I spent my teenage years in a podunk little town in Lorain County, Ohio named Wellington. Calling Wellington podunk is not really fair, as I've seen much smaller towns with far less to do for young people, but after spending my life thus far in a significantly larger town (some would call it a city), it was a terrible shock. I was never very popular and the kids I went to school with never did anything interesting, unless you consider tractor pulls interesting. The joke, and it's only funny because it's true, is the only thing to do in Wellington was to drink. I never drank, never enjoyed it much and still don't touch alcohol very often to this day, although in retrospect it might have gotten me laid a lot earlier if I had given it a shot, especially after finding good tasting wines and a lot of the girls I liked got loose when they got sloshed! Regardless though, I killed time talking with people online, trading cassette tapes through the mail, taking short trips to Cleveland to shop at once-legendary indie record shops and pestering people in Oberlin. In case you've never heard of Oberlin, it's home to a very large liberal arts college and is about ten minutes away from Wellington. I think it sucks worse than Wellington, because most people there are extremely pretentious and everyone takes everything far too seriously. They used to have courses on Eno's ambient recordings, and while that might sound cool at first, how much you wanna bet the class was filled with self-indulgent douches who thought they were better than Eno and could be the "next big thing"?
Anyway, I digress. Oberlin wasn't a complete wash, as there were a few cool things about it like the Apollo Theatre where they played current films for about two bucks on their single screen (too bad Danny Devito is involved with it now), The Feve where you could get a bad-ass swiss-shroom burger, and the best being the record shop on the second floor of the Co-Op Book Store. I learned more about music there than just about anywhere else I can think of. The main guy who ran the store (whose name I unfortunately can't remember. Maybe it was Keith? Sorry man!) dj'd all kinds of electronic music and knew about stuff I don't think I would have ever heard of otherwise. He told me about punk, funk, metal, hip-hop, noise, pop, the avant garde and anything else you can think of, always with a spot-on recommendation to check out and always prepared to play me a few tracks. With his help, I heard The Pharcyde, Aimee Mann, DJ Shadow, Frank Zappa, Squarepusher and more because he listened to what I said and answered my questions, and that's the best type of record shop employee, the one who is always willing to listen and advise but never shove their own tastes down someone's throat.
Another artist I learned about because of the Co-Op's record shop was an Oberlin legend in her own right, the fabulous Liz Phair, although I became familiar with her as I do with many artists I love, totally backwards. I had borrowed Liz's Whip-Smart from the Elyria Public Library and fell completely in love with it's simple beauty. I didn't know what she was talking about but I felt like it was my soundtrack. When the Juvenalia EP was released, I hot-footed it to the shop and picked up the only copy they had which was open for in-store play. The new songs, Animal Girl and Liz's cover of Turning Japanese, were great, but I found myself entranced with the EP's last five tracks, previously unreleased four-track demos Liz had recorded by herself while a student at Oberlin under the name Girly-Sound. It was just Liz and a guitar, sometimes multi-tracked vocals or layered guitar, but never more than Liz and the guitar. They had a seriously dirty sense of humor (California still doesn't make much sense but is funny as hell!) and sounded like the musings of someone I wish I would have known in high school. I had heard stories that she recorded these songs in her closet, afraid for anyone else to hear what she had written, which while that doesn't seem to be true was enough to grab my youthful interest.
No one I knew seemed to know where to find more of these recordings so they faded from memory, until years later when I heard Exile In Guyville, the album I should have heard first. If you haven't heard Guyville, finish reading this and go buy it immediately, there is still time for you to be saved! (You don't have to be a girl to relate to Fuck and Run, hell, you can still have your virginity! And everything else on the album is just as powerful if not just a hint more subtle, although there isn't much about Guyville that's subtle.) Like hearing Aimee Mann's I'm With Stupid for the first time, I felt the world open up a little and everything seemed a little better. Totally life-affirming.
Let's fast forward a few years to when Napster was starting to fall apart and people were moving to alternatives like Kazaa (GAWD, what an awful service! Anyone else remember those shitty ads they had that would talk to you constantly?), Bear Share (Could they have given that service a more ridiculous name? Sounds like a toy for lonely children!) and Soulseek. Soulseek is still around and doesn't suck in the least, although it's certainly not the easiest way to find what you're looking for these days, but in those days (late nineties, early 2000s?), if you were looking for something kinda rare, Soulseek was, and still is to an extent, the place to look. It's there I finally found more of Liz's Girly-Sound demos in the form of a two-disc compilation that claimed to be complete. The quality of the recordings sucked, but hearing Liz performing these songs that touched me so deeply, as well as tons of equally powerful songs she never re-recorded, in such a spare fashion was like being given the holy grail and then told to drink from it, it just got better and better!
After years of listening to those awful sounding recordings, I started looking again for more information on the origins of these recordings. For awhile there wasn't much to find, but eventually I stumbled upon a page dedicated to the Girly-Sound recordings alone, and it even contained extreme upgrades to the previously circulating versions I had, as well as information on their origins and a forum where people could discuss the tapes. I can't say it's more than I could ask for, because I'd sure love to have the rest of the non-circulating songs, but it's pretty damn close!
So, if you've got a taste for some kinda-folkie, extremely honest songwriting that will touch your inner 16-year-old (and not necessarily just in a friendly way!) you've got to check out these recordings. As the Girly-Sound site contains the two available demo tapes and all other available recordings, I'm not going to share the files here. Instead, just hit the site and grab to your heart's content. It's beautiful stuff! And thanks to the folks running girlysound.com, as you've made me truly happy as I'm sure you have many others as well!
GO TO GIRLYSOUND.COM NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PS - Hope the slightly NSFW image doesn't offend anyone, but since she had naked pictures of herself in the Guyville packaging and she's never been afraid to show a little skin, I couldn't think of a better image to show of Liz.
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