without a second thought.  Within the span of an hour I could hear the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Dire Straits, Van Halen, and maybe even an Ozzy or an AC/DC track.  In the early days of FM radio, there was always some element of free-form.

I was given a massive playlist to choose from, and I devoured pretty much all of it.

Walk in Silence: The Blog Series starts tomorrow!

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Yes, after all these years of talking about it, doing all kinds of reading and note-taking and excavating my memory banks, I’m finally going to make this a thing!  Over the weekend I started making the posts, and will schedule them to drop on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.  Woo!

I’ve even made it a point to be a few posts ahead and want to keep it that way, so I’ll have a backlog.  This is a project I’ve had in my head for a good few years now, so I want to do it justice.

Hope you enjoy it!

The Persistence of Memories is NOW AVAILABLE!

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We interrupt our usual obsessive music blog entries with some important news:

tpom 032316 take 2
The Persistence of Memories
 is now available!!

Here are some fine online establishments where you can purchase the ebook:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Smashwords

Don’t forget to support your local bookstore! If they sell e-books, go ahead and download from their website! Here are a few of my favorite local bookstores where you can buy it:

Copperfield’s Books

Green Apple Books

Books Inc

 

Thank you for your support! 🙂

 

***

A DIVISION OF SOULS is also STILL FREE! Want to get caught up first before jumping in? Head over to B&N, Kobo or Smashwords (or hey, even NoiseTrade) and download the first book, and your reading list is good to go!

The taste of youth, the taste of you, dear

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Okay, I’m finally going to take the plunge.

Next week will be the first of many entries for the Walk in Silence blog series…and of course, I’ll be letting you know all about that over the next week and a half.

But that’s not the plunge I’m talking about.

When I was first planning out the WiS project, I always had the timeframe in the back of my mind: should I focus just on my own personal connection with college radio (1986-1989)?  Should I talk about its history (197? – 199?)?  Or should I just come up with an arbitrary time?  Eventually I chose the third entry, that way I could focus mostly on my own personal history, but also include the time before I connected with the genre, thus 1984 – 1989.

The plunge I’m thinking of now is the college and post-college years.  They weren’t exactly the happiest years of my life, for various reasons, but they were interesting musically.  College rock, at least with American radio, gave way to grunge and Britpop as it became more popular, and changed genre names numerous times before deciding on the all-encompassing ‘alternative rock’.  A schism grew: those who felt alternative rock was selling out and followed the most obscure bands possible, and those who really didn’t mind either way, as long as the prefabricated crap currently in the charts went away.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a sequel to Walk in Silence for quite some time.  There’s no name to it yet, nor is there any concrete schedule or plan for it at this time (all my focus is currently on posting WiS and publishing the Bridgetown trilogy), but I do have a few ideas floating around…it’ll focus mostly on the years from late 1989 (when I left for college) to late 1995 (when I left Boston and moved back home).  And it will most likely continue the WiS theme of both personal story and music history.

Some albums from that era still get heavy airplay on the radio: you’ll still hear tracks from Nevermind and Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Loveless and Definitely Maybe and Achtung Baby and Violator and so on.  But there are so many more albums I’ve ignored for one reason or another, forgotten about or couldn’t make myself listen to for personal reasons.  Songs that radio let pass into history, even forgetting to play them on Throwback Thursday.  But as with Walk in Silence and the 80s, it’s been nigh on twenty-plus years for most of these.  It’s well past time to revisit them again.

So starting today I’m going to start listening to some of these albums in my collection, give them a once-over they haven’t had in quite some time, and see where I can go with it.

Should be an interesting ride, to say the least.

Weekend Fly-By

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Oof!  Yeah, still working on the final revision/edit of The Persistence of Memories, and it’ll be another few weeks before I can give myself a breather.  The soft release date at the moment is “sometime mid-April”, but I’ll let you all know more as soon as I have more concrete plans!  At present I’m THISCLOSE (translation: about forty or so pages) to finishing the revision/edit, I’ve made a quick mock-up of the cover (which you can see at Welcome to Bridgetown).  Once the edit’s done, then comes the formatting and the uploading.   And then FINALLY I can get back to a normal schedule again.  [That is, until I start the same process once more with The Balance of Light.  Whee!]

