another part of left field

[Todd Melnick]

Does anyone know anything about this?:



One night Johnson, Coley and I were sitting in the backyard with a bucket
of fresh sangria and a few bongloads of some very righteous boo.  I'd
brought out a box of my live Sonic Youth tapes and we were arguing about
Ranaldo's tongue vectors in the third quadrant of 'Society Is A Hole'
[Folk City, NYC 12/1/82] when one of T. Moore's downstrokes caught our
attention.  We ran the tape back and listened to the passage a few times.
 The subtly monstrous and mindless GUSH with which T. Moore hit the 'E'
chord made it obvious that his playing was not coming out of a complete
spiritual void.  This was a real revelation.  It meant that he was
capable of actually unclenching his brain and loosing demons of soul
creativity.
      Because we hate to see *anyone* lackeyed to jive-ass,
pop-structure, white-man a-motionalism, a plan was immediately spun for
freeing T. Moore from the shackles of Peggy Lee-descended dogshit that
were obviously choking off his TRUE HUMAN FORCE.  Deciding which hominid
cudgels might best be weilded [sic] against these procedural chains was a
lead pipe cinch.  Who *but* Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich?  These two men
are the freest, loudest, swingin'est white motherfuckers to ever
jaw-cleave an industrial strength reed.  Their work with Borbetomagus has
long been a raucous fountain of tonal explosion and aesthetic purity, as
well as a black-gloved fist up the diz of all conservative musical
architects.  If anyone could blow the lock off of T. Moore's creational
emo-safe, Jim and Don were it.
      The rest was a snap.  I had my agent get in touch with all the
parties.  She explained the points of our proposal in no uncertain terms.
 The results are presented here.  Two free men meet a slave.  Everyone
goes home barefoot.  Right-fuckin'-on.

--Thomas Pynchon
  Somerville, MA
  January, 1990



It's on the back of "Barefoot In The Head" (Forced Exposure 015),
recorded on June 16, 1988.