Déjà vu

DualDiscs, dualities, and a chilly year of yesterdays.

By J.H. Tompkins

LET IT BE known that in 2005, after surfing the generational divide successfully for more years than I care to count, I took a dive. My interests as a critic collapsed into the music that fed my semiregular 2nd Time Around reviews, which appear in this publication. Aside from my weekly trip to iTunes – that's an admission of guilt all by itself – I spent the year listening to reissued music and the hundreds of albums I own that I'd never had time to play before.

Stepping back had something to do with geography. I'm writing from a loft in downtown LA rather than from my former office in Bay Guardian HQ in SF. You could say I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd. It's more than that, though – '05 was shaped by sharing space with the area's army of homeless. It runs 11,000 strong and counting, and lest you get the wrong idea, I want to point out that I gave up a piece of my heart, but my ass was safe behind the 10-foot fence surrounding our complex.

Still, I got to know a few of my fellow citizens, sort of. They were easy to spot when they arrived with a couple of suitcases and maybe a nice tent. They'd pitch it at a distance from the hood's long-term homeless, because they were different – not homeless, just experiencing one of life's speed bumps. And day by day, I'd watch them lose confidence, belongings, and pride. The tent was always the first thing to go – too bulky to carry around and too hard to keep safe. Then a bag or two of clothes, which took care of finding places to change. Finally, they'd learn the local dance craze: the homeless shuffle – just a few steps further and they'd be dancing with the dead.

All that and a crumbling marriage made '05 a year for the blues, around here, anyway. Thing is, I'm not crazy 'bout the blues – having them or hearing them. But Sam Cooke, the father of soul music, sounded bluesy, and his albums – three of them reissued by RCA/Legacy – felt good going down. Cooke made music that snuck out of church through the back door and left a divine imprint on the future of pop music. "You Send Me," his first hit, was on my playlist, but the real treasure was a pair of reissued live albums, Nightbeat and One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963. I listened to the latter more times than I can count and came away with a better understanding of how a person – me, for example – could feel impossibly, wonderfully alive even as life sometimes felt so grim that waking up in the morning was painful.

This was the year of the DualDisc, or something – old, reissued material rereleased as a CD with a DVD flip side. How many times can Talking Heads material see the light of day? How many times can Miles Davis's Kind of Blue be repackaged? Do fans – or anybody else – need Weird Tales of the Ramones (with – mais oui – a special DVD and drawings by "25 of the Top Comic Artists")? How many ways can you say desperate? (Ask me – I know what I'm talking about.)

I spent more time with the New York Review of Books than I did at Pitchfork or Pop Matters, segueing from essays and book reviews to the books themselves: Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs, by Peter Schwab; Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond; and a dozen or so more. Once upon a time, I'd read and feel fortunate to live in Uncle Sugar's belly. Not so today, first world insulation being another casualty of globalization.

I searched high and low for belief – in something or somebody. Didn't find it, not even close. But I did get my hands on the Main Ingredient's Best of, which, along with gorgeous takes on "Euphrates" and "Just Don't Want to Be Lonely," served up my favorite, which tells the story of my year: "Everybody Plays the Fool." Bring on '06, please.

J.H. Tompkins's top 10 reissues

1. Sam Cooke, One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 (RCA/Legacy)

2. Bill Withers, Just As I Am DualDisc (Sony)

3. Main Ingredient, Everybody Plays the Fool: The Best of the Main Ingredient (RCA/Legacy)

4. Ol' Dirty Bastard, The Definitive Ol' Dirty Bastard Story (Rhino)

5. Living Colour, Live at CBGB's Tuesday 12/19/89 (Sony)

6. Miles Davis, A Tribute to Jack Johnson remastered (Sony)

7. Richard Pryor, Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966-1974) (Rhino)

8. O'Jays, Essential O'Jays (Epic)

9. Yo la Tengo, Prisoners of Love: A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent Songs: 1985-2003 (Matador)

10. Loretta Lynn, The Definitive Collection (MCA Nashville)