The Past Never Goes Away

In my never-ending quest for everything to be just so, I was cleaning out the crawlspace and came across a box of textbooks from college and lodged in there with them were these old Musician magazines I'd held onto.

It was beyond interesting to re-read them. They range from the early 80's to the early 90's. I began reading and then subscribing to the magazine in the early 80's and read it religiously till it stopped being published. I didn't save very many, but the ones I did tended to reflect my interests or shocking events; the ones above covering Steely Dan 12 years apart (1981,1993), and the deaths of Zappa and Kurt Cobain not long after this edition came out.
Perhaps more interesting is the world of music at those times. In the early 80's I was getting more and more immersed in writing and recording, buying my Tascam 244 and figuring out how to use it. Unlike today, where just about everything and everybody has a website or Facebook or Soundcloud page, finding new music or what people were doing was generally the domain of magazines, fanzines, and industry newsletters. I'd forgotten how much was jammed into an issue. As an example, the March '81 magazine had interviews with Steve Winwood, coming out of a self imposed retirement, Steely Dan, finally releasing Gaucho after years of legal fighting with their label, John Lennon, this was two moths after his murder and people were still trying to understand why, record business news, Jazz news, up and coming bands U2 and the Psychedelic Furs, a look at the music scene in Austin before SXSW took it over, think eclectic country and what we now call Americana,  music reviews, gear reviews, critical snark; it had it all.
The other trend, if it is that, is the new found love of the old, in this case cassette tapes of which I have a few.

Like many a poor fool I had a record collection and a tape machine and so, as was the custom, I made tapes for the car and my Walkman. That this would be making a comeback is amusing to say the least, but maybe it's not that far-fetched. Obviously, making lists of songs to share is the happening thing, but often, as one should expect, on many sites it's more and more lists created to push a particular artist or label. And there is the old school notion of actually getting together to listen to each others tapes, or playing them for one another; that human touch thing rearing its head.

As I said, interesting.

This Week's Song: The Concerns of the Holy, is from Life Without Chickens, is something of an elegy to being a holy-man in this day and age; is it for real or is it just a racket to take advantage of a bunch of rubes. Lyrically I tried to play on that ambivalence. Musically, the song is fairly simple, 2 guitars, a synth, and a drum pattern with my usual desire to have them interweave like smoke rising from a flame. 
You can hear it at mrprimitivemusic.com