Fufkin is A Fascist: Deadlines, Mingus, Joey, Jazz and Angry, Antisocial Rants

Christamighty, April 27 and another fucking deadline looms over me like jack-booted fascist Nazi’s ready to bust my ribs with a few swift kicks. I hate these moments, when I have nothing to say to anyone about anything, much less the rotten state of American music culture. Shheeez, what’s a fella to do? I can tell you all that I just flat-out gave the fuck up on rockroll because it got too damn tedious anymore – not entirely a lie. I could ooh and ahh about how much I love Charles Mingus because his Ah-Um and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady are two of the most astonishing records I have ever heard (and those are only a scratch at the surface). Couple that with an evening reading Geoff Dyer’s astonishing book but beautiful: A book about jazz and you’d wanna give up writing and give up on rock and roll too. So maybe it is that I’ve just become an old fuck with no sense of energy anymore. What’s it to ya?

It isn’t all agony and sorrow. Just eighty percent of it, the other twenty is filled with headlong fever rushes like the swaggering Bigger Lovers gig I caught a few weeks back along with three others in the "crowd" and one very nice barmaid. It was like we were five of Christ’s apostles stumbling out to the tomb on a dreary Sunday morning, head full of morning-after wine aches, only to discover that someone had rolled away the stone, hooked up some amps, plugged in some guitars and mics, and started wailing away on a healthy set of originals from a very fine recent record (How I Learned to Stop Worrying) as well as cosmic covers of the Soft Boys and the Move’s "Do Ya?" I wasn’t sore at the scene that night I’ll tell you. Rock and Roll should have more nights like that in store for its faithful when you recall the promise it made some half-century ago; you know the one, the shaman’s claim that this was the sound that would finally reek havoc both literal and figurative. That this noise called rock and roll would reach down into oblivion and pull the fucking thing inside out on itself. That rock and roll would forever be of the people, by the people, for the goddamn people. Well the people have been dumped, duped, and defiled – and worst of all, record sales and the sad state of commercial radio seems to prove that they like it! Not this cat, not those few others at the Bigger Lovers gig, never, never, never.

So I got back to the house after that show and zonked out on the couch as a beer went warm on the coffee table as the disc player caressed Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, funny how I wanted to hear that after having some rockroll faith restored. Fuckin’ jazz, it’s softened some of my callused rock and roll heart.

So it is that this goddamn deadline thing nudges me awake a scant few hours after boozing myself into a loose coma. Death himself, cloaked in a black robe, face buried under black hole shadow, come to tell me, "It is time." And we sit at the same table, playing the same game of chess, with the same chilling quiet. "I’ve got nothing," I say. "I’ve got nothing and I think that whore I loved has finally left me for good." Silence. Maybe that’s the inspiration, maybe this should be a grand ‘fuck you and good-bye’ to the musical bitch I’d fallen in love with some twenty-five years ago. She’s gone to find younger more virile blood. I had no more stamina, and she wanted the younger guy who had more flash and less complications. "You have soo much baggage" she exhorts as she grabs only her purse and a compact. "You’re just no fun anymore." "What about all of your clothes?" I plea pathetically. "Take them to Goodwill the next time you go clothes shopping for yourself." Touché.

Complications? No fun? I guess I didn’t get around to hauling out the new Uptown Sinclair disc for her soon enough. Now that’s fun. Uptown’s 8-Song Demo has been such a heroic slab of driftwood on which to cling in the stormy wake of rock and roll’s slow, steady sinking that I’m not so sure it isn’t the last thing I want to hear. Like the last roll in the hay with that foxy chick that you’d always wondered why she was with you just before she started wondering that too and left. You just savor those memories. I could give up rock and roll forever and take this disc and the two sizzling live gigs I’ve seen these guys perform and just move on in life. Or I’d like to think I could. But illness is illness, and guys like me always wind up in that same old bad part of town, mingling with the weird and wild ("what’s a clean cut looking fellow like that doing in a place like this" says cop 1 to cop 2, cop 1 reaching for his radio to call in the coroner) and looking to score one more time; I’m gonna kick tomorrow.

"I had a lovers quarrel with the world" reads Robert Frost’s epitaph. Amen to that Bob, if you’re a drinker I’ll owe ya one when we meet in that great lounge in the sky. Although mine isn’t so much with the world, but rather my world, the one I’ve chosen to live in. It’s a place where people like you Bob, and people like, oh I don’t know, maybe John Lennon, and Lou Reed (he’s not dead yet you say? Check again, have you listened to his last record?), and Peter Laughner, Morrison, Hendrix, John Phillips, Ginsberg, kerouac (small ‘k’ intentional), Fitzgerald, O’Hara, Mingus, Coltrane, Bird, Steve McQueen, and Joey Ramone to name so few of them, it’s the place they all live and work. It’s a place where things - thoughts, feelings, ideas, originality, passions, loves, and lives - are filled with the endless chaotic joys that life should probably be filled with. But those aren’t he only names on my list, not by a long fucking shot. There are all of you. All of the people who still care, who still give so much to be a part of the rockroll culture we all embrace. It’s a list littered with our "day-job" generation, the guys and gals I know who play in bands and deliver cars to dealers by day. Those who staff (or used to staff) dot coms and alternative papers and magazines. The ones who shuffle papers in some big office where they tell you to take that damn nose ring out. The folks who rev guitars up by night and sneak office time on the internet to surf band and music sites, or set up a short East Coast tour. There are guys who are lawyers, doctors, and (one particularly fine guitarist and songwriter I know) even garbagemen. This is about all of you, no matter how many different bands you play in. I think of all of this as I wrestle this motherfucking deadline to the ground and kick it in the balls again and again. "Leave my girl alone fucker! Just leave her alone, she may not reciprocate always or completely, but I love the bitch."

So take your deadline and stick it up Fred Durst’s ass. Clowns like that make a mockery of what was once a proud stallion of an art form. I got nothing against Durst’s music, cuz I don’t have to listen to it. That boy can rock away any ‘ol way he chooses, but he can’t keep strutting around MY rock and roll acting like he started the whole fucking thing. You’re a footnote pal, a rich footnote who discovered a lame-ass formula that turns shit into gold. So be it, it’s all yours buddy, keep mining for shit and pretty soon it won’t become gold anymore. Then what are you left with? Exactly.

One more snort, one more syringe, one more hit, one more pill, one more…one more… Deadline mainline…it’s all the same when it comes around to the life we lead. Although the drug analogy may be a bit crass in light of the entirety of rock’s morbid history with substances, it is entirely appropriate. They often say the first step to recovery is admitting you have the problem…well, I’m sick as hell with the problem. So what now?

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