That’s right. Playboy is launching a new site called TheSmokingJacket.com that is 100% safe for consumption in public, including work (according to All Things Digital). I’m sure that we’ve all taken that precarious risk of going to our favorite porn site at work just to shake up the system or shitty day–this happens usually when my own creative tank is empty and I just need to wake myself out of that artistic slumber.

So by that application, I guess this site will function as a bottomless cup of weak coffee. I think I’d rather wait to get home, shut the blinds and drink the espresso.

And while Playboy in the past has employed some of the best writers in history, including Norman Mailer, Alex Haley and Hunter Thompson, it seems like Playboy is drinking their own Kool-Aid now in thinking that wasn’t filler between pictures of naked ladies. Let’s be honest, it was those contributions that made it OK for the magazine to be in plain sight at home, whether on the back of the toilet, in the rack in the living room or even sitting on the coffee table. I mean the original name for the magazine was Stag Party–have you ever read a good book at one of those?

Remember when Las Vegas became sinless? That sucked.

-A

It was August 1999 and we were in Texas. Houston to be exact and the “we” I refer to is my early 20s musical outlet slash band called Sleepover. The other guys in the band were both from there and had set up a couple dates for us to play down that-a-way, but for me there was way more romance in just being in that state for the very first time. I was in the biggest state in the lower 48, the home of ZZ Top, amazing BBQ and so much pride that the beer cans all said “Texas” on them–for example, down there it wasn’t Busch Beer, it was Texas Busch Beer.

I got off the plane at Houston Hobby and met my friends at baggage claim where I was greeted by guitar player Chris with “that leather jacket is pretty funny.” No, it wasn’t a case of me playing it too cool with a bunch of country boys–my friends all dressed like Black Sabbath too. It was the peak of summer and in that town, where the heat is so intense that you can actually see it curving in the air all around you. I shed the jacket and got in the car to head back to Chris’ parents house over by Rice University.

This house was our home base during our “tour” and it was quite the spread. Chris’ father was lawyer to some of the big oil companies in the region and what that gets you in Houston is a 2-story brick house with a giant swimming pool and a garage with a garage apartment up top, which is where I slept. Like a sex comedy script, Chris’ parents skipped town for the week and we tore it up between gigs which usually began with all of us deep diving in the pool for beers around 11am.

One evening our other guitar player Daniel took me out to San Antonio to meet his folks and show me what that was all about. Not much. However we did rent a lane at the local bowling alley where two very amazing events took place. First, a pair of women in their 70s in the lane next to us taught me how to bowl correctly by “pointing my tits where I want the ball to go.” Second, while draining pitchers of Shiner, Daniel and I were ambushed by a swarm of Mexican schoolchildren asking us for autographs. We were after all, both long-haired and wearing tight jeans and black boots, so we really could have been anyone to them. My theory is they didn’t want to take the chance of not meeting us were we actually famous. We went along with the fantasy, signing away with messages like “stay in school” and “say no to drugs.” Rock stars or not, we were pretty good at it.

Back in Houston, Chris and Daniel took me to that city’s best record store, Sound Exchange in the Montrose (aka Boys Town) and that is where I stumbled upon this jewel. Daniel had this cassette in his car and we had been listening to it a ton on our last tour, where we actually played a string of 8 or 10 dates up and down the Pacific Coast. It called out to me, that fluorescent highlighter yellow cover, and the price was damn right too at $3.99.

That night, we put the record on back at Chris’ parents house and pumped it through the outdoor speakers in the backyard which had probably only experienced the warm sounds of Willie Nelson, Julio Iglesias and some contemporary Christian music until then. We fired up the citronellas, the pipe, and the night, while krautrock’s finest filled our polluted ears. Texas was as big as ever at that very moment.

-A

This story is actually going to take us wayyyyy back. I won’t be racking up the cool points by being able to say that this record was the first configuration in which I had ownership, however the journey there totally worth it.

This story begins in the latter half of 1988, during my first semester of eighth grade at Marine View School in Huntington Beach, CA. I ran with a very small pack of over-testosteroned, under-sexed dudes who ruled the boys’ bathroom during recess and lunch, where we got our bragging rights from being the first to own the heavy metal and hardcore rap (this was the 80s) that we blasted from our Sony dual tape decks. Guys came in just to pee, but they left with their ears properly trained after being served a dose of some real shit, and probably went and did things like talk to girls or whatever people who didn’t hang out in the bathroom did.

At home, I was allowed to listen to metal after complete consent from my mother. Thrash and speed metal were all me and my friends listened to and therefore the approval meter was set on “paranoid.” Mind you, these were the glory days of the PMRC and while I can now appreciate the first lady of Alliance For Climate Protection, back then she was keeping me from owning music by Slayer, Death Angel, even the Dead Kennedys. Anthrax however, was on the OK list.

