P A U L D A S K E N S P E C K L E D A X
Side One 
Busy Day
Wichita Lineman (coke bottles)
Side Two
Wichita Lineman (megaphone)
Kyssen
Michigan, 1989,
no label
edition of 300
The following is a press release written up to go with complimentary copies recently mailed to several college and independent radio stations.
Gil
Scott-Heron declared “winter in America” in 1973, but it couldn’t
have been later than autumn, because the winter that seems to continue
to this day didn’t really start until 1980, the year Mark David
Chapman shot John Lennon and Ronald Reagan conned his way into office.
Born in ‘75, I’m too young to remember the political climate
during Reagan’s presidency, but I’ve read and reread (among
other things) Paul Slansky’s day-by-day media digest of those two
terms, The
Clothes Have No Emperor, and I can appreciate the creeping despair
that defined those years for thinking people, the sense that America had
embarked on a decline that might well end in total annihilation.
Another instructive refraction of eight years under Reagan can be found
on Paul Dasken’s one and only record release, a 12”, four-song
EP called Speckled Ax. The handmade packaging beckons the intrepid
listener -- though its oblique newspaper layouts pasted over old record
covers give little indication of what lurks within.
Each side consists of two elements: a plaintive piano recording and a
reinterpretation of Jimmy Webb’s 'Wichita Lineman' as protest music.
Dasken is a conceptualist first and a musician second; each performance
is site-specific and unabashedly amateur. His piano pieces will resonate
with anyone who ever sat down at a piano without a lick of training but
the will to peck out a pattern of notes that almost resembles a composition,
if only to the player. That is to say they are intimate, singular, “real
piano,” and beautiful.
The first 'Lineman' finds Dasken taking on a manic street preacher, singing
the song to a beat tapped out on a coke bottle, an abstract form of heckling
that weirdly puts bogus fundamentalism in its proper, ridiculous place.
The second take finds him at a 1988 campaign rally for Bush the Elder,
where the wild applause that follows each of the candidate’s proclamations
and an efficient team of secret service agents renders Dasken’s
protest little more than a barely-noticed exercise in futility.
Paul Dasken keeps a low profile. I found my copy of his record in a South
San Francisco thrift store in 2003 and searched for him in vain until
this past summer, when Dasken googled his record and found it featured
on my website. I got him to talk about where he was coming from and the
significance of 'Wichita Lineman.'
“There was a sense of trying to oppose the sham realm of politics
with something more genuine. There was also a sense of frustration with
the usual way in which music was presented and with music itself . . .
. There was definitely an idea of challenging the listener by putting
together two very different and almost incompatible kinds of music, the
piano stuff on the one hand and the Wichita Lineman covers on the other
. . . . It was certainly my aim to do something uncompromising . . . .
I don’t have any formal art or music training and there was a conscious
decision to take a completely instinctive approach. I was a brash young
man.”
Speckled Ax has gained formidable resonance with the passage
of time. It's a key piece of loner Americana on wax, as personal and unique
as records come. In the wake of 9/11, the fears and upset of the Eighties
seem almost quaint, but Dasken’s voice in the wilderness burns brighter
than ever as a fire to warm oneself by in this very long winter in America.
, October 2006
As a little vote for consciousness and sanity in the upcoming elections, copies have been sent to the following stations. Call them and make a request...
KALX,
University of California at Berkeley
KDVS, Davis CA
KAOS, Evergreen State University, Olympia WA
KCRW, Santa Monica CA
KFJC, Foothill College, Los Altos Hills CA
KJHK, University of Kansas at Lawrence
KUSF, San Francisco CA
KZSU, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
WESU, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT
WFMU, Hoboken, NJ
WHPK, University of Chicago
WNUR, Northwestern University, Evanston IL
WNYU, New York, NY
WPRB, Princeton University, Princeton NJ
WRAS, Georgia State University, Atlanta GA
WREK, Georgia Inst of Technology, Atlanta GA
WTUL, Tulane Universit, New Orleans LA
WXYC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
WUOG, University of Georgia
"My scheme of Order gave me the most trouble ...with regard to
places for things, papers, etc., I found extreamly difficult to acquire.
I had not been early accustomed to it, and, having an exceeding good
memory, I was not so sensible of the inconvenience attending want of
method. This article, therefore, cost me so much painful attention,
and my faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress
in amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready
to give up the attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in
that respect, like the man who, in buying an ax of a smith, my neighbour,
desired to have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge. The
smith consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel;
he turn'd, while the smith press'd the broad face of the ax hard and
heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing. The
man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went
on, and at length would take his ax as it was, without farther grinding.
"No," said the smith, "turn on, turn on; we shall have
it bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled." "Yes,"
said the man, "but I think I like a speckled ax best." And
I believe this may have been the case with many, who, having, for want
of some such means as I employ'd, found the difficulty of obtaining
good and breaking bad habits in other points of vice and virtue, have
given up the struggle, and concluded that "a speckled ax was best";
for something, that pretended to be reason, was every now and then suggesting
to me that such extream nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind
of foppery in morals, which, if it were known, would make me ridiculous;
that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of
being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few
faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance." -- Benjamin
Franklin