The Listening Room, May '23

All about Acetone

I don’t know my internal total spins data, but I suspect that Acetone’s self-titled LP is one of my most played records. It is that record (and I think everyone has one) that will, unbidden, come on in certain car stereo systems with an autoplay setting. There is no AC/DC in my phone’s music library, no ABBA. It’s Acetone for me. The first few phrases of the guitar line that kick off this record are branded into my brain, as synonymous with a newly started car as the ding of the seatbelt nag.

I discovered Acetone as one did back in the 90s — I thought the name was cool and the album cover design up my alley and I whipped through a few tracks on one of those listening kiosks at my local record store. I didn’t commit to spending any of my precious few dollars on it until I discovered a plain promo copy selling for cheap at the UC’s record store. No cover, no design. Just block letters spelling out the name of the band and the tracklisting on the CD. Can’t imagine I spent more than five bucks.

I tend to think of myself as someone who prefers a certain singing voice — crystalline and reedy — so Acetone, by that measure, had me going against type. Singer and bassist Richie Lee’s voice is quiet and whispery, a little lazy and off-pitch. An embarrassed Lou Reed, maybe. But there’s a sneaky sense of melody in the band’s songwriting and the interplay between the instruments in the ultra-sparse arrangements is golden. Particularly the back and forth between the guitar and the bass — a kind of dance that comes out of two players really listening to what the other is doing and showing patience and restraint. Letting the empty space become another part of the texture. Later, when I dipped into the Grateful Dead in a more deliberate way, some of that early seventies Dead where there’s a sweet back and forth between Lesh and Garcia — I thought, hey, they sound like Acetone!

About ten years ago, I abandoned compact discs in favor of streaming and vinyl. I ripped all of my CDs on to a hard drive and sold them to a local record store for credit. A lot of credit. I then promptly lost the credit certificate, one of the great misfortunes of my life, but easy come easy go, right? Anyway, several hard drives down the road, everything’s been uploaded into the cloud. Sneakily, however, my uploaded promo copy of this Acetone record has been transformed into the commercial copy (I have no idea how this works) and now there is a pedal steel part on a bunch of the songs. I’m a fan of pedal steel. I like the instrument. The thing has glossed its bendy strings over many of my own songs. But the version of this record without pedal steel is — and trust me on this, guys — a better record. The open space is there, the white in the canvas between the brush strokes is intact on the pedal steel-free songs. The thoughtful back-and-forth between bass and drums is a duet, a fascinating and dramatic monogamous relationship. What’s this pedal steel doing in there? Three’s a crowd, people.

How did this happen? I imagine the record company wanted to get the promo copy out there and into the hands of DJs and music critics before the band was quite finished with the record. The mix was done, but they had this hankering to get a pedal steel down, and the pedal steel guy had pertussis on the day he supposed to come in. Something like that.

I’ve searched the internet for an uploaded copy of this promo record. There’s no sign of it on youtube. Who would think to upload a copy of the promo CD? It’s too niche even for the twenty-first century internet. So I can only listen to the one that’s available to us all and try to edit the pedal steel with my mind.

Did I imagine this? Was there pedal steel on that record all along and I never noticed it? I wish I could confirm this one way or another, but my copy was sold to Jackpot Records in 2009.

Sadly, it appears that a lot of Acetone’s output — which is by no means small, considering they were around for only about a decade — is mostly out of print. The self titled record (with the pedal steel) and the 2000 follow up, York Blvd., are available on streaming services, along with a Light In The Attic-released compilation. That’s it. Vinyl of the first record is going for upwards of $400 (according to Discogs). I don’t pretend to know what’s going on with that scarcity — this is one of those things, like Nic Jones’ lack of in-print records, that beggars belief a bit. Acetone is a great band, a timeless one, and a band whose records deserve to be out there for a new generation of fans to discover.

Richie Lee died by suicide in 2001. He was 34. I guess he struggled with substance addiction most of his life. In the little press footage of the band that’s out there, you can see him shrinking into himself as he answers questions, relieved when the ordeal is over. These were the familiar leading-men of my rockstar upbringing: creative souls forever chagrined by the expectations put on them by the industry. But the music he made with his two bandmembers is unchangeable, untouchable. If only we could hear more of it…