Ballad Of The Lonely Argonaut. Beulah. 1999. Sugar Free Records.

 Memory, despite the quiet it projects in moments of recall, is just another form of hyperbole, which accounts for the notoriously unreliability of its character. A faulty memory explains why even the most desperately honest among us was born to lie. I remember being a part of that generation of record store employees who, in the nineties, were the last wave of retail workforce from vinyl’s original era. Though I was subsisting on an income level somewhere between poverty and beggary, and though I was self-medicating with the frequency and the ferocity of a condemned man, and though my clothes almost always reeked of stale cigarettes, I felt nevertheless that, punching the clock at Sound Warehouse, I had been admitted into a rarified world of privilege. No one questions the authenticity of a boy passing from his teens into young adulthood proclaiming himself local faux royalty because an excess of physical stamina has granted him the prerogative; I seized control of my interior territories and undertook the process of educating myself, learning the names King Oliver and Charlie Musselwhite, Tracy Nelson and Ras Michael. From 1985 to the decade’s end, I did what everyone else seemed to be doing and created a base inventory of taste for myself from the extensive canon being elaborated by the ever burgeoning rock press, from NME to Rolling Stone. The Velvet Underground, The Beach Boys, Monk, Sly Stone, the Ramones…no one terribly outrageous. In short, I learned the de rigueur influences and, from that list, fashioned a network of twentieth century traditions that, in the following decade—amid a spasm of creativity that ultimately became the rock era’s valediction—culminated in a brief period of intensive artistic rediscovery. The new canon forged from the global glossolalia included Tricky, Cesária Évora, Sonic Youth, Bjork, Ali Farka Touré, DJs Shadow and Spooky, the Elephant 6 collective and artist rosters from the Thrill Jockey and Touch and Go record labels. It’s also an exaggeration to say that there were touring acts to see every night, but I saw the very best: Stereolab, Cibo Matto, Portishead, the Buzzcocks, R.E.M., New Order, the Cramps, John Cale, Radiohead, T-Bone Burnett, Velvet Crush, the Flat Duo Jets, Squeeze, Mose Allison, Rubén González, Sonny Rollins, the Demolition Doll Rods, Guitar Wolf, the Butthole Surfers, Olivia Tremor Control, the Flaming Lips, Nashville Pussy, the Pixies, Grandaddy, Bob Mould, 10,000 Maniacs, Dinosaur Jr, Matthew Sweet, Tom Verlaine, Texas Tornadoes, Los Lobos, k.d. lang, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Beck, Pavement, Camper van Beethoven, Dwight Yoakam, and, the jewel in the crown, Nirvana at Trees the Saturday night in Deep Ellum that Kurt Cobain assaulted a member of stage security with his electric guitar because drugs. My memory of this time of near total immersion in the culture of pop commercialism is now inseparable from my obsession with pop music as semiotics. To attempt to draw substantial meaning from a time of insubstantiality that I had devoted myself to seems like one of those paradoxical gestures or jokes that once defined modernism, and therefore worthy of pursuing. It occurs to me, as I struggle to write my way to an ending for this entry, that I could very well be wandering into the vicinity of onerous, well-intentioned bad taste if I were to try to plumb the depths of personal feeling to acknowledge the complex of friendship I made while working at Sound Warehouse. Record store employees are as queer as they come. Outsiders who also occupy the furthest reaches of “in;” intensely private personalities who crave social company; brazen iconoclasts who bristle at the suggestion we aren’t anything but normal; music snobs so democratically minded about our tastes that there are no guilty pleasures; obstinate individualists who will claim to not recognize themselves by any of these descriptive generalizations. Last year, I received a phone call from the wife of the man who kept the record store circus in full seamless operation telling me that he had died. Charles was a thin, bearded store manager gifted with a tireless virtuosity for problem solving, born in the shadow of American atomic energy, and who came of age alongside that altruistic generation of young idealists whose passions for liberal western principles challenged, here in the States, the prevailing conservative orthodoxy and defined the sixties. Growing up in the barrio, I often preferred the company of adults above my peers, and, when I came to know Charles, in my young adulthood, I realized I had been looking for a model of critical thinking. Dedalus and Bloom. Charles and Sound Warehouse made such a lasting impression on me that I still dream, not of Organon, but of working at the record store. Typically, the dream involves a familiar, standard retail crisis—like a till that will not balance following a register shift, a safe count that comes up short, a catastrophic in-store marketing display mishap—that unfolds in an accelerated mood of nervous anxiety, neuroses taking free rein as I lie sleeping, grinding my teeth and birthing the headaches that will wake me up hours before the alarm sounds. As the nightmarish chaos mounts, time for correction ticks away, and I can feel Charles’ presence as the beginning hour of his shift nears. There’s money everywhere but we’re short hundreds of dollars, or the day’s shipment is nowhere near checked in so display stock will be a day late, or merchandise hasn’t been sale priced yet when you had all morning and early afternoon to get it done, or customer lines are only getting longer but you can’t figure out a discrepancy in a customer’s disputed refund amount and the figures and receipts are continually changing so you can’t any longer remember the original figure to work your way back to a correct amount and you look up to see your boss crossing the sales floor in his brown leather jacket and brown fedora, bringing with him the confidence and certainty of order and logic. Writing in the Ithaca section of Ulysses, Joyce noted of Dedalus and Bloom, “each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.”