SONG OF THE DAY: Clap Song

Internet still got wormholes galore. Got this track off a go-go comp, so I assumed everybody was from DC, forgetting from my own real life experience the go-go belt stretches down through Piedmont into North Carolina even. I thunk to myself this should be the Pied Piper of Buckingham, as in Buckingham County, Virginia – definite part of the go-go belt. Lo and behold, looking ol’ boy up online and it appears Pied Piper of Funkingham is a group based from somewhere in North Carolina, back in the go-go heyday, and released an album and single on Chocolate Cholly’s Records, suggesting they must’ve been from Gastonia area. This song is great, and then being on discogs means I’m now hoping I find some of these obscure ass 7” records from Chocolate Cholly’s Records in a junk shop somewhere. More importantly, the label is now on my radar, which is not actually radar at all but just a multiple-time concussed user of hallucinogenics heavily earlier in adulthood trying to remember awesome shit to find when digging through dusty assed storage crates of old 45s.

SONG OF THE DAY: Status Quo

Even in living in the Greater Go-Go Belt (from far south of Baltimore to about Petersburg, with rural trickles into the Piedmont of Virginia that fluctuate, occasionally even reaching North Carolina), there’s so much music that got to exist that is hard to find. So much stuff has gotten a second life due to the digital era, but a lot of it – this song for example – seem to have had a second life in Europe and beyond all the while mostly forgotten in America. Are we that superficial here in America, bouncing between next things too fast to pay attention to the last dozen things deeply enough? Maybe. But how a 10-minute long go-go tinged song called “Status Quo” complaining about Reaganomics could’ve gotten lost on me until the past year bums me out. This shit is great. Political as fuck, but not in a pretentious way like today’s online politics tends to always be, and still funky as fuck too. Where the fuck is Donald Banks now? What happened to this dude? And obviously this was such a jam that the original Kapital Sity Records release got re-released by 4th & Broadway in Europe. I miss physical media, which I guess is why I’ve gotten so into 45 collecting the past year or two. Shit just takes a weird life of its own, bouncing between homes, and will exist magically in an unplayed state for decades. There is a 45 version of this, obviously not 10 minutes long, but I ain’t found one I can afford yet. Best believe if I do that shit is going in the collection. I just hope if they chop up the song for the 45, the b-side is just full of percussion breaks from this long version, because I need that as much as anything else.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cheating In The Daylight

Been doing a radio show called Slow Hand on WTJU out of Charlottesville, where I play old 45 singles at 33 speed. I was going in every other week, then got knocked out by covid for a month, but have been doing it weekly the past few weeks, and really enjoying the vibes of it all. I'd say it's been over half old funk, but a lot of other stuff feels funkier slowed down, because the bass thickens and the vocals turn into ghostly warbles. Last night, I dip dip dived through some old country, because I ate some fried chicken gizzards from the Valero last week, and it reactivated my bumpkin soul. I love that stretch of southern Virginia/eastern or central North Carolina that has unique vibe to it, where you're bound to still find chicken gizzards at a gas station, and the racial mix between black and white was always a lot closer to an even break than the rest of the country. It's Swamp Dogg country.

TH3 CVLTVR3 0F P13DM0NT H4S...

the culture of Piedmont has 
plenty that bums me out, but 
it still shaped me at my core 

SONG OF THE DAY: Nothing New

 

Whenever Morray is blasting out of somebody’s car, it just makes me want to disappear for four days into a Carolina del Norte oblivion, checking out a car show or some drag races on a Saturday, looking for a good gas station pupuseria, hopefully hitting a train yard somewhere within an hour’s radius of Rocky Mount, and contemplating how great it would be to go to the beach but knowing I can’t actually afford to stay there and it’s white as fuck too, which is always the worst parts of North Carolina. Shout out to whoever did that Thelonious Monk mural in downtown Rocky Mount; I believe it’s magic. We need one like that in Hamlet for John Coltrane too, and fuck it, on the way home might as well have one in Danville for Clarence 13x too, "for the culture" - whatever the fuck that means at his played out point.

SONG OF THE DAY: Quicksand

 

Despite all the historical racism and national geopolitics which seems somewhat Jesse Helmsesque still, Carolina is a whole vibe. It’s fucked up too, because there’s no real identifier of that whole vibe (which I’d dare say is its own culture), but it’s where the edges of New York influence and Dirty South ambiance bleed together, perhaps at the margins of both. I grew up in southside Virginia, which feels far more like Carolina than the more known geopolitical parts of Virgina (northern Virginia’s affluent DC suburbs and Hampton Roads military industrial complex of a whole bunch of lives spread wide across multiple cities). As a young delinquent, we were at first always more apt to roll up to Richmond than south, because those artificial borders create big psychic walls. But as I got older, I’ve come to see how that whole Piedmont Carolina vibe is steeped from the same sludge that I was in southside Virginia. And with the steady influx and influence of migration from further south, turning large parts into Carolina del Norte, it’s gotten even more Southern Gothicc Futurist. You might just zip through on the interstate, or skirt through the edges trying to get to Charlotte or the OBX, but if you slow down and slide in deeper, you’re gonna experience a beautiful place with a unique vibe. I love that shit, and with the weather turning warm, it’s got me daydreaming of meandering cruises through that whole area, windows down and AC running on high, at the same damn time because fuck it, blasting Morray’s “Quicksand” and trying to decide if I wanna get chicken gizzards from the gas station deli or pupusas from the back of the tienda. Can I do a gizzards/livers combo? And get two lorocco pupusas too? Damn, true and living Southern Gothicc Futurism is already here, and it’s a glorious goddamn thing.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Don't Wanna Disappear

