Hello, death. Goodbye, Avenue A.
I'm tired of waiting. Tired of being afraid. Joseph Campbell gave me hope and now I have been saved.
Ah, good times. A weekend with old friends. Fun. Lots of music. Lots of . . . well, never mind.
I was on in the music scene in Raleigh in the late 80's. I had a good friend who was in bands and worked in a record store, so I heard all the cool new stuff. I think I still thought of it as the "punk" scene but it had really evolved further than that. I saw a lot of good shows. I saw the Flaming Lips and Sonic Youth repeatedly. The Flaming Lips put on a great show. They were good, period, plus they had a lot of crazy accessories. Have you ever seen what a disco mirror-ball does in a cloud of smoke? You can see the individual shafts of light, reflecting off the facets of the ball, striking out through the smoke, and the bubbles from the bubble-machine drifitng down among them.
In 1991 I started going to Appalachian. I fell into a crowd which included several fellows whose sense of self-worth was deeply grounded in keