2. Fading OutFading Out

I flirted with bringing in a little Slint to this list. There was a recent remix of their first record, Tweez, which I thought about putting in just in order to talk about how important they were personally and musically to me, but then there were just other things I wanted to talk about more, like Fading Out.

My older brother went to a middle school that I followed him to, a year or two later, called The Brown School. This was an experimental public school, started in the early 1970s, with a humanities based curriculum. Here, my brother met other outsiders, creative folks that were involved with the music scene at 12 or 13, forming bands and writing crazy, weird, surreal, confrontational, abstract songs.

One band, Malignant Growth, became Fading Out. Malignant Growth were a more traditional hardcore band, but their lyrics, by the singer Brett Ralph, who was also a big football player in the city, were more introverted, self-examining and emotional and declarative than they were angry or political. They morphed into Fading Out, which was a little more Sabbath, a bit proto metal, full of this dark and deadly, yet warm and fuzzy intensity, but with this beautiful human core.

These days, Brett owns an art gallery/bookstore/record store about a half mile from where I live called Surface Noise. He was such an important person for me as a kid. When I started to gingerly step into the music scene – this little kid who hadn’t hit puberty yet – he took me under his wing, and was always exceedingly kind, would always recognise me, and come over to talk to me about Ramones or the Misfits, which felt huge. This is a tape of Fading Out from 1985, when I was 15 – everyone would dub it for their friends, everyone in Louisville had a copy – and I was able to create this sub imprint with Drag City called Palace Records in 1995, so we could put it out for other people.