{for the record}
me, with my place in the world, with wanting to do something with my life, wanting to contribute something that I thought a force for good.”
G
rowing up in Wilmington, Del., Nagoski didn’t have to travel far to find songs wor- thy of obsession. He first heard the guitar at his fa-
ther’s knee, listening to him pluck out the house favorite, the gold-rush ballad “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” His mother taught piano and voice. He can still re- member her Bach and Beethoven, her cathartic renditions of ’70s pop hits, and her deep tutorials on the Beatles’ “Abbey Road.” He and his twin sisters were encouraged to play along. Thrift- store instruments hung on the walls — a banjo from 1865, an old Martin guitar, violins and recorders — museum pieces you could touch. Listening to records or grabbing a
guitar proved easier than real life. To make ends meet, Nagoski’s parents, Joe and Marcelle, ran a photography busi- ness, taking portraits of baby ballerinas and shooting local recitals. The work was unsteady and a grind. During the first eight years of his life,
Nagoski had pneumonia three times, as well as a prolonged bout of tonsillitis. He spent his childhood on the couch, home-schooled by Jim Croce LPs and his father’s art books. Although his ill- nesses eventually went away, his sense of isolation stayed with him. “I real- ly didn’t fit in when I went back [to school],” he says. “I was odd. I was not okay. Kids can sniff it out when another kid just doesn’t know how to be.” But Nagoski did know how to get to
the record store. The closest one was three blocks away: Bert’s Tape Factory. In the fourth grade, he asked employees if they had any Ravi Shankar records in stock. His grandfather, who lived two doors down, introduced him to even older records and taught him to play drums. He’d watch the old man crank up Gene Krupa LPs and keep time in his garage on those exuberant breaks. Nagoski introduced his mother to
avant-garde composer John Cage and his sisters to the Velvet Underground. As a teenager, he’d show up for class in
cowboy boots with a pair of headphones draped around his neck. “He was not popular in school,” recalls Rich Pell, a friend from those days. “He was not thought of at school. Nobody knew what he was.” He started writing his own songs on
an acoustic guitar; he named his first homemade tape Pincher Martin, after the William Golding novel. He sent letters to his favorite composers and artists. They all bore the same message: Please tell me how I can get out of Wilm- ington, Delaware. One artist sent him Christmas cards every year for a while. Nagoski’s therapist recommended
to his parents that he drop out of high school — he was too depressed and wouldn’t survive it. His parents agreed. “It was not smooth,” his mother recalls. “But he knew that he could not just do what everybody else did. He couldn’t settle down, get a job, get a grade. Ev- erything just meant far too much or far more to him.” Nagoski enrolled in the Universi-
ty of Delaware’s continuing education program and took a job at Bert’s. He developed an almost spiritual love for free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and Javanese gamelan music, and by then had delved headlong into New Zea- land indie rock. But after two years in college, Nagoski still couldn’t find his place. Too much experimentation with psychedelics, a bad breakup, and a lot of F’s caused a breakdown. “So, I came home and sat around in my bathrobe for a couple months,” he says. He wanted to be a modern composer.
He decided that if he couldn’t go to col- lege, he’d find his own teacher. At 21, he moved to New York to work for the pio- neering modernist composer La Monte Young and to live in the artist’s “Dream House,” a loft space that had been converted into an experimental sound- and-light installation. But he spent most of his time attending to Young-ordered household chores ranging from the mundane (laundry and dish duty) to the ridiculous (shrine scrubbing). “I was so lonely,” Nagoski recalls.
“I was living all alone in New York on $300 a month, and everyone around me was really stoned. And I wanted to, like, make something of myself. … I had
28 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | august 22, 2010
to beg and plead finally in tears to get a music lesson.” He lasted six months. Nagoski moved to Philadelphia and
took a job at a Borders bookstore. He later edited internal documents at a health-care company and then pro- grammed databases for a small software firm. In his spare time, he began record- ing his own albums of dense electronic symphonies made with a CD burner, cassette tapes and a tone generator (an outmoded electronic device that pro- duces single frequencies). For one song, he recorded a shower pouring over an upside down lobster pot. His pieces pulsed with menacing drones and dive bombs of piercing static, and he gave them titles such as “Feather,” “Rain” and “A Joy Forever.” They sounded like the most brutal New Age music — incredi- bly loud, incredibly slow — and reached very few people. In 2000, Nagoski moved to Bal-
timore, lured by the city’s receptive experimental music scene. He found friends, a community of like-minded, off-the-grid musicians, and steady shows. No venue was too obscure or too small. He introduced his noise experi- ments in the back room of a gay bar, and conducted a three-hour dronefest for 40 people in his living room. With each show, Nagoski’s expecta-
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