(Originally posted November 2002)

KIDS: You have to read the previous episode of Bargain Bin Culture for this to make any sense. Ahhh, who am I kidding? Nothing I write ever makes sense.

Surprisingly, I didn’t even blink when the Air Force Sergeant pushed me out of the airplane into an open freefall in the dark Middle Eastern night. I had several minutes to waste before I’d be below radar level and able to open my ‘chute, so I calmly reminisced on the events that had led me to this moment. I’d been tapped by the CIA to infiltrate the camp of the famed General Zarcon, a Middle Eastern despot set on worldwide domination. Whereas many other agents had failed to integrate themselves into Zarcon’s closely knit group of advisors, they had not had my secret weapon: an omnipotent command of pointless record trivia. You see, Zarcon demanded that his cadre of serviceman be able to answer any query he proffered about obscure musical groups both past and present. As the United States leading expert in such matters, I alone would be able to work my way into his camp.

However, my task at hand was a mere prelude to my final mission. Today I was assigned to sneak into an encampment containing General Zarcon’s beautiful daughter, Sally Zarcon, and do what I could to pump her for information. All in all, it seemed like a pretty cushy gig: parachute into a well-guarded fortress and convince the resident beauty to give up her allegiances to her father and provide me with whatever information might prove useful. Nothing I couldn’t handle in my sleep. After all I was an amazingly talented super-spy, I…

Egads! I’d reminisced so long I’d forgotten to pull the cord on my parachute. Now it was too late. The ground rushed up to meet me, closer, closer!

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(Originally posted October 2002)

Slowly, I lifted my third gin and tonic of the evening to my lips and took a deep sip.

It went down smooth, but couldn’t chase away the bitterness and resentment I was feeling. After three years as the chief record purchaser for McRainey’s Rock and Roll records, I’d been let go. I’d been replaced with a machine. The Xoltan 3000, a device that could give the blue book value of a record within three seconds, with an accompanying printout listing the musicians who played on the album cross referenced against their favorite groupies. It was a mechanical horror that didn’t take coffee
breaks, didn’t ask for raises and didn’t tell the customers they looked like a leftover squash that had been left to sit in the sun for three days and then sprinkled with acne. It had been with a swift boot that McRainey had shown me the door.

What was I to do? Records were my life. And truth be told, I had no other skills. I couldn’t mix an espresso, but I could tell you who played bass for the progressive blues band, Camel. (Dave Ferguson) I couldn’t deliver a pizza but I knew that Kansas guitarist Steve Morse had a career as an airline pilot. I was doomed!

Suddenly a strong hand gripped my shoulder. “Snap out of it, soldier!” a manly voice
commanded, and I turned to face a portly woman with a three o’ clock shadow,
dressed in the military greens. Several high ranking Army types stood behind her. “Your country needs you!”

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(Originally posted August 2002)

I hadn’t slept for three days and I was jonesin’ bad when I met my source at a dilapidated record store in south Los Angeles. “I need something, man,” I told him, my voice shaking. “Give me anything, as long as it packs some punch!” My source nodded and led me into the back room. Lest you think I was merely pining for some some junk, let me correct your feeble-minded assumption. I kicked the horse long ago and was in total agreement with Keith Richards’ observation that “heroin is for pussies.” I had a new monkey of my back now… music! I craved it with every fibre of my being, but only the good stuff – the crazy stuff. You can take your Britney Spears, your P.O.D., hell, even your …Trail of Dead, and stuff it up your socks. I wanted something that spoke of the lost generation of now, the reckless angst of modern youth. Like an empathetic vampire, I thrived on such musical cacophony. “Check this out,” my source said, removing a long play album from its plastic wrap and placing it on the turntable. The needle hit the groove and suddenly the room was fill with sweet, wonderful music. It was sound unlike any I had ever heard and it filled my soul like a Truck Stop waitress filling a mug with the murky black. “Yesss…” I said, feeling the driving hunger in my soul subsiding. “This is it, man… I’ve never felt this high before… don’t stop… don’t stop… oh, man, whatever you do, DON’T STOOOPPPPPPPP!!!!”

My source, a longtime music addict himself, knew what I was going through. He held me in his arms as we listened to this musical ambrosia over and over into the night. I question whether I should reveal the identity of this album to you. It may well convert you into a music fiend as well, my friend. I may be creating a generation of night travellers that walk the record shops in vain, looking for a greater high. But my journalistic integrity demands that I must reveal it to you. I cannot hide from you what is the greatest musical collection ever. It is… SESAME STREET: THE BEST OF ELMO!

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(Originally posted July 2002)

It seems like lately I’m doing all my review columns according to themes in which I group the albums by genre or some other predefined categorization. Like, last month it was heavy metal. Before that it was fusion. And the first column of the new year was the ten best albums of last year. Despite every indication that the universe is a meaningless, random place, I still attempt to find some way to compartmentalize it. Well, enough I say. I give up. I’m through fighting.