Malcolm Holcombe’s a dude I’ve listened to a lot the past few years, looking like the type of dude who would be getting high with my folks back in the day. Americana music is tough because there’s so much shit that falls under the “real country to the urban pie shoppe set” that people used to always try to hype me up about. I call this “the drive-by trucker rule” where because some shit is about the rural south, but not being a brainwashed racial patriot, I should like it. The problem is a lot of that stuff is… I don’t know, it’s just missing something that’s not missing in me, or it has something that I don’t, or something’s not synchronized. It feels false to my heart, and I know people love that shit, but fuck man I don’t like DTB nor Jason Isbell, and for god’s sake Sturgill Simpson’s dad was an undercover narcotics agent in eastern Kentucky, so he’s automatically disqualified, for at least another generation.

But Malcolm Holcombe has whatever that other shit’s missing, at least for me. Maybe it’s geographic. He’s from western Carolina, which feels connected enough to the Piedmont foothills Virginia/Carolinas region that red clayed up my internal make-up. I’ve known southwest Virginia well, and that whole southwest Virginia/east Tennessee/western North Carolina/even northwest Georgia is a weird Venn diagram where Appalachia meets the South, and it has some sort of unique feel to it. Holcombe is not a polished dude with cop mustache (like Sturgill Simpson) or heavily marketed by a record label DEMANDING YOU PAY HIM THE PROPER RESPECT AS A PROGRESSIVE SOUTHERN AMERICAN WHITE MALE THAT IS ONE OF THE GOOD ONES like Jason Isbell; he’s just some old ass dude who writes some great fucking songs but has that rural dirtbag ponytail just like you’d expect from a guy buying two packs of Winstons and one of those half-cases of Old Milwaukee that’s just a case cut in half with boxcutter by the Indian family that runs the country store now, then taped shut with packing tape. I love that shit, still. Sadly, many country stores are replacing their old deli counters that had gizzards and livers with some sort of chain fried chicken, or worse yet shitty fucking pizza.

Lolol I had anticipated having no stream of consciousness today, just talk about Malcolm Holcombe, but somehow I got to rambling about country stores, and it calls to mind the other week when I had to go back to where I grew up to handle some serious bullshit (death threats, fantasy arsons, all sorts of ‘70s movie vengeance scenes) and on the way back I stopped at Ali’s in Buckingham. This is a long-time country store that’s been called Ali’s for much of that time because an immigrant family owned it like a decade ago. Not even sure what the actual store is called now, but it’s changed owners like five times since Ali, but everybody knows it as Ali’s. A high school kid flipped out on drugs there two years back and got killed by state police after a chase, but being it happened in the middle of nowhere, nobody complained or protested the fact the police chased a guy obviously acting bizarrely for no reason and shot him dead on the porch of his family home nearby in New Canton. I actually emailed the state police spokesperson about it a few times, but just got the run around. (RIP Dyzhawn Perkins.)

Anyways, I was coming back from serious soul-crushing shit, so figured, “yooooo… gizzards and livers!” and swung into Ali’s. I tend to code switch pretty hard linguistically, so combo of that southside VA dialect with the double dimple dropkick out the wolfman beard gets a response from certain demographics, one of those being the type of woman that works the deli counter at a country store. Sadly, they had no gizzards, and as the lady was giving me an order of livers, she said, “They’re old, and pretty dry…” so gave me one to try. I ate it, and shrugged. “I guess give me two thighs” I said, she smiled and gave me the rest of the livers for free with the two thighs. Symbolic of my life – the diminishing returns of being a rural idiot savant from the forgotten underbelly of America, means there’s no more livers or gizzards like I’d want, except for the dried out leftover ones, which I get for free because obviously I deserve them, but the only way I’m gonna get fed is to accept the same shit everybody else gets now, which isn’t much.

I think Malcolm Holcombe would understand all this, and likely make a pretty great song about it too. He’s a rural idiot savant, and hardly nobody knows him either, and in fact I looked at his tour schedule one time and he was playing in somebody’s living room in Richmond, as part of his tour. That’s my kind of artist.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Cut Off

I am no J Cole apologist as is seen upon these internet lands, who assumes the contrarian position that J Cole is the supreme rapper of his time. But I also ain’t gonna lie, I don’t mind J Cole at all, and actively enjoy him if I’m being honest. Also, there is no doubting he is likely the most prominent rapper of this Piedmont Virginia/North Carolina land I’ve always felt was home. Often I look at old indigenous tribal maps (roughly drawn by western scholars) to see how those non-existent delineations of tribal lands often seem to coincide with the metaphysical feel places have. Although even in the context of indigenous history, the entire swath of Virginia and the Carolinas which was many other things will be marked as Powhatan lands, likely because the Powhatan worked with the colonists to an extent. And also, back to J Cole, is there nothing more perfectly Piedmont than a bi-racial kid coming up with dreams that straddle cultural worlds? And I guess there’s nothing more American than kid born on military base in Germany who grew up in Fayetteville which itself is off-shoot or supported by major military base itself. Culture is such a complex, layered thing, anywhere really but very much so in these strange and terrible times of the United States experience. Escape feels necessary, except there are limited means for those who desire escape the most to actually achieve it. We are stuck. So there are two sedentary routes of escape – through the arts, or the substances. Both essentially work to solve the immediate issue of I AM DOOMED. Currently I am of the belief that the substances treat the symptoms (standards western cultural practices tbh) while art attempts to untangle the source. But that’s also likely a self-supporting mentality not really based in reality. Life’s fucking hard. So I can’t fault anyone for self-medicating (unless they’re stealing shit out my house to support their habits, should they develop them), but I’d also enjoy your art more (I hope). And I enjoy J Cole’s music art, without having to get caught up in the superlative argumentative-laden mindset of the internet, where everything and body has to either be a greatest of all time, or its trash. (Also, I will always refuse the acronym for greatest of all time, because real goats are way better, in every instance.)

