SONG OF THE DAY: Feel Like Makin' Love (kudzu'd)

I don’t know how highly you think of Roberta Flack, but no matter what it is, she’s still underrated. Born in the mountains of North Carolina, steeped in life in Virginia and North Carolina, and yet another graduate of Howard University (the Harvard of Black Folks). When the Fugees used that one sample, she gained some fresh notoriety, but it still ain’t enough. Black Mountain now has a mural of her up, and I wanna go see it. I love the Thelonious Monk one in Rocky Mount… like I think about downtown Rocky Mount and that mural and the old furniture store and the trains coming and going in that big CSX yard and the wonderful pile of bricks from a torn down building my one kid used to always make us go see. I hope Black Mountain is all fucked up (in the good ways) like that, too.

SONG OF THE DAY: Scorpio (kudzu'd)

The last time I went on a wander for train tracks and used record shops, I went to one in a small town in North Carolina, but the dude running it didn’t take in store customers no more. He let me in to talk though and he had a shelf full of old 12-inch singles in the back that I saw, all faded and enticing. I stopped at an old school turned into giant junk market that I had passed too, because I figured he had to have a stack of 45s in there somewhere. The Record Gods smiled on me that day, because he did have one small shelf with a stack of like 75 or so. But in that stack I found a couple very clean copies of Yarbrough & Peoples “Don’t Stop the Music”, some clean Solar Records 45s (always a groove slowed down), and yet another scratchy but wonderful copy of Dennis Coffey’s “Scorpio”, the famous break that’s been backbeat to hip hop since the beginning of Kool Herc having parties. I’ve been meaning to sample my scratchy ass copy to send Boogie Brown to use in a beat, because in our modern digitized fake perfection realm, having a classic breakbeat looped from actual raspy ass vinyl copy from North Carolina junk store adds a missing spice to our cyber-life. There’s a reason all those old breakbeats were so popular, and I bet there’s more still hiding, maybe not in American music genres, because them old school DJs dug pretty deep. But stuff is still hiding. There’s always gems you can dig deeper for.
Anyways, I’m contemplating a drive to a big ass used record store this weekend, to take my luck with The Record Gods, and see if I’ve been living right. I feel like I have, but you never know what they have in store for you. I seem to be ruled by record stores close to me that don’t believe in The Record Gods no more, and I can’t stand those secular ass bougie colored vinyl spots. If that’s your thing, fine, enjoy your life (if you can afford it). But to me, true digging is always going beyond what’s known, and keeping it cheap as you can. Ballin’ on a budget… that’s a foundational tenet of hip hop actually, which for some reason as we get all this 50 years old hype, nobody talks about that aspect as much. Capitalism co-opted the fuck out of it, and is riding the vinyl resurgence as well right now, beating it like a sick horse to crank out seven colors of the same Taylor Swift shit. I still worship The Record Gods and bypass all that shit, and I’ll take my chances with dusty fingers in some fucked up spot a boy told me about a few months back. Also hoping The Train Gods bless me too, because probably gonna try to scribble a few dirtgods while I’m wandering.

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: Camel Walk

Look, I'll be honest… I'm not really giving a fuck here the past couple days. I'd rather have a woman in shiny silver go go shorts try to choke me out from above with her thighs, in a roadside motel along a former US highway that's as abandoned and hopeless as my heart, in some town too forgotten to even have a Dollar General anymore. As soon as quarantine is done, I'm gonna do that shit. For the rest of my life (which hopefully means at least six months). Stretched to capacity fishnets with a couple rips and maybe a leg bruise or two will always catch a stray dirtgod. And lord have mercy if there's a fucked up $60 thigh tattoo involved… game over.

SVND4Y M0RN1NG C0M1NG D0WN...

Sunday morning coming down

route 158, prostate

full of hazelnut coffee

C0NT3MPL4T3 SM0K1NG B4CKW00DS...

contemplate smoking Backwoods

blunt at Roxboro drag strip,

by myself, people watching

34T1N PVSSY K1CK1N 4SS...

"eatin pussy kickin ass"

graffiti in Pea Island

Wildlife Refuge bathroom stall

G00GL3 S0VL F00D R3ST4VR4NT...

google "soul food restaurant"

and chances are better than

not you will find non-soul food

S1MPL3 C3R4M1C C0FF33...

simple ceramic coffee

cup, refilled with flirtatious

small talk; it's nothing, like life

T1R3S L1K3 3L3CTR1C4L T4P3...

tires like electrical tape

sliding up down and around

them Carolina back roads

F1ND1NG F0RG0TT3N C0RN3R...

finding forgotten corner

in devils' gridlocked lines to

downward spiral for few days

SVND4Y M0RN1NG D3W DR1PP1NG...

