musical associations

musical associations

Mugtoe
2/16/02
9:16:58 AM
172.128.81.246

I still gotta toothache. I’ll tell you that certain music has power over my mind in the way of a trigger discharging images and smells and emotions and flashes of brilliance beyond the normal sway of garden-variety nostalgia. The Toadies or Bob Marley put me in my 63 Chevy at the Brazos River and running wild with Joey and Chris on country roads and on the west side of Fort Worth. At least that’s where the sound of one brought the thought of another amid all the other connections only moments ago. The smell of dust and smoke and gasoline and hot wind blowing through the cab and we’re all fucked up and heading out to the river at the Dennis bridge beach. > I play the Texas Tornadoes and I’m suddenly on the sofa at Fat Jack Price’s apartment in east Fort Worth listening to him bitch about his girlfriend. He’ll give up the hard line the moment he needs some pussy. I guess, anyway; that was more than a dozen years ago. We also listened to some other homegrown music at his place like that old Bloodrock LP that Nitzinger was on that had the DOA song. I remember that being a big deal to me in second grade, because they wouldn’t play it on the radio. It had something to do with the sound of sirens in the song. Some blond boy with white shoes danced in Mrs Riddle’s second grade class, and my mind is telling me that he danced to that song played from one of those school AV department phonographs that looked like luggage. But I know he didn’t dance to that song. He kicked high. That was one of the last years I ever had to do a duck and cover drill. > I remember Albert and Fat Jack bragging about how they talked shit to David Allan Coe when he was playing a show. Coe apparently was always getting mileage out of his stint in the pen with the crowd and these two heckled him apparently. You’d have thought they’d counted coup to hear them tell it. Fat Jack was a legendary speed freak I met during one of his brief periods of blessed respite from that sort of perpetual motion. He was a short, wide, goofy motherfucker with thick glasses and a continuous squint who gave the impression of waddling when he walked across the room. That’s about as far as he ever walked in my presence. I understand that he lost weight precipitously after the last time I saw him. > Now it's something off of the Yes "Tormato" LP and I'm in downtown Fort Worth in 1980. And it's that crowd from the Old Mill Stream apartments that I did all that acid with. I understand that one of those guys went on to be a guitarist in Ministry or something. Mark or Mike or somebody. Chuch and Barry had overturned the sofa he slept on in the clubhouse of the complex one night and busted a plate glass window in the process. That same party saw Red-Eye bust a mirror in the bathroom after eating more than a dozen hits. He was the source, so we gathered up all the broken glass into a big rubber garbage can and dumped it into the pond there and tripped over the idea of shredded duck feet. Red-Eye took us driving around shortly after and we all flipped off the Las Colinas cops and hoped they were just LC cops and not Irving cops. I saw the band in the round in Ft Worth in 80. The rest just fell out somewhere. > I can't even tell ya what Tejas brings up. Every listen is another layer of accretions peeled off. I remember leaving Pam stranded over by the Snelling office on Mockingbird one afternoon when I was 16. I went to White Rock Lake and saw Robert Purdy and remained there overlong. I was 90 minutes late coming back. Robert changed his name legally to Kari Albright after that, and I last saw him wearing parachute pants with his hair all teased out and ready to make a name for himself in rock-n-roll. I don't think he played anything, but he'd a fit right in at the Ritz. > Sorry, Pam. I was a punk.

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