SONG OF THE DAY: Come Walk With Me

Did a train/bus trip around the American nation a couple summers back, in the lead-up to our last MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER which we seem to always have for some reason, and one of the two strong takeaways for me from that trip was that borders in terms of nation-states are bullshit, false, and ultimately not a good thing. This does not mean they’re fake, because – like many false things in this age of falseness we inhabit – they’re very real, and have been shoved so forcibly into our physical existence that they’ve put their poisonous tendrils into metaphysical reality. You can feel the difference when you cross these arbitrary borders in many places, because of the variations in manmade authority being enforced. But ultimately, if you get back to the dirt, back to the foundation of being alive, that shit’s false and likely needs to go away.

The one place I have found peace throughout my life, and escaped the chaos, was wandering the woods. This was true as a kid, and as adult, the entirety of that time in a geographic region that’s best described by the term Piedmont Virginia, which was also all once land tended and lived upon by the Monacan. That land has always been home to me, and there’s a feeling to the land that I find comforting, unlike other places, which can also feel beautiful and safe, but do not feel like home in quite the same way.

Our hyper-“connected” lives today allow us to sort of know about so much more, but that knowledge is about an inch deep. I actually know more about people in other parts of the world than the folks that live across the street from me, which is kinda weird to be honest. I think about the difference between a one inch depth of knowledge spread across a large base, like most of us have now, versus a mile deep knowledge of a tiny area, explored greatly. In other words, truly knowing a subject or region or thing, to great depth, as opposed to this cursory wikipedic knowledge we tend to possess for things, accumulating trivia like pokemon. I actually contemplate this a lot as I walk around, a lot, though have not the past two weeks. I live in a city now, and miss the woods, and I guess I’ve sunk into a funk of being too extended in terms of errands and external responsibilities, and not been taking the literal steps each day to just walk, know the region I’m living at right now. Dedication to walks is important, a form of exercise but also a form of meditation, as well as connecting better to where I live. And the better connected I am to where I actually live, the more I actually feel alive. We’re not machines, meant to be productive and spend the entirety of our awake time performing tasks. I’m not “wired” in any way. I’m a fucking person, born and raised and nurtured and comforted in this little corner of the Earth best described as Piedmont Virginia because the name it used to have got lost as the history of western civilization manifested its destiny over top of what was already here. But when I walk, whether in the woods or the manmade places, I hear it vibing, it’s always been there and keeps that hum going, from deep in the ground, sedimented in for centuries, beyond the borders and fences, beyond the flags, beyond the MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVERs which keep happening for some reason. It was here before all that shit, and it’ll be here after all that too.

