The seconds melt of the face of the clock hanging on the wall over my right shoulder. Work moves this slow when you’ve been awake since sunrise and your head didn’t hit the pillow until only a few hours earlier. The businessmen who stop by don’t really enjoy small-talk in the morning, but there’s an old Indian man who likes to crouch over my daily crossword puzzle and look at the fields I’ve left momentarily blank, so, today we spent about two minutes talking about the Trojan War and he told me about tide patterns. When he left an hour or so later, he tried to teach me how to fill in the acrostic, but he failed miserably in his quest.
I feel so tired right now that I’m going to do the unthinkable and fill out the rest of today’s entry with someone else’s words. It’s not plagarism if I announce to the world I have no intention of using my own words. You see, if I could get away with writing my band-introductions for this “book” in the vein of…. Mark Prindle, I would consider myself not only lucky to get the thing published, but I would think myself a writer of immeasurable genius! Here’s where I stop talking and start to cut/paste examples:
Captain Beefheart: Captain Beefheart (real name: Don Vliet) was a strange chap! An on-again /off-again friend of Mr. Frank Zappa, the Beef Weiner took blues rock into the strangest pastures of oddity that the music had henceforth been shoved. He had the voice of an 65-year old belting black bluesman when he was in his twenties, and he surrounded himself with musicians of the strangest, most talented calibre. Not only that but he had a goatee sometimes, and a beard once and a mustache a couple of times and a hat and some funny clothes and a voice and a nose and he drew pictures and married a woman and retired from music and now he’s sick and when he was a kid he knew Frank Zappa and he had funny voices and his drummer went “pudda-pudda-pudda” and his guitarist went “whee-do! Whee-do! Whee-do!” and his bassist went “buddum-bum-bum” and he had poetry and weird lyrics that were weird and colorfully languaged and his songs were weird and sometimes normal. And he was weird.
The Birthday Party: Before Nick Cave became a world class crooner of epic propertytortions, he screamed, yelped, raged and did drugs with Australia’s The Birthday Party. One of the first and most creative “post-punk” bands, The Birthday Party combined outrageous guitar and drum noise with sleazy strip club type music to create a form of music so extraordinarily ugly, dark and sickening that it’s almost more likely that you’ll hate and respect them than actually enjoy listening to them. You know how if you listen to Napalm Death over and over and over again, you become obsolete to their ridiculous overblown death metal and find it easy to nap to? That’s not the case with The Birthday Party. At their peak, they were one of the most intelligent and hard-to-listen-to bands in the hemisphere. Plus, Plus, the bass player dressed like a cowboy and died by banging his head on a bathtub while having a seizure. They were that good!!!!!!
My Bloody Valentine: My Bloody Valentine were one of the leaders of tbe British “shoegazer” movement, a collection of really lush, guitar droney romantic songwriters and boring as hell concert performers. They had male and female dueling vocals and dealt out a death blow of wave after wave of delayed, layered electric guitars playing droning, pulsing, soothing sounds that even the late great Jackie Gleason would approve of. They also put out around eightytwelve gabillion EPs before their debut full-length Isn’t Anything but I don’t own those and it doesn’t matter anyway because as everybody knows, an EP isn’t a real record any more than a woman is a real person.
