The Dexateens - Hardwire Healing

I've had a friend over doing some work on my house here and there the last few weeks.  He's a wonderful guy and a real craftsman, so whatever he charges I never care because the end results are just something else.  He's really a cabinet maker, but the need for cabinet makers in this day and age seems smaller than it used to be.  Years ago, he was married to a girl with a great job, and he worked for the airlines and made seriously good money, and he had a beautiful McIntosh stereo.  That was the first really amazing stereo I had ever heard.  He's since upgraded the one I heard, but he says it's getting older nowadays and he can no longer afford to upgrade it (besides, upgrading $10,000 components requires more than $10,000).  So he's glad he got what he did when he did, but he was saying he wasn't sure he'd do it over again.

Our conversations eventually (make that quickly) turn to music.  This time he mentioned that he doesn't know anyone to turn him on to new music, and the radio is awful and he hates the internet.  I told him the internet is a valuable tool, but you certainly don't need it. You can still do things the old fashioned way, and you'll find all kinds of great stuff.  Now, my friend has an amazing cd collection of well over 5000 disks (years ago he sold his Empire table and all but about 50 MOFI records - he truly regrets this), and he's a little older than me so he's pretty heavy on the classic rock, but also listens to classical, jazz, blues and really twangy country (he really liked my description of new country as "Journey with cowboy hats").  So he's more than willing to see what's out there, but he's just not sure how, and he says that a mutual friend of ours and me are the only people that still need music in their life to get by and be happy.  Since he's not on the internet much, he's really flummoxed that people think shitty mp3's and ipod's are a substitute for a decent stereo, plenty of amplification and cd or vinyl sources.  I had to tell him that he's not alone, but there's not nearly enough kids these days staring at pictures of the modern day equivalents of Pioneer SX 780's and Dual turntables, while they spin records by new bands that have integrity and know how to write their own songs.

So while he was putting in my new front screen door (which is beautiful), I played him The Dexateens' Hardwire Healing cd (I don't have this on vinyl, I should fix that).  Right off the bat, the big, three guitar attack hits him square in the back of the head on Naked Ground and he's asking, "What year did this come out?"  I told him 2006 or 2007, something like that.  He said, "I like that it sounds like it could have come out any time since 1970.  It sounds like it's just always been there, but it sounds real good."  That's what I get from these guys.  I'll even credit them with getting me to revisit Lynyrd Skynyrd (I hated them when I was a kid and for a long time after), because The Dexateens don't sound like some racist assholes with a confederate flag.  When The South rises again, The South is gonna have to deal with a generation of people that think that flag stands for a bunch of jackasses that they're embarrassed with.  I was surprised to find that I think Ronnie Van Zant probably thought more like me than I thought, and I've since been enjoying them.  Fixed my uptight ass!

Now the other things he liked were the crazed and disjointed three guitar intro to Fyffe, and I told him he needed to listen to this one a few times because the lyrics are really cool.  It's about a paranoid sort of guy that actually makes some valid points about wanting answers to his questions.  He liked the thumping of Maker's Mound, which just grabs you reminds you we're all gonna die, and we don't know where we're going, but you can hope it's somewhere you want to be.  What I found funny is the instant empathy he had (as did I the first time I heard it) of living "outside the loop in Ohio, in O-hi-o..." when Outside the Loop played.

I have realized that just because I love a band (make no mistake, I LOVE The Dexateens) doesn't mean the rest of you will.  This has been clearly borne out through getting to see bands like The Dexateens or The Dirtbombs and finding out that only 75 other people in Cleveland cared (and my group made for four or five of those).  I'm not the arbiter of all things great in Rock N' Roll, I'm just a guy.  But it does make me sad that so few people are interested in how great three guitars and some pounding drums can make you feel.  It feels great, and I'm not gonna get bummed out that so many people would rather not feel great.  I'll just keep turning my little part of the world on to bands like this, and be happy that those people are feeling a little more great, like me.