Low: Classic or classic?

listening to the curtain hits the cast on my stereo really loud
this band was heavy

Just note that I’m not making light of Alan’s struggles, but Curtain in particular brings me to a very deep place in my psyche— 19 years old, semi-closeted, living in a small town in Ohio in the winter, depressed, not drinking but on all kinds of pills and hallucinogens and weed all the time, just lying in my bed playing it absolutely full fucking blast and pretending like my body didn’t exist.

It’s a really powerful record besides those associations, but fuck if it doesn’t pull me back to one of the darkest times of my life and make me feel them in some way again. It’s why I love it and also why it makes me cry.

"Just Like Christmas" is pretty and downright jaunty.

Sonically for sure...and definitely not lyrically!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/arts/music/mimi-parker-dead.html what a weird obit.

Extremely strange obit

don't see what is bad about it

couldn't read it, but the visible subhead alone was really strange.

Low, which was essentially the couple with a series of bassists over the years

- ok bullshit Zak was not just a sideman

From the outset, Low was well positioned within the indie rock orbit. The band shared a label, the influential Seattle-based Sub Pop, with archetypal bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden

They didn't sign to Sub Pop until 05, at least read the Wikipedia right

ok I see

I didn’t think the obit was bad so much as it just made me realize that I’ve never ever thought of Low as ever having been a “90s band”

Let alone any sort of counter (intentional or not) to grunge or Seattle or whatever.

It drew contrasts where there weren’t any (as in the grunge example cited) and also didn’t get a lot of the history correct, also mentioned. Just a strange and lazy obit

…and frankly, I know Alan means well, but his quote about Mimi not singing for or to anyone felt weirdly denigrating?!? As if he was trying to accentuate her humility but instead it came off as “she wasn’t that great a singer.” Am I reading too much into it?

Why would there not be a contrast? Low were an American indie band that came out at the same time as other American indie bands, but were very different from them. Seems a fair enough point to me.

Because Low was different from a thousand bands, but no one would cite them as a contrast, let alone a contrast to an unrelated scene. I think it makes more sense, rather than contrast them with something they're not (grunge, pop, IDM, whatever), to do what most obits did and cite their peers and antecedents. Galaxie 500, Codeine, Bedhead, etc.. But even that doesn't really do a band justice that also toured with Soul Coughing and Radiohead.

The irony is that Low is actually as much indebted to Neil Young, the so-called Godfather of Grunge, as Joy Division or the VU, which probably gives them a stronger claim to "grunge" than the Seattle groups, who were often more metal-derived, anyway. (Though of course Alan is into metal, too). Anyway, it's dumb. Low was on Sub Pop. So was Saint Etienne.

write up about the funeral from the Duluth paper

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/duluth-celebrates-lows-mimi-parker-with-laughter-tears-at-funeral

This quietly broke me:

After the service concluded, attendees were presented with what Davis described as gifts from Parker's family. Each family in attendance was invited to take a rose, a printed cartoon drawn by Tony Husband in Parker's memory, and a square cut from a quilt.

"When Mim and Al were first married," said Davis, an aunt sewed the quilt for them. "The quilt was a vital part of their lives, keeping them warm, bundling their children, sitting out on the lawn in the sun, and it provided comfort during the last days of this long, hard journey."

Because Low was different from a thousand bands, but no one would cite them as a contrast, let alone a contrast to an unrelated scene. I think it makes more sense, rather than contrast them with something they're not (grunge, pop, IDM, whatever), to do what most obits did and cite their peers and antecedents. Galaxie 500, Codeine, Bedhead, etc.. But even that doesn't really do a band justice that also toured with Soul Coughing and Radiohead.

No one is comparing them to IDM or pop, but I don’t think it’s totally unfounded to compare them to grunge, which was the dominant alternative rock sound of that era. Only comparing them to Bedhead or Codeine is artificially narrow and does a disservice to all three bands who existed in much noisier scenes in their respective parts of the country. For a short time Zak Sally was simultaneously in a band with the guys from godheadSilo, for instance. Low’s music was their form of punk in that it was purposely meant to contrast against the noisy punk/indie scene of Minnesota. Those are the kinds of bands they shared the stage with.

Touring with Soul Coughing in 95 (though not a noisy band) is a good example of their attitude—they did that tour knowing full well their contrast was going to agitate the audience. (I was in that audience and can attest to the fact that SC fans *hated* Low.) They we’re definitely proactively challenging audiences back then.

Now I'm envisioning the impossible insanity of Low somehow being on AmRep.

Bedhead were on Trance Syndicate which is probably the closest you’ll get to that fantasy

They seemed just a tad annoyed to have to play in between my stupid band and soul coughing at the show we did with them. It was an amazing experience that I'll never forget, but I'm not sure Low was really loving playing in front of a restless rock audience.

It may or may not have been fun for them but i do think they knew what they were getting into.

