Shorty VL 303

[Michael Bailey]

 alice wellintown wrote:
> Penguin soft  284-285
>
> Right, he does show her the recall notice in the paper. But it doesn't
> matter. It's just a football game; time is running out. The women will
> get the W.  His yelling, his crying, his acid dropping, his surfer's
> eye on the big set of swells he hopes to ride with a band full of
> junkies all tripping in solopsistic isolation and betting on an
> Indolent record roulette wheel turning, so they can stay turned on and
> on and on. Here, we see  Zoyd's Tubel addiction is evident: the
> football, the star trek . . . and the LSD ...both, what today might be
> called SMART instruments, but only instruments of solitude,
> individualism, romantic immaturity.  The American Narcissus crawling
> toward any possible transcendental edxperience. But money can't buy
> back God.
>


I guess.  But let me note that not all of his bandmates were junkies.
Your description did make me think, though, of a nifty parallel that I
never noticed before
- this one period where the suits let the mailroom dudes choose the
bands for awhile and that is
when Zoyd seemingly might have had a chance

Is it just a bit like Pirate and Brock Vond, entering a social
landscape knowing they could never achieve full membership in,
(in fact, the Bush family same way, junior partners in Harriman et al
doing the dirty work, but anyway...)
- like Zoyd chugging away at music which the inclusion of those
junkies indicates a sort of continuity with jazz,
and knowing that the top of the pops will be who the record company
will push, most of the time, and it won't be he?

but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

anyway, Robin and others have kindly annotated various psychedelic
bands, and perhaps made this
reference also, but I found in a Creem Magazine retrospective this
mildly famous review by Lester Bangs
of the imaginary records put out by the group that made a hit with
"Psychotic Reaction" -- I want to say
"Count Zero" but that ain't right, that's Gibson...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotic_Reaction
ok it was Count Five

anyway, all those guys went back to school and finished college
instead of making more records.  Wow.

but Lester Bangs wrote this review as if they had gone on to make more
records.  Some really nice writing.
Can't find it online.  Famous piece.  Should go down in history like
say that poem about Chapman's Homer...
Really that good.  (imho miles better than any of the other stuff of
his I've read, but what do I know?)

Anyway, I read his biography written by a guy who interviewed him for
his high school journalism class like 2 weeks
before he died.

But anyway, those guys Bangs & Marsh et al, labored for like 35 bucks
a week plus room & board (which actually
sounds kinda cool in a way) and lived on dreams the way Zoyd does too.
And see, as I was growing up and hitting puberty in Royal Oak
Michigan, CREEM Magazine was in its heyday.
I think I bought it as a tabloid.  But anyway...

trying to put together a linkage between IV's milieu - 1969/70 which
was the heyday of CREEM and as well as my
first, rather embarrassing, acid trip... - and Zoyd's band dreams -
and Lester Bangs
and how things were back then,
this was an industrial country, there were, like morning and afternoon
newspapers,
cigarette commercials, guys could be hippies unironically - like this
one guy I met (I was way young,
but super motivated) who had a waterbed store and dealt quaaludes...or
this store - there were like
2 black-light poster stores within a mile and a half of each other on
Woodward Avenue in 1969 (one went under within a year,
but the other one was there at least 2 or 3 years) - and those guys at
CREEM Magazine had an office in Birmingham and
before that out in the country, and they to me were the upper echelon,
people I might meet if I was lucky
(but never was, you really never completely regain your cachet, loose
lips sink ships, so forth, but lemons lemonade mutatis mutandis)
and this pot dealer who lived in an attic and had that poster "War is
not healthy for children and other living things"
and this other pot dealer who lived in a basement with velvet paintings of Jesus
and free concerts, yes,
I remember a group called The Up with a local hit called "Just Like an
Aborigine" playing outdoors and this girl who was
in our class at school who had run away from home and her dad came to
get her and people were like wailing on him so he couldn't catch her
(no, I wasn't one of those, I kind of felt for the guy, though who
knows how mean of a guy he was at home...)
She ended up having all kinds of adventures and I saw her years later
in Ann Arbor...

and all the baby boomers who now bestride the world like a colossus
(or squat upon its back like a toad (Ted Hughes?))
were like freshfaced and full of youthful glue





-- 
"My God, I am fully in favor of a little leeway or the damnable jig is
up! " - Hapworth Glass