Piedmont Virginia elven

king is called Rassawec; he

spakes a Welsh-like dialect

L.E.o.R. - Spring '11 - Day Five - 70 to 40

It's a beautiful warm Friday afternoon, I've got the outside speaker - as water damaged and dry-rotted as ever but made of indestructible 1970s stereophonic craftsmanship - pumping it up from its perch on top of a blue milk crate, sitting at the picnic table, finger poking my madness into a laptop with a hot battery that feels like it'll burn my shit up one day. Alice Cooper is playing on the music box, "I'm a boy and I'm a man" blaring through the universe that is the compound back yard right about now. I'm feeling pretty swelled up with pride in my southside roots, my DNA a lot like that damned speaker I got five years ago from underneath the "To Good To Throw Away" carport at the Fluvanna County landfill. I get messed up and uglier the more I get left out unprotected in the elements, but somehow I keep doing what I'm supposed to do, and do it better than most new-fangled bullshit meant to replace me. Alpha-to-omega mindframe, in full effect. So the criteria I'm gonna use today is thinking back on those southside roots, crazy fuckers standing around the bed of a pick-up truck, passing joints, reaching into various coolers, wrapping a hot shot of Jim Beam with a pre- and post-swig of ginger ale, and telling stories, based on reality usually, but always extraordinary. That's how I got to talk the stories I talk at the world, from wanting to be all those dudes when I grew up. So the criteria today is who of the match-ups could handle leaning on the back of a '72 Silverado or '76 Ram or whatever, and survive the conversation.
GARY SNYDER vs. GAYLORD PERRY
Day two (1 to 0, Snyder): Gaylord Perry is a baseball player, which is most closely resembled in our modern southern society by the travelling salesman. They do okay in more structured environments, like bars or cookouts with pop-ups. They don't fare so well in the naked realms of pick-up truck philosophy sessions. And for as pretentious and cultural elite as Gary Snyder can come off as sometimes, he still slummed it up with lumberjacks for a long ass time, and has prided himself on being in touch with working class folks. You can't even try to pull that off without splitting some Olympias over top the back end of a Chevrolet. Advantage: Gary Snyder, he done won.
GHOSTFACE KILLAH vs. GLEN STEWART GODWIN
Day two (1 to 0, Ghostface): I hate to break it down this way, because it comes down to race, but Ghost is a black dude who probably would be wearing very clean clothes, that maybe had never been worn before. Godwin is a piece of white trash from California who somehow ended up being involved in running cocaine from central America as a fugitive from the law. Both would distrust the back of your average southside pick-up truck, but Godwin would make easier friends. Advantage: Glen Stewart Godwin, tied 1-1.
GRADY STILES III vs. GRANDMASTER CAZ
Day two (1 to 0, Caz): This is even tougher because Stiles is a carnival freak who refuses to be in a carnival, and Caz is a pioneer rapper who never got his proper cultural daps. Still though, being old school, Caz has hung with all types of folks by now, and you get them old dudes together with a joint, black and white, city and country, and they bond over the simple things like Otis Redding or how bad angel dust used to be or Mexican pussy or something. A carnival freak is always gonna be a carnival freak, no matter where you put them, unless it's Gibsonton, Florida. Advantage: Grandmaster Caz, he done won.
H.D. DENNIS vs. HARRY CREWS
Day two (1 to 0, Crews): Shit man, Harry Crews in his prime got most of his stories from leaning around the back end of pick-up trucks in scenarios exactly like I'm describing. Advantage: Harry Crews, he done won.
HENRY FULCHER vs. HERIBERTO LAZCANO
Day one: Not really a fair fight because a Mexican drug lord is not gonna trust a bunch of southside Virginia rednecks, nor want to be around them at all. Henry Fulcher is a southside Virginia AM radio bluegrass DJ, and old as fuck, so he probably wouldn't be comfortable around all those good ole boys either, but they'd at least be more tolerant of him, hiding their joints until he left, and toning down the conversation. Once he got back in his Buick and drove off though, they'd be blazing up for lost time. Advantage: Henry Fulcher, 1 to 0.
JACK CHICK vs. JACKIE TYSON
Day one: Jack Chick makes up Jesus comics for retarded Christians. Jackie Tyson is actually one of those southside Virginia dudes I remember seeing growing up. I need to get by and see that old dude once I can start driving again. Which reminds me I need to get a new battery and two new tires for my truck. Somebody used the truck to take our trash to the landfill, and the cargo light got left on, so the battery is dead. No matter how much I try to escape it, I'm still country as fuck. It's like a stain on my soul. Advantage: Jackie Tyson, 1 to 0.
JERRY "CATFISH" RIDER vs. JERRY LEE LEWIS
Day one: This is actually the best battle, between an old and crazy, somewhat racist rockabilly legend, and a dude who became somewhat famous for being one of the more fearless barehanded catfishers (aka noodler, or grabbler) that there ever was. In fact, this is the only match-up I'm writing about under the back-of-the-truck talk criteria that would move beyond the initial phase, because both of these dudes would probably survive the initial conversation. But after a few hours of talking about catching catfish with your bare hands, or throwing dynamite into ponds, or whatever, you run out of things to talk about. When you're an old crazy fucker who does not mind doing speed even slightly, you are bound to last longer around the truckbed, probably late into the night, until the conversation moves into the shed under lights. Advantage: Jerry Lee Lewis, 1 to 0.
JESCO WHITE vs. JIM BROWN
Day one: Again, Jim Brown is a somewhat proud black dude former football player. Jesco White is a tapdancing hillbilly from West Virginia. Jesco would easily survive better, but he also seems full of himself after his documented fame, and would probably get his ass kicked before the night was over. Advantage: Jesco White, 1 to 0.
JIM "DANDY" MANGRUM vs. JOHN FORCE
Day one: Actually, this one would probably move past the first phase too, as you have David Lee Roth prototype lead singer of Black Oak Arkansas who parlayed being an Ozark wildman into a long musical career where he still has weekly gigs in Memphis, Tennessee. John Force is a wacky California-style redneck guy who races funny cars really well. Again, like the Catfish Rider/Jerry Lee Lewis thing, after you talk cars for a long ass time, which would probably take the early lead around the truck bed, what's left? And I doubt Force would get all fucked up, as he doesn't seem the type. Jim Dandy would probably make it until under the shed lights as well. Advantage: Jim "Dandy", 1 to 0.
JOHN WATERS vs. JUNIOR JOHNSON
Day one: Sorry, a homosexual filmmaker into kitschy art, as awesome as he is, is not gonna compare to a former bootlegger turned Nascar hero who got out of Nascar when it got too fucking stupid and corporate and sold pork products instead but now also sells small batches of handmade liquor. Not even close. Advantage: Junior Johnson, 1 to 0.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #3: “Central Park West” by John Coltrane

