Curating (my) taste

Remembering Chris Wiersema by thinking of his role as one of the handful of people who helped to expand my musical horizons

Tonight, I'll head out to see the first show of the Mission Creek Festival here in Iowa City. It's the 19th festival, so I assume it's my 19th year catching bands I've never heard (or heard of, in some cases). Most of the best experiences I've had at the festival were booked by my friend, Chris Wiersema. I didn't know Chris in those early years, only knew that someone with really good, eclectic taste was making these amazing shows happen. Chris moved on from Mission Creek in recent years, curating his own series, Feed Me Weird Things, which meant even more bands I didn't know, more opportunities to expand my musical horizons.

We lost Chris last month. That loss means more than not having someone to chat with after the show was over, to grab a beer with occasionally to catch up. It's about the hole left in our cultural community, in my cultural support system. Chris was more than a friend. He was an enthusiastic guide, an adventurous spirit, a catalyst that introduced me and so many others to new music. 

Like many, I have been looking for a way to articulate what Chris meant to me. It started to come into focus, oddly enough, in my basement. While looking for something else, my eye landed on the few remaining cassette storage cases I kept after a purge. You know, the ones that made us '80s kids feel like junior businessmen as we carried these facsimile briefcases full of tapes from one friend's home to another so they, box of Maxell XLIIs in hand, could dupe them from their dual deck.

Because I've recreated most of that collection of music many times over — from CDs to MP3s and back to vinyl — I didn't feel the need to save many of the hundreds I had collected over the decade from my early teens to early 20s. Seeing the improbable secondary market for tapes, I may regret that move. However, what I did keep were the mixtapes made by friends, those irreplaceable crash courses in tunes new and old, discoveries shared, inside jokes conveyed. I started to think about the people behind those tapes, the people who sat for 90 minutes, a stack of records, tapes, or CDs at hand, figuring out what went best where, calculating run times to fit in as much as possible before the leader rolled across the head.

Chris never made me a mixtape. The new things he shared with me were exclusively presented on stage. But the impact was the same. Like Chris, a handful of friends helped to form much of my musical taste. I can think of songs, albums, bands, and sometimes entire genres I count as favorites and point to a specific mixtape that planted that seed. 

The first was Tad, a friend from high school. We met in a government class led by a student teacher who was a former Drake basketball player who was (pleasantly?) surprised that we knew of his other life. Given the relative lack of discipline from this temporary presence, we obviously found time to talk a lot about music. My earliest exposure to R.E.M., which, push comes to shove, is still probably my favorite band of all time, came from taping the copies of Fables of the Reconstruction and Lifes Rich Pageant left at Tad's house by his older brother who was home from college over the summer.

In our junior year, Tad decided to tape a couple of songs to share with me. He used a full-sized cassette made to capture answering machine messages, six minutes per side. I listened, then taped a couple of songs over it and gave it back the next day. A tradition was born. Tad's "Silvertunes" and my "K-Tunes" were passed back and forth, sometimes one day to the next, as we shared our favorite songs and new acquisitions. Our elaborately designed covers, along with crude editing to cram as much on the tape as possible, probably took more time than our studies… at least on my end if my transcript is any indication. 

Tad later was largely responsible for my nascent fascination with jazz. Or rather, credit goes to his other brother, whose John Coltrane and Kenny Dorham CDs kept me busy with the tape deck during one college summer.

Another high school friend, Blair, and I began trading tapes as we headed to different colleges. Towns with better record stores and dorm floors with access to the collections of dozens of others led to an explosive expansion in our tastes, and it was a charge to share these discoveries with one another. As with Tad, this trading of tapes, and then CDs, and then playlists, continued for years. Even now, we’ll send each other a note that begins, “Have you heard this?”

