Various: Knitting on the Roof

Our Californian Neil Young odyssey last October began with us meeting in San Francisco. After a quick tour of prime tourist-photo locations for first-time visitor Scott, we headed to Amoeba to browse some records. It felt like we were a gang of alcoholics strolling into a distillery, pretending everything would be OK.

Fortunately my love of recorded music was balanced by my hate of carrying extra baggage when I'm travelling. I found this CD — stickered 'Out of Print', 'File: magnetic fields', $7.99 — in the Magnetic Fields rack, and figured that was all I needed as a souvenir of the visit. I had been through the check out within five minutes of arriving and was ready to head to the bar. But I had a lot of hanging round still to do. Paul came out with many items, the most interesting but impractical of which was a Greendale boxed set on heavy vinyl, a full inch thick. And $60. I can't remember if we were allowed to break the cellophane seal and find out what was inside.

It's not really The Magnetic Fields playing on this album. It's Stephin Merritt with his ukulele singing If I Were a Rich Man, but in 1999 he refused even the slightest trappings of a solo artist, even when performing as one. I already had this track as an MP3, downloaded from… somewhere, not a file-sharing site, but some here-today-gone-tomorrow page— on a tip-off from another fan. So what was the point of getting the CD? As I said, a souvenir of the Amoeba visit, the extra appeal of exclusivity conferred by the 'out of print' sticker, a salving of conscience (though I doubt that any royalties get paid on deleted catalogue). And, as with the western movie themes a couple of days ago, the other tracks on the CD — including those by The Residents, Negativland, David S. Ware and Elliott Sharp — hold as much or more interest as the Stephin Merritt performance.

Finally, the album is, I think, a kind of benefit for the Knitting Factory in New York, and I like the Knitting Factory. M and I went to a gig there in June 1999: Joey Baron and band, possibly including Marc Ribot.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full (not) at Last.fm