No longer out of reach

On receiving the vaccine

Friends, I have good news to share. 

Today marks the two-week anniversary of my second vaccination shot. That means I should now have the antibodies for the COVID-19 coronavirus coursing through my bloodstream waiting to do battle with the virus.

I have not eaten in a restaurant or gone to see a movie or visited with friends. I haven’t done any of the things I imagined I would do after being vaccinated. Instead, I will get on an airplane tomorrow and fly home to see my mother in Virginia.

Long before the pandemic, my mother was diagnosed with chronic lung disease for which there is no cure. When the pandemic was declared in March of 2020 I had to postpone trips home that I’d booked in March and April. As cases and deaths surged throughout the summer and over the holidays, I grew more and more anxious. Not only was I worried about my mother contracting the virus, but the health challenges she was already facing were serious and significant and steadily getting worse. 

But somehow here we are over a year later with 40% of American adults vaccinated (and 80% of teachers) and I will be getting on a plane for the first time since I flew back to San Diego from San Miguel de Allende 14 months ago.

In 2018 I was about to embark on a trip to Europe to follow Bad Religion around for a bit when I was laid off from my job at an advertising agency. After that I took full advantage of not having a regular job-type-job by traveling all over the place. I took trips with Nuvia, traveled for work projects, went on a few writing residencies, and visited friends and relatives more often than I had in the past when I was tied to a desk. 

I’m now rethinking a lot of this. From the way I work, to the way I socialize, to the merits of traveling an overcrowded planet rife with inequalities. But first I must go home.

For many Americans, home is a complicated concept. The place where I live is not where I’m from—far from it—and the home where I grew up no longer exists. My parents divorced, the family spread out, and the actual house where I was raised has been torn down. 

My home back east is now the house where my brother has raised a family and my mother has lived for the better part of a decade. First, part-time as she split time between Virginia and Indiana to pursue her passion for still-life painting, and for the last few years full-time as she’s dealt with an illness that has gotten progressively worse. I don’t know where we’d be if my brother and his wife hadn’t been in a position to welcome her into their home. That, in itself, is a blessing for which I’ll always be grateful. 

My mother is fiercely independent so any help she receives is always on her terms. She lost both of her parents to heart disease when she was still a teenager so self-sufficiency is one of her core values. It takes a lot for her to ask for help even though she is currently receiving hospice care.

Although she’s been a nurse for most of her life, she’s always felt that she would follow her parents to an early grave, but that hasn’t been the case. In fact, she’s been remarkably resilient and has survived open heart surgery and colon cancer in recent years. This, however, is different.

So I’m absolutely thrilled that I’m finally going to get to spend some much-needed time at home. I’m not sure if I’ll write a newsletter next week or, if I do, when it will come out; but I’ll have a full report on what traveling is like in this precarious yet hopeful time.

PssSST…

While pet sitting in Paradise Hills last week I was able to get a ton of work done on the book. I also received some exciting news about the way the book is going to look. I’ve been continuing my conversations with photographers about licensing images. One photographer I spoke with, who had provided me some images of one of the more obscure bands in the SST catalog, sensed I was looking for more. 

“Would you like to see some photos of Black Flag?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied, and he told me he’d start scanning them. I thanked him and moved on to the next task. 

But then it dawned on me. Wait a minute, this photographer has photos of Black Flag and they’ve never scanned them before? 

I don’t know if this photographer is scanning them from a negative or from prints, but I know the images haven’t been published. That means this photographer has photos the public has never seen—not online, not in a book, not in a magazine. 

The link to the photos arrived on Easter Sunday and holy shit are they amazing. Fans are going to freak out when they see these photographs. If you’re looking for a hint I’ve got two words for you: black speedo.  

But black speedos are not what I want to talk about this week. I want to talk about Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK, the band’s first studio album and SST debut. There’s a lot to say about Soundgarden and SST but I want to focus on the record. 

When Soundgarden signed with SST in 1988 it had recorded several demos of the songs that would end up on UMOK. The sessions were produced by Jack Endino, who recorded an album called Bleach by a little known band called Nirvana. (I have a story about that record that blew my tiny little mind, but you’re going to have to wait for the book.)

SST wanted Soundgarden to record at a 16-track mobile studio called Dogfish that Black Flag had used to record its second live album, Who’s Got the 10 ½? Soundgarden was familiar with the studio; they’d recorded an EP for Sub Pop with Dogfish. Long story short, Soundgarden never liked the final mix and even approached Greg Ginn about remixing it, who gave his approval. But life got in the way. Or, in Soundgarden’s case, rock superstardom. 

This week I received a copy in the mail of the remixed and remastered UMOK released by Sup Pop in 2017. It’s a gorgeous package with embossed cover, extensive liner notes from guitarist Kim Thayil and Jack Endino, new images, etc. The package is a double album gatefold with a bonus EP that includes remixes of many of the demos that Endino recorded. 

I won’t recount how the reissue came to be as that’s covered in the liner notes or how Soundgarden got its record back as that’s covered in the book, but I will say that it was released two months before Chris Cornell died. 

Thayil is generous in his notes toward SST but holding the package in my hands and listening to the album, I can’t help but think of it as a lost opportunity for SST. Nothing like it exists in SST’s catalog. No anniversary reissues, no special edition remixes, no boxed sets with bonus material. Why? Because the owner of SST Records isn’t interested in running his business like a normal record label. To be clear, SST does sell vinyl reissues for many, but not all, of its top selling releases, but much of the catalog isn’t available on vinyl, CD, cassette, or even streaming services. It just sits there and that’s a shame. Although it took almost 30 years to finally make it right, the expanded edition of Ultramega OK is a shining example of a band and an independent record label working together to get it right.