I first became seriously hooked on Wagner when I was 12 or 13. Everything I’d been listening to up to that point—Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms—seemed to be little more than building blocks culminating in his final opera, Parsifal, and all the music that came afterward was a falling away. It wasn’t until a few years later that I began hearing about Wagner’s personal views and accidental associations, and you know what? It just didn’t matter. To this day nothing has changed. From all I’ve learned and read about him (including his massive autobiography), Wagner the Man was an insufferable blowhard and a jerk, someone I likely wouldn’t care to spend too much time around. But his monumental, glorious music remains central to me, and always will.

Today marks the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth, but you can’t hear anything about it without also hearing that Wagner was an anti-Semite and a friend of Nietzsche’s and a Nazi.

Yes well. OK, those three things seem to be far more important to most people than, say, The Ring Cycle, so let’s take care of these one by one.

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Jazz is a music of swagger. A genre based around solos, virtuosity, and technical prowess, its descent (or ascent, if you prefer) into avant-garde hermeticism was, if not inevitable, then at least not all that surprising either. Bird, Dizzy, Coltrane, Miles, Mingus—one-name giants of cool and geniuses of the new.

Not all jazz is new, though. There's a jazz traditionalism as well, though its profile is considerably lower. Trombonist Bill Harris, for example, definitely needs both his names. Even with those, it's likely that few non-aficionados have heard of him, or of his great, blandly titled 1957 album, Bill Harris and Friends.

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The risk of going to a public place to be alone is that sometimes people mistake my book for a prop and my lack of companion for a desire for companionship. To be fair, a stranger can’t know that in my hands, no book, above all a 1974 copy of Rex Stout’s The Red Box, is ever a prop. But I still cut short my time on my second-favorite bar stool last night. First, my neighbor, having heard me yammering with the French barman, asked me to spell out some French for a text message. Next, she asked me to describe my experience of the oysters. In the matter of the French query, I acquiesced; in the matter of the oysters, I did not. Oysters are my Tardis. I put them in my mouth when I need a shortcut to certain beaches in the Bay Area or in Rhode Island. And, via airplane or bivalve mollusc, I go to those places alone. 

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Smashpipe’s editorial offices consist of two bunkers, one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the other in Jersey City. (We have yet to break ground on a tunnel to join them—the plan is to piggyback on that fucked-up gas pipeline if it goes through.) Jim Knipfel is blind, and I skew toward hermit. Email suffices for our edit meetings, which mostly amount to stuff like, “Hey, d’you wanna cover that plague of locusts over Israel, or should I?”

But I’ll venture out into the world for the right reason. Like Xenia Rubinos’s record-release show last night at Cameo Gallery, next to my old grocery store in Williamsburg.

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For the first 15 years of my Smiths pathology, I toiled to decode every image in every line of every song. It all had to mean something. As my rapport with absurdity grew, I got wise. There's an entire field of scholarship on what goes on in Morrissey’s head. But I say let those dingos eat their tails. Sometimes people string words together simply because the sound they make is pleasing, not because they’re the key to Sylvester II’s lost treatises on the quadrivium. The song that comes to mind, of course, the one I killed myself over for decades, is “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others.”

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It’s hardly surprising that Jake Bugg, the 19-year-old from Nottingham whose eponymous debut record charted at #1 in the UK last fall—and was released this month in the U.S.—shrugs off any comparisons to the young Bob Dylan, saying that his influences run more to the Arctic Monkeys, Everly Brothers, The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. It’s unlikely—but not unfathomable given Bugg’s professional jump-start—that the singer/songwriter is well-versed in the hype that record companies pushed in the 1970s, hailing the latest “New Dylan,” and besides, in 2013 getting lumped together with the septuagenarian Dylan isn’t worth the currency it once was.

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I spent most of the week studying the angles, curves and corners of Xenia Rubinos’s Magic Trix. Lucky me. (I’ll be writing more on Rubinos soon.) I was also beginning to get to know Samantha Crain’s new recording, Kid Face. The young artist from Shawnee, Oklahoma, who made You (Understood) continues to defy categorization, delivering sophisticated, nuanced songs that feel more personal than past work. Check out the video for opening track "Never Going Back."

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Whenever I drift into a blues phase, it’s like waking up. And in those first fuzzy moments of consciousness, I struggle to recall why I ever bother listening to anything else. 

My formal conversion to the church of blues came the summer of 2008, when my wolf-dog and I lived on a working-class Rhode Island peninsula, less unfriendly than just not interested, a few houses up from Mount Hope Bay. 

Victoria Spivey. Magic Sam. Howlin’ Wolf. Bessie Smith. Little Walter. Booker White. Booker T. Doctor Ross. B.B. King. Freddie King. Lightnin’ Hopkins. Curtis Jones. Big Mama Thornton. Pinetop Perkins. Pinetop Smith.

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Early in 2011, I decided to sell out and write a novel that regular people would want to read, and more important, buy. I'd just lost my second job in two years through economic downsizing—two companies out of business.

Selling out sounds humiliating, but it wasn't. It was exciting and fun. Boy, I musta really been ready to sell out. I loved creating problems for my characters so that I could guide them through flawed episodes of self-discovery interrupted by real life complications—small-town gossip and infidelity. A regular soap opera of conundrums featuring a girl genius and the family of nitwits who raised the illegitimate daughter she gave birth to before she was whisked off to Princeton University to structure the very first courses on human sexuality, thus providing her daughter with a resentment that left her immobilized, sifting through old electric guitars and reel-to-reel tape in the attic of the family home, trying to figure out the lost connection between Jimi Hendrix and Riot Grrrl.

My kind of fun!

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The only time I saw Deerhunter was in Baltimore at the now-defunct Sonar, on a triple Round Robin-style bill with Dan Deacon and No Age. The three of them opened the show with a heinously loud drone, riding a wave of sustained feedback and hemorrhaging layers of delay into abandon. The whole club was filled with this honky, hollow body of sound, as if every sound and dimension of the drone was wrapped and shielded in wool, blanketed and obscured by a crummy mix and a haze of delay. Death to reverb. You can watch for yourself here, as Deerhunter segue into a killer version of 2007’s “Cryptograms.” The fog clears, and bandleader/enfant terrible Bradford Cox’s considerable songwriting is able to shine, and he’s keen to bask in the glory of a capacity crowd, pogo-ing in unison.

I never got completely behind any of Deerhunter’s records because they sound so messy.

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