Today’s earworm: Loomis and the Lust. Their bio page says they’re influenced by, among other people, Johnny Cash. ***snicker***
I think not. Anyway, they wisely steered away from dull, black chords. I don’t know how far you can get in the music business anymore while appearing to enjoy yourself, but it always worked for me. Brighten up your snout-house cul-de-sac with Bright Red Chords.
(Editor’s Note: First offered in 2006)
I’ve been in a thousand roadhouses. Paint peeling from tin ceilings, yellow pine floors stained with the offal of a million benders and scoured clean by the grit of numberless shoes. The neon winks at you. The Men’s room door is on its fifty-fourth set of hinges, the room itself is on its third cleaning in forty years. There are bowling trophies and fish heads and incongruous signs on the walls all donated by the denizens — some of whom are half forgotten but in attendance, others always present but dead. The glasses aren’t clean but beer comes in its own glass, and you can order it by holding up your fingers. The pool table lists to port a bit; after 11:00 PM the patrons do too, so all is well. The quarters, stacked like a tower in Pisa, signal “next game” ’til tomorrow and tomorrow and then some anyway.
There’s a stage, capacious enough for an anorexic to tell jokes from, with four people, their instruments and equipment, and a full drum kit on it. The singer wanders the floor anyway. He sings into a bus station microphone, whispering in it like a lover, or alternately screaming into it like a Stanley Kowalski sort of lover, and peppers his delivery with winks at pretty girls and harmonica playing like a distant elegaic train whistle on the prairie at night.
The guitar is a Fender Stratocaster, of course; it’s strung with strings like cable, and you never hear a note unless it’s intended. You can’t mash them all around. The amplifier is right behind him, that player, and if he swings his hips — he does– the sound shakes the strings into a sort of harmonic frenzy, and he rides the rising howl like a surfer does a wave, and then swings the neck away and the volcanic tone returns to the slow boil.
There’s a lot of space in the music. The bass is an anchor. The drummer could make do with just a high hat and snare. His right foot is like a piston driving a pile. He moves his stick to the ride cymbal, and you sense that the bell of the cymbal is a world away from the edge.
The guitarist knows what he is doing, and never plays what is being sung; he winds his counterpoint around the vocal like a vine on a drainpipe, and the beautiful rainwater courses down inside, splashes down in the garden, the curb, the gutter — into the very earth. It rises again from that earth, and forms melancholy clouds, scudding across the musical horizon, then brings the cool, gentle rain down on all of our heads, which cleanses and anoints us.
Your girlfriend goes home with the bass player, of course.
I’ve decide to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the old Sippican in his natural habitat, inhaling fumes in lieu of drinking Guinness.
In this photo, you can see me applying “eco-friendly” finish to one of my creations. Not satisfied with simply having a carbon footprint as small as a clubfooted tse-tse fly, I’ve gone the extra mile and switched to only using finishes made from recycled radons, which I capture at night in the basement with a mining helmet and a dipnet.
As you know, the radons are a multi-legged organism that scurries around unwholesome places like basements and state senators’ mattress pads, and transmogrifies previously harmless substances into the carbon we all fear like dentists. By harvesting the radons only when their distended bellies signal a full load of the nasty stuff (we throw back the small ones) we ensure that we offset at least three quarters of a one-way plane ticket to a Climate Change Summit for one congressional staffer, as long as they don’t weigh more than 89 pounds and don’t have any luggage. Unpleasant people actually desire that the trip only get 3/4 of the way there, as it’s in Bali, but we shun such naysayers, and redouble our efforts.
Another beneficial side-effect of using the radons to coat the furniture is the gentle glow your furniture has in the dark of the night, allowing, perhaps, for your children to find their way to the unheated composting bathroom without the need for a carbon-spewing 2 watt light bulb in a nightlight for them. With us it’s all subtraction, subtraction, subtraction.
I’m sure you’ll remark, of course, on my spraying costume. The tie does not have an industrial use, it’s true, but I save a lot of paper by using it in lieu of a napkin at lunch. Win/win, as it looks rather jaunty blowing back in the radon breeze, like a WW I fighter pilot.
So everyone, follow my lead and ask yourself: What have you done today to save the environment for the future generations of children you shouldn’t have?
It was just a tent by the side of the road.
The road meanders from noplace special to nowhere anyone wants to go. The semis rattle by going both directions filled with the boles of trees, showing their butt ends to the only place they’ve ever known, going somewhere else to be useful. Like all the children born here do, as soon as they’re big enough.
The car’s a bit worn now, and a muddy chuckhole reaches out for the tire as we bound into the hardpan lot, pitching and yawing like astronauts on the way home. His grandfather would have called it a chuckhole, anyway. His grandfather, the man with the twinkle in his eye and a laugh on his lips and the same name on his certificate of birth. He winked out like a star in a distant galaxy last year, but the light from it is still reaching us here. It’s in the back seat, bright; and driving, too — a little faded.
The words aren’t up to the task anymore. People grope for the name to call it. Antiques? A flea market? Junk or junque. It’s stuff for sale that no one wants so it costs a little money. If anyone would want it, it would be by the side of the road with a “Free” sign on it. But then, commerce is not arithmetic.
I know too many things and examine everything like a doctor looking at the third person in a row with a cold in the last ten minutes of office hours. He knows nothing so everything is wonderful.
You can never tell with him. He never uttered a sound until he was four. Just looked at you with eyes like saucers half-filled with motor oil and you wondered if he was sent to make you nervous forevermore. Then he never stopped talking until his eyes banged shut each evening in a bed laden with bears and talking sponges. To bring him anywhere is to bring Ken Coleman along to murmur about the mundane in a continuous stream, and pass the time contented.
What would it be this time, you wonder. A broken Happy Meal toy or a dented sousaphone or a three-and-a-half legged-table covered with lead paint? He ranged around the tent like a bedouin holding up a caravan mid-desert and pawing around for some honorable plunder. Then he disappeared.
We found him there, sitting alone and tapping away. No paper. A Royal Standard Ten with beveled glass windows on the sides. He wouldn’t go anywhere else. He wouldn’t look at anything else. Tap tap tap ding.
“I’m going to find the man and make him a bargain.”
It was twenty bucks we didn’t have. It was twenty bucks that wouldn’t show up on our plates. It was twenty bucks I would have sold a quart of blood to get for that boy. All the way home, he sat in the back and craned his neck to look at it on the floor behind the seat. Some things are worth more than money.
“This is the machine you write books with, dad.”
Yes, my boy. The machine comes with the stories in it. You just have to let them out. They put in windows so you can get a look at them first.
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