Drawn from previous posts, this is not part of my book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1).
An infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Today, this is THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!
Hey Carl! Dig THIS!
Over a span of years--decades, really--most music fans have benefitted from inspiration and specific recommendations to discover new (or at least new-to-us) sounds: New records, new artists, new discoveries, each a fresh revelation even when it happens to be a record released before we were born. Any record you ain't heard is a new record.
I benefitted from friends and family, from helpful and knowledgeable folks at record stores, and from mass media. Rock magazines. Radio stations. The pursuit of buzz. I'm still on the hunt for all of it.
Alas, no one hipped me to the Shirts in the '70s. A few live tracks on the Live At CBGB's various-artists set were the only Shirts material I recall hearing at the time, and that didn't grab me like, say, Bowery scene contemporaries the Ramones, Blondie, and Television grabbed me. I didn't get hip to how GREAT the Shirts were until the '90s at the earliest, whenever it was that I snapped up a used CD reissue of the Shirts' eponymous debut album from 1978.
Instant thrall. Maybe I said to myself, Hey Carl! Dig THIS! I know I cursed the passage of a couple of decades that I had wasted by delaying my entry into Shirts fandom. But what the hell--I'm there now. Any record you ain't heard....
The fact that my enthusiastic immersion in punk, new wave, and other assorted rock 'n' roll labels in the late '70s did not include the music of the Shirts wasn't a rejection of the Shirts; I just wasn't exposed to their recordings until many years later. The only thing I even remember from their Live At CBGB's contributions is Shirts singer Annie Golden's greeting to the Bowery audience:
We're the Shoits, from Brooklyn.
She exaggerated the accent deliberately.
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| Nice shoit, Annie |
(I don't remember whether or not I've ever seen any of Golden's performances as an actress. I have never watched Orange Is The New Black. I do remember reading a letter she wrote to CREEM magazine in the late '80s, dismissing the artistic validity of the Monkees. Her opinion of the Monkees did not match mine. I'M a believer!)
When I finally did get around to snapping up that above-mentioned CD reissue all those decades after the fact, I was immediately and overwhelmingly taken by the album's opening track "Reduced To A Whisper," hypnotized by a guitar sound that reminded me of the Shirts' CBGB's contemporaries Television.
As a whole, the Shirts didn't really sound at all like Television; the comparison was based almost entirely on a similarly serpentine six-string thrum and the two groups' shared stomping grounds. The Shirts were...well, I don't wanna call them more mainstream than Television, 'cause that ain't exactly it either. But there were hints of connection to some things beyond the Bowery, to, say, the progressive-folk mix aura of Renaissance, or maybe even post-Woodstock FM radio, but at least a little more aggressive. It all still felt like part of Television's world, the Ramones' world, the world of Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Max's Kansas City. CBGB's. New York City really has it all.
From that first album, the track "Tell Me Your Plans" just clicked with me recently. And suddenly, I can't get enough of it. Written by Shirts guitarist Artie LaMonica, the simmering blend of regret, resignation, yearning, and unmeasured dollops of uncertainty echoing throughout each microgroove of "Tell Me Your Plans" suggests a love affair approaching a crossroads without benefit of a map. Or a plan. There is, at best, a bumpy road ahead. There may not even be a road at all.
What's the plan, then? It's hard to tell. I guess we'll just dig what we can along the way.
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My new book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) is now available; you can see details here. My 2023 book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones is also still available, courtesy of the good folks at Rare Bird Books.
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, streaming at SPARK stream and on the Radio Garden app as WESTCOTT RADIO. Recent shows are archived at Westcott Radio. You can read about our history here.
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