(1977, Rounder Records)
My dad used to play the Woodstock soundtrack, which out of like 200 songs had about 3 that were worth my time, and that was as a young and naive doofus, mostly interspersing the bowl hits he took while it was playing with stories of how his buddy Bozo went there and climbed the lighting rigs and there was a picture of him in the papers. Bozo has a real name and lives not too far from me and I enjoy visiting his waterless cabin on a mountain with no interior walling in half of it. We sit there and drink a 12-pack and compare paranoias. Those guys like Bozo and my dad (aka Tuna) were just as much redneck as they were hippie, and they sort of twisted my attitude towards hippies into something positive until I grew up, went to college, and met well-to-do (meaning pretentious) hippies my age, and learned that they are full of shit, but a really bad type of full of shit where they try to force they bullshit on you because they know what’s best for you better than you do, like conservative Christians, just with bean sprouts instead of Bibles.
Anyways, the whole Woodstock party was okay I guess, although if I wanted to go somewhere and listen to music really loud while tripping balls, the last place I’d want to be is around a hundred thousand other motherfuckers. But I guess a bunch of people ended up stranded there in upstate New York, to this day even, and they turned a couple small towns into Obama sign factories and coffee shops with rural wi-fi, and artisans galore, which is a term who people who aren’t real artists but are fairly pretentious about what they make use. This is an album done by a pack of such settled artists, who held a weekend jam session, but with the recording machines a-running. If Woodstock the festival was the naked, drugged-up freakfest of a Saturday night party, this album would be the post-hangover, mellower late Sunday afternoon back porch music while the womenfolks are cooking up some butternut squashes and roasting a couple of chickens. It’s also probably the type of mellowed-out folksy shit that the loudest parts of the internets would never love. But I got no shame.
The record features Happy and Artie Traum (I have no idea if they’re famous or not, but that is funny pair of names to say; I think they’re brothers, meaning they shared a mother, not a blunt), John Sebastian (the dude who did the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter), Paul Butterfield (of Paul Butterfield Blues Band fame), and Roly Salley. Quickly consulting the internet, I found out that this record was famous because it is the first recording of “Killing the Blues” by the aforementioned Salley, which I guess became a famous song because some later more famous homos have done the song in the past decade or two. But I dig this record for songs like “Bluegrass Boy” and “Waiting for a Train”, slow-moving, hobo country boy fish out of water songs. I could go sit out in my 18 foot borrowed camper trailer and listen to shit like that spin on the turns table all night long, sipping on some homebrews and maybe smoking a bowl (haha, just like my old man used to... what a fuckin’ loser I am sometimes). I actually just used a three parts of a song off this album to make a weird ass beat for my new alter-ego rap bullshit called The Ancient Hobo with pitch-shifted vocals.
The odd thing about this record is I bought it years ago in Richmond at this now-gone record store called Memory Lane Records that was run by a weird ponytailed guy who would talk to you (or at least me, with my retardar) about the mail wrestling league he was in where you would mail a postcard to another guy you were having a by-mail wrestling match with and it would have your next three moves, and then he would do it. I never did figure out how that would work or why you would do it. I bet the internet exploded that guy’s mind - every record ever for sale and plus all sorts of wrestling dork games. But that’s where I got this bama. And then I never saw it again. Until a month or so ago, when the PSY/OPS told me some dude in Goochland was selling off thousands of records on the side of the road in front of his house for a dollar each. I had to check that out. He was a weird ponytailed guy too, kind of like if me and my dad were brothers and we had a middle brother between us. He tried to sell his shit at Plan 9, but they told him he’d get like a dime a record, and he didn’t want to mess with online selling because he wouldn’t buy anything that he couldn’t see and touch, so he didn’t trust anybody else who would do such a crazy thing. He had thousands of records, and not much I wanted, because he had more records that I also have from my weird redneck/hippie sections than I’ve ever seen. It was disturbing, to the point I was looking at the guy, being all anal about certain records and thumbing through an old issue of Club magazine that I got all freaked out like he was me in the holographic universe, but somewhere where I went right at a fork, he went left, and that’s how it ended up for me/him. He was moving to Colorado and it all had to fit in the back of his Blazer, because it was a one-way trip, so he was selling it all. He had a second copy of this record, that I almost bought to double up my copy of this record, but if I had started buying up doubles of shit that was important to me, I would’ve dropped another $100 at this guy’s place on the side of 522 between Gum Springs and Goochland Courthouse. And plus, there was some half-wit painter following me around, talking about how his older brother used to play with Toby Keith or some shit that was driving me mad.
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