On Distortion

There's something that goes on when you're between the ages of 12-16. This is when, as far as I can tell, "taste" is made. What you gravitate towards in film, art, music; all that stuff moves from the background to the fore. Sure, you might have listened to music up to that point; the radio exists, your parents were on a steady diet of Fleetwood Mac or ABBA, you saw E.T. at the theatre. But from 12-16, the fog clears from the glass and you start to see yourself reflected in art.

Kevin Tomkinson. Kevin Tomkinson was the brother of my friend Kelly. He's older. He listened to metal. My memory puts him in the same grade as my sister. Anyway, Kevin found out I liked punk and gave me a dubbed cassette of music he didn't like. On side one was SNFU's …And No One Else Wanted To Play. Honestly, it didn't turn my crank. Sounded metal. Still sounds metal to me but I'm a student, I'll do the homework. I worked my way through side one waiting to be ignited but it never comes. Tape ends. Flip. Side two.

KLANG! F#. I don't know it's an F# then, I know it's an F# now. If you strummed an F# and let it ring out, my head will go "dundundun dundundundundun dundundundun", I will being doing a snare roll on my knees, and I will yell "WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?" This is what hearing Filler by Minor Threat for the first time will do to you. That chord, those drums, his voice. They are blowwwwwwwwn out. It's the sound of metal oxide tape being magnetized to its limit. The sound of a VU meter buried at +3. And again, I don't know any of that then. I only know that this is new to me. It's a combination of high speed and low fidelity that excites me atomically. Then as now. But that sound, distortion, isn't new. I'd heard it before when I was learning the guitar.

Turbo. Remember Turbo gas stations? Turbo had a punch card and if you filled up at a Turbo enough times, you'd get a reward. We filled up at Turbo a lot. One reward was a CD of rights abandoned garage rock recordings; basically Nuggets in gas station form. Anyway, it had The Standells Dirty Water, Count Five's Psychotic Reaction, The Monkees (I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone and Blue Cheer's Summertime Blues. I think The Chocolate Watchband and The Strawberry Alarm Clock made an appearance, too. That strikes me as funny. A real sexy fondue. The singular thread across nearly every song on that disc was distortion; mostly (likely) a by-product of the technology at the time being in the hands of people newly skilled in manipulating it. These were the songs I gravitated towards while I pressed my full index finger across the width of a Harmony acoustic guitar with a brutalizing action and chased the root notes along the low E string while I confidently coalesced a cacophony. But an acoustic guitar doesn't distort. It isn't until you receive an electric guitar and discover that plugging it into the instrument input of the family organ and turning the volume way up, you might approach the sound you're hearing.

It's been the same since then. Hearing Raw Power for the first time, the opening of Fugazi's Red Medicine, whenever Spoon cranks a pre-amp, the just past the limit crash cymbals in a Jeff Rosenstock song, the entire recorded history of The Marked Men. Multiple orders of harmonics from 20 to 20,000 Hz that instantly invoke a memory. A sound, not even music, can create neural circuits that strain against the current, generating heat and burying the needle in the red. Fucking amazing.