Sunday morning dew dripping

off Chevy Cutlass sitting

on that elevated chrome

traditionalist

A Primordial Traditionalist, 1366 A.D. in western North Carolina style

c h v z w

late night truck rides home from drag
races in roxboro with
uncle ricky - rest in peace

August O.C.D. #4: Atlas Fantasies

I have been half-assedly working on sketching together a non-fiction book proposal about riding Greyhounds, which I've done far too many times in my life. The sample part of the proposal was fairly easy, though I could probably tighten it up, or maybe rewrite it from a different segment of bus travel in Oklahoma City that's just as notable and interesting to read. It's all that proposing part that I stumble with.
So what I've invariably been doing is pulling out the atlas, and plotting all sorts of strange paths. Sometimes off-the-beaten paths through the south, sometimes following long former U.S. highways that have been replaced by sterile interstates and clogged up with suburban sprawl and stoplight cluster crawl. Other times I draw out giant shapes across the country with itineraries that take about 5 hours of ride time a day (ideally, which is rarely how a bus rolls), and imagine all the bullshit I'll experience. Plus plotting out shapes makes me think of that kid in Iowa that was trying to blow up mailboxes and leave a smiley face pattern as if Detective Freamon and McNulty were gonna use thumb tacks to chart the crime scenes on a bulletin board.
But I've been spending a lot of time looking at atlases. I briefly entertained the notion of making "collages" over state road maps, using an exacto and my shoebox full of clipped pictures from magazines to cut out perfect shapes of little triangles or squares of tiny sections of states separated out by roads, but looking it over, it seemed like the final product wasn't gonna be how I wanted it to be. I need to get one of those in-depth state road atlases for a couple states and do a few pages together to make giant retard things using that motif. My early choices to do such a thing would be Vermont, Alabama, and North Carolina. Probably Carolina because the likelihood of me going down there and being able to actually buy a state road atlas are probably better than most. Then again if I go to North Carolina, I'd probably just try to find Vollis Simpson's compound of homemade whirligigs, go to a strange town's dirt track, get drunk, and try to figure out where one of my handful of old school homies who live down there actually live and if I could make it there without getting busted for DUI, or if I should just find a logging trail and sleep in the passenger seat of my truck.

100 VINYLZ: #70 - The Best of John Coltrane: His Greatest Years 2xLP by John Coltrane

(1971, Impulse Records)
Man, I had a hard ass time finding the info for this double LP online, so I'm guessing it's not that common. It wasn't fetching fat dollars on ebay or anything, but it wasn't showing up all that often or easily in google searches for Coltrane discographies.
When it comes to the jazz music, I like freaked out skychasers like Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra more than the other standard classic stuff that whiteboy music experts tend to like (although that might be exactly what they like and I'm just playing myself). This is a nice collection of stuff from some of Coltrane's better years, and honestly is the only Coltrane I have on LP. I had like 7 or 8 tapes as well that I bought back then, but shit, tapes are obsolete even to me, Mr. Anti-technocracy. And I don't really think I'd need anything more, although if I could Coltrane's Sound on LP, I'd jump at that.
One time, me and Boomer were wandering around North Carolina, looking for some piece of shit armory building to watch some piece of shit wrestling show featuring Buddy Landell vs. Ricky Morton, where we'd most likely get drunk in the parking lot, stumble in, and soak in the sociological mayhem of multicultural underclass Carolina. But we couldn't find the place, and there were burned out buildings along semi-back roads, like they had riots but in the country. So we go up to this convenience store for me to go in and ask directions and buy another 12-pack, and the lady behind the counter gives me some half-assed bullshit, going right back where we were, but just deeper into the muck. Boomer figured we should ride through town and see what else was going on, maybe get a hotel room beforehand if we can find one, and some pimped out Cutlass cuts into the parking lot quickly as we're trying to pull out, Boomer stops, I look up, and there's one of those roadside markers saying "John Coltrane was born a block from this spot in..." with all the rest of the pertinents. I had no idea he was from Shittown, North Carolina, but it explained a lot.