editorial input: scott woods and tim powis cover illustration: karen watts foreword: rob sheffield Copyright © 2014 Phil Dellio All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans- mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including scanning, photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and layout by Vaughn Dragland ([email protected]) ISBN: 978-1-5010-7319-9 and your mother, and your dad patricia dellio (1932 – 2009) peter dellio (1934 – 2003) contents foreword i introduction iii the publications v show no traces 1 the last phase of yours and yours and mine 31 whole new kinds of weather 49 some place back there 73 rain gray town 105 long journeys wear me out 123 fragments falling everywhere 159 if anything should happen 201 always window shopping 269 constantly aware of all the changes that occur 291 people always live and die in 4/4 time 331 in and around the lake 361 a friend i’ve never seen 415 appendix 435 acknowledgements 437 foreword The first thing I noticed about Phil Dellio was that he sure liked Neil Diamond. The second thing I noticed was that I liked Neil Diamond a lot better after reading what Phil had to say. I was reading a copy of Phil’s fanzine Radio On for the first time, riding a Charlottesville city bus in early 1991, wondering if my mind was playing tricks on me. This guy had provoc- ative comments on recent hits by C&C Music Factory and the KLF; he also wrote about musty 1960s ballads by Herb Alpert or the Vogues. He had this mind-blowing ability to hear massive amounts of emotion or drama in pop hits that seemed ordinary to other ears, including mine. Everything sounded different after reading what Phil had to say. And he had a lot to say. I knew Phil Dellio’s voice would become a permanent part of my brain chemistry, and it did. He’s one of my favorite writers on music, on film, on memories, on pretty much anything.Radio On was the best fanzine that ever existed—a kinda-yearly Xerox-and-staples symposium on the big- gest radio hits of the moment, if “symposium” is the right word for a bunch of pop aesthetes arguing over Blind Melon or Salt-n-Pepa. It remains an inspiration to me—in my head, I’m always writing for Radio On, even if it’s been 15 years or so since the last issue. (Not such a big hiatus in fanzine time, right?) This collection—Interrupting My Train of Thought—is but a great- est-hits anthology from Phil’s catalog. As a writer, he has little use for con- ventional wisdom—he keeps living up to the question posed in an early issue of Radio On: “Forget what you know: What do you hear?” He’s obsessed with so many of the things I’m also obsessed with—Cheap Trick, The God- father, Richard Nixon. Yet so many of my obsessions are ones I picked up from him, like Neil Young or Bill James or Pauline Kael. Neither one of us seems to be obsessed with Robin Zander’s solo career, but there’s still time. He’s also one of the few writers I’ve ever encountered in any genre who does justice to that most elusive of topics, the Seventies. (A decade he already glossed in his classic exegesis with Scott Woods, I Wanna Be Sedated.) In the two-decades-and-gravy I’ve been reading him, Phil has count- ed down three lists of his 100 favorite songs, with a different Number One each time—Gene Pitney’s “It Hurts To Be In Love,” Rod Stewart’s “You Wear It Well,” and Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” Each time, he’s made that Number One sound fresh and new to me, no matter how many scuzillions of times I’ve heard it. And each time, he turns me on to buried treasures I’ve never even heard of. (If not for Phil, I would never have i found Hot Tuna’s “Sea Child,” and I don’t even like to imagine such a fate.) One of the happiest memories of my life, for reasons tough to ex- plain, is sitting with Phil and my wife Renée Crist in Toronto’s Skydome in the summer of 1996, watching the Blue Jays play the Red Sox. Phil and I got giddily distracted by a middle infielder named “Wilfredo,” setting us both off on several innings’ worth of free-associating Godfather references. The same visit also involved a screening of Raging Bull, a lesson in the 1970s Canadian band Goddo (who sounded so ridiculous I was sure Phil was mak- ing it all up), and that great moment in the car when the Stones’ “Under My Thumb” came on. Phil reached to turn it up, then hesitated, realizing there was a lady present; Renée reached over and turned it up for him, whereupon they both sang along and rocked out. In one of his Radio On essays, Phil wrote about a short-lived Top 40 station in Toronto with a gloriously freewheeling playlist—he once heard the DJ segue from Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It” right into Madonna’s “True Blue.” In a way, Phil’s book is like that radio station—a place where an essay on Neil Young, a highschool journal entry, or a Greil Marcus inter- view can seem right at home next to a riff on the Spice Girls or the Guess Who. His voice makes all these topics seem connected somehow. It’s a radio station I’ve spent a couple of decades listening to and learning from. And it’s one I never tire of turning up. Rob Sheffield ii introduction It’s the second half of the cruise—last third, probably. Time to gath- er up this stuff, put it between covers, then move on and forget about it. I’d never really thought about a collection until a couple of years ago. (I’m not sure if collection is the right word, but I don’t want to call it a best-of, and greatest-hits would be wildly off the mark; I’d like to think this is more in the spirit of K-Tel, a scattershot mixture of this, that, and the oth- er.) The thing that got me going in the first place was the simple realization that it could be done—that I was in a financial position where I could publish it myself (i.e., continue to live in the luxurious lifestyle I’m accustomed to even if I didn’t sell a single copy), and that I had a good idea of what would be in there and how I’d want the book to look and feel. It would be a book for me and for those who knew me, with a couple of hundred extra copies for the world out there. I could even include a few things that would, absent their original context, not always entirely make sense. And I wouldn’t have to worry about that, either, because most of the people who’d read it would be able to put back the context on their own. In a sense I’ve been self-publishing almost since I first started writ- ing about music in 1985 (or ‘82, if school newspapers count). Maybe a third of what follows was written for publication in the conventional sense, but mostly I wrote for fanzines in the 1990s, and when that world started to fade away (for me, anyway—I bet there are still lots of fanzines defiantly and anachronistically plugging away, which is a heartening thought), I moved online. The conventional sense has never really worked for me, at least not since my involvement with Nerve at the very beginning, where I had the kind of editors every young music writer should be lucky enough to have. Nerve spoiled me; I didn’t realize it wouldn’t always be so easy. “Pitch- ing,” “shopping around,” “spec,” and all those other freelance terms—after Nerve, and with the occasional exception, what you’ll find in here was my way of not ever having to say, think, or act upon those words again. Having a non-writing full-time job obviously had to be part of the equation, too. That’s me; many others thrive in that world. In any event, from putting out your own fanzine to putting out your own book was but one short step tem- peramentally, even if it did take me 15 years to actually do it. I knew it had to be a book book, though—I never for a second contemplated going the e-book route, which could have been done at con- siderably less cost, and would have made more sense about a dozen other different ways, too. I’ll probably have to get an e-reader myself sometime iii in the next few years; my eyesight has never been great, but the last few years especially it’s been a problem. So sending more dead paper out into the world is, to put it charitably, a little irrational. But I’m slow to change. I’m addicted to things—books, records, DVDs, baseball cards, drawers and shelves and boxes filled with junk of all sorts. I was that way 30 years ago, and I still am, even if that world is in the process of dying.