»In which our hero is a Chrome Tubby

When the extent of my apartment was a record player (sadly broken on my move to San Francisco), an amplifier, and pair of ten-year-old speakers (now almost twenty, and still rockin' steady), oh, and probably a bed and a lamp, I would sit on the floor and listen to a few songs again and again.

Metronomic Underground, the lead track on Stereolab's yellow glitter double elpee, Emperor Tomato Ketchup -- I have a nagging sensation that my purchasing this record with Aram's coöperation (and massive employée discount!) led to some difficulty back in Chicago --;

Viva Last Blues, the rockin' incarnation of Will Oldham;

The Serpentine Similar, the magical and precise difficult full-length by David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke that introduced me to the Louisville-Chicago-Oberlin triangle;

and Travelling Light, a heartbreaking (and, some would say, wrist-slitting) single by the wretched Tindersticks. (Whose second, untitled album I bought because Mark Athitakis unhesitating recommended it, and because the NME review cited on the sticker read "Total F***ing Godhead!", a phrase apparently coined by a SubPop exec to describe Soundgarden, but, eh.)

In fact, at one of the house parties we threw on Wightman Street, I received a visit from the local police, responding to a complaint by neighbours that our music was too loud. At the back of the house we found someone lying on the floor of my bedroom, playing the only available record at earsplitting volume: Metronomic Underground (aka Chrome Tubby).

Now here I am listening to Metronomic Underground again and again. Apparently the lyrics are Socialist and complicated, but I really cannot ever make them out enough to interpret. I stopped Laetitia once outside a San Francisco gig, but she was (understandably!) more interested in feeding the baby than in redacting her poetry, and left me with a signed tour single that reads "Help Salim! I am a rock!" as she dashed back to the tour bus. That's it, that's the law, that's the whole of law.

Whoops. Different song.

None of my record players has an endless repeat feature. The first one I had -- the only record player in the family, an all-in-one hi-fi unit with a tuner and amplifier and pair of speakers -- cheerfully accommodated 78s as well as big-hole 45s and longplays, and had an endless repeat. One could also go all out and stack the records one atop the other!

I rarely listen to records these days; so many songs and albums are in my iTunes Library, and the songs that aren't I miss only rarely (but then, when I miss them, I miss them immediately and deeply. Tart's "Kite", a song that will never appear properly mastered on a CD, is one of these songs. I learned the word "inchoate" from comments scrawl across the WHPK radio station copy of the single; I think Will used it in his review).

CUT TO FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER: I have dug through several dusty boxes of neat, alphabetised forty-fives only to realise that I probably searched for this record sometime within the past few years, and thus probably filed it somewhere in the stack of records directly beneath the turntables.
Aha.
Here it is: Tart. "single." Michael Lenzi plays drums on this. Joy Gregory, who was teaching at the Lab School at the time, sings the delirious "I'm a kite, twisting, turning in the wind / maybe I can catch some lightning".
$3.25 from Ajax Records in November 1994.

CUT TO ONE DAY AND ONE GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH LATER: