The Library of Babel

The Map Out of Town Was Right There When I Needed It

Black Book 82, September 9, 2013

The life-changing discoveries of my formative years were purely serendipitous. In a sense, I now realize, I was lucky to grow up in a smallish town in Southern Minnesota in the 1970s, when my bored and highly suggestible adolescence coincided with the glory days of both the chain bookstore remainder table and the cut-out record bins that then proliferated at small-town drugstores and department stores. In my hometown those included a Waldenbooks, Osco Drug, Sterling Drug, Woolworth’s, and J.C. Penney.

The bulk of my early record collection—at least the stuff I’ve held onto through all the intervening decades—was fished from those various cut-out bins (usually at 99 cents or $1.98). This was obviously before the internet, and before my exposure to—and obsession with—the scads of great music magazines of that era (Creem, Crawdaddy, Hit Parader, Circus, Rolling Stone, New York Rocker, Trouser Press, etc.), so I was totally unfamiliar with the records in the piles I’d bring home every few weeks; my decisions were based entirely on band names, titles, and cover art.

I’m certain, though, that I could get up right now and pull out at least 100 records that I bought from those cut-out bins. Off the top of my head: The ABC/Impulse reissues of Sun Ra’s Atlantis, Magic City, and Jazz in Silhouette; Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction; Thelonious Monk’s Underground; Dr. John’s Gumbo and Gris-Gris; The World of Harry Partch; Cecil Taylor’s Conquistador; Larry Young’s Fuel and Spaceball; Eugene McDaniels’ Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse; Andrew Hill’s Grass Roots; a half-dozen P-Funk spinoffs, including Eddie Hazel’s Game, Dames, and Guitar Thangs; John Fahey’s Of Rivers and Religion; Swamp Dogg’s Cuffed, Collared, and Tagged; Gene Clark’s White Light, Don Covay’s Super Dude I, and a whole bunch of other jazz, blues, funk, soul, and—to me at the time—uncategorizable records that it is no exaggeration to say changed the direction of my life.

I certainly didn’t get a lot of those records at the time, and often had no fucking idea what I was listening to, but for a kid raised on jerkwater AM radio stations, every one of those albums was both a transmission from another planet and a garden of forking paths that led me to more records, more music, and more beautiful and strange places than any of the other cultural discoveries of my early life.

Around this same time I also stumbled across photobooks—the other enduring obsession of my life. In the little local Carnegie Library I discovered (there’s no other word for it, because I didn’t then have a clue about anything happening in the outside world) what were, I now know, some of the seminal photobooks of the 20th century: Diane Arbus’s first monograph; Robert Frank’s Americans, William Eggleston’s Guide; Philip Jones Griffiths’ Vietnam, Inc.; Helen Levitt’s A Way of Seeing; and Garry Winogrand’s The Animals. On the remainder table at the Oak Park Mall Waldenbooks I found (and purchased) Susan Meiselas’s Carnival Strippers, Bill Owens’ Suburbia, Emmet Gowin’s Photographs, Danny Lyon’s Conversations With the Dead, and, a couple years later when I was home for the Holidays, Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor.

(An aside about that extraordinary collection at a small public library in a meatpacking town: Much later I learned that every one of those books had belonged to a local kid who had gone off to New York after high school, become a poet, and died of Leukemia. His parents had donated his collection of books and records—also extraordinary, and including Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music—to the library.)

All those books and records essentially punched my ticket out of town, and provided my first clear glimpse of what I wanted to do, see, and feel during my time in this world. They brought me here.

What prompted this reverie tonight was this:

If someone should one day ask you what sort of man I was, tell them that I was the sort of man who might, at three o’clock on a Monday afternoon, begin to rummage through the stacks and racks full of records and CDs in my apartment, intending initially to finally get all my Andrew Hill records in one place, and by eleven o’clock in the evening I would have been listening to Andrew Hill for eight hours, and would have miraculously rustled up at least another 10 hours of Andrew Hill, by which time I would be determined to hear all of it. All the while I would be reminding myself—or Andrew Hill would be reminding me—how much I love the man’s music.

What did I love about Andrew Hill? you might ask, and I would tell you that when I first discovered his music it was utterly alien to me, but in time it felt like an adventurous new progression, an inventive, chromatic style that landed somewhere between the great late-60s quintet of Miles Davis and the more imposing and thorny Blue Note recordings of Cecil Taylor from pretty much the same era.

Hill was off-kilter, a clear but distinguished Thelonious Monk disciple who could also roll out graceful lines that reminded me of Bud Powell. He could sound like the most elegant man on the planet just strolling along the boulevard, and the next moment he would be tumbling down the stairs, but still, somehow, tumbling with elegance.

The compositions were complex, but accessible enough that they rewarded careful attention without demanding scrutiny; you could scrutinize them if you wanted, and be rewarded, but you could also just write and read while you listened.

You were also the sort of man who would wonder what might have resulted if Hill and Wayne Shorter had gotten together—there seemed such a natural affinity. You could become obsessed with the idea that maybe, somewhere along the line, Hill and Shorter had recorded together, and that thought could lead you down the deep rabbit hole of Andrew Hill’s massive discography, and the next thing you knew it would be five o’clock in the morning and the first flare of bruised daylight would be moving into the neighborhood outside your windows.