Doxology. Nell Zink
new single, out now on Lion’s Den. He introduced Flora, turning and lifting a corner of her blanket to show the manager her sleeping face. He talked too much and too loudly. He continued talking after the manager turned away. He was allowed to leave two singles. He left the store against traffic, through the entrance, turning around to wave goodbye.
He headed westward toward NYU’s radio station. Failing to get past the security guard, he was told to try the U.S. Mail. At select bars and nightclubs, he pressed the single on whoever answered the door—in one case, a custodian holding a mop.
SHORTLY AFTER HE LEFT TOWER RECORDS, A JUNIOR EMPLOYEE WHO HAD WITNESSED the proceedings asked the manager if she could please, please have the singles before he threw them away. He said of course not; he would never throw them away, much less give them to her. They were the property of Tower Records, to be listened to in due time by the staff member responsible for selecting indie records for distribution.
She knew how many supplicants he had—dozens every day. She said, “At least let me listen to it. You have to!” She clasped her hands and bounced to indicate pleading.
“Fine,” he said, holding out both seven-inches. “Take them.”
“I don’t want to keep them,” she said. “I want us to distribute it, if it’s any good. I want to hear it!”
“Why?”
“Because that guy was so cute, like an angel. Did you see his eyes? They were like stars!”
“Take them,” the manager said, disgusted.
She put one in her messenger bag and brought one to the frat boy working the customer service desk.
Forty-five minutes later, after his ironic Anita Baker compilation tape was done playing, the store filled with a fresh and compelling sound. Joe had recorded all the A side’s instrumental tracks on bass. Open strings played the part of Neil Young and Crazy Horse bass. High fretting was Phil Lesh meets the Congos bass. Fuzzy bass, courtesy of Pam’s distortion pedal, stepped in after the bridge to play a solo. All the tracks were doubled, because he liked playing them so much. The sound was low fidelity, but the tune rocked like a cradle rocking, like someone casually pitching a melody from hand to hand, and he sang in a tormented voice about something it was hard not to take for loneliness. The chorus was a three-part harmonic cadence on the repeated word “down,” careful and precise as a madrigal.
Annoyed by the challenge to his preconceptions, the customer service frat boy flipped it to hear the B side. Massive riffage blasted from the store’s speakers while the same voice cried out, “American woman!” The vocals were lower in the mix than on “Hold the Key” and conveyed a note of pain definitely lacking in the original. It sounded as if the American woman really had the singer cornered this time. It was less a succession of throwaway insults than a cry for help. The bass recalled live Yes or King Crimson, with the kind of distortion that peels paint off distant walls.
“I’m in love,” the stock girl said. “Do you think that was his baby?”
“It definitely wasn’t his single,” the frat boy replied. “That guy was a retard. That’s who the breeders are. Not smart people. That’s why we’re devolving.”
DANIEL BOUGHT FACTSHEET FIVE, THE FANZINE THAT CATALOGED FANZINES, AND PAGED through it, noting down the names and addresses of likely sounding targets. First he sent promo singles to riot grrrly magazines such as Bust and Chickfactor. (Post-punk women had exchanged duct tape on their nipples for heels and cocktail dresses without compromising their ironic focus on objectification by the male gaze and the appropriation of epithets intended to belittle and demean them.) Likewise he mailed promos to painfully masculine publications such as Thicker and the Probe. He tried for attention from mass-market monthlies with nationwide distribution (Spin, Alternative Press) and tabloid weeklies (Village Voice, City Paper), which got five singles each, instead of one, on account of their big staffs.
He truly didn’t expect any competent reviewers to approve the single by this means, but it was all he had. Music being a matter of taste, and the urge to help a struggling artist rare, he counted on wasting hundreds of dollars in postage alone in return, if he got lucky, for three or four inattentive reviews.
After about two months, he had his first responses: amiable paragraphs in modest publications—five-by-eight xeroxed, stapled, folded fanzines with circulations in the hundreds—all of which said that the single was “gorgeous.” That was the adjective du jour. In the age of grunge, anything that didn’t sound like a riding lawnmower was gorgeous. Several of the reviews arrived with demo cassettes from the reviewers’ bands. The one he liked best sounded like lawnmowers ridden by nymphets playing banjos, but he didn’t have the money to put out another single. Every time a review arrived, he cut it out with scissors and pasted it to the letter-sized sheet of paper he called the “press kit.”
JOE LACKED THE ROCK STAR’S STANDARD NEUROSES. HE FELT NO BASELESS CONVICTION that he was a genius. He had never needed illusions to feel good about himself, and his illusions had never been exposed. Unencumbered by the guilty suspicion that he was secretly a no-talent impostor, he had zero inhibitions about telling the world. Soon hundreds of people with no interest in music and less inclination to buy seven-inch singles were quite pointlessly aware that he had one out. The mail carriers knew it, as did the transvestite from Essex Street with the Yorkies, the girl who made the egg creams on First Avenue, the schizophrenic who sat on the discarded end table next to the BMT entrance on Houston, et cetera.
He liked magazines and he liked helping Daniel, so whenever he came near it, he stopped into See Hear, a large alternative newsstand in the East Village that specialized in music fanzines. He leafed through every magazine—dozens of new issues each week—checking each one under H and J to make sure they didn’t miss a review of his work. So it was he who found the notice in Forced Exposure.
Joe Harris. “Hold the Key” b/w “American Woman” 7" (Lion’s Den). Ruins meets Badfinger in a jar of Gerber’s. Mark my words: You don’t need to hear this, and whoever mic’d the drums on it should die facedown in a pile of dog shit with an AIDS-infected needle up his ass.
It was the first time he had seen a review before Daniel did. He wasn’t sure what to think. It was troubling enough that he didn’t even point to it and say, “Look! Forced Exposure reviewed my record!” to the cashier when he paid for it. He paid and left, walking with studied briskness toward Chrystie Street, repeating key phrases such as “facedown in a pile of dog shit” to himself with his first-ever inklings of self-doubt.
Daniel didn’t mind being awakened from a Saturday afternoon nap (Pam was out clothes shopping) to read it. A review in Forced Exposure was exciting to him.
“Admittedly hard to parse,” he said, “but definitely positive. Ruins is good.” Ruins was a Japanese improvising bass and percussion duo widely regarded in avant-garde circles as ultimate rock gods. “Badfinger means British invasion without the invasion. They’re saying it’s not bluesy.”
“And Gerber’s?” Joe protested. “That’s baby food!”
“They’re saying you can’t play guitar.”
“But I don’t play guitar, or drums either!”
“They’re making a funny about the drums.” Daniel turned to the front of the magazine and glanced through the features. “Oh, look. Here’s a sex scene between you and Thurston Moore.”
“A what?”
Daniel was too busy laughing to answer right away. “It’s a fake Sonic Youth tour diary. He loses his virginity to you in the ladies’ room at Wetlands. Definitely do not read this. They’re not trying to pluck you from obscurity, like they do with crappy Swedish speed metal. It’s like they think you’re already famous.”
Joe perused the tour diary entry. “‘The probing, darting fist of it-boy Joe Harris,’” he read aloud. “I’m the ‘it-boy’!”
“You’re