To be pure, the first time I laid eyes on this album was in the vinyl stacks at The Wherehouse (goin’ back!) on the corner of Beach and Warner. The record player however was in the living room and in my mother’s own words, there was “no way in hell” I would be playing that one out in the common area of the house. My listening had to be done via cassette, in private, or in the bathroom at school. The Wherehouse was sold out of the cassette that day (but they did have one of those crazy expensive “CDs” for rich people), so rather than ride my bike to the Licorice Pizza (goin’ wayyyy back!) seven blocks away, I went home and yanked the BMG Record Club (goin’ wayest back) ad out of my mom’s TV Guide, taped the penny to the dotted circle in the corner and sent that in with State Of Euphoria as my number one selection.

That unsexy tape case saw a lot of action over the next couple years, going with me to school, sleepovers, and the beach. High school eventually called the cops on that party, my first day in class got me a welcome wagon full of stink eye and laughter when I showed up in my Anthrax t-shirt and long hair (in the back only–long all around did not make that OK list). With no bathroom to hide out in anymore, I was forced to conform and naturally evolved into a citizen of the Alternative Nation, a place where ex-metal heads were allowed to remain anonymous while listening to grunge.

Thanks to a fellow Anthrax devotee, the record you see photographed wound up in the used bin at Logo’s in Santa Cruz in 2008. Oddly enough, this was a place that I spent the mid-to-late 90s mining for lodes of seventies jazz fusion almost exclusively. Our story comes full circle 20 years later where I was finally able to take that record home and play it as loud as I fucking wanted in the living room.

Anthrax – “Finale”

-A

I was chatting with a couple friends in the corporate kitchen yesterday about this new album; they thought that MGMT has let down a legion of fans that spent 2008 jumping up and down to alternative anthems like “Kids.” I agree that the band has taken one giant step backward….into the 60s. Taking cues from flower-power heroes like Love, I think regardless of what direction this band is heading, it’s in the right one. To be sure, check your Barney’s catalog, but I think easygoing 60s psych is here to stay.

MGMT – “Siberian Breaks”

-A

The funny thing is I don’t really even like this record. The ship that carried all the VW commercial converts sailed without me, I guess. I’ve only listened to Pink Moon twice, but it never stuck, which is weird, because I am in my 30s after all, and I’ve been noticing that simple songs with soft but ardent vocals have been making their way into my playlist. But this story isn’t about a love for an album. This is about the time where I had possibly the best job in the world.

In early 2001, I was living alone in a studio apartment in Hollywood on Franklin Place, a side street between Las Palmas and Highland that ran parallel to it’s bigger brother, Franklin Avenue. The rent was $525 per month, including utilities. With little overhead and even less direction, I was taking odd jobs wherever they came: freelance writing for music magazines, working as a post-production lackey logging video all day, and sometimes temping in strange and square offices. Money either came from one of those spotty sources or the EDD in those days, so I wasn’t able to afford a car. After a few long months at a bad cable TV production company called Film Garden in Studio City, I was burnt out on both the work and the commute, which was an hour each way on the Red Line and bus. I never wanted to work in television and build my IMDB profile anyway. Fed up, I looked up the street from my apartment to the thing that would become so significant in my 20s: the Capitol Records building.

I could work there! I would walk to work everyday and totally make it in the record biz. I went to music school, didn’t I? This was meant to be. As it turns out, they weren’t hiring applicants right off the street that day, so in a moment that I consider to be one of my greatest, I asked what temp agency they used. After they told me, I set up an appointment with Adecco that day, suffered through their battery of typing and Microsoft Office tests and when I sat down in front of the agent assigned to my file, I simply said “I don’t want to work anyplace else but Capitol. If they call you, you call me.” That week they called and I was put to work in the Office Services department.

If you’re wondering, working as an assistant for Capitol Office Services ordering office supplies and sodas for the entire building was NOT the amazing job that I spoke of earlier. However, I was so good at being an unimportant cog in the Capitol Records machine that I was eventually offered the full time position. Great moment number two: I said “no.” Why would I turn down a steady paycheck, benefits, and insurance for a job I was already doing anyway? Because I had been doing that–working  shitty jobs that is–since I landed in Los Angeles and for some reason I knew I had better things to do. So they asked me to leave, hired a permanent person about a month later, and I went home to sit by the phone waiting for Capitol Records to call again. And they did.

