TheFader

When I went to college I listened to a lot of Bikini Kill and Man is the Bastard and Pavement and did not know shit about shit. I cared a lot and I went deep but not wide. Classes started on my nineteenth birthday and a few months later I met my friend Daniel when I saw his band Black Eyes play. One day he came to my dorm room with a four CD Painkiller box set and we listened to the brutal mix of jazz and grindcore and something clicked. I went out with them that summer for a few weeks, me and them driving around the country listening to dub and Out Hud and talking about jazz. That was in early June and I went back to my parents’ house in Connecticut that summer, worked a four-day-a-week job at the Connecticut Jewish Ledger that afforded me a lot of time to read allmusic.com extensively. I drove around to all the used book and record stores finding out about jazz, ordered records online and made my girlfriend listen to Live at the Village Vanguard way too much. At the end of the summer my parents bought me one hundred dollars worth of music from Forced Exposure and I didn’t listen to anything but jazz for the next year. The next summer I went on tour with them again, to Canada this time, learned about Pigbag, Caroliner, Mighty Sparrow, gamelan. Daniel and I were in the same grade, taking similar classes. He was playing shows, I was thinking really hard. We hung out most days, listened to cassettes on Walkman and went to all the free museums in DC. Any time they played a show out of town, I went. I was way weirder then, superficially nice and unboundingly unshy. I had huge curly hair and a desire to know things. That last part’s the only part that’s really still true.