Re: Noise for noise's sake

In the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs relates how Robert Quine managed to see his true m.o.: to find the noisiest, most god-awful atonal blaring record he can get his hands on, month after month, and write a great review of it so that people will buy it.

Bangs said that Quine had him totally sussed (with the proviso that he actually did like all those harsh, rude, noisy records), and traced it back to a living arrangement where his roommates teased him relentlessly for his taste in music: "I've been trying to get revenge on those assholes ever since."

Has anyone ever felt compelled to play a music selection — whether for just one person, or a roomful of people — knowing that the chance of it being widely appreciated & embraced was nil? And if so, what do you think, in hindsight, possessed you to do it?

---

Jermoe's post about party-killing music selections made me think of this anecdote. (I hope Jermoe isn't displeased to be associated with Bangs in this way.)

Yeah. Huntsville's pretty fucking exciting innit?
You must feel like a relative genius.

I love to play OUTSIDE THE DREAM SYNDICATE by Tony Conrad & Faust for unsuspecting bystanders. Their looks of confusion and horror are priceless, as they fight against being mesmerized by the endless drone - they can't stop listening, but hate that they can be so fascinated by something so far from their usual tastes.

Another good one in that vein is JESUS' BLOOD NEVER FAILED ME YET by Gavin Bryars. People beg you to turn it off, but at the same time they can't stop listening to it.

Ah, well, should we get into the notorious art of jukebox sabatoge? My friends and I would check to see if a bar's jukebox had the White Album, set Revolution 9 to play ten times in a row, and leave.

Can't remember where I found it, but there's a funny story on line about being in a bar where the jukebox had Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" in it's hour-long entirety driving everyone crazy.

Ah, here it is.

I've got a buddy who tells a story about his favorite bar in Ann Arbor in college. When he'd go in and it was really crowded, he'd drop 50 cents and play the Allman Bros' "Mountain Jam" on the jukebox twice. When the crowd realized that the 30+ minute song was playing again, about half the tables would clear out and all of a sudden, he had a place to sit.

> My friends and I would check to see if a bar's jukebox had the White
> Album, set Revolution 9 to play ten times in a row, and leave.

I did the same thing at a bar once, except the selection was The Stooges' "L.A. Blues." And I stuck around, to watch the people in the bar get irritated.

The bar was pretty loud to begin with; it appeared that the aggravated patrons couldn't grasp that this grating noise actually was emanating from the jukebox. Even after hearing it for the fifth time.

There was a jukebox in the cafeteria my senior year in high school, which often spent the entire lunch hour playing nothing but "Another One Bites the Dust" - not intentionally, so much as the fact that all the knuckleheads would run in and fill the thing up with quarters and make their selections without considering that everyone else was doing the same thing, and it didn't go in the order of when things were selected, but by the alpha-numeric number of the selection on the jukebox. So if 20 people came in and made their 3 selections for a quarter and all 20 picked that song, plus two others, once it reached the first play of "Another One Bites the Dust" it would stay on it for 20 more plays. Which it did on a daily basis, because people are damn stupid and never seem to learn.

So anyhow, one day a friend of mine snuck in early and loaded it up to play "White Christmas" nonstop. I believe this was in April.

The jukebox was removed shortly thereafter and never seen again. It was a nice idea in theory, but in practice it was hell.

Donnie Iris's "Love is Like a Rock" spelled the end of the jukebox at my high school. Why that particular song struck such a nerve in Atlanta, I'll never know (although I'm proud to say I've owned KING COOL for many, many years).