Live Album: Acetone’s “I’ve Enjoyed as Much of This as I Can Stand”
I’ve Enjoyed as Much of This as I Can Stand
Acetone
New West Records, 2024
$44.99 (Double LP)
Acetone made exquisitely, magically ordinary music. The Los Angeles trio, who formed in 1992, adored artists that much of America had relegated to thrift-store bins: the easy-listening zither player Ruth Welcome, the trailblazing Hawaiian group Hui Ohana, the country crooner Charlie Rich. Sam Sweet wrote in Hadley Lee Lightcap, his self-published 2017 book on the band, “They came from the rock world, played like a jazz combo, and dressed like beach rats.” Many of their best recordings took place in a pool house and a spare bedroom, and they sound like they could have been made nowhere else. The group’s songs evoke slow breathing, gentle ocean waves, soft late-afternoon light, a California summer day running at quarter-speed.
Commercially, they left behind a legacy of disappointment. Signed to a cushy record deal around early 1993—a time when the music industry was flush with cash and seeking the next Nirvana—they were label-less and deep in debt by 1996. Their debut full-length, Cindy (1993), launched them on tours opening for The Verve and Oasis. But their second record, If You Only Knew (1996), flopped, ending up in the same dollar bins they drew their inspiration from. (A companion mini-album of covers, I Guess I Would, was released in 1995 and met the same fate.) They dug in, and kept refining their languid sound. Their third, eponymous album (1997) was a blissful masterpiece that fell into obscurity on arrival. York Blvd. (2000), their fourth LP and an ill-fitting bid for popularity, caused the band to splinter. In 2001 their singer, Richie Lee, took his own life. He was thirty-four.
But this telling of Acetone’s story is a disservice to their hypnotizing body of work. Their songs are too tranquil, too hospitable to make sense on commercial radio, in arenas, or giant festivals. They created music for living rooms. For ambiance they regularly brought thrift-shop lamps on stage with them. I’ve Enjoyed as Much of This as I Can Stand, a newly uncovered live recording from their sole headlining tour in 1998, is available only on vinyl, a format intrinsically linked to listening in an intimate space.
But this telling of Acetone’s story is a disservice to their hypnotizing body of work. Their songs are too tranquil, too hospitable to make sense on commercial radio, in arenas, or giant festivals. They created music for living rooms.
I listened to the record one June afternoon, with my friend Michael in his turntable-equipped living room, spinning each side of the LP while we enjoyed a spread of fresh bagels and orange juice. Acetone has shifted our orientation to daily life, giving ease and looseness to the ways we walk, the ways we observe our surroundings, the ways we think as musicians and play our instruments. Their songs encourage slow breathing, easy but deliberate speech, a gently widened field of attention.
Opening the record with a slowed-down rendition of Link Wray’s proto-surf instrumental “Rumble,” Acetone take their time, letting their songs unfold, sinking into the hollows between beats. “Another Minute” is all graceful drift, the guitar sounds warping as if the music has begun to melt from sun exposure. “If You Only Knew,” though a little faster, bobs on the same steady tide. When it appeared on their second studio album, “I’ve Enjoyed as Much of This as I Can Stand” sounded painfully dejected, the weary lament of someone trapped in hopelessness. In this live performance, they break their patient pacing and play the song at what feels like double-time, ripping through it as if in rejection of the misery they’d committed to tape a few years earlier. The trio were at their most assured in the late nineties, and this recording is full of confidence and love for the art of making music.
Acetone’s best recordings show how resonant, how instantaneous, how trusting their nonverbal communication is. Unlike so many jam bands, they seldom showed off. They had the intuitive flow of a jazz combo, but they played few traditional solos. They devised their own kind of virtuosity, their individual styles serving a hushed, absorbing conversation. Their dynamic is palpable in the home recordings they made near the end of their career, several of which appear on the extraordinary compilation 1992–2001 (2018). About these recordings Mark Lightcap, their guitarist, told Sam Sweet, “We’d all be playing and doing so little. It was like keeping a snowflake in the air, or a bubble. You manage to keep it aloft and eventually it pops, but the time that it’s up there is so…” The quote ends with Lightcap’s longing pause.
The band’s attention to delicate dynamics is plain, particularly during the first half of this record. Lee and Lightcap almost always sing at a near-whisper, but their harmonies on songs like “If You Only Knew” and “All You Know” float with perfect, lullaby-like calm. Their lyrics merge seamlessly with their spare and wistful playing. (“All you know has just slipped away / Still you go on waking up each day / How’d you get into this state?”)
But Acetone also loved playing loud, and in the final stretch of the record they create swells of noise that rival Sonic Youth. Closing out the show with “Endless Summer,” one of their earliest and heaviest compositions, they end with drummer Steve Hadley doing an anti-solo, repeating a simple beat with swelling, oceanic force. When Hadley was first learning the drums, he was told to “listen to everyday sounds—cartoons, traffic, beach noise—and repeat them back as rhythms.” Hadley’s mastery of this style helped Acetone become kings of the depthless mundane.
Sweet’s book Hadley Lee Lightcap—not only a great piece of music writing, but a great work of California nonfiction—emphasizes Acetone’s deep identification with Los Angeles at its most quietly poignant. When Sweet describes driving around LA with their music on the car stereo, he writes, “Their music made sense anywhere the late afternoon light caught a lonely wall.” Acetone is for liminal moments like these, pockets of introspection amid the frenzy of California Dreaming. In I’ve Enjoyed as Much of This as I Can Stand—as in all of their best music—you can hear the low-level wonder within reach every day.
Like several other perpetually under-recognized artists from the nineties—Unwound, Karate, Bedhead, Duster—Acetone is now reaching new listeners. Their recordings are in print again, thanks to the dedication of longtime fans and the quirks of streaming culture. The 1992–2001 compilation released in 2018, followed by the reissue of all Acetone’s studio recordings in 2023, has even encouraged the group to start playing live again, with visual artist Senon Williams succeeding Richie Lee on bass.
This past April, I saw them take the stage in San Francisco. Even though Lee’s absence was palpable, Lightcap, Hadley, and Williams unfurled the same velvety tapestry as the one recorded in ’98. They started even slower this time, luxuriating in rhythms and tones that conjure the atmosphere of an empty California street in the summer, or a friend’s living room in the middle of the day. Twenty-six years after the recording of I’ve Enjoyed as Much of This as I Can Stand, they sound as rich and vital as they ever did. Easy to overlook, but a treasure to behold.
