This was exactly what I wanted music to do, to ennoble and articulate and unsettle, but in an unpretentious way, in an affecting way. Just when I was kind of getting used to the saxophone, a really fractured guitar came in, a downtown-ish guitar, the kind of guitar that would be used to repel gentrifiers on the Lower East Side, then some percussion, then the guitar just broke out into some massive cacophony, like a pallet of submachine guns toppling over onto the floor, drowning out the saxes for an interval.

Started out with one saxophone, and then there was a second answering horn performing these sort of arpeggio-like runs. I couldn't really fathom how melancholy and enthusiastic it was. Sort of the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life. My delusional semi-sleep was a recombinant mixture of hypnagogic voices and New Sounds, and I heard this saxophone playing. It was late one night in Hoboken, and I was barely awake.

See, somewhere in the midst of my enchantment with the New Sounds show, in the late eighties, I heard this saxophone solo playing over the airwaves. SECOND PROPOSITION, that a certain period of music by the Lounge Lizards amounted to some of the most transportative music ever recorded. Leroi's placid and hilarious 'Home Sweet Home') especially now that you can no longer listen to archives of the really old episodes. Some of this music has probably been lost to history, alas (viz., A. I first heard Arvo Paart on New Sounds, first heard Gorecki's third symphony and David Hykes and Lamonte Young and Ingram Marshall and a lot of other stuff. Soon, I moved to Hoboken, and at that juncture I became passionately addicted to it, would stay up late especially to listen to New Sounds, often recording bits and pieces that interested me, and then searching them out in record stores that specialized in obscurities. I started listening to the New Sounds radio program when I was in graduate school on the Upper West Side, this being in the mideighties. on WNYC, public radio affiliate in my fair city. This concert was part of the New Sounds Live concert series, Svengali'd by one John Schaefer, the host of the radio program of the same name, broadcast each night at 11 p.m. Please see below.įIRST PROPOSITION, that the best concert I ever saw in my life was a gig by the Lounge Lizards, on April 12, 1992, at the Merkin Concert Hall, New York City. In these pages, I attempt to replace the High Fidelity–style obsession with a more serious apparatus, one which ideally gives the concert to which I address myself a stately, serious treatment. You wait until the lights go down, and then you somehow connive your way down to the row where the industry suits repose. ('I just waltzed up to that black dude and got two third-row tickets off him five minutes before the show, only fifteen bucks!') You camp out. You have to wait in long lines, you have to exercise Machiavellian crowd control instincts, or you have to exhibit first-rate scalping prowess. Apparently, going to concerts involves a masculine manipulation of worldly impediments. It's one of those High Fidelity–style games, talking about the gigs you've been to. In the case of popular music, however, this absence of statistical abstracts gives rise to annoying compilations of top-ten lists, desert island discs, accounts of various shows. The deployment of these facts becomes an important part of the obsessive lifestyle of the cathected individual. Those pursuits have their elective affinities, but they also depend on rigorous templates of factual material. Unlike being, e.g., a deranged baseball fan, or a hardcore weather person, or a day trader, or a wine fanatic. PREFACE: The problem with being an engaged music listener is that it's completely unscientific. Some Propositions Concerning the Lounge Lizards: The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience

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