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In Honor Of Labor Day, I’m Taking The Day Off From Work And Talking About Work Instead

September 2, 2013 6 Comments
[Editor’s Note: Begun in 2009. Never finished.  The perfect metaphor for Labor Day]
[Author’s Note: I only get to take the day off from writing. I’m making tables. Thank God there’s no welding involved. And there is no editor]

Gerard at American Digest hit me with one of those Internet chain-letter chores the other day. As is my wont, I’m late in responding and refuse to cooperate. I’m supposed to list all the jobs I’ve had. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to and I don’t.

I’m afraid of Gerard, so I have to say something. Gerard is one of the very few people that are actual writers on the Intertunnel. Between quixotic ramblings and bizarre pictures of women not always wearing all their clothes, he’ll toss off an essay, which in my narcissism I assume is done simply to remind the web that Sippican Cottage is the second-best writer in the world, and no better. He is, as my father calls it: Full of life.

I’m full of other things. But if I wrote down all the things I’ve done for work no one would believe me so there’s no point. I’ve chopped sugar cane in Central America and taught Frisbee in Framingham and many points between. If I exaggerated one iota you’d think I was Baron Munchausen.

Another person who writes things I want to read is the Barrister at Maggie’s Farm. He writes in a spare, avuncular style I like, like many of his co-bloggers there. They are calm people and I like calm because I am mercurial.

The Barrister displays a hallmark of the truly intelligent. He is curious about quotidian things. He wrote about the lowly thermocouple today, because a problem with his water heater caused him to discover it.

I think he’s misdiagnosing his problem, or had it explained imperfectly to him; if the thermocouple breaks it never tells the machinery that the water has gone cold, or tells it it’s magma hot and turns it off even though it isn’t. The pilot light goes out out of boredom, I guess. But the detail is not important.

So I’ll respond to Gerard who’s no doubt lost interest, and to the Barrister though no response was asked for: You two can’t name a job I haven’t done. I’ve made thermocouples. Thousands and thousands of them. I’ll describe one job I had, instead of listing all of them.

I needed a job, bad, in LA, 1980-ish. I moved there with next to no money and no plan. I was only old enough to drink because they hadn’t changed the law yet. I’d had a dozen jobs or more already. No one was hiring nobody for nothing nohow. If I see another person compare today’s economy to the Depression I’m going to show them a picture of 1979. When a mortgage on a house reaches 17%, unemployment is right around 30% in the construction industry, and inflation looks like it’s going to touch 20, you get back to me. Car companies did more than just talk about going bankrupt back then.

I was sleeping on the couch in an apartment shared by two girls, neither of which I knew then or know now. You can distill painful shyness into a kind of brazenness if you try real hard.

The only job opening I could find was a classified for a welder. I had welded under a microscope before, so I was prepared to say I was qualified. A ship in a bottle is still a ship, right?

I drove 66 miles dead east from LA to get there. Outside the place looked like Ingsoc owned it, and inside it looked like Beelzebub was renting it. Medieval. A metal corrugated roof in the desert. The concrete block walls could just barely hold in the amount of crazy required to be a welder in there.

It was a terrible job and the pay was about the same as begging in Calcutta or maybe a dental assistant in England. There were — I remember because they told me– 135 people there that day applying for the job. There was a person sitting on every horizontal surface you could see making out an application. I was the only one wearing a suit and holding a resume. They took me out of the scrum, up the stairs, gave me the man what are you doing here act.

I lied. I lied like a politician. I lied like an infomercial. I lied like four hundred sermons played backwards. You bet I can weld your thermocouples. They sent 135 people away that very minute.

(to be continued)

In Furtherance Of My Evil Plan To Resurrect Wichita Lineman And Make It The Official Cover Song Of The Twenty-Teens: Glenn Tilbrook

August 24, 2013 8 Comments

(Earlier on Sippican Cottage: Another In The Long List Of Songs I Don’t Like That I Like  )

There appears to be a magical barroom somewhere in Great Britain where you can stumble in on an odd night and find Glenn Tilbrook, along with a motley assortment of other musicians — and some people just dragged out of the audience at random — in the corner, banging away at whatever song comes to mind. Glenn Tilbrook was the driving force behind Squeeze, if the name doesn’t sound familiar.

