t’s a Sunday morning, so it’s time for a little Blind Willie Johnson. Lou and i bought this last week, and a hellish gospel croak, with some coarse slide runs down an acoustic guitar is just what is called for.
I rather like this account of one man’s account of inauguration day. The rumor that Shrub might still be on coke is new to me. I have noticed that he still touches his nose far too much, but the mainstream media has not even mentioned that Shrub was a coke user in the past, let alone still using it. And while I know that Greenspan is a Republican and a fixer for corporation, I didn’t think he was going to let Shrub pull this ridiculous tax cut stunt. The New York Times even comes out to chide Greenspan. These tax cuts are not even going to be good for the evil corporations. they seem just to be good for short term profits for Shrub’s rich buddies. Where’s the evil conspiracy here? Where’s the world domination? Why do we have to put up with a small-time crook who squanders the powerful organiztion backing him like this?
And yet again, the Guardian takes the piss out of Shrub, this time on the ban of blue jeans in the White House. What a jackass prig he is.
Julian Cope is being utterly obtuse, and picked Montrose’s first album as his album of the month. Hearing his last effort, I still think Cope has it musically, even if there’s a lot of guitar wankery on it. However, his continual championing of David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar is archly perverse. In a way, I get where he’s coming from, even though sometimes it simply seems like he’s deliberately kicking dirt in the faces of uppity collectors who fixate on miniscule pressings of ’60s Texas garage bands or bizarre Musique Concrete outta ’70s Germany. Montrose is just… there. Yeah, he must be doing this on purpose. Damien even pointed out the cover of a David Lee Roth solo album, “Skyscraper” and it has Roth climbing the side of a huge rock…. and how it looks eerily like Copey on the side of a monolith.If Cope released an album called Skyscraper with a cover like that, would I listen to it? Uh…. yeah, actually i would. Damn…
Back to zines! I found that white plastic garbage bag, and dug out a couple of old zines. While I found a few of Robert’s, I could not find Gretchen’s (meaning it is probably in the locked filing cabinet that my old journals and letters are hidden in) i did mange to find a zine by Art Boonparn, the feature rock star of many of Turducken‘s projects. I now have a splitting headache from the dust that I stirred up, but I shall do my best to muddle through, and describe the zines, or at least, what I got out of them when I read them.
Vienna Sausage #4 was one the very first zines that I managed to read. I had already been doing zines without ever seeing one, so a waitress at Mariner’s Inn handed me a zine by an exboyfriend of hers, which was basically a full-sized leaflet with a lot of poorly xeroxed photos of GG Allen, and a loopy theory that Johnny Thunders was murdered by the CIA. In the back were a few addresses of other local zines, and Robert “Sausage” was the only one to write back. I quickly learned that most zine editors rip you off, almost always by accident. Robert had just relocated from New Orleans to LSU in Baton Rouge, and most of the episode was devoted to exploring his new surroundings, with a few contributions from his friends who stayed in N.O. It was filled with odd stories, and it made sense that he would eventually study creative writing, and write some pretty good short stories, including an amazing one about a man who was professional performer on talk shows.
He made me a few compilation tapes too. He introduced me to the new punk explosion, not the crap stuff that wound up all over the radio in 1994, but nutty stuff like Nation of Ulysses, Six Finger Satellite, and Plaid Retina. While I didn’t really get anywhere in this genre, I thought this stuff was cool as hell. If i had money to spend, I’d probably blow it all tomorrow in nostalgia for how cool the tapes he made me were, totally unlike the hack, punk-by-numbers stuff that flooded Maximumrockandroll.
This zine seemed to be dated even when it showed up in the mailbox, as the interviews an reviews were old even then, but it’s aged well. In fact, it’s aged great. I knew nothing about Art, aside from the fact that he seemed to have a rock star reputation among his friends even then. Hell, I still know nothing about him, aside from he plays bass in Zoom sometimes, and has a project called Hotchkiss that I don’t care much for. The zine though, reeked of cool attitude, the nonpretentious variety, and was absorbed into all sorts of fringe bands that didn’t quite fit any genre. Thye were not quite punk. They were not all hardcore. Indie had not yet become the rallying cry it became a few years later. And it all came with a Thai flavor, which bled through mostly from part two of his three part diary of going to Thailand. I only got the one issue, so I have no clue if he kept putting out great zines like this one. It even had interviews with relatively high profile acts like Superchunk and David Yow, And all of this was in my own backyard, and i didn’t know a thing about it.
Be warned. I might be continuing this nostalgia trip. I cannot budget wasting hundreds of dollars on music and movies just to write a line or two about it in my journal anymore, especially since a lot fo the time, I’d ignore the new stuff anyone, and go back to stuff I’ve had for years.