The Business Development department at Capitol (let me interject that this was the early 2000s and there ain’t no such thing as a BD department, let alone person, in a label’s org chart anymore) was assigned the task of cleaning out the label’s warehouse and finding something useful and possibly charitable to do with its contents. Inside this storage space was tens of thousands of square feet piled high with the tangible legacy of the oldest major label in the U.S.A.–mainly sheet music and, you guessed it, old records. Multiple copies of every vinyl album that Capitol and it’s sub-labels had ever released that never went to market. And what did I have to do with this? I was the guy who had to go through every piece and photograph, number and catalog it in a database that was to be purged into one of the largest eBay auctions to ever take place at the time. For charity.

At that time, this was the most comfortable zone I could have ever been in at a job. I was in the biggest office on the 7th floor surrounded by records from the 40s to the 90s. Department heads would stop in to visit and make small talk with me while they cursed under their breath about my digs being bigger than theirs. But then a storage facility mover would kick open my door and brush past them with another dolly topping over with boxes of vinyl. I saw everything from copies of Can’s Tago Mago still in it’s shrink wrap to alternate cover art for Sgt. Pepper’s. Between the hours of 9 and 6, I talked to my friends on speakerphone while typing one-sentence descriptions and making $15 an hour. Nobody but the people I reported to directly really knew what I did, giving me a “top secret” status that wowed assistants and intimidated execs.

The payload kept getting better by the week and after a time I set aside a box of stuff that I thought should be earmarked as “shit that would auction well.” Or maybe it was “shit I should take home.” The lines get blurred at this point, but for a reason I can only describe as “sexually opportunistic,” I tucked in that copy of Pink Moon. I didn’t have the balls to take some of the amazingly rare stuff I came across, but I did walk out with Nick Drake and for that I openly apologize to to Capitol Records and EMI. I still live with guilt over what I did–leaving the treasure chest and taking the costume jewelry.

After a few months, I gave up the job to move to San Francisco to record music with a buddy who played guitar for John Vanderslice, because while he was on tour with JV, he had met some girl who worked at a music PR agency that promised to get our stuff in front of indie labels if he slept with her. Turns out this girl had zero influence on anything except my friend’s penis and after a month of fucking around and getting really freaked out over 9/11 (I was in SF in that September), I came back to LA. Surprisingly my old job was waiting for me, but the Round Table at Capitol had decided that the job was total bullshit, so they moved me up to a closet-sized office with no window on the 8th floor.

In the end, the auction never happened, but I did manage to impress the head of marketing enough to secure another temp job—one that lead to my career as I know it today. A career that from what I can remember, NEVER again put me in a giant room filled with amazing records.

-A

By record, I mean vinyl discs that when played, sounds are heard. My collection consists of nearly 1000 12″ discs and around 100 7″ discs and 45s. There is a difference there; the 7″ usually contained a couple very indie or punk rock songs that were purchased sometimes to enjoy the music that could heard on them, but almost always to experience the rush of being a part of a small, very elite class of music consumer. My experience has been, the more songs you could fit on a 7″, the more punk value it had. I think some of you readers might have to get honest with yourselves and admit you may have owned 7″s but never had the means to even listen to them. While 45s may look the same at a 7″, they almost always were pop tunes from a year gone by.

This series will be in no particular order except that I’ll probably start with the most vivid memories first. I hope you enjoy.

Earth Wind & Fire – That’s The Way Of The World

Summer 1994. I had just finished my first year of college at UC Santa Cruz and in that time had gotten myself a girlfriend who grew up in pay-to-be-progressive Marin County. She was a year ahead of me and had been drinking the PC kool-aid they were serving up at school long before she even got there. An independent woman of the nineties, she got herself a room at one of those student residences for the summer in Berkeley; some giant Victorian near the campus where you had to share a bathroom with strangers.

One weekend she was away and my friend Alex and I made a trip up there from Huntington Beach where we were staying with our parents for the summer. Alex did his freshman year at UC Santa Barbara, far enough from his parents to stave off regular visits but close enough to cave in when the guilt was laid on. We took my family’s Toyota truck up the 101 with the sole purpose of getting to Berkeley, shopping at Amoeba on Telegraph and getting stoned the entire time. See, this was before the expansion of Amoeba into the west to SF and south to LA. For a couple of vinyl junkies like me and Alex, you couldn’t craft a better afternoon than getting some crazy greenbud-induced tunnel vision and burying your nose in those dusty stacks.

I put on my uniform: jean shorts, Converse hi-tops, some beret-style cap that I stole from my girlfriend and a t-shirt that probably said “Super Fly” on it and set out to Telegraph Ave for an experience I can only describe as “Disneyland at age 7.” In the clearance bins in the SOUL section, I stumble upon this record for $1. At that point, I had never really identified as an Earth Wind & Fire fan. They did that song “Let’s Groove” with the vocoder, which for me was attached to a fond memory of a day care situation in Sunnymead (now Moreno Valley) when around the holidays and a Santa-for-hire came by to deliver all the children toys and some popular black kid a few years older than me got a toy robot with a built-in radio. He flipped it on and it started playing that song and dancing around. For 1980 that was the paragon of technology in toys, like the robot knew to play the song with the robot voice! Oh and Earth Wind & Fire was the band that Forrest Whitaker’s character in Fast Times At Ridgemont High buys scalped tickets from Mike Damone to go see–that was all I knew.