When I started playing music for money, I more or less stopped going to musical performances. I really couldn’t derive any enjoyment from them, and simply fidgeted until I could bug out early. The only exceptions were performances that were so unlike what I was doing that they didn’t even seem like the same thing. I went to La Boheme with my wife, for instance. That’s another galaxy removed from pop covers in the corner of the pub, so it didn’t count. There’s no way my lizard brain could transmogrify my presence just behind the orchestra pit while How Cold Your Little Hand Is soared overhead into the urge to be facing the other direction and helping out.

Another exception to attending other musicians’ performances was Glenn Tilbrook, although it didn’t start out that way. A fellow musician and friend dragged me to a geriatric music tent in Cape Cod to see Squeeze, and it turned out they’d gone bust and were touring as two buskers instead of a power pop band. It was there that I came to the realization that Glenn Tilbrook is the most talented busker in existence. Every venue on this planet with a liquor license should have entertainment like this in the corner all the time, and never does any more.

I was the worst of the bad musicians I generally played with. But the last bunch I ended up with did entertain people, without exception. Whoever showed up got a show from us. Four people or four thousand, we DID THE SHOW. Glen Tilbrook DOES THE SHOW. It’s nice to see.

That YouTube video is the first time in a long time I’ve seen THE SHOW being performed anywhere. It’s almost exactly the format for what we used to do. None of us were a shadow of the singer or player that Glenn Tilbrook is, but the bones of the thing are there. We’d drag people from the audience, and make them play a note or sing a word, or pretend to sing along, or just dance around with us and have fun. We talked to them, and they to us, and if a pretty girl and her tubby friend said they like Brown-Eyed Girl A LOT, we’d play it two times in a row to make them happy, because what’s the harm?

This is sort of uncanny for me to see:

Twenty years ago, my friend Paul, the stand-up drummer, would halt our show, and mockingly threaten our audience: “If you don’t start dancing, (Sippican) is going to sing Tom Jones!” He’d repeat the threat mordantly from time to time, like reeling in a fish, and then we’d trot it out if things got quiet. Stevie would throw me a wig, and the two guitars and drums would start vamping It’s Not Unusual. There was an ubiquitous TV commercial back then, featuring a bald guy with a muskrat glued to his head, selling weaves or wigs or something, called the Hair Club for Men, with the tag line: “I’m not only the Hair Club president; I’m also a client.”

So then I’d stuff the wig partway down the front of my shirt, and Paul would say that I was not only the President of The Chest Hair Club For Men, I was also a client, and then I’d sing an amusing version of It’s Not Unusual — amusing being the only kind of version of it I could sing, because I never could sing, really — and when we’d come to a hard pause at the end of each line, I’d bow my head like some exhausted Fat Elvis while running my fingers suggestively through my nylon chest hair,  and wordlessly lever my wrist to point the microphone I was holding towards the audience, and without exception, no matter whether the audience looked like a nursing home or a biker bar, guys and girls, young and old, deaf and dumb, mean or jolly, drunk or sober, labor or management, barfly or barkeep, every manjack of them would roar in unison: BA DA DA DA DA DAHHHHHHH.

It was glorious. I think I improved our approach to the thing when I started stuffing a second wig down the front of my pants for the full Tom Jones effect, but then again, I’m not sure it was possible to improve the effect of the original.

So You Want To Start A Metal Band…

August 20, 2013 4 Comments

Back when I played music, the various bands I was in all developed shorthand for explaining in a thumbnail what was going on in any particular song.

My older brother was, and is, really good at this. I’ve only performed with him once for money. He got me a job playing in a bad blues band (is there another kind?), and the guitar player and the bandleader (they were brothers) had a fight over who busted mom’s lamp or some shite, and the resultant falling out left us guitarless. I’d been playing the bass for two weeks at that point. My brother, who was a bass player, swallowed his pride and agreed to be seen in public with us making musical noise. He played the guitar and sang half the tunes. I still remember him standing in front of me, singing, playing an ES330 that would feed back if he turned his shoulder, and at every chord milepost he’d hold up the fingers on one hand in sort-of gang sign shapes to let the rest of us know what chord was coming next. Index and middle finger pointing down in an inverted “V”, with your thumb poking through like a winkie, is an “A” chord. Try it, it’s fun. My brother didn’t have to worry about whether the chord was major or minor just then, because the keyboard player didn’t know what the black keys were for, and I wouldn’t play the third note of any scale if you put a pistol to my head at that point.