I didn't mean to say that Low had to be compared to any particular cohort, just that I never heard them as oppositional to anything, really. Maybe at first oppositional to any loud, fast bands? But of course Low did get noisy early on. Still, comparing them to grunge? Like, why? Most bands in the '90s not aiming for the radio sounded nothing like the Seattle stuff. (If anything, Nirvana's Unplugged was them shifting gears to sound more like a band like Low.)

Anyway, the only two I acts I personally ever thought of when I listened to Low was, at first, Galaxie 500 (superficially, mostly because of Kramer) and then later Neil Young (c. Things We Lost in the Fire). But Low mostly ever sounded like Low, which maybe partly explained how they managed to always be good.

tbh -- more as a sometime professional magazine editor than as any kind of expert on low -- i think that nyt obit reads the way it does bcz a higher-up said to the writer re an earlier draft "look, you probably know why this person is important but you have to contextualise it better to readers who have never heard of her and don't really know the world she's from"

the "context" is like a super-basic thumbnail of the broadest idea of a time as a way to position the band to said reader

and it's not a good solution to my guessed-at request for redrafting but it looks less like laziness to me than panic :(

Love this photo of all of Low's bassists at Mimi Parker's funeral. pic.twitter.com/O0n3DLYhzx

— Join a union (@Jonnyishh) November 11, 2022

That was originally from Scott "Starfire" Lunt's IG, the pirate and later college radio DJ from Duluth who inspired the song

Okay that photo is A+.

yes

just for completeness' sake, from left to right:

Liz Draper (2021-2022)
Steve Garrington (2008-2020)
John Nichols (1993-1994)
Zak Sally (1994-2005)
Matt Livingston (2005-2008)

Alan just posted a message from Zak on IG and it is really incredible, definitely wept reading it.

Truly.

https://www.instagram.com/p/ClAGlhGIiAE/?hl=en

Man.

everytime i think i'm done getting teared up over her passing...

yep, that wrecked me

"All of the things that inhabit (and sometimes define) damn near every artist you’ve known and loved: some desire to be recognized, paid attention to and lauded - she didn’t have it. In fact, I’m sure she didn’t want it when it came her way

What she did have, and what you heard and saw - it poured out of her so naturally that she didn’t identify it as “talent” or a “unique ability”, and she found it strange when others viewed it as such"

I just read Zak's tribute. It's beautiful. Midway through I thought "omg Mimi was a Virgo" and I googled it and yes she certainly was

Just got an automatic notification of a refund for what would have been the March show. Even knowing subconsciously it would come doesn't make it any better.

Talking about Low in the past tense is so sad

Yeah, really is. I almost haven't felt this much of a past/present divide in talking about an artist now gone since Bowie.

Guardian obit today:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/nov/18/mimi-parker

this paragraph jumped out at me because a. first sentence is wrong lol but also b. didn’t know this bit about TRW (i was only 9 or 10 when it aired so i never watched that season):

Low’s 1995 LP, Long Division, included the single Shame, on which Parker sang lead for the first time. Picked up by the MTV reality show The Real World: San Francisco, it soundtracked the story of a gay man living with HIV. Parker told the Guardian in 2018 that it “became kind of a gay … I won’t say anthem. But a lot of gay men come up to me and talk about that song. They say that it really spoke to them.”

Just got an automatic notification of a refund for what would have been the March show. Even knowing subconsciously it would come doesn't make it any better.

My friend got the same message today (assuming you had tix for the Chapel show, Ned) and hadn't realized Mimi had passed until reading it and shared condolences via text with me.

I think it's always interesting to see how far a band's impact can reach. For example, I never would have expected Rick Beato to chime in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Mj4Nv_ip0

There should be a word for the empathyless triggering of human pain by automated systems. I feel the same way when Facebook reminds me of the birthdays of dead friends.

someone recently uploaded this 2004 documentary about the band to youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6BkD5ivYww

i think most of it was shot while they were touring 'trust'. there's a sweet clip of alan singing 'little surfer girl' to baby hollis in the SPIN offices. also, an unexpected but delightful celebrity cameo at the 29-minute mark!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXxBE1qi_24

also, an unexpected but delightful celebrity cameo at the 29-minute mark!

I sent this to my wife and asked her to guess who it would be and she somehow guessed immediately before watching it lol.

Re: Trust. I only listened to it for the first time a couple weeks ago but it struck me as “countryish”. I’ve been going through the catalog chronologically after writing them off as slowcore way back in the 90s and then idly checking out Double Negative a couple years ago and being blown away.

Has any band had such a subtle stylistic evolution over as long a period as these guys? Like album by album over almost 30 years they slowly morph into something else, like watching day by day a tree change colors in the fall.

That's pretty apt. Though with Low, I want to say the ingredients were all there from the start; famously, Alan supposedly heard both Joy Division and the Velvet Underground for the first time the same night in college, which adds up. The country element that you cite, I think that's maybe the Neil Young influence, which does start to creep in more prominently a few albums in.

Looks like Alan is returning to (local to him) live performance. He also posted a link to this 2021 music store set he did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DaU8X7yBt0

I have tickets for tonight's show, will be very interested to see what happens.

How was the show?