While Our Defense Is Down
Crate Diving in Modern America
What do I mean by “modern America?” Isn’t this time always the modern age, even if it’s not the High Modernism of Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner? I was talking to a friend last week and it hit me that when I had to write a research paper on The Great Gatsby as a college freshman in early 1975, that novel was exactly 50 years old. Still relatively fresh and new and, of course, modern. As Gomer Pyle once said referring to an old freezer he was trying to repair on Andy and Aunt bee’s back porch,
“Makes you think!”
I say all of this while listening to Cindy Lee’s brilliant Diamond Jubilee while I keep getting breaking news on Hegsethgate. This isn’t the rabbit hole I want to go down, but incompetence loves incompetence, and so what else should you or I expect? I have more to say on Cindy Lee over on Medium, but for now, I will more competently than anyone deserves explain what I found on a recent crate-dive, trying to ease my worried mind and building a wall around all things orange, except for the UT Vols who, while they aren’t my favorite team, are nevertheless dear to my heart because where else but UT did I first study Joyce and Woolf? Faulkner started in my undergrad days, so not everything is coming up Vol-colored daisies.
I have six ripe finds to display today, plus a tattered seventh almost-freebie, and while no one would consider them classics, exactly, when you’re trying to fill holes and stay out of unsecret or unsecreted chatrooms, what better than to drop a few bucks on LPs that start you up?
Tav Falco: Cabaret of Daggers, a RSD exclusive ($14.00) languishing in a bin at Pharmacy Records, just waiting for an amused passerby to grab it. This was released in 2018, and among the tunes that Tav regales us with are “Old Fashioned Morphine” and “Strange Fruit.” Tav was around for the Memphis Blues and rock of good old sadly dead Alex Chilton, and if you’ve never read Jim Gordon’s Memphis Rent Party, there’s more to the story, of course, and by reading it you certainly won’t be divulging any wartime secrets.
Jim Croce: You Don’t Mess Around With Jim (ABC X756, 1972). Croce’s first record which I snagged for $8.00 at Horizon last Saturday. I never owned any of his records back when he was bad bad, though I really liked such songs as the title track, “Operator,” and of course “Time in a Bottle,” which apparently was used in the ABC TV Movie “She Lives” starring Desi Arnaz Jr of Dino, Desi, and Billy fame, among other things. “Time in a Bottle” was also the theme of many proms and lead-outs (and if you don’t know what a lead-out is, maybe you aren’t from Alabama), though I went to only two such events in my high school days and actually missed the one with this song playing in the spotlight where young couples were “clinging and clawing and drowning in love’s debris,” to quote Carly Simon. In my defense, I did wear a pink tuxedo to my own senior prom but I no longer remember our theme.
David Bowie: Lodger ( RCA AQL 1-3254, 1979). I never owned this one back in the glam day, but I do now for $20 even though originally someone suggested/engraved that this one was a “demonstration, not for resale,” but who listens, or listens in to secret rules of bombing and selling these modern days? Part of the Low, Heroes, Berlin trilogy, it features “Fantastic Voyage” and “Look Back in Anger.” Words for/to the wise and the unsecured.
Dead or Alive: Sophisticated Boom Boom (Epic BFE-39274, 1984). First, that title, doesn’t it make you think of Hegseth and Waltz and good old JD who’s winging his way to make Greenland great again? The hit from this record and the song that made me love MT
V is “What I Want,” and when the band appeared, particularly singer Pete Burns, I know I kept my eyes glued. Some looked away, for sure, but there was no real cost either way. Just boys being boys, which is all rock and roll is and should be, except that girls rock, too, and even if you can’t tell which is which and who is who, what you want remains what you want. $8.00
And three for the price two or three. My Rolling Stones obsession means never having to say you’re sorry for finally buying…Tattoo You (Rolling Stones Records COC 16052, 1981, $15). I really don’t like “Start me Up,” but “Little T&A” has some oomph to it. How often will I play this? Time, at least, is still on my side. Dirty Work (RSR OC 40250, 1986, $12.00) including “Harlem Shuffle,” “Dirty Work,” and “One Hit to the Body” (which also doesn’t send me). And finally, when I entered Cabin Floor Records the other day, I said to Joe, you used to have an old copy of Sticky Fingers with the workable zipper hanging on your wall.” “Yeah, it’s gone now.” And then I looked on the floor which is why they call it that, and saw leaning against a box, another copy of working zipper SF. It was a bit tattered for sure, but a little tape will go a long way, and we played both sides of the LP and the little pops were contained and so I asked how much and he said what do you think and I said I don’t know and someone must have been taping all of this and he finally said “$5.00” and I said “deal” and before I knew it, I was home, knowing that the zipper could harm other records and so it has to be kept on its own secret shelf away from Tusli Gabbard and all the others who don’t know how to classify or unclassify themselves or their records.
See you soon after I figure out how to set off my wallet so that I can buy more goodies.