I’ve been around the blues block back in the day. I can play at least three of the instruments shown, badly. I know how to carry the ones I can’t play, too. I sang worsely while I played badly. Everything in this video is familiar, but not exactly. I feel like I’m looking at a photocopy sent through the copier over and over.

That’s not a criticism. We all cobble together some form of today out of the bits and pieces of yesterday that catch our eye. The only truly original people in this world are schizophrenics. The rest of us make do with the world as it is, and was. I’m interested in this video because it’s an example of what some young people are finding interesting in the flotsam and jetsam of R&B and blues. I’m modestly intrigued to survey the instruments and amplifiers to see what has snagged their wallets at the music store. For instance, kids are playing Telecasters again, after a long love affair with Stratocasters. My sons played out the other day, and the Heir showed up with a Telecaster for some reason. Synchronicity, I guess. Speaking of synchronicity, Wilhelm Reich lived right down the street from us in Rangeley, Maine, after all.

Wait a minute, my bad. Synchronicity was Dr. Carl Jung and Dr. Gordon Sumner. Wilhelm Reich was the guy who put people, naked, into a sheet-metal-lined box with a tiny window, and told them to stay in there until whatever was troubling them, from being neurotic to having cancer, went away. They were supposed to be cured by their own energy, in a form he called orgone. Hmm, that sounds a lot like a typical music studio. Cramped, mostly windowless, with long stretches of boredom between bouts of inspiration.

So Eddie 9V locks himself in a box with his friends, and cures himself with his own energy. He picks up hints from musicians long gone, but not forgotten. He gets his dress sense from a blow to the head, I guess, or watching any number of movies about the seventies. He’s like a magpie, taking a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and trying to make a nest of music and image for himself to sit in. It’s not bad, is it?

And I ain’t going to lie. If the blonde backup singer sits naked in the orgone accumulator, I’m going to look through the little window, whether I’m wearing a lab coat or not.

[Many thanks to my interfriend Mark M. for sending that one along]