Heard not seen:  the omnipresent Spike Priggen is everywhere

So Spike Priggen has played with just about everybody who has ever strapped it on and got things going in the past twenty years on the eastern seaboard. So it is that his scrapbook alone is probably one of the richest veins of indie Boston-via-Connecticut-thru-New York –and-God-knows-where-else history. So what if he plays bass, plays guitar, sings, dances, and christ knows what else? So what if a bunch of people have heard him, but no one has heard of him. Why’s this guy just putting together his own record now? And what makes him think he – just because he’s been around – can pen a fucking song? Who the fuck is this guy anyway?

What’s it matter to ya? Yeah, Priggen has played in a bunch of cool bands (Dumptruck, the Schrams, Liquor Giants, etc). Sure he’s a bass player and a guitarist. Certainly he’s walked in some pretty heady circles, working music stuff with cats like Jon Brion, Mark Mulcahy, Kirk Swan, and the omnipresent Adam Lasus. Yeah he’s got his own record out now – which, by the way, isn’t a johnny-come-lately one-off, Priggen has always been writing and playing his own tunes. And yeah, you probably haven’t heard or heard of him. So what?

The Very Thing That You Treasure, Priggen will tell you, has been a lifetime in the making. Quite frankly it’s been worth the wait. He’d heard Dwight Twilley when he was fourteen or something, and then got into Big Star ("before everyone jumped onto that band"). Which burned his brain with rock and roll passions for Cheap Trick, Wire, Buzzcocks, and the Only Ones. Shifting tides of the times, shifting sounds that feed his now sounds. "I was a big dB’s fan when I was a kid," Priggen says. "I can hear it in that song you do called ‘Yesterday’", I respond. "But it all goes back to Twilley," Priggen admits. "I bought that "I’m On Fire" single and it was over."

Well, hardly over. Actually it just began. We know what Priggen meant. When he talks about the bands he dug and still digs you hear a fanatic. A music fan who can’t be contained; so much so that he pulls buried sounds out of the deep corners of a pop rock soaked mind and litters his fine new record with them. So much music, tossed in fragments, splattered like a Jackson Pollack, across Priggen’s own first-time canvas. It’s really something to hear. A drip here, a shard there, a splat over this way...

"This is something I never thought I’d hear," Priggen says, "but some people have said that the disc sounds sort of like Chris Bell (ex-Big Star), which is very, very cool." Of course they do, because that’s part of the mix. When "Alright" sounds like Priggen’s tenure with the celebrated Boston start up Dumptruck – guitars raaiiilling like mad-as-hell demons – the quietude of Bell comparisons shatter like a beer bottle to pavement. And then in the echoes of so much chaos, while the noise drifts away, after "Alright" rings away into the ether Priggen invokes Bell’s ghost, and the ghosts of so much pop past, once again. "She Used to Be My Baby".

Whatsit sound like? Who's a contemporary? Well, when Priggen sings "Nothing" and sounds so much like another bassist/guitarist who existed in the shadows of others greatness that the commonalty winds up making Priggen and ex-Replacement Tommy Stinson brothers of blood, he's wearing a rare heart on his sleeve indeed. The stories seem to parallel in cosmic fashion; Stinson ran with the influences of rockroll from a young age, so did Priggen. Both have played out the run with some fabulous musician/songwriter types, both released astonishingly assured first solo efforts (Stinson with Bash & Pop’s Friday Night is Killing Me) that pour over a host of influential sounds yet blend into a signature sound, and both write a pretty sharp tune. They sound the same in different ways.

So, you can listen to so much that invades your sub-conscious that you, having been a musician for what seems like your entire life, find those influences pouring out of you in every drop of sweat. Little beads like windows to the spirit. You can feel it.

Then you finally make a record, and it’s a damn good one. You sing songs about girls and love. About how it sucks, and you keep expecting it to suck, but you keep buying into the whole fucking mess. "Every Broken Heart" means there’s always another one waiting and plays it like a post-punk Louisiana HayRide sad, sorrowful, country stroll. It’s sharp enough to cut, and the tune pulls you in to do the carving. Priggen can write ‘em, play ‘em, and sing ‘em. It must be experience – poor fella.

The Very Thing That You Treasure is well-defined pop music. Priggen has no problem remembering the effect that those early Dwight Twilley tunes had on him, how they knocked him end over end into this rock and roll life. And a record like this one is probably the finest sort of tribute a fan turned purveyor could come up with. Treasure is just what the it says – an old box in the attic, dusted clean, opened, and filled with the bits and pieces that memories try to connect and bring meaning and value to. Lord knows Priggen has a fat ‘ol chest filled with more rock and roll memories than you, I, or any other three friends may wish to accumulate. The thing is that Priggen knows what he has and Treasure is just the start (hopefully) of his trying to share it all. By the time he breaks down and sincerely sings "I’m so tired / I’m so tired / I’m so tired / of being all alone / So good to see you" on the song that takes its name from that last line he’s admitting as much. And in fact he may just be singing about this record, one that has been a lifetime in the making.

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