If anything, the events of September 11 have shown us that any attempt at making sense of it all is lost. My mind may scream out with a desire to organize, to systematize, to classify… but it’s a lost cause. Our universe is a random stream of floating nucleons and electrotrons that can just as easily end up in the brain of rabid terrorist as they can a harmless puppy dog. Therefore, I now offer you five record reviews that have nothing to do with each other. They share not same genre nor artists, they are totally random. And meaningless. Just like the real world.

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(Originally posted May 2002)

Overlord note: In case you were wondering, Tuesdays and Fridays are now diskant rewind days where we’re posting up some of the amazing columns we wrote years ago that have since been unavailable online.

You know, I gotta tell ya, gang… I ‘m hip to the fact that diskant is primarily an indie music e-rag, and I try and be respectful of that, but the man who holds the knife to my throat, our beloved taskmaster, Gen. Simon Minter, has just requested – nay, demanded – that we get our new columns in right away, so I’m going to have to leave the confines of currently popular music and venture outward to ruminate on the kind of music I know best – heavy metal.

(Dig that incredibly long opening sentence, y’all. I’ve been reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft lately and let me tell you, homeslice could stretch a single sentence over three paragraphs.)

So anyway – yeah, don’t be frightened. Heavy Metal ain’t gonna hurt you. Sure, the subliminal messages may cause you to kill yourself, the satanic references may cause you to sell your soul to the netherworld, and any emulation of the heavy metal “look” may ensure you never get hired to be anything other than a gas station attendant, but otherwise, metal music is perfectly harmless. It’s got a bad reputation, but my feeling is that this poor rating has always been do more to crappy rock critics that any general opinion of the masses.*

I’ve actually got a theory of why heavy metal has always done so badly with the critics. My suspicion is that whenever a rock critic was sitting down to give a good listen to a metal album, a knock would come at the door, and he/she would open it to see a chimpanzee holding a balloon. Attached to the balloon would be a note and when the rock critic read it, they would see, “Hello. My name is Bobo. Would you like me to sodomize you?” Now we all know rock critics love to be sodomized by chimpanzees, so they would jump at this opportunity, and instead of giving the metal album on their plate a good listen, they’d quickly scribble down something like “This sucks. I hate metal” and send it off to Jan Wenner or whoever their overlord was, and then get down to all that chimpanzee-sodomizing. Of course this is just a theory, mind you – I have no proof of such activities. And I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I’m just painting a picture of such degenerate activities as a mean spirited attempt to get even with all the critics who have maligned my favorite form of music.

For example, by no means do I want you to visualize Rolling Stone‘s Jimmy Gutterman sitting alone on a Saturday Night, settling down to review Ozzy Osbourne’s “No Rest For the Wicked,” and then hear a knock and see our previously mentioned chimpanzee friend. Get such an image out of your head if it is currently residing there. (Did I mention that the chimp is wearing a clown suit?) I would wish you to focus on that no more that I would wish you to ruminate on alterna-critic Gina Arnold spending lonely hours in her bedroom, bad mouthing KISS, while intermittently pining away for a stray sodomizing primate, only to have her dreams answered by a doorbell and bobbing balloon. I beg of you, wash such iconography from you mind. Were you to continue such thoughts, you might start envisioning The Stranger‘s Sean Nelson breaking into the New York City Zoo’s Ape section when he should be giving a favorable review to Prong. Okay, that joke is quite finished, isn’t it? My point being, however, that as usual, critics speak for themselves. Regular, decent, salt of the earth fuckers like you and I, love metal. (You do love metal, right?) So I thought I’d take the time to list what I feel are some forgotten metal classics that happen to reside in my vinyl and tape collection. (What the term “Heavy Metal” means has always been a point of contention, so some people may object to my rather loose encapsulation of its definition as seen by my choices below. Generally, I think Heavy Metal can be said to include all music in the sub genres – Hard Rock (Poison, AC/DC) and Metal (Celtic Frost, Slayer.) Many will disagree with me on this and they should know I have a chimpanzee with their name on it.)

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(Originally posted April 2002)

Many a day will pass where I’ll be reclining in the Secret Diskant HQ (It’s location is so secret I can’t reveal to you where it is, but I will say it has a great view of the Eiffel tower) and young pups such as Greg Kitten or Ollie Simpson will approach me and say, “How do you do it, Wil? How do you get all the chicks? The birds go ape around you!” (I dunno how they found out about my dalliance with the London Zoo’s female gorilla, but that’s beside the point.) “Well, boys,” I’ll sagely reply, while taking a puff from my opium pipe, “You have to dig the right type of music. Girls don’t give a damn about all that indie-noise you waste your time with. You wanna know what gets chicks soggy? Fusion!” “Fusion?!” Greg and Ollie will say in disbelief. “That’s right, lads” I’ll say. “Nothin’ makes a woman hard like a twenty minute moog solo. Or a bass riff harmonized with a ten piece horn section. Or songs with titles like “The Struggle of the Turtle to the Sea, Pt. II*” “Gosh Wil,” Greg and Ollie will reply. “That makes perfect sense! Perhaps you could provide us with a brief review as to what you see as being some of the key fusion albums that can easily be pertained in the used record bins of your native America.”

