You're Tuned In Now

Well, howdy. You tuned in again to WCRISPO, pilgrims.

Last night's listening pleasures were

Ned Rothenberg / Tony Buck / Stomu Takeishi + Tronzo -- The Fell Clutch, from 2006
Ornette Coleman -- Sound Grammar, also from last year.

Both are very good. Jon Abbey won't agree but he doesn't like jazz so a good jazz record ain't a good record, to him. So it goes.

So, many years ago, 12 or 13, maybe more, I bought the world's most indescructible boom box. Ten bucks at a lawn sale in Burlappingtongrad, Varmint. One of them cheap models with detachable speakers and the crappy set up for dubbing tapes in ultimate lo-fi. I didn't have a tape player in my rig so I figured what the hell, the boom can ride on the passenger seat. Turn it up. There's a stereo in the rig for you, mister. Ten bucks. A gift, right there, mister. Fucking thing hasn't been cared for at all, all these years. It's lived in my car trunk for years at a time, all dirt and dust covered. Kept right on workin' like that indestructible light bulb in *Gravity's Rainbow,* being hunted down by Those Who control the grid. Shit ain't allowed. For years, now, too, it's been collecting dust in the barn and kept right on working, just like used when I bought it. Ten bucks. One lousy gig's pay. So this week it finally stopped playing tapes on the "record" side. The "play" side crapped out a couple of years ago. Damned if that wasn't the most reliable boom box ever made.

So damned if it ain't a good thing I broke down and got me one of them there mp3 players. The boom's radio still works so it's still pumping out the good sounds. That digital player has 65 hours of music on it. Set on shuffle play while I'm working, there's just no telling what's coming up next. It's like having the best-ever radio station that plays nothing but music you really like, if in impossible sequences. So yesterday I had everything from James Brown's "Ain't That A Groove" to the Dave Holland Quintet to early Bill Monroe from the late 40s (my favorites) to Stax hit singles to Cooper-Moore with Hamid Drake and Assif Tsahar to Hank Williams to Sacred Steel music coming on. The hits just keep comin', cousins. I have a friend has one with a monster capacity. He says he has 18 24-hour days' worth of music on it. I was thinking, hell, with 65 hours on there I could drive from my spread here in Varmint the hell across the continent to Portland so I could go to Church, and I'd not hear a repeat track the whole damn way.

That's progress, mister. Take it to the bank. I've driven across this country wide with nought but a standard AM radio in the old '63. Made for some long days, buckaroos, behind the wheel with nothing to listen to and no reason to even turn it on until late at night when you could get the good AM bounce and tune in highpower stations out of Mexico or, another favorite pastime, the lunatic late night, call-in talk shows they had in them days. Maybe still do. I don't know. You could tune them in and listen to insomniacs from all over the country babbling sleepless gibberish, for hours. One night, I was driving east across the great salt flats of Utah on that I-80 and people were raving the whole way about them damn Vietnamese boat people the gubmint was allowing into the country after we'd just had a hellish war against 'em and so forth even more ignorant than that. Finally one dimwit announced that his family had been in this here great country for 85 years and he'd be damned if he'd welcome anymore goddammed forrinners in, especially them Vietnamese, and so on and so forth. Talkin' like 3:00 a.m. and there ain't nobody in Utah 'cept my old rig and me. The talk show guy finally interrupted and said he was an Indian and his family had been in this country for 10,000 years and he had no problem with it. I wanted to pull over and call the guy myself, just to say howdy there, pilgrim, I'm with you. I like that fish sauce and ain't any gringo over gonna make it. Bring 'em on. But there ain't anywhere to pull over on the great salt flats and I didn't have a spare dime for the phone booth anyway.

In them days when I was a rubber tramp between summertime Varmint and that part of Nevada around Dayton and Silver City where we liked to hq because of its general lawlessness and 24/7 saloons, and a whole bunch of good people and card-carryin' ZZC's to like it along with us, and runs up through northern CA and up to Portland and Washington, I had as my whole music collection in the world, a shoebox full of cassette tapes, mostly compilations made by friends or myself. I had two great ones Elwood (Michael Hurley) made for me that I still have today, also burned on to CDrs to guard against the inevitable: Every time you play a tape, you see, could be its last. We all know this even if we won't admit it to ourselves. Some of them tapes I listened to hundreds of times and never got tired of them. I still listen to them today, when I have thousands of other choices of stuff to listen to.

Just goes to show, you see. Everything depends on where you're standing and which direction you're looking. Five great compilation tapes from a buddy with impeccable taste, like Elwood, or my buddy Roots, o-or the ones I made for myself years ago in them days of '80 from Lightbourne's record collection (the best I've ever encountered apart from Elwood's own), mining the old-timey and delta blues hits, mostly -- see, they can be as good as any hundred records you're likely to encounter.

Let us then give thanks for friends and for that audio tape.

And let's all drink -- don't you never scold -- to the occasional rogue player that won't quit for so long because the corporation that made it and forgot to build in its obsolescence -- I'm so sure it was "forgotten" -- I like to believe there was an old head like me who let one go by now and then as sabotage, the indestructibles, on purpose so other old heads like himself could find themselves with a piece of quality merchandise, yessir.

Once in summer/fall '79 me and Elwood and Dave Reisch, Boozin' Susan, and their then infant daughter Emma, were all encamped at John Cassel's estate in Lost Nation Valley, in Varmint. Had the whole valley to ourselves. No rent. Luxury life could be had cheap in them days. That was when The Sensitivos were born. Elwood stuck his head in the door of the old barn where I was encamped -- there was a cold-water apartment that various hipsters through the years had created in one part of it -- and an outhouse with real stained windows from a church -- and asked did I know a good drummer he could find for a couple of gigs coming up. I said, Well, hell, Elwood, I can play drums with you. That was how it started. We didn't know yet that thousands of miles was still to come for Sensitizing.

But that spring had been a wet one for sure. Great huge ferns had sprung up at the forest edges on either side of the dirt roads we traveled on like ghosts no one wanted to see. We got to having a pastime we called aimless driving that year. I wrote a song of that title I have to revive. Just driving the dirt roads. No music on or anything. Just driving. Maybe a beer between the legs. Well, more than maybe. More like certainly.

One day we were aimless driving with the windows down and we could hear all the brooks and freshet streams as we drove by. I was thinking about them Jurassic ferns and how Portland its own self couldn't have been too much wetter than that spring had been. No one was talking, even.

Then Elwood looks over at me and says "The fuckin' water's running out of this place, Crispo."