Patience

Again, just writing to write. Open the tap, yeah, some foam comes out, but it's the only way to get beer, too.

So I had my studio apartment in DC up until October 2005, which means that that whole story about the girl and the question about Yoko Ono and Pharmacy Bar took place in Novemberish, 2005. After that, I lived at home for a while, and then moved in with a friend in Silver Spring, MD, a few months later, around March of 2006. Silver Spring was ok. I was about a mile's walk from the metro station, and most of that walk was along a highway with no sidewalks.

There was a club in Silver Spring that had just opened up around the same time. I have no idea if it is still there; can't even remember the name. It was opened to be the kind of place I would never want to go to. Bottle service, "modern" furniture on the cheap. Fusion snacks. But the place was not making enough money. Apparently, not enough douchebags around. So some good promoters had the chance to experiment. Well, a little.

Anyways, summer 2006 I had the chance to go and hear Roy Davis Jr. play some records. It was a fun night. Good music, and good people. Roy played a lot of good records that night, but the one that stood out, was, of course, the rarest one. That's just how my taste is, and I hate it.

I went over to the DJ booth to figure out what I was hearing. It was one of the rawest records I had ever heard, and seemed to exist in this perfect place between Chicago house and UK synth pop. I was told that the record was unreleased, was something made for Ron Hardy, and that Hardy had given the tape to only a small handful of people, and that one of his dying wishes was that the tape would not be shared by any of the people to which it was entrusted.

I only remembered the name of the artist, Jamie Principle. Jamie's work was, of course, familiar to me. Years earlier, I had found a Trax vinyl with "Baby Wants To Ride" and "Your Love" in the used bin of a small record store in Amherst, MA, and had gladly, eagerly, handed over $20 for it. I had never paid so much money for a used piece of vinyl in my life, and have never given it a second thought.

Time went by. Discogs became more informative, more music was available for perusal online, Youtube got big, and yet, I kept hunting, kept yearning for the record. Only in 2010 did I get a glimpse.  A heavily-edited version was pressed. Of course I bought it, but I also knew I was only getting a piece, a preview, a condensed version, a screenplay, not a novel.

It was only in 2011 that I finally, finally got my wish, and the demo version, given to Ron Hardy probably 26 years previous at that time, of Jamie Principle's "Bad Boy", was finally available in full on vinyl. Of course, it was mine immediately.

I can't tell what the record sounds like to you. But to me, it has lost no magic. It was worth the wait. Because it sounds like what going out used to feel like. The possibility of danger. The possibility of the unexpected. The feeling of being somewhere you aren't supposed to be, doing something you aren't supposed to do (but not in a narcissistic way, if that makes any sense). It sounds like all the important nights of a life, those nights when the end can't be anticipated at the beginning, those nights when the routine is broken, and not in a routine way.

So here it is. If it sounds amateurish, underproduced, like some weird hallucination from a basement paneled in cheap wood, well, yes. Exactly. Exactly!



Bonus Cut:
I had an interview at the University of Chicago at some point in late 1998 and totally fucked it up because I found out that the admissions counselor had been a regular at the Warehouse in her youth and asked too many questions.