Version, Aversion

Rick Rubin, The Replacements, The Bible, and art

First off, we’ve picked up a lot of new readers in the last month. I’m not sure how you found me but I’m glad you’re here. I post about 1 time a month. The Why and How Book Project is about book making in general but creativity and life at its most aspirational. Let’s go. 

I’ve been picking at Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act for about 6 months. It’s Rubin’s Mystical Guru on a mat vibe giving out advice of the I Am The Walrus Variety. “I am he as you are he as you are me

And we are all together.” Yes, It’s woo woo but it’s really good woo woo. It’s got a lot to say about the contradictory nature of art.  if you play Punk you need to listen to Country. If sometimes you are loud, you need to be quiet too. Limitations are often your best route to creativity and as Sam Elliot once opined, “Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.” This is true of all creative endeavors. 

What all of this has in common is decision making in art, which is one of my favorite things to think about. It’s one of the hardest things to get done. 

Let’s talk about the book as a physical thing for a minute.

I am 99.9% sure the cover material is Brillianta 4003 with a black pigment stamp over board. It’s a perfect bound book, so with these specs it was probably made in the US. You wouldn't put fabric on a cover and then go for a perfect bound, read- cheap binding unless you were trying to lower cost in the US. In essence you are springing for the vibe and feel of the fabric for the cover and cutting cost on the binding. 

For the interior you have 1c black print on 50 lb cream uncoated stock, which in this day and age is a nice paper weight. 

You know what all of these things are? They are decisions, practical but still creative decisions. Brillianta is an uncoated fabric. That means a few things. See this coffee I spilled on the back? It’s not coming off. I don’t mind that at all. It adds to the book for me. 

See this stamp of the Colophon on the spine? We call that globbing. The detail elements fill on or don’t adhere. The letters run together a bit. This cover material is an uncoated fabric so when you stamp it it’s not a flat surface. 

If this was a coated fabric neither of these things would happen but at the same time, the book wouldn’t feel like fabric. As with most art as commerce, you are picking your poison. 

None of this is bad. If you plan to take the book in and out of a backpack, maybe it’s bad, if you plan to leave it on a coffee table, it’s fine, just watch the coffee. 

While I’ve been picking through Rubin’s book I’ve also been listening to the latest Replacement’s reissue, TIM (Let it Bleed Edition). The Replacements and their mixes is one of the great rock n roll puzzles. Not only has TIM been remixed but Don’t Tell a Soul from 1989 was remixed in 2019 as Dead Man’s Pop. 

I can’t think of any other band that has had two records needing to be remixed and actually having them remixed. This glowing review of TIM 2023  notes that The Stooges Raw Power, Metallica's And Justice For All and The Beatles Let it Be, all have had remixes. But all of those are one record in the band’s output and arguably none are astounding improvements. TIM (Let it Bleed) and Dead Man’s Pop depending on who you ask are revelations. 

Both remixes are the result of a long held belief that the existing mix was done wrong. So twice, history has been rewrit. Lightning has struck the same band, or the same place, twice.  

We live in a disposable world and it’s fast changing too. Digital editing has made it possible for any manner of reimagining to take place in seconds. There are Snyder’s Cuts of Justice League. Star Wars aficionados have Harmy’s edition of the original movies. Harmacek, a teacher in the Czech Republic,  said changing the films constituted "an act of cultural vandalism." “The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable” goes an old Soviet joke.

I’m not going to get into how many versions of Blade Runner there are. Fact is, I don’t know, I just know there are a-lot. 

There are pernicious aspects to change as well. The phrase Orwellian gets used a lot but apparently scenes or offensive phrases from TV shows can get scrubbed out and the online streaming version has no ghosts of the past. One of my friend’s, Joel Miller, writes exceptionally about books at Miller’s Book Review. Here he goes over the topic of changing the works of writers after publication to meet with changing sensibilities. Further into this world of the digital and ephemeral you can purchase a movie on Apple, Amazon or what have you and if their license changes then poof goes your movie. It might come back later but it might not be the same movie you had before. 

Given that stories survived through the Oral Tradition for centuries before the printing press came along, changing content is nothing new but this feels different. We improved the stakes for a piece of art. It could be written, edited, and preserved in a fixed state like Han Solo in carbonite, which I guess is up for change now too. 

When TIM (Let it Bleed) came out, The Replacement’s internet, the FaceBook groups, and Reddit threads were on fire with opinions. Vitriolic, impassioned, and distraught even. There are the obvious human feelings of loss or maybe disorientation but why do fans get so angry? They can still listen to TIM 1985. Part of me thinks it’s the loss of shared experience in our world. We are having a tough enough time agreeing what the middle C’s of our world are, now we have to clarify which version of a record we like? 

When I was in publishing we had an author who sold millions of copies of their book. The author wanted to change or tweak a phrase or word fairly often when we reprinted the title. In every case the intention was to improve the work. 

Unlike most books that never reprint, we could actually make these changes happen. The book was on an aggressive reprint cycle so we kept a spreadsheet of changes to make and scheduled them. 

And change them we did and people noticed. Message boards and Amazon reviews decried the changes, pointed them out and asked what else had we changed? Since we printed Christian Books they wondered what else and where else had we had changed content. More people, more anger about changes to books, movies, and records. Totally different crowd. 

This brings me to the book Dominion that I’ve also been picking at. Dominion is a whopping, spine breaking 640 pages. Dominion argues that we live in the shadow of Christian habits. Whether you believe in Jesus or not, your values are shaped by Christian ideals. Dominion, Rubin, and Let it Bleed rolling through my brain. Texts on art and change, actual change, and on our culture took me to here, the end of the Bible. 