A favorite tape from Blair was titled "(In one month, this tape will end up in the) BOTTOM OF THE BOX." My tape collection had far outpaced my ability to house it all in those little pseudo-briefcases, so I had resorted to throwing them in a fairly sizable box that lived under my stereo. On a visit, Blair asked about a particular album, and I dug in the box until I found the tape, unearthing a few of his mixtapes in the process. I assured him they were out of sight, but never out of mind, but his prediction was still pretty on the nose.

The best thing about Blair's tapes was that he often reflected back my own discoveries and then dug deep. I would send a song I liked, say Sloan's "The Good in Everyone," and would soon get back a tape of the band's B-sides because he had fallen in love and scooped up everything to be had. 

College was a goldmine, but other than one of my roommates, Pete, a Chicago-area kid who introduced me to everything from Big Black to Naked Raygun to the Slugs, most of the influence came from simply having access to nearly everything I would want to hear. The aforementioned box was filled with XLIIs, an album per side, as I slowly absorbed others' collections into my own.

John was one of the first influences who really pushed my taste in a backward direction, sharing music from the 60s and 70s that had clearly influenced some of my favorite artists. Keeping in mind this was pre-internet, the places to learn about the music I liked were college radio, record store clerks, fanzines and magazines, touring bands, and friends. Over wiffle ball games during down times at the college newspaper, we would talk about sports, movies and music. John was the one who introduced me to Big Star, blowing my mind with “The Ballad of El Goodo.”

In spring 1991, John made me two tapes. The first was titled "Break Away" and featured the Flamin' Groovies, the Raspberries, the Beatles, Utopia, the Kinks, the Nazz, and of course, the Beach Boys. I was familiar with many of these artists, of course, but hadn’t gone deep, so these were a revelation. I listened to little else for the next two weeks and begged for a follow up. He obliged with "Cadillac," featuring more of those artists along with Let's Active, Mott the Hoople, the Byrds and more. While I was busy looking forward, these tapes were a road map to the past, and I scoured used record shops and the reissue rack to fill the enormous gaps in my collection.

Kelly went so far as to mass produce his mixtapes, gifting them to multiple people. "Rhyme Without Reason" and "Popcornbelt" were like a magnifying glass, helping me to discover wonderful pop bands in my own backyard as he highlighted Midwestern bands who usually didn't stick around very long, as well as like-minded acts from around the world. Sure, today you can pony up $35 for a deluxe two-LP set that does this same thing (and I did, of course), but Kelly was doing it at a time when I could hit the used album racks and find the source records for a buck or two.

Brian may be my most consistent, most successful musical sherpa. He wasn't a mixtape guy, though I do have a couple, including one that veers from the garage rock that obsessed him at the time to tracks from the MC5 and Blue Oyster Cult that disabused my notions of their one-dimensionality, to Lionel Hampton and Professor Longhair. Instead, Brian was the one who would ask — in a phone call, a letter, or an email — "Do you know this?" So many albums in my collection stem from my blind faith in his unerring ability to accurately predict my pending affection for a band.

All these tapes sit next to my computer as I type this. I'm without a way to play them at the moment but will eventually rectify that. Yes, I could replicate much of what is here with a playlist, but it's not the same. Much as, to bring this home, listening to an album purchased from an artist after one of the many shows Chris promoted isn't the same as sitting at those shows, waiting to hear his enthusiastic "whoop!" that would let everyone know it was the proper time to applaud at the end of a sprawling 40-minute set of uninterrupted music. 

I can’t lean on Chris anymore, but all the other above-mentioned friends are still with us, still sharing musical suggestions, enthusing over some new discovery or unearthed gem. They no longer do it with painstakingly crafted little boxes of plastic, but I still appreciate that dialogue, however sporadic it might be these days. Losing someone like Chris means never taking that for granted. I hope Chris knew how much he meant to people, how much his efforts had changed their lives for the better.

People don't just do this with music, of course. I have friends who have introduced me to authors and poets and filmmakers and visual artists and more. We're in constant conversation with one another about our passions, about the things we want to share. If Chris gave me one last thing, it was a reminder to never take that for granted, to continue to seek out something new, something different, something weird, and to share it with someone.