A good road dog is hard to find, a dude or ol' lady you can just jump in a ride with no real direction but general, head out into an early weekend, and wander through shit towns and cheap hotels, looking for whatever might have been calling you in that direction, and get back by work on Monday, maybe Tuesday. I haven't had a weekend like that in a while. Me and my boy Boogie Brown had some epic trips out to the midwest, to see death match wrestling tournaments and four-day long demolition derbies. My ol' lady and me, that used to be our main activity was to wander the weekend away, staying in crappy hotels and vibing on the strange sights and sounds all around. Solidified why I love her because she is me, we have the same soul, just in different bodies, that luckily are sexually attracted at each other like universal magnetics.
My man Boomer and me had a couple of jaunts that were memorable enough. They always seemed to involve strange encounters with crackheads though. I have been blessed/cursed with something we call the retardar, which attracts whatever person has some sort of strange story to tell, he finds me, and tells me. That always happens. Boomer has the same thing, except with crackheads. But we had a weekend wander where we drank beers at a dirt track and ended up closing down a bar by the hotel in some dead end North Carolina town, and my retardar kicked in and we had people buying us beers and Mexicans in soccer jerseys kept playing AC/DC on the jukebox and some drunk redneck dude was on the bar dancing to David Allan Coe and the bartendress seemed to be sweet on me or Boomer or us or whatever, and when her boyfriend showed up and the bar closed down, they shut the shades and we were allowed to be part of the select few who could keep on drinking. That's quality friend-making. Rest of the night involved laughing at crackheads sneaking around the building to rip each other off from the ninja spy confines of the shut down swimming pool.
Next day, I don't know, we were gonna go to some bullshit wresting thing at an armory in some other shithole North Carolina town, and it looked all burned out, like they had a Southern Krystalnacht and set half the town on fire, and it looked pretty dead end in every direction, except somewhere had to go out, didn't it? We couldn't find no hotels, so we pulled into one of those awesome country/city southern convenience stores that always have the best fucking fried chicken on earth, and sell crazy amounts of peach blunt wrappers, and I asked for directions to any sort of hotel. The lady looked at me like I was crazy, and pointed us all the way back up to Rockingham, which seemed a little out of the way, because a town with this many buildings clustered together, no matter how boarded up and run down, had to have at least one hotel. Right? No. So off to Roxboro it was.
On our way out the convenience store parking lot, stopping to let some gully ass dude in a Caprice plenty of room for entry, there's a roadside marker, slightly bent from one too many drunk drivers, in the most anonymous and perfectly inglorious place ever. It said, to paraphrase, "One block from here John Coltrane was born back in the day." Hamlet, North Carolina. Blew my fucking mind, the greatest jazz wacko there ever once was came from the polluted loins of Piedmont North Carolina. But it made perfect sense.
This "Central Park West" for me is the greatest jazz song ever made, and maybe the saddest song ever made. It's one of those songs that's so fucking sad, it makes me feel good when I listen to it. I don't think most humans really have a clue as to how to capture emotions with sounds that aren't words. Words are easier, because people understand the associated meanings of all the parts. But with straight sound, where you're digging into something that was in us before words came about? No, most people can't do it. They just learn how to pluck strings or push piano keys or whatever. If you played this song for cavemen chewing on raw Manchurian Beast meat in a fire-lit cavern, they would get it. In fact, I hope when I am King of the Universe, they let me go through the microfiche of the future, and I can look at when the earth people all blow themselves up in a fabulous frenzy of philosophical goatheadedness, and when all that is blown up and busted down to ash and rubble with the charred refuse-to-die-easies staggering around for a few months before the nuclear ash chokes the last of us away, that they let me listen to this song with headphones on while I'm listening to it. I've not gone there yet, so I'm not sure if they allow headphones and music devices in the microfiche of the future room in Universal Heaven or not. We'll see.
In case you were wondering, the hotel in Rockingham was nasty as fuck, looked like the door had been kicked in multiple times and there were bootholes in the wall by my bed as well. Boomer ran into some crackheads somewhere, and I went to the Huddle House to get us some food. The waitress was one of those sweet sad short-haired hard life ladies with eyes that put cobra clutches on my heart. The cook was a wigger dude who was drawling something about peaches and cream, and she rolled her eyes and walked off, and he looked at me and said, "She like that." It was perfect. The whole fucking thing was perfect. That's how you get to be John Coltrane. You steep yourself heavily in all that perfect, and then it just flows right back out of you.
STEAL “Central Park West”
NEXT UP: Murky muzik!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #2: “The Baby Is Mine” by Swamp Dogg

I don’t know, I’ve written an awful lot about Swamp Dogg on this site in the past year, and I feel it’s unfair to August Moon of Richmond public access fame. Swamp Dogg is great and all, but I’ve not hyped up “Homeboy” by August Moon at all, or the Richmond fatback sound. Swamp Dogg bolted Virginia and made his soul name for himself in various other parts of the country. August Moon made the anthem for the Fatback sound, which was Richmond’s style of soul, as every city that had a soul music sound back in the day had to have a name for whatever it was they did. Can I make mention of how tribal black culture sometimes seems to this day, and wonder if there’s any connection to the African roots, and not come across as racist? Racism has ruined everything. My last name is Scottish, and the Scotches rolled in clans, not tribes, but it was pretty much the same thing, sort of. But a white dude can’t be like, “Yeah, I roll with this clan,” because of the whole Ku Klux Klan stigma. Speaking of which, I was looking at pictures of Klan outfits the other day, and honestly, those shiny green grand wizard outfits, those things were pimp as fuck. I mean, I’m not down with killing black people. I don’t even like raising my voice at black people to be honest with you. But you can’t deny the awesome style of the Klan higher-ups.
We didn’t keep the fatback from our previous two pigs. We cooked it down in a giant crock pot to make homemade lard, most of which my wife sold at like $10 a pint for people to make herbal tinctures with. It’s really hard to get nice healthy lard. Next pair of pigs, I’d like to keep some for cooking, because it can’t be as deathly for me as soybean oils, but most likely we’ll just sell it all again, because times is tight motherfucker. I am selling the fat of my former farm animals though, which is really funny to me, because it’s 2010 and both me and my wife have college degrees. Rise and grind, baby; rise and grind.
STEAL “The Baby Is Mine”
NEXT UP: Amo a las mujeres con culos grandes, y debemos llegar alto, asi qu puede poner a un bebe dentro de su vientre!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #13: “The Cover of Rolling Stone” by Dr. Hook