Coincidentally, I have had a pistol put to my head in a barroom, but whether the third note of the scale was flatted or not didn’t enter into it. But I digress.

Lots of people know which note of a scale the coming chords are based on, and hold up fingers to let you know. In the key of C, C’s one, F is four, G is five, and so forth. You’re playing with fire here, of course, since you’re adding arithmetic to a drunken, drug-addled carpet installer-cum-guitar hero’s creative process. He’s got Chemistry down, it’s true; but Math can be a bear. Besides, most guitar players don’t even try to ascertain what key the rest of the band is playing in until the second eight bars of their solo.

My favorite thumbnail-producing bandmate, Stevie, could explain any song by telling you another song you knew that was just like it. He was always right; I always knew the song he referred to, and it was always close enough to what you were doing to play it. He always learned songs by rote, and understood nothing of music theory — and didn’t want to either. But what difference does it make why someone’s correct about something?  “Show your work” is for academics. “Give me the answer, right now,” is for the real world where beer bottles are thrown for not knowing requests. 

My only contribution to the world of musical shorthand was, interestingly enough, concerning metal music similar to the appended video. I was able to sum up the entire musical genre, with myriad sub-genres, with one sentence: It’s one of those,”This is how I go, when I go like this,” songs.

Billy Mays With Acromegaly And A Palsied Makeup Artist

May 18, 2013 15 Comments

The sign says the factory is in Brewer, Maine. Brewer is basically Bangor. It’s a city a couple hours east of where I live. We have a Paul Bunyan statue in our town, too, that doesn’t belong here, either. Ours doesn’t look like a nifty gay superhero like Brewer’s does. Ours looks like Billy Mays if he had acromegaly and a makeup artist with palsy. All those people in the video sure look familiar, though. Mainers from the poor cities look and talk like everyone working on the line in that video, except for the robo-dweeb that’s narrating. He looks more like Portland, ie: Northern Massachusetts.

No one in any of those places would be caught dead wearing Sperry Topsiders. Someone must still be wearing them Down East, I guess — the constellation of little hamlets hard by the granite coast where people sail during the ten minutes of good weather that Maine gets every year. They don’t wear them while sailing, of course, just in the bar after.  Yuppies used to wear them in the eighties. I wonder if the fellow with the shirt three sizes too small signals a resurgence among the hipster crowd. They’re comfy shoes; they could do worse. According to the Bangor Daily News, it’s the Japanese and other assorted Asians that are buying them. Asians only want them because they aren’t made in Asia. You can try to explain that if you want, but I have a headache already.

It’s the Sperry label you see at the beginning of the video, but Justin Brands owns it, and Berkshire Hathaway owns that. That’s Warren Buffett’s bailiwick. Warren Buffett only buys things that have some strategic advantage someone’s missing out on. A “Made in Maine” tag seems to be all you need to sell boat shoes in Japan. Who knew? Then again, Berkshire Hathaway used to make shirts when Buffett bought it. If I was working in one of his factories, I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.

The elderly workforce in the video is not a gimmick. Maine is old people. After we moved to the wilds of western Maine, we later learned that everyone called us “the young couple.” We are not young. But if you stand next to midgets you’re tall, I guess. If you have children shorter than you, you’re young, at least in Maine.

Maine used to make a lot of shoes and boots. It was the state’s largest industry until very recently, when free trade killed American piecework dead.  The state’s current largest industry is selling oxycodone you stole from grandma’s medicine cabinet, I think. You can still find Quoddy in Maine. Bean. Sperry. Bass. Red Wing. New Balance. Oops, I forgot about Bass. They’re made in: “Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, Honduras, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan.” They still show scrawny, WASPy- looking chicks and their lantern-jawed LL Bean brochure consorts sitting on Adirondack chairs, dockside, on their website, though. The Maine ethos still sells. Maine is the size of Ireland, and about five square miles of it looks like those ads, but, whatever.

Maine used to look like those people in the video. Hardworking, no-nonsense people. I always admired people like them. I wonder who I’ll admire when they’re dead and gone. It won’t be long till I find out, I guess.

(Thanks to my friend Gerard at American Digest for sending that one along)

Tag: 1980s

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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