Perhaps, I could, boys… Perhaps, I could…. Oh, you mean right now!

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(Originally posted February 2002)

So dig this – I’m sitting back in the Wil-crib, grinding up my new batch of Tylonel 3 for a quick snort, when I get an urgent e-mail from Diskant content producer, Simon Minter, saying he needs a new diskant column “now, as in ‘pronto’ fuckface!” Apparently the theme for all the columns this month is “the ten best releases this year.” (Or maybe it was “five best” or “hundred best” .whatever, I’m doing ten.) Now right off the bat, that conflicts with the general concept of my column which is to review obscure record classics that have ended up in the used bins of record stores.

Obviously, one year is too short a time for someone to release a record and have it end up in the bargain slots (unless they’re Meatloaf) so I plaintively pleaded with Simon to give me some leeway – “What if I reviewed the ten best used albums I purchased this past year? Is that good enough for you?” Well, ol’ Simon demurely let it pass and I set out to gather my trophies.

Did I actually buy all these albums in the past year? Hell, I dunno. I can barely remember last week. But I could have, and that’s what’s important!

Now when you’re talking about used records, “best” is a subjective term, Granted, a lot of the albums I picked up this year, really were good. I mean, they sounded good, they had good lyrics, they conveyed whatever immutable quality it is we ascribe to music that we call “good.” But some of these albums were “good” in the sense they were bad. I mean, really fucking bad. If you look at some of my choices below you’ll see what I mean. Do I really think “Oral Roberts: On Country Roads” was a good album? Hell no, I think it’s a piece of crap and I’ll probably never listen to it again. But as a testament to the absolute ludicrousness of decades past, “Oral Robert: On Country Roads” seriously blasts the competition. As such, I tried to include a little of both kinds of “good” in this list – I’ll let you figure out which is which.

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(Originally posted December 2001)

So this was it… this was supposed to be my big break. When diskant contacted me about writing a music column, I figured I’d hit the big time. No longer would I be a part time loser with a full time absinthe addiction, travelling the streets, forlorn and dejected.. By wielding the vast power and clout that came with an organization such as diskant, I’d be on the inside track of the music business. No longer would I have to stand in 100-person lines to watch the big acts; instead, the bouncers would simply wave me through. No longer would I have to hide in the bass drum to get backstage, I’d simply flash my diskant badge and I’d be smoking crack with Axl Rose and Dr. Dre. (On that note: Marceline, where is my diskant badge? You said you’d mailed it weeks ago.) THIS WAS THE BIG TIME, BABY.

The problem came when I sat down to write. As a writer, you’re not so much a self-motivated creative force as you are an ANTENNA TO THE UNIVERSE. You sit down, tune in to the cosmic A.M. and spit out what the great Gods talk at you. Unfortunately the Gods were about as quiet as Harpo in the Marx Bros. films. I just couldn’t get the juices flowing. It seemed a simple enough task – all I had to do was lay down my thoughts on the music of the day. (Sure, most music of today sucks, as did most music of yesterday and will most music of tomorrow, but there’s still plenty of chill stuff to hip people to.) It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say about it, it was just… it had all been said before. So, I was sitting there, feeling the rage of literary impotency wash over me and my eyes desperately cast themselves about my bedroom for inspiration. Could that pile of dirty socks speak to me about the state of modern music? For the first time, they were quiet. What about my collection of 1960s erotica? It too held its tongue. But then my eye settled on the darkest corner of my room and Shiva, Jesus, Elvis and all the other Gods of inspiration spoke to me. In that corner, you see, lay my record collection… my beautiful record collection… comprised mostly of obscure audio treats I’d picked up at a variety of pawnshops, garage sales and home invasions throughout the years. These records had eased the pain of many a lonesome night and spoke singularly about me – about my tastes and my ideas. Who else would have an album by the 1970’s progressive rock band, Kayak, next to the Broadway soundtrack for “A Chorus Line.” Or the Brothers Johnson’s 70’s funk masterpiece, “Light Up The Night,” sleeve to sleeve with Robert Goulet’s “Summer Sounds.” None other than little old me, that’s who! And I realized that I finally had a tangible theme I could work with! By examining records like the vinyl that lay resting amongst the filth-strewn contents of my room I could provide a look at the history of rock and roll. Because the albums that end up in the used bins and pawnshops truly are a genre unto themselves. They’re the one hit wonders and the no-hit flounders. They represented lifetimes of rock and roll dreams gone up in smoke due to record company bankruptcies, changing fads, lack of talent or plain ol’ tragedy. These records were the grimy old men who sit at the end of the bar… and at last someone would tell their story!

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