Paul (Spacehotel)
http://www.myspace.com/spacehotel

Were you in Singapore when Los Lobos played there? It was a school night I think but I heard they blew the roof off the place – a discoteque in Orchard Rd – and their version of La Bamba that night was a 20 minute garage rock version that foxed all those Rick Astley era people who probably thought it was a novelty record unaware that Los Lobos are a crack unit who know their Hank to Hendrix and Waits and Thompson and muchos more.

Mark Kramer, or Kramer, of (as far as I am concerned) God.

His passion for music was/is incredible & he’s been involved with some of the most notable bands over the last 15 or so years. The easiest point to begin with him was as a bassist in The Butthole Surfers for their rather destructive European Tour back in the late ’80s – the one I fkng missed & the one where they destroyed the Newport Leisure centre 20 miles down the road from my old home town.

The money he made for that led to him opening his Noise New York recording studio – the only reason I ever wanted to go to the US when I was a kid, as he had an open door policy & openly welcomed people through the doors to shake hands, drown in coffee & generally shoot the breeze. From there he started the Shimmy Disc label & over the years (prior to Shimmy Disc being bankrupted/bought out by the Knitting Factory label & following a crippling legal ‘divorce’ from Ann Magnuson, his Bongwater partner) discovered, managed, toured with as sound engineer & musician, produced & mixed the likes of:

Galaxie 500 (whose entire oeuvre he produced), Low (whom he discovered & produced), Danielson Famile, Will Oldham’s Palace Songs, Daniel Johnston, GWAR, King Missile, Dogbowl, Paleface, Beck, Dot Allison, Shockabilly, B.A.L.L., Bongwater, Ween, Half Japanese, The Fugs (played bass on their reunion tour), Allen Ginsberg (yes, the poet), John Zorn, Alice Donut, Jellyfish Kiss, Urge Overkill’s (their “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” hit single for Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Penn & Teller (he was a sound engineer/score writer for a host of their Broadway shows & won a Tony as a result + was in a band, The Captain Howdy, with Penn + Deborah Harry & Billy West (of Ren & Stimpy fame) – notable for their cover of Always Something There To Remind Me & for having a song written for them by Lou Reed), When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water, Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Eugene Chadbourne, Rebby Sharp, The Nightjars, Daevid Allen (as in Soft Machine & Gong), Hugh Hopper (Soft Machine), Damon & Naomi, Das Damen, Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, The Black Keys, David Sylvian + stupid amounts of others), Syd Straw, Shonen Knife, Fred Frith & Milksop Holly. Amongst a hell of a lot more.

Of the original (approx.) 103 vinyl & CD releases (there were some videos & merchandise items released on the Shim catalogue numbers also, which buggers up the chronology a bit) I have 85 of them. There are also a shit load of off-shoots & one offs & etc & so forths that I have my hands on (I used to buy direct from Kramer/Shimmy Disc, then from Shimmy Disc Europe when the $ hit the floor, then Knitting Factory when SD was sold, then Ebay when I couldn’t find anywhere else & there was this one German guy & a Dutch guy who seemed to be forever selling their SD back catalogue off…).

Now, following some self-imposed wilderness years, a clutch of sporadically released but brilliant (if you like psych-pop/rock, that is) solo albums – including one I’m seriously looking forward to: The Brill Building, his f5-year effort to bring new life to a collection of hit singles written in the Brill Building in the late 50′s & early 60′s.

&, yes, I would consider my appreciation of this guy’s work obsessive.

Indie didn’t happen until college, when working at our campus radio station taught me about options beyond mainstream radio, and that all the records I hadn’t heard of at the used record shop could actually hold some good possibilities. Interestingly enough, though, it was watching punk videos at 1am on Saturday nights during high school that introduced me to the (International) Noise Conspiracy and the Hives, opening up my taste to garage rock and taking me out of an emo phase. For that, I’m appreciative.

Toad, maybe you’ve mentioned it before and I missed it, but were you an army brat? I’d never thought to ask why you lived in so many countries, but I’m curious now.

And does going to shows alone and tracking a producer’s work really make you an obsessive? Fuck me, then. Christ.

i will admit to a healthy hall and oates fixation, carly simon, james taylor, neil young and jackson browne. in the eighties i found the music scene to be way too air-supplyish and journey-ish for my taste and i got into really old stuff, jazz standards and such. i came back to life in the mid-to-late 90s and i’d say the love affair with music has been steadily intensifying since then, only now i’m drawn to smaller and smaller bands and tinier and more intimate venues. the thought of going to a coliseum or stadium gig makes me want to throw up!