I am southside Virginia, Willis Mountain, getting blowed the fuck away little by little, to where there’s an enormous earth scar you can see during the stretched out drive down 15 south rider between Dillwyn, Buckingham, USA, and Farmville, Prince Edward, USA. That’s me up there, chipped away into heat resistant countertops and furnace linings. I am one of a kind, nothing like me on this half of the earth, and the best use for that is exploitation, blow it up and stretch out how we can profiteer off it.
This is the dream, to be exploited and feel useful to the world. You die and there’s bank accounts attached to your name, that your offspring can withdraw from and live a life not like the one you lived, halfheartedly. I am southside Virginia, fucked from birth, potential buried beneath the surface, and somebody will probably come along and blast it out of me, make a dollar, especially now that I’ve stopped poisoning myself lately. Mellow drama, trying to find fake energies to get my braindick hard until four in the morning every night. Mellow ass drama.
I still dream of hype tours and book deals and having enough money to buy a goddamned piece of art instead of stapling pages torn from a magazine onto the wall. And shit, honestly I don’t literally dream. I barely sleep, and if I do dream for real, it’s usually something traumatic and I wake up freaked out about what has happened, but hasn’t really happened. I also babble, but at this point it seems I have to force some babble out to get down to whatever is below the surface, that digs into the reality of this fake ass world. I’m as fake as it all, overwhelmed by the mellow drama, not used to this day-to-day where I’m not soaking myself away. How to reshift thinking? That’s why Willis Mountain is gonna keep getting scraped away down to nothing, a single beautiful green monadnock popping up from nowhere, shaved the fuck into oblivion. Self-righteous motherfuckers watch PBS about Kentucky or West Virginia and mountaintop removal, but judge upon rednecks and can’t even see through their organic halos right down the fucking road, 20 minutes south of Charlottesville.
Fuck it, I’m gonna blow some shit up myself.
And instead of all this shit, I should've just talked about how when I was a kid I thought Dr. Hook was that band on The Muppets with the dude with the gold tooth. That was the first gold tooth I ever saw, and it made me want one. Plus that band gave me a Bo Derek furry fetish.
STEAL “The Cover of Rolling Stone”
NEXT UP: Leon Russell but rappitty music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #5: "Kissin' And Cussin'" by The Carolina Chocolate Drops

Part of the same reason the divorce rate has become so high is the reason you can’t punch people without getting charged with assault. People have been trained by movies to think marriage is this perfect match that works out wonderfully and is nothing but honeysuckle juice, firm titties, and clean cotton sheets with a high thread count. You’ve got to work at a relationship just like a friendship just like dealing with any other human being on this earth surface because every brain is all tweaked out in its own very special way. A man and a woman, in the comfort of their own house, should be able to get their fight on, preferably not physically but sometimes you know how it goes (so long as no one over-steps their physical domination, if it exists, like a father shooting basketball with his kid and not shooting from inside an imaginary line), and fighting is fighting. I have good long-time friends who come from similar backgrounds and we know it’s perfectly okay to punch each other from time to time, to work off the tension that builds up in a relationship, and get on with it. Now me and the ol’ lady don’t go around hitting each other – I’ve never laid a hand on her (at least not that way, hurr hurr hurr). But things build up and we’ll blow the fuck up like the World Trade on each other at times, and it clears the air, or at least allows us to freak out how we need to be freaking out.
This is a great relationship song, because relationships, six times out of ten, are a pain in the fucking ass. When three relationship involves sex, it’s nine times out of ten, and that’s rounding down from 9.4.
Carolina Chocolate Drops, I’m not real sure yet how to take them. I heard them on NPR one day, which means I have to be wary of them. They are genuine black-ish people playing genuine country-ish music. Out of every album they’ve made, I’ve found about three songs I dig. And we have some friends who come around, and the mama of the family, she digs her some Carolina Chocolate Drops. But she also hates Hank Williams III and the idea of screwed norteno music. Plus, she’s a black chick with skinhead tattoos. I guess that’s the Carolina Chocolate Drops perfect demographic.
STEAL "Kissin' And Cussin'"
NEXT UP: Cough syrup sippin’ and mom’s car steering wheel grippin’!

L.E.o.R. - Fall ’10 - 40 to 20 - 3 of 4

Continuing with the process...
LEONARD KNIGHT vs. NAZARIO MORENO
I don't know, as awesome as La Familia seems, having followed Mexican drug cartels on google news for over a year now, I'm starting to be afraid of them. They seem like just by reading about them too much you might get your head chopped off. Those dudes actually blockade the streets of major Mexican cities whenever they want to. It's not like they are some underworld element anymore; they can flaunt their power in the open in Mexico. And as much as I embrace chaos, I don't necessarily want mass murders to be part of my chaos. (Automatic "fuck you, shut up" to whichever budding Tea Party mind out there is all like, "Well, when you have chaos you have murder." I had a teacher in 6th grade who when I asked her the difference between anarchy and communism, she said there was none. And I wasn't being a smart ass; I wanted to know. You kids are lucky you have the interwebz to teach you all the mind-corrupting things your ignorant ass teachers cannot.)
Leonard Knight is still painting the desert, and honestly, there's a handful of people in this first process that I'm like, "Oh shit, I need to get them to be part of the final five hopefully because they might die before next time." Knight is one of those dudes.
Advantage: Leonard Knight.
GHOSTFACE KILLAH vs. R.A. THE RUGGED MAN
R.A. is awesome, and a one of a kind American treasure, but Ghostface is Ghostface. The best rapper alive and the greatest rap show I ever saw, by a thousand miles. R.A. is a treasure, but Ghostface Killah is a blessing.
Advantage: Ghostface Killah.
GABRIEL DUENEZ vs. HENRY FULCHER
It is fall so all music should be slowed music. I cannot even listen to some things normal speed anymore. Bluegrass is way too fast, and probably will be more my speed come the cold when the woodstove is fired up and you have to wear wool socks when chilling out on the couch at night. But for now, leaves are just starting to change, and I haven't started carrying a coat with me during the stupid boring ass days.
Advantage: Gabriel Duenez.
JIMMY VALIANT vs. TERRY FUNK
If you assigned three wrestling nerds each to both of these guys and had them come up with a single DVD of great moments to watch to compare, I am sure for the average human being, Terry Funk would win out. But I am a southside Virginia knucklehead, born from longhaired rednecks and redneck hippies and lifelong underachievers and never-coud-be-ers because the world does not travel paths we know how to navigate, regardless of the innate talents and raw awesomeness we possess. Jimmy Valiant is one of us. We are street people, even if from back roads, and we understand each other without even having to know one another.
Advantage: Jimmy Valiant.
CAROL NESMITH vs. JACKIE TYSON
Nesmith raises chickens in the deep south for cockfighting in foreign countries. Tyson showed me how to raise chickens in central Virginia. I don't have three slabs of pork chops in my front porch chest freezer for no Carol Nesmith.
Advantage: Jackie Tyson.

