HOT WAX Wednesday: Dead Moon

Baby I'm going south

Every record collector has a few White Whales, the wax they’ve been chasing for years and haven’t yet found. It might not even be anything rare—often it’s just that record, that album, that LP you can’t live without and haven’t gotten lucky with yet. There’s no better feeling in the world than when you finally do, when your heart skips a beat as you flick through the racks because, holy shit, there it is. I have been known to launch myself off the couch and take off running down the block because my local record store just posted of a snap of something I’ve been trying to find for five years.

Dead Moon has had this effect on me more than once. By now I have a pretty impressive percentage of the discography for a someone who’s never lived in Portland, where the punk trio (founder Fred Cole, his wife Toody, and drummer Andrew Loomis) hailed from and where most of their American fans still abide.¹ The band never achieved anything like mainstream popularity in the States, despite developing a following in Europe relatively early in their career and cranking out crackerjack records nearly every year between their 1988 debut, In the Graveyard,² and disbanding in 2006. There isn’t one in the batch I don’t like, but there is one that became a Melvillian obsession in the writing of Hot Wax (which you can pre-order at a steep discount this week at B&N or for free shipping from an indie, which would be much cooler of you than falling for Am*zon’s Prime day cash grab).

This record, Strange Pray Tell, was only ever pressed on vinyl in Germany, and good luck finding that OG mono pressing anywhere else. It was repressed in 2013 after the vinyl resurgence got well underway, but I held out for the real deal. I do that with records I really love, but especially something like Dead Moon—rough and tumble, lo-fi garage punk that wouldn’t sound right with the edges filed off. When a sealed copy popped up in the Discogs marketplace, I waffled for a while. It was a bigger risk than I like to take with big-ticket items. Records that have spent decades sealed in shrink wrap fetch a higher price because the sleeve and the media will be mint condition, but with one glaring problem: records that have been squeezed tight in cellophane and languished in storage for dozens of years are much, much more likely to be warped.

I said a prayer to the gods of rock and pulled the trigger, unable to let it get away again—the last copy I tried to buy disappeared out from under me in the time it took to message the seller—and for once the fates were on my side. I’m very glad nobody heard the noises I made when I slit the shrink open and saw it wasn’t warped. There was some squealing involved. But I’ve been waiting to get my hands on this for so long that maybe some squealing was warranted. While it’s very much about the music itself—Bob Christgau aptly described Dead Moon as “the 13th Floor Elevators without the clinical dementia”—it’s also about the book.

It was the weird closed world of record collectors that started me down the road towards Hot Wax in the first place. Much like finding “my people” in the theatre department when I was a teenager, as a twenty-something I found my people at record stores and fairs and rock shows. Nowhere else could I talk to so many people who shared my fanatical love of analog music and its history. While Hot Wax is not at all autofiction, I did want to capture the intensity of that subculture; Suzanne, like me, spends most of her life on the hunt for musical revelation in 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. The high of a good record score is one of the highest highs she knows, and to tap back into that feeling firsthand at this stage of the process is especially, well, special.

That it should be this record in particular feels like kismet. Since it’s been a while since I harpooned a Whale, I made a night of it and turned all the lights off and put the good earphones on and just listened, start to finish. If any album, track by track, could be background music for Hot Wax, it’s Strange Pray Tell. The music might not be polished, but that’s where the power is. It doesn’t need gloss. The songs are undeniably good and undeniably bare: “no showboating or bullshitting,” as my fictional frontman might put it, just solid rock cut lean as a bone. It’s what I imagine much of Gil & the Kills’ early work sounding like, from the dirty country undertones to the obliquely ominous lyrics to the riffs that might have been played on a buzzsaw. Every track title here could just as easily have been a chapter title, there’s that much thematic overlap. “Going South” is a good sample of the synchronicity; it’s a classic driving tune in the vein of “Roadhouse Blues,” but one that’s fishtailing all over the road.

What makes this record a real treasure to me, though, is the mix of ripsnorters like this one and the introspective interludes of something like “Can’t Do That,” a song that breaks my heart a little every time I hear it. Like a good novel, a good album has enough variety to keep a listener engaged for the duration, and there are enough subtle moods and tones here to make it a rich listening experience, never mind the rinky-dink production value.

It’s one of the few albums that gets more than a passing namecheck in the book and plays a pivotal role in an interstitial scene, where Suzanne has this to say: “Through not fault of their own, some songs were psychically contaminated and couldn’t be cured.” The song she’s talking about, “Room 213,” is “etched in her subconscious acetate, for reasons she preferred not to think about.” Strange Pray Tell came out in 1991; it’s exactly what Suzanne, at that age, would have listened to, and it would have resonated unavoidably after everything she’s been through. It’s a pyromaniac record, obsessed with fire and ash; a record on the run, always looking over its shoulder or warning you not to; a record swimming around in the murky waters of memory. It’s like it was made for her—and, in a lesser way, me.

Anyway, I’m over the moon to have this bit of Dead Moon in my collection, and I hope I’ve turned you on to them, too.

1. I once saw a guy wearing a Dead Moon jacket in my neighborhood and he got away before I could chase him down but I have been low-key stalking that corner for a while, dementedly determined to befriend this person.

2. In the interest of divesting from companies with shitty politics, I’m in the process of transferring everything digital from Spotify—which I never liked to begin with but was the only real option for me after Google Play was gobbled up by YouTube—to TIDAL, a newer streaming platform which is friendlier to artists and higher-quality audio. The transfer process is pretty easy if your library is not as massive as mine (31,000 tracks and counting) and you would also like to not support AI weapons tech.