What I didn’t know was just what a deal I was getting. Like the lottery, $1 was about to change the game for me, forever. Packed away in that yellow paper bag, it sat mixed in with about eight other records that I was sure were going to be a lot better than that wild card. I remember that Tower of Power’s Ain’t Nothin’ Stoppin’ Us Now was in there as well; TOP was a band I was incredibly fond of and I had all the good records up to 1975 and this one was 1977–another risk. For the funk and soul records I had a general rule: 1970-1975 you were safe as most of these bands hadn’t jumped on the disco bandwagon yet. ‘76 and beyond, it was always a gamble.

Alex and I got back to the room at the residence and fired up the pipe and resurrected our highs. We burned through all the stuff we recognized, the stuff we made pre-meditated decisions on. Then we got to That’s The Way… and studied the cover for a minute orrrrr maybe a lot longer–we were pretty baked. They were all in black and white and they were all dancing and taking flight. One guy on the end was staring at us with his hands on his hips, as if to ask us “how high are you, motherfucker?” We slipped the black disc out of the insert, which was still in tact, and put on side one song one, “Shining Star.”

That song kicked in and Alex and I stared at the turntable for a good minute, unable to believe our ears. That bassline, those voices! “Holy shit!” we shouted in chorus and started to dance like well, really high college kids. The title track was next, a bit slower but it didn’t lose our attention at all. We played that album all the way through from start to finish, playing every air instrument known to man as the Berkeley sun broke through the window and dense pot smoke–we had heaven.

Then I saw the copy on the back cover, mentioning that this was actually a soundtrack to a movie produced by none other than Sig Shore (and starring Harvey Keitel). Some may recognize him as producer of a much more popular black cinema gem Super Fly, and since I owned the t-shirt, by association this album had to be good. How could I have ever doubted it! From this point on, Alex and I were determined to carry this colorful message to all our friends and suggest they carry it to their friends. We started a movement that day. A few years later however, I found out that the gospel of That’s The Way… had reached other parts of the country. A friend from San Diego played me a version of “Reasons” from this album, covered by a local white college band down there. The singer of this band not only had good taste in music, but apparently fucked Jewel before she got famous. Not a bad calling card to have in the 90s and a deflated, almost unbelievable party story today. I mean, Jewel is for sure normal guy territory now, anyway.

MP3: Earth Wind & Fire – Shining Star

-A

If you’re like me, you can’t wait to SPRING FORWARD this weekend and rejoice in the gift of later sunlight given to us by the benevolent minds of Ben Franklin and the more obscure New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson. According to legend, while Franklin was an envoy to France in 18th century, he suggested the lazy French wake up earlier to take advantage of more sunlight and save on candles; the compromise being to set the clocks ahead one hour cos no one wanted to get up early. Even better, Hudson’s plea had more modern-day parallel: his shift job didn’t allow him enough time to collect bugs after work so he diligently proposed we jump ahead an hour in the summer, thus giving us what we call Daylight Saving Time today.

We’re all on this fun train however except for the states of Arizona and Hawaii in the U.S., the province of Saskatchewan in Canada and the State of Sonora in Mexico. I wondered why so I grabbed my knowledge shovel and went digging.

ARIZONA

This state seemed the most likely not to join the party as they were also the last state in the union to observe Martin Luther King Jr. day. However, they were on DST during WWI and WWII in a national effort to conserve energy. My thought was that with that state being so hot in the summertime that another hour of sunlight is the last thing they would want. I was right. So for 6 months out of the year, me and John McCain share the same time zone. Sweet.

SASKATCHEWAN

Apparently as recent as the 1960s, each of the divided areas that you see above were able to have whatever time zone they wanted. Talk about freedom! I’d have my sun going down at midnight if I could. As you can imagine, the fallout was pretty severe with all these Saskatchewanians missing appointments with people on the other side of the province–family gatherings were a mess. The decision to get everyone on the same time zone was a bit complex so they had to take an all-or-nothing approach to this and just stick to one time, ALL THE TIME and not mess with the clocks ever, lest they take a big step back to their chronological dark age they fled not 50 years ago.

SONORA

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that because this area is just south of Arizona that they kind of just said “let’s do that” and voila. Pretty convenient for those crossing the border as they won’t have to reset their watches. That’s important.

HAWAII

I’ve never been here but I’d imagine that any time here is awesome so why f— with it?

-A

And for those of you hiding under a rock, here’s the original video.

-A