s k y a a

back yard reflections, looking
towards the property line
where VDOT don't keep it cut

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May ’10 #1: “One Less Set of Footsteps” by Jim Croce

Upon the internet, people try to maintain their cool, even though we all know from dealing with people inside the internet, if someone is immersed in this fake world, then something is probably not quite right for them. Usually, they are not firing all eight cylinders socially, but there are many deviations from this standard. My point is, as I start to hype the wonderful greatness that is Jim Croce, there is nothing fucking cool about that. He is a dead dude from the '70s, and an AM radio mainstay. He is what your mom listens to, or they play at the dentist's office on the subscription easy listening channel that is meant to not offend a single solitary person. Why would someone inside the internet try to tout the greatness of a completely inoffensive old ass dude who's music is most likely to be redone by second-tier American Idol cast-offs as adult contemporary hits on charts that no one actually pays attention to anymore outside of the actual radio industry dinosaurs, desperately clutching to their dying format, unable to imagine life without it?
Well, because Jim Croce is fucking awesome. I don't even know how to pronounce his last name, because he's only been music my whole life. No podcasts, no VH1 specials, no long-winded interviews about why he did this or that. The motherfucker made common man pop hits, on the regular, then was smart enough to die before it got ugly.
The thing about Croce is, I have often wondered what kind of short story writer he'd be. When you listen to his songs, he is obviously somebody who has known the dirtbags and pieces of shit of our American culture, at least during his time. But rather than look down upon them, you can tell he's known these dirtbags and pieces of shit as friends and lovers. That's very real. Who amongst us has not had a great friend we'd do anything for who was a hopeless fuck-up and involved you in some seriously sketchy bullshit? Who amongst us has not been deeply in love with the most whorish of sluts, yet unable to make the break because of the way they look you at sideways with those eyes of their's? Jim Croce, rather than make a stupid fucking song, humanized all this shit, and gave it great detail, without you really knowing. A faded matchbook with her old phone number (as in "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)" - one of his biggest hits). This song here I have been pumping (though it should be known I be pumping mad Jim Croce lately, and he has caused me to want to dig out the USB turntable and rip all the albums of his I have onto robot files so I can enjoy him within the happy buzzing confines of my new-fangled robot world), and it is a great ode to telling a bitch to fuck off. Like, it's a Fuck You song that would make Ani DiFranco proud. And yet it's by a dude that nobody really knows except as some shit that is in the background of the safe and sterile world of old people. And while it does not bum me out, because honestly if everybody started loving Jim Croce all of a sudden and stupid fucking kids were wearing Jim Croce shirts and drinking PBRs at hipster bars, I would at first be like, "I liked him since back in the day," but eventually I'd just stop liking it publicly, because it would be tarnished. Popular opinion ruins everything and anything, because all you have to do is ride down the fucking street and look around you, at the stores, the people, the cities we've built, and you can realize how fucking terribly misguided popular opinion is. To go against that is not a dangerous bet to make.
Nonetheless, I think a lot of motherfuckers are missing out on Jim Croce by him just being old fogey music. Or then again, maybe I am more old and fogeyish by the season. Oh well... such is life. We become old and irrelevant, and get stuck on reminisces about the way things once was.
Completely unrelated, other than it being Jim Croce, my favorite memory relating to his music is when I rode a Greyhound to Colorado on an open ticket and back one summer after me and this bitch I was living with split up finally for good (thank god). It was a good trip that involved drinking with hobos and crackheads and setting shit on fire in Colorado and almost getting stabbed in West Virginia and having a hallucinatory experience (I think) even though I had taken no hallucinogens of a deranged man on a bus being hauled in upon arrival by Elvis in the middle of the night in Amarillo, Texas, and handed over to local authorities. I saw that shit, but I have never really understood why I saw that shit, or if it was totally real. Seemed too far-fetched. But once I got back to central Virginia, riding 360 south out of Richmond into Amelia County, the land looked like my land, where I grew up, Piedmont Virginia, and I was talking to the old lady beside me about how this was home. I rode all the way to Keysville, where they dropped me off in front of the video store I used to rent kung fu flicks from when I was 15, and I started hitchhiking towards my mom's house, singing Jim Croce's "Walkin' Back to Georgia" the whole time. Five miles down the road, not a ride to be had for a fucked-up scraggly kid with a hiking backpack full of not-from-around-here looking shit, so I made a collect call to my mom's house, and when they said say your name, I said, "Raven, at the county line gas station, come get me," and hung up. I sat on my pack and sang the song a few more times, and then there she was, and I was home.
That's Jim Croce.
STEAL “One Less Set of Footsteps”
NEXT MONTH: Perhaps some Chalino Sanchez, or Huntsville rap, or shit my eldest daughter makes me write about!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May ’10 #9: “Luchini aka This Is It” by Camp Lo

