Sunday Morning! “This is Memorial Device” by David Keenan

Music is always more than life, he wrote. His thoughts had been turned around. It’s life’s duty to live up to music, he wrote. When is life the equal of music, except in memory, except in dreams?

I could relate to that.

-From “This is Memorial Device” by David Keenan (She changes her mind one paragraph later.)

I think the best way to discover a band that will go on to have a profound impact on your life would be to see them perform in a small club having no idea beforehand who they were or what they would sound like. You hear stories about people seeing Prince in a honky tonk, or the Ramones playing in 1974, and it sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone or a divine incarnation.

Then, the second best way to discover a life-changing band would be because the album cover looked intriguing: this has the same angle of coming at it pure, but in most cases it’s true that the record won’t quite compare to the live experience. And then, the third best way- although in some cases it’s so revelatory it almost rises to number one- is when someone with excellent taste in music says “You know what I think you’d really be into?” and then hits you with an amazing album you’ve never heard of, and probably wouldn’t have otherwise. “Musical matchmakers” we could call these people, although they’re really more like a shaman or spirit guide.

Now for my most controversial opinion: the fourth best way to discover a band is through a mixtape made by a love interest. Most of us “of a certain age” very fondly remember the youthful mixtape, which was really just a way of saying “I’d like to be naked with you.” Most likely it worked- it always works, let’s be honest- and so we remember the sex and the music at the same time. But, were these tunes that changed your musical tastes? Or, was it just sexy music?

Music doesn’t really “change your life,” although it can reinforce tendencies that were already there. It’s unlikely I would have become a police officer if no one had played me a Dead Kennedys cassette in the school lunch room, although at the time it felt that way. When you’re 14, everything feels like a prophecy: it’s a bit like being Moses and receiving a dozen new commandments ever week, most of which are about art or sex. It feels like every new song or book or obscure movie is another piece in the puzzle or another component to finally build that vessel that will take you away from this place. As David Bowie once said about rock’n’roll: “I’ve found the door that lets me out!”

Once Upon a Time in Airdrie

For the record (pun intended), I came to read David Keenan’s This is Memorial Drive via the recommendation of a book and music friend who loved it and thought I would too; I suspect this is the usual way a book becomes a cult classic. An alleged “Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-1986,” Keenan’s book interviews many of the key players in that music scene about the legendary short-lived band Memorial Device, and includes an index, list of major players in the community, and an invaluable “Memorial Device Discography,” ranging from their essential Adherence 12 inch to the ultra obscure posthumous recording made by late singer Lucas Black entitled “The meaning of the Executioners.” As the interviews make clear, however, no recording could truly capture the experience of seeing this band live, something akin to seeing Sun Ra jamming with the Velvet Underground. It could change your life.

You CAN buy a tee-shirt for a band that never was. 1 of 100 UK.

Before you run to look on Discogs, remember that music fans are notorious for overstating their case, and since no music could live up to the rapturous descriptions contained herein, it’s perhaps fortunate that Memorial Device never existed. David Keenen wisely avoids dry descriptions of the band’s nonexistent creative process, how they came up with their “sound,” or came to write the songs we can’t listen to; the best music bios, he seems to realize, are more about the people who responded to the music and how it made them feel than the often boring sods who made it. The band Memorial Device is not central to this story, more coincidental. All of these people happened to have been there at the same time in this small working-class Scottish nowheresville.

And, as these oddball locals talk and talk, they seem to cover everything else that might be only glancingly related to the band: synchronicity, visions of ghost ships, bodily organs “dreaming the world”, IRA hitmen, a porn actress and musician with leaky breasts, existential terror, magic, Spanish performance artists, plenty of sex, Mikhail Bugakov, the PLO, sea creatures, Aleister Crowley, and nylons. Partly, this is because Airdrie native David Keenan is a wide-ranging writer with eclectic interests; his recent Xstabeth reminded me of Kundera with its blend of aesthetic musing, philosophical rambling, and lurid sex. But, he also captures something of small-town cracker barrel philosophy where people are often just, dare I say it, more interesting than their urban counterparts. It’s as if their imaginations have more space to wander as well. And music is just another vehicle to mind expansion. (Remember mind expansion?)

Keenan’s also captured the thing where a more secluded town will have a band that means the world to the inhabitants because, like the local sports team, it’s theirs. I’ve met more than a few Hamiltonians of a certain age who believe Teenage Head was the greatest Canadian rock band of all time, probably correctly, and seen younger groups treated like the Next Big Thing for playing music that in a bigger city would be dismissed as a copy of a copy of something from the 70s. What I liked about the novel is you start to get the feeling halfway through that maybe Memorial Drive wasn’t some short lived but hugely influential band, like Rites of Spring or Joy Division, but they were just remembered that way by a handful of eccentrics in their own little world. Which is even better.

Because, like all great books on music, David Keenan is really writing about us, nudging us in the ribs, passing a beer, and saying Hey, do you remember what it was like to be 19 and working at some crappy job, about which you couldn’t have cared less, because you thought the most important thing in life was to make and worship art and music and, on occasion, love? Well, you were right.

Memorial Device Reading List.

Keenan’s Memorial Device photo essay.

Memorial Device adjacent playlist.

And so, friends, what are YOU creating, pondering, playing, or jamming out to this weekend?