Revelation 22 18-19

18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:

19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

Do not add or take away is a pretty stern rule. 

Is decrying a new version of Star Wars, Blade Runner, Ian Flemming, or The Replacements on the internet really just being worried about heretics in the religion of culture? Maybe. But I think that's an important thing to be concerned about. Culture is important. Language is a part of culture. If everyone can’t agree on the meaning of things then problems come up. If these things change, then “What else are they changing??” is a fair question. 

I asked my friend Rob Matthews if there is an instance of a painter doing a work and then years later going back and redoing the work. Rob is an accomplished t artist in his own right. At one time, he cleaned art at the Philadelphia Museum. I guess arguably that’s an example of redoing art. A remix of a record is a restoration of sorts. Colors that had become muted are clear again, lines that had faded are visible. The term art restoration makes me think of the lady who restored Jesus a few years ago. Remember this? Which one is TIM 1985?

Oddly enough, the next day this article popped up on my feed. AI are you listening? The painter Albert Pinkham Ryder messed with this painting from 1896 to 1908. For a little over a decade he redid the textures and colors of this work. You can tell. There is a depth and strangeness to the colors and textures here that a single pass wouldn’t achieve. 

But Tim, and though I played it and listened to it as is all through highschool, I always knew the drums and guitars sounded like they were played on a boombox in a dumpster and a microphone was put in that dumpster and that’s how they got that record. I say that like it’s a bad thing. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t but that was the record that we all knew and loved for the past  40 years. My options were that record, like that or nothing. So to not have Left of the Dial and Little Mascara would be no life at all, so the record was the record. 

I am a fan of mystery. I don’t have to have things well defined in music or lyrics. I like the idiosyncratic much more than virtuosic. Additionally, If every record sounds good, or like whatever is deemed correct, then everything is identical. That's boring. I like field recordings and single microphone to Shellac recordings from before World War II. Both of those are fraught with challenges. It’s a miracle there is anything captured at all, much less sound. I love how Tusk by Fleetwood Mac sounds. Tusk sounds grumpy and glossy. Some of it was recorded in a bathroom. Bathrooms sound pretty banging if you’ve ever recorded an amp in one. But that's not the “right” way to do it..  My friend Rob says, “It sounds like cocaine and a four track.”

I don’t want every record to sound “right” or “good” because that’s what we have now with most pop, country, rap, and rock n roll and nothing sounds particularly interesting. If everything sounds good, then nothing sounds good. A unique identity is hard to find in sound even if it’s gained at something being off or strange. A good bit of press is out there now and has been for 40 years on how being messed up was a big part of The Replacements appeal. So maybe, Tim as is was the true picture? 

 But there is a line, right? So what is the cost of releasing art in a mess? That’s sort of the Replacements mythology? But didn’t they have enough mythos to cover a book and not need to have a record that sounded smothered?

Tommy Stinson didn't play bass to not be heard in the mix. Paul Westerberg didn’t compose piano parts to have them muted and no, not everything a band plays in a session gets used. True enough. But if you listen to the live album that comes with TIM (Let it Bleed), Bob Stinson plays the licks on Little Mascara live that were muted on the album mix. In his mind, they were there. The remix record makes sonic sense with Let It Be before it and Pleased to Meet Me after it. Same band. Same identity. They were a rock n roll band and they were mysterious enough without a bedsheet full of reverb and mixed out parts.  (Bob Mehr’s epic, lovely, heartbreaking book) You can now clearly hear Westerberg’s amazing rock n roll voice and wholly unique rhythm guitar playing eloquent voicings.

But you have in your hand a changed a version of the past. 

Back to Rubin, “Releasing a work into the world becomes easier when we remember that each piece can never be a total reflection of us, only a reflection of who we are in this moment. If we wait, it’s no longer today’s reflection. In a year, we may be guided to create a piece that looks nothing like it. In an environment where nothing is permanent, we produce static artifacts. Mementos of spirit. Every work of art is an iteration.”

Different versions of work and a competent mix versus an incompetent mix are two different things but I feel like opinions blur the two because all of this is subjective. Elvis played Mystery Train in 1954 differently than he did in the 1970’s in Vegas but both times he recorded it in an agreed upon level of quality. Bob Dylan changes his lyrics over time. His records are not the last word or iteration of his songs, the songs change but at one point he made the document, the representation of them, often expertly. Art is pretty darn malleable to the artist, not so much to the listener. It’s the document that we hold dear. There is even a PreWar Label called Document. 

So was the art ever there? Yes, we have the Documents!  

Did we take the same movie and take two pictures of it? One in 1985 and one in 2023? 

What if David grew back marble every year and we had to chip it away? Who would we hire to do it? You know some year someone would want to get fancy and see what would happen if. 

We all want to go back and redo our mistakes. For art’s regrets, films get Director's Cuts, books get new translations, or edits, or corrections. But when you are changing the agreed upon final snapshots of the past, that’s different?

In Neuroscience is the idea that whenever you think back on something, you don’t remember it as it happened because since then your brain has become a different home to those thoughts. I guess that’s part of it. I was always fascinated as a kid by the map at the mall and the little red dot that says, “You Are Here.” By the time I walk to the Gap that sticker will still be there. The person I was standing there looking at the map is long gone.

Time is always changing and it’s not only changing on the inside it’s now changing on the outside.