In the meantime, I’ve been on a School of Seven Bells kick lately, partly due to their release of their last album, SVIIB (recorded just before Benjamin Curtis passed away).  Jangly shoegazey goodness that kind of reminds me of Lush with a bit of Stereolab mixed in.  Enjoy!

See you soon!

News on Walk In Silence (the book)

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Hey all,

Some news on the Walk in Silence book project.  I shared this on my LiveJournal a short time ago (edited for clarity):

I think I may set aside Walk in Silence, the book.

I’ll finish it of course, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I’ll be releasing it as a self-published book, at least not for the foreseeable future. It’s a tough decision, but it’s one I’ve been thinking of ever since the start of the year, maybe even before then.

There are a few reasons…one is that it started feeling less like a book worth publishing and more of a vanity project. On a more personal note, writing this memoir version really felt like I was really just trying to finally purge it from my system once and for all so I could move on. While on a personal and emotional level this can be a good thing, and I may even be proud of the end result, it’s not something I’d be happy with on a professional level. I wouldn’t be embarrassed about it…I just don’t think it would be something worth putting out there professionally. As I said, it’s become a vanity project — it’s a story I want to tell, but I’m doubting there’s a significant audience for it. Maybe I’ll put it out there as a serial on [this] blog at some point. It feels that would be the best home for it, when all is said and done.

Do I feel sad about this? Not entirely. A bit let down, of course. That nagging feeling that I’ve wasted a few thousand hours of writing time on something that may or may not see the light of day. But I’ve had a hell of a fun time reading all those music bios and reference books for research, and I’ve come to appreciate and understand music a hell of a lot more over the years. Totally worth it just for that alone. I may also feel a bit embarrassed, having bloviated the idea and everything else about it over the last three or four years online, much to your wavering patience and tolerance, but I think I’ll get over it.

But really…the main thing is that I think I’ve outgrown the project. My heart and mind have moved on, probably some time ago, and it was high time for me to accept that.

…

…so yeah.  At this time, it’s no longer going to be an e-book/physical book project.

On a more professional level, I think it would have been problematic as a book, especially a self-published one.  There’s only so far I can go with Fair Use in regards to copyrighted music, and I don’t think I’d have done the project justice (to my standards, anyway) if I had to hold back for legal reasons.  Doing it as a blog series would give me more leeway and make it more interactive, as I’d be able to provide links, audio and/or video.

SO.

What’s in store for this project?  Well!  Glad you asked!

I’ve already gotten a good ways into it (it focuses mostly between 1984 to 1989, and I’m currently writing about late 1988), so instead of trunking it and erasing it from my mind, I will use my collected notes and writings for it and do a serial much along the lines of my Blogging the Beatles series from a few years ago.  It may start out as a once-a-week entry, but if time permits and I get myself into the groove, I may post more than that.

Another plus for me morphing it into a blog series is that I get to return to my originally planned release date again!  Yay!  It’s still in the planning stages, but I’m thinking a soft start date of April 19 or thereabouts, to celebrate thirty years of me obsessing over this damn genre.

April vacation, 1986, when a dorky teenage kid from a small town discovered a college radio station for the first time, and how it completely changed his life.

Thanks again for sticking by, folks.  🙂

All Things Must Pass

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This phrase has been stuck in my head quite a bit lately.  Not so much in tandem with the recent passings of numerous famous (and infamous) people we’ve known in our lives, but more with how nothing is ever permanent.  It’s a theme that runs rampant in the Mendaihu Universe.  Things end, things begin.  Things evolve.  It’s never the end of the world; it’s just an unfortunate moment that we must process in some way.  Yes, there are horrible things in history, horrible things that cost lives, and I’m not ignoring or belittling that.  But in the evolution of humankind, it’s never remained that way forever.  We learn from our mistakes as well as from our insights.  We make things better for ourselves and for others.  There are always naysayers, but there are others who believe.  There are destroyers, but there are also makers.

And to be honest, that’s the most fascinating part of being alive for me.