I was reading a thing on a thing recently about HIP HOP ONE HIT WONDERS! and Camp Lo and this song came up. But the thing is, this song is so fucking summertime perfect, riding around high as fuck with the air condition running on full blast but the windows cracked so it sucks the cool right up past your eyebrows just right, that I can't even hear the hatred. It makes me hate the fact that things like VH1 or Amazon.com lists or any of this shit exists, because none of it is even close to "Luchini" in perfection, or even usefulness. Have you sat upon a picnic table in a public park with an older woman flirting with you for a beer as you try to remember how to get back to the horseshoe pits where your cousin was last seen at, and he was your ride? Were you born to people who played records that weren't jazz music, ever? Do you personally know the hopeless drug-addled shoe factories with plywood windows frustration that rules southside Virginia, where at least one of these Camp Lo dudes is allegedly from? Whatever your answers, my point was somehow supposed to show how you couldn't possibly understand how awesome this song was, even if you thought you understood, but I got lost somewhere in there, because I was trying to yell "WHAT!" in time with the song.
STEAL “Luchini”
NEXT UP: More stupid nowadays country ass rap music!

Duck-Rabbit Brown Ale

AFFORDABILITY: I was in the Wine Warehouse, where nothing is affordable, so you go from normal thinking to "Ooh! This is only $9 for a six-pack!" thinking. The Duck-Rabbit products were actually even $8.49 a sixer, so I whittled my way down to getting this Brown Ale because my wife be loving on some brown ales. And even though I was wearing semi-dress clothes for my new work that make me uncomfortable and stiff, plus my big Carhartt black jean jacket, I didn't knock any of the tightly packed bottle displays stacked every fucking where in the Wine Warehouse on my way to checkout. 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: The Duck-Rabbit Brown Ale was good, but it was nothing I would pound with the urgency needed to get my drunken sirens WAAA-WUHHHH WAAA-WUHHHH-ing through my bloodstream with the infusion of insanity that I so desire in this crooked ass world. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Duck-Rabbit Brewery label is very simple and almost inkspot psychological testly-looking, where it is a simple assed duck, but you can turn it sideways and it is a rabbit. The Brown Ale label is, of course, brown, and their whole style is solid colors, very simple looking, which makes it stand out sharp against the back drop of frou-frou superbrew beer labels full of a bunch of allegedly witty descriptives and boring historical data and stupid doohickeys galore. All of that nonsense is just psychic clutter to justify exorbitant microbrew prices to the discerning paranoid consumer. The Duck-Rabbit Brown Ale was packaged so simply and clear that I was like, "Wait, should I get this shit at this price?" because there was no external nonsense to assuage me into wasting money. You were buying a beer, not a pretty label to wash the bottle out and store on a shelf in your hanging out area to show off the obscure stupid bullshit you are into to others who pass through in an attempt to impress them with your wealth of experiences with a fringe culture they may or may not respect. The Duck-Rabbit is the Duck-Rabbit, straight up, no confusion. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: The dude that started the Duck-Rabbit Brewery used to be a philosophy professor at some university, and the whole “duck-rabbit” logo comes from a similar drawing that challenges your perspective from a Wittgenstein book. Plus, they are located in Farmville, although North Carolina not Virginia like I grew up around. Except I did go to a wedding in Farmville, North Carolina, one time, and that whole Piedmont Carolina is like all the good things about where I grew up in Virginia’s neglected armpit of the southside, just with more jobs, thus less hopelessness. This is probably why black dudes in North Carolina and not black dudes in Virginia started rocking donk cars first, because you have to have some sort of hope for the future to pimp your car in such an elevated manner. Also a plus, the Duck-Rabbit Brewery is located in a shitty metal building on a Pine Street in Farmville, and Pine Street is that infamous ass main thoroughfare through Oregon Hill that my first kid was only born half a block off of back in ‘99. All in all, it seems like one of those creative storms where it makes sense that my destiny is to love the Duck-Rabbit offerings, although the more old world slavemaster new world order manufacturers amongst us have learned to engineer these things to create traps for many of us that seems like our destiny but really were just labyrinths meant to cage us up in shitty lives. That would be manifest destiny. Still though, I am tempted to go buy a couple more six-packs of Duck-Rabbit shit right fucking now, and instead of studying more rat brains, maybe I’ll do a little philosophizing and contemplizing in my truck with some semi-cold ones. Which I probably should because I need to write something to perform at this poetry slam thing tonight anyways. I always like the almost always vacant parking lot down beside the multiplex on 29, because people cut through to an apartment building, there’s couches in the woods, and grass grows through cracks in the pavement. Those types of things make for a good suburban environment for getting drunk in your truck and writing shitty paranoid ass hillbilly raps. 6 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I have no qualms whatsoever with this here Duck-Rabbit nonsense, and if I stumbled across it at my convenience, I would heartily partake of it again. I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to find it, but knowing a strong love for Piedmont North Carolina as something that those who believe in either irony or deities would call “God’s Country”, I know I’ll find myself down there at some point, in some bar, with some people, soaking in the vibes, and there will be the surprise of some Duck-Rabbit this or that on tap, and I’ll get it in a frothy pint glass and feel comfortable in doing so, because they seem like decent beer people. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 4/5 STARS!