I’ve just read that Matthew Seligman, bass player with the quirky English rock band The Soft Boys, has died as a result of this damn virus.

This has led to me spending some time not only rediscovering their songs (which are still just as fucking great as I remember), but thanks to the ineffable power of music, a small part of my youth.

Yes, the Soft Boys hold a special place in my music-lovin’ heart, and, if you’re willing to indulge me, I’d like to tell you why.

(A warning to anyone in the tl/dr crowd: This is going to take a while).

I was already a music enthusiast and well on my way to becoming a “fanatic” when I first arrived in Toronto in March of 1997. A small-town boy from a town of 600 people, I immediately set out to absorb all that city life had to offer. For me, that meant record stores. Lots and lots of record stores.

In those days it seemed like there were hundreds of them dotting the city, and I made it my mission to seek them all out. East End, West End, from dumpy basement stores to the palaces of music buying on Yonge St.’s old “record store row.”

They’re mostly all gone now, but a shout-out here to Phil, Greg and Ernest at Soundscapes on College, which is still a regular haunt — as much for our long conversations about music as the actual purchasing of music. People talk about all the things they’ll do when this whole pandemic is over and, yeah, Soundscapes will probably be one of my first stops. I think there’s a Mitch Ryder collection put aside for me, right Phil?

But the place where I truly “majored” in musicology was Vortex records at Yonge and Eglinton in midtown Toronto. It was situated on the second floor of a non-descript two-storey building, accessed through a narrow doorway that was, quite literally, like the entrance to a secret kingdom.

Up the long flight of stairs to a shabby room with water-stained ceiling tiles and piles of records haphazardly scattered about. It was a dump. That’s the thing about (good) record stores though: they never, ever try to be something they’re not. There are no potted plants, no complimentary snacks, no concierge. They know their customers are there for only one thing: It’s all about the music, man.

At Vortex I developed a well-honed plan of attack: Start with the new arrivals on the back wall (and there were always dozens to choose from) and then a clockwise circuit of the store from A-Z. It was in this tiny room, probably no more than 500 square feet, that I discovered the bands that would become musical touchstones: The Hoodoo Gurus, the Plimsouls, The Paul Collins Beat.

I bought my very first John Prine album here (The Missing Years). My first John Hiatt album too (Bring the Family). Southside Johnny’s Hearts of Stone, Gang of Four, Stiff Little Fingers, the entire Elvis Costello discography (yep, even Spike). It was here that the building blocks of an obsession were first assembled.

Now, when virtually the entirety of recorded music is available at the click of a button, and algorithms determine your next “like,” it’s hard to articulate the sense of discovery that accompanied these weekly sojourns to Vortex. I’ve never done hard drugs, but this was quite literally a “high.” I would be tingling with excitement whenever I left the store with a prized new CD.

My main dealer at Vortex was “Gord,” and he was a stereotypical asshole record store clerk: sneering, supercilious, smug. He was not at all pleasant. Once, and I swear to God this is true, I saw him recoil as if slapped when a customer (who must have wandered in accidentally) innocently enquired if they had any Judas Priest albums.

But I’m nothing if not persistently personable, and I eventually wore Gord down. We settled into something of a mentor/mentee relationship, and Gord seemed to take delight in schooling an eager neophyte like me. It got to the point that he would whip something out whenever I entered the store.

It was a regular old Friday night when he first played me “Queen of Eyes” from The Soft Boys’ 1980 classic Underwater Moonlight. Gord knew by now what pushed my buttons (chiming guitar, unignorable melody), and this had them in abundance.

Gord then played me an assortment of tracks, each one as great as the one that came before: “I Wanna Destroy You,” “Kingdom of Love,” “Tonight,” “Insanely Jealous.” Holy shit, it just went on. By the time it got to the title song (a stone-cold classic in an album jammed full of ’em) I was fully on board the Robyn Hitchcock express. I dream of trains, indeed.

Underwater Moonlight joined a rarified list of albums that went beyond being merely ones that I loved, to ones I was obsessed with. It’s a relatively short list, and I’m ashamed to admit that I somehow neglected to include it in that recent “10 albums…” Facebook thing.

There have been a few times in my music-obsessed life that I’ve been prone to making hyperbolic statements like “I can stop now: I will never hear anything better than this.” For me, briefly, Underwater Moonlight was that album.

One of the downsides of being a music obsessive is that our constant pursuit of the new means the old can sometimes be neglected, pushed to the back corners of our memory, replaced by the new shiny thing.

The great thing about music, though, is that the songs we love can leave an indelible impression. There’s a line in a Hold Steady song that is as great a summation as I’ve ever heard: “Certain songs, they get scratched into our souls.”

It had been a while since I’d spent any time with Underwater Moonlight, but listening to it from front to back this morning, probably for the first time in 10 years, felt like a form of time travel. Matthew Seligman isn’t a household name, but I just want him to know, wherever he may be, that his contribution mattered.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash