Memory Serves (Rapture)
Memory Serves is the title of the 1981 debut album by Material, Bill Laswell’s longterm multi-genre band/music project. It is also an apt title for my re-entry into writing about records, and in particular my records, that is to say, my collection of records. That is to say vinyl records. In 1981, vinyl - and cassette tapes - were the formats, period. When you bought a record, you bought a record. You didn’t say vinyl record or vinyl. It was per se a vinyl record. Records were just records.
Why do I say that this is my re-entry to writing about records? For many years I had a blog called Vinyl Record Architect that was pretty well-known and popular in the record collecting sub-culture. Top Twenty by someone’s reckoning worldwide. Whenever I was in a new town or city I would visit record stores, and very often the proprietors were my readers! It was going great, but then the site disappeared when it wasn’t renewed - silly story for another day, maybe. This year, on Father’s Day, my family decided that it was time to get me back online. The stories kept coming but weren’t being written down. They recovered my old posts - which will be collected on the Archives here - and helped me buy a new domain and set up this website. So, thanks, family! You are the best.
I am also back with a shorter name. No longer, Vinyl Record Architect, I am now simply the Vinyl Architect. Even though I am an architect, readers will figure out that vinyl means records here, not siding. And someone else seems to own my old name now anyway…
Which brings me back to 1981, Bill Laswell, and Memory Serves. In my life, 1981 was a milestone. It was the year I graduated from college and entered grad school. Returning home to New York City briefly that summer, I noticed the worlds of music and art were interweaving in startlingly creative directions. The boundaries between musical, artistic, and fashion genres were becoming more complicated, not breaking down exactly, but intersecting, crossing. Earlier that year, on January 12, Blondie’s Rapture was released. Later that month, on January 31, the music video debuted on MTV. It was the first rap video on MTV and not only featured Debbie Harry and Blondie, but also graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and hip hop artist Fab Five Freddy. It fused the Bronx and East Village, graffiti art and fashion, and mainstream pop and hip hop.
Laswell’s musical breakthrough occurred just a few years earlier in Giorgio Gomelskys’ downtown Manhattan loft, the Zu Club, where Gomelsky asked Laswell to put together a house band to back up the musicians Gomesky was bringing to New York from Europe. Legendary music producer Gomelsky is perhaps best known for London's Crawdaddy Club and his association with the Yardbirds but his move to New York was a new beginning for him and the younger Laswell was a big part of that. Originally named after the club, the Zu Band evolved into New York Gong before finally becoming known as Material. Rather than hire mainstream session musicians, Laswell assembled a changing roster of creative artists from all over the city and all over the genres.
In the early 1980s, uptown and downtown were crossing in the East Village and Chelsea. The distinctions between gallery and street were changing. Musical worlds were also converging. What I didn’t know at the time, but have recently become obsessed with, is the role that bass player and producer Bill Laswell played - in roughly the same place and time that Rapture was released - in bringing together diverse musical worlds. Records like Memory Serves document his approach, which Laswell calls ‘collision music,’ mixing artists from wildly different worlds to see what will happen. This includes people like blues musician Sonny Sharrock, progressive rocker Fred Frith, free jazz sax player Henry Threadgill, and many others. The music is unpredictable and entertaining, assembling new wave, punk, jazz, dance, funk, and avant grade approaches.