Lifting Weights with Ken

An old song of mine takes me (nearly) full circle

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapse readers!

While I know some of you (both here and on social media) balked at reading last week’s JTL piece on the inherent creepiness of Gary Puckett’s discography — and in some cases even questioned why I would focus on something like that over, you know, good records — the truth of the matter is that I often find strange, grotesque and utterly indefensible music just as fascinating as the inarguably brilliant stuff; there was, after all, a period in my life where I was just as obsessed with Uri Geller’s self-titled 1975 LP as I was with The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

And while it’s part of my Substack mission to turn you on to some quality stuff that you may have missed, I will also from time to time guide you to the darker corners of my mental museum where the musical equivalents of lawn darts, New Coke and John Dillinger’s severed penis reside. But whether your JTL subscription is free or (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE) paid, I do hope you’ll stick around for the entire tour.

That said, my piece on “The Puck” has already become the most-read and -shared thing I’ve written for JTL, save for last month’s Cynthia Weil appreciation. Which, along with the popularity of my Rod Stewart post from a few weeks ago, makes me feel like I’m definitely finding my people here — and I couldn’t be more delighted!

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This particular post is, in many ways, a sequel to the one I wrote last week about The Baseball Project, The Dear Boys and the antiquated notion that one should stop playing music (or otherwise being creative) before one becomes, well, antiquated oneself. But it’s also a flashback to this post from the early months of Jagged Time Lapse, which in itself was a three-decade flashback to the days when I worked at a Chicago record store called See Hear. That, in a nutshell, is the way things reflect and reverberate around here…

I worked behind the counter at See Hear from August 1989 to July 1993 — it was my first job out of college, and was as educational in its own way as my four years at Vassar were. I learned a lot about music retail, and the music business in general, while working there; and then of course there were the wide variety of lessons that you can only learn by interfacing with the public on a daily basis.

See Hear wasn’t the coolest record store in Chicago, not by a long shot. Our stock was made up almost entirely of major label compact discs and very mainstream titles (at least until early 1992, when I was able to use the surging grunge and alternative movements as leverage to convince the store to order some oft-requested indie titles), and we were known more for our occasional cash-only weekend sales (where everything in the store was $9.99) than the depth or quality of our stock. But it was a good gig for me at the time; my hours were somewhat flexible, I was paid decently, and it enabled me to interact (and in some cases strike up wonderful friendships) with a lot of interesting folks with whom I otherwise probably would have never crossed paths.

The main priority in my life at the time was my band, Lava Sutra, which also included my high school pal Jason and my college pal Bob — both of whom also worked in record stores. (There was even a year or so where all three of us worked for See Hear’s three-store mini-empire.) A record store gig was ideal for musicians like ourselves; my shifts never began before 10 a.m., and I often worked from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., which was particularly ideal for running pre-work errands, or just sleeping off a hangover or the exhaustion from a late-night gig.

Far more interesting than See Hear was Ken, the guy who owned the place. Ken was a square-jawed fireplug of French-Canadian descent, who looked kind of like Woody Harrelson in Kingpin and seemed far more temperamentally suited to the life of an 18th century voyageur than the dull day-to-day realities of record retail. Ken openly admitted to anyone who asked that he didn’t really care about music — “I like the business of it,” he would say — and he would typically begin a day in the shop by playing the same CD on repeat for hours until I or one of the other employees would sneak over and change it to something else while he was distracted by a phone call. (He completely ruined Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits for me in this way.)

What Ken did care about were manly things like adventure and weaponry. He loved to scuba dive, and he spent a lot of time building a house for himself down in the Caribbean — an endeavor which often resulted in confrontations with local machete-wielding Rastas, or so he enjoyed telling us. Ken had handguns (presumably loaded) hidden all over the store in various drawers and cubby holes behind the store counters, and a definitely-loaded crossbow on prominent display behind the back counter. He instructed all of his employees to give discounts to police officers from the local precinct, ostensibly to discourage shoplifters and hold-ups — Old Town was still a little sketchy in those days — but mostly because Ken really dug rapping with the cops whenever they’d come in. (This was how I came to know to the unforgettable Undercover Steve.)

Ken lived in the apartment above our store on North Avenue, and the See Hear basement functioned as his personal workshop, as well as a break lounge for employees and a storage space for overstock. There was also a full Sears weight set down there, complete with workout bench. My bandmate Bob had noticed these weights while picking up some boxes of CDs for See Hear’s Armitage Avenue location; one (possibly very stoned) evening in early 1991, Bob asked me, “What would you do if, one night while you were getting ready to lock up the store, Ken asked you to stick around and pump some iron with him?”

