iJamming.net

It’s funny how things work out. I spent much of last year writing a first draft of an account of my teen years, a certain percentage of which I spent in the midst of the mod revival; though I proudly refused to don a parka or even a skinny black tie, it was impossible to live in South London in 1979, at the age of 15, running a fanzine called Jamming that was the go-to place for news of Paul Weller and co., and not find myself somewhat immersed in the movement. It was a farce, in retrospect, but we were too young and naïve to know better. Certainly, we had some fun.

I had much of my fun with the band Speedball. I’d made my acquaintance with them through Roger Allen, who published something called the Surrey Vomet, not so much a fanzine as an artsy comic that sent up its suburban newspaper namesake and everything else to do with the British stiff upper lip. With its creative redesigns of existing comics and articles on “How to do a runner from an Indian restaurant,” it was something of a precursor to Viz. It was a surprise then, to find out that Roger was in fact a dedicated old-school mod, complete with personal prized Lambretta. And once the revival kicked in he wasted no time picking up a band by which to mould himself as the next Pete Meaden: a four-piece from Southend called Speedball. He helped line up a single release, “There Are No Survivors”/ “Is Somebody There?” on a Southend label, and invited me to see the band open for the Purple Hearts at the Moonlight Club in Hampstead, the night after Thatcher’s election victory in May, 1979. The moment front man Robin Beulo, in blue army tunic, played the opening chords to “Don’t You Know Love By Now,” I fell in love with them.
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Yes, that is thigh-deep snow. Yes, this is the East Coast. Yes, that is Clair’s Way on Hunter Mountain with only one person on it. Yes, this was yesterday, a perfect powder day. And yes, they did only open the West Side of the Mountain at 2pm, a bummer for those who got up early for first tracks and finished early as a result – but a joy for me and Campbell, who had to wait for our own hill at home to get plowed before we could get out the house and 20 miles north. Us East Coasters are so used to skiing on hard ice and groomed, packed powder that we often don’t know what to do when we encounter un-groomed, loose snow, especially when it’s as heavy as it was in this last storm. My 14-year old, who resolutely refuses to take any more lessons, subsequently spent much of the day in the following position…

Today, Thursday, is our third snow day off school in a row. Just as well our kids have parents work from home; just as well, too, that we didn’t have Winter Break last week, as nature has given it to us anyway. By the end of the weekend, we should have several feet of snow on the ground – especially on the ski mountains. There are plenty people around here who hate winter and can’t wait for it to end, but for those of us who moved up here in part so we could steal the occasional powder day, the snowfall is a sight for sore eyes.

PS: Staying on skiing, I really felt for Julia Mancuso yesterday, after the fiasco of being pulled off her Giant Slalom run because of life-long friend-turned-rival Lindsay Vonn’s dramatic fall. I’ll even forgive her the Diva-esque crying fit. After all, any skiier who summers in Hawaii and warms up for races by playing Guitar Hero is alright by me.

“All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77″ received a full page critique in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. Though Ben Ratliff clearly had some issues with the book, I’m certainly not complaining about the size of the review. And I was grateful to note – albeit after the event – that the Times’ online review links to my web site. So in the likelihood that there are a fair few people visiting iJamming! for the first time right now, let me offer you a friendly welcome and something of an overview.

iJamming! started out as a place for me to archive my older work and provide a home for some newer writing. As the Web developed organically (or as organically as bits and bytes can ever do), I began posting a daily/weekly diary, and then, as tens of millions of other people began to do the same thing, and they all came to be grouped together as “blogs,” and nobody had time to read them any more because they were so busy writing their own, I backed away from relentlessly commentating on my own life, and, in the last two-three years, have been very hard at work on my book projects. (And parenting. And running. And being on the school board. Etc.) In something of an ideal world, I’d write news, reviews and opinions at iJamming! every day, but that ideal world necessitates getting paid to do so. Any old-fashioned Patrons of the Arts out there, you’re welcome to get in touch.
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I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s Day. Never have been, not since I was a teenager in Britain and saw how some people – other people – got more cards than other people – like me. And while I quite like how American culture uses February 14 to instill in our younger kids the concept of love with a small l, I’m not so keen on the manner in which big business tries to create out of this an additional holiday and with it, of course, an opportunity to make big money.

Still, I met my wife on a February 16, so we tend to blend that anniversary with the traditional focus on Valentine’s and raise a toast to the fact that, here we are, two kids and all, and still together. This past week, in fact, we celebrated twenty years as a couple and what with Valentine’s falling on the Sunday before a Holiday Monday, it felt like the perfect occasion to raid the cellar for two special bottles of wine.

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I went down to the basement on Monday to find some old photos. I found something better: a couple of containers full of old cassettes I thought had been lost to the elements. It’s not like I don’t already have several boxes full of cassettes in the storage room behind my office, including tapes of my pre-pubescent bedroom band from back in the late 1970s, mix tapes from the 80s and more promo tapes than I’ll ever know what to do with from the 90s. It’s that those tapes don’t tell the whole story, that of the obsessive future music journalist who practiced for taping John Peel shows on Radio 1/2 by frequently recording the Roger Scott show on Capital Radio as early as 1975; a kid who often seemed intent on taping every single track that ever came out and who, naturally, catalogued his cassettes along the way.

As I’ve hinted at in recent months, I’ve been busy with Boy About Town, a memoir (of sorts) of my secondary school years, the period from 1975-80 in which I transitioned from precocious/bratty hard rock fan to precocious/bratty (post) punk rocker, years in which I started a fanzine and a band, interviewed established rock stars and obscure new artists alike, hung out at the Rough Trade store and the Town House studio, saw gigs on what was often a nightly basis, tried to digest the complex politics of the changing country around us, participated in the mod revival and less so in the ska revival, and all the while chased girls – or, to be honest, meekly stared at them while hoping they’d get the hint and invite me into bed with them. While writing these stories – a Top 50 of them, at the last count, a number that may yet got down to the talismatic 45 – I was forlornly recalling all the borrowed records I had put down on cassette back in those years, and all the nights I sat by the radio, taping the Peel show. I could remember certain Peel sessions, even specific tapes and their precise track listings. I wondered what happened to those cassettes even as I wrote about some of the music from memory (and searched out the rest of it, of course, on the web).

History in the making? Not really, just another few nights with the John Peel show.

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