Other than laughing hysterically, I have no real memory of what my response was in that moment. But Bob’s question soon inspired me to pen what remains one of my favorite songs from Lava Sutra days, as well as one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written. The chords were pretty simple, and the melody was, in retrospect, probably inspired by Dinosaur Jr., as I was listening to a lot of them at the time. For the lyrics, I combined some sorry-for-myself feelings I was working through (I’d been blind-sided by a breakup and was taking it fairly hard) with the annoyance and anger pent up from dealing with some of See Hear’s more entitled customers, and topped it all with some mildly homoerotic imagery based upon Bob’s original concept. I called it “Lifting Weights with Ken”.

Sunday morning breakfast coming up

Cuz I can’t keep it down

I’m counting all my blessings on my thumb

And my knees still hurt from the spill I took

Outside of Rayan’s Liquor Store

I watch his muscles ripple

As he locks us both in

Lava Sutra would occasionally do acoustic (a.k.a. “unplugged”) shows in those days, which were a lot of fun as well as a good way to “workshop” new material. I debuted “Lifting Weights” at one of these shows — possibly at The Avalon on Belmont Avenue — and it was an immediate hit, not least with the several fellow See Hear employees in attendance who knew exactly who/what I was singing about and chuckled mightily at every chorus. I believe some of them may have even subsequently mentioned the song to Ken, but he never broached the subject with me. (Nor, for that matter, did he ever extend a weight-lifting invitation.)

“Lifting Weights” quickly became a mainstay of Lava Sutra’s set lists, but for one reason or another we never got around to recording it. It probably wasn’t fully ready to go when we went in to Acme Studios that spring to record a handful of songs — and we didn’t get do any recording again until December of that year, by which time there were other, newer songs that we were more excited about. So it just kinda slipped through the cracks, which was pretty par for the course for a lot of bands, back in the days before everyone had a multitrack recording setup on their laptop.

I left Lava Sutra in the spring of 1993, shortly before I left See Hear and moved to Los Angeles with my then-girlfriend. In 1994, I formed a band called The Fancy Trolls with my friend Eric, who had also transplanted himself from Chicago to L.A.; we were much more mod/psych/power pop-oriented than Lava Sutra’s more alt-rock/’70s hard rock leanings, but there were a handful of numbers from my previous band that I thought would work well with our sound, “Lifting Weights with Ken” — one of the few songs I’ve written that I’ve never felt any desire to tinker with further — among them. We even recorded it as part of a three-song demo we made with Rusty from Baby Lemonade producing, a tape which got us a few gigs but no real label interest to speak of.

When the Trolls broke up in 1995, “Ken” got locked away in my song drawer — a drawer I only occasionally opened again over the next two decades. My next musical endeavor was St. Nick, a Nick Gilder tribute band that I formed with Robbie “Cousin Oliver” Rist, and my band after that was The Jupiter Affect, which was led by Michael Quercio of Three O’ Clock fame; there obviously wasn’t room for my songs in either of those bands, which was fine with me; I was sick of leading a band, and happy to just play guitar and sing backing harmonies for awhile. Then, in 1999, I left The Jupiter Affect for a variety of personal reasons… and things went dark, at least in terms of my own musical creativity, for nearly the next two decades.

A few months ago, when I accepted the unexpected offer to play a short acoustic set at the Morton Memorial Library’s monthly acoustic night (my first solo set in over 30 years!), I opened that dusty drawer back up and tried to figure out which songs would be coming with me to Rhinecliff. I’d seen a lot of folks get up on the Morton stage and play all or mostly covers, but I wanted to primarily do my own material. So along with Big Star’s “I’m in Love with a Girl,” I chose a couple of new-ish originals (including “I Loved It Here,” which I recorded a couple of years ago for my ongoing Corinthian Columns project) and a couple of songs that dated back to the ‘90s.

The oldest one of these was “Lifting Weights with Ken” — and it wound up being the best-received song of my entire set. I even got a text the next day from my friend Paul Clarke, who also performed that night, saying, “I met a man at the market today, who told me he drove home with a guy from the audience last night who was singing ‘Lifting Weights with Ken’ in the car.”

As with the other fifty-something musicians that my friend and colleague Tony Fletcher mentions in his recent maiden Substack post, I have no ambitions for a musical “career” at this point in my life; I still love playing music and writing songs, however, and I definitely mean to make up for lost time where that’s concerned. But I’ve gotta say, there’s nothing quite like hearing a roomful of people enthusiastically applaud a song you’ve just sung that they’ve never heard before; a song which you wrote in an entirely different place and time and mindset. It feels like a long-missing piece of my puzzle has finally been snapped into place, and it kinda makes me want to pat my mid-twenties self on the back.

“You may not have ‘made it,’ kid,” I’d tell him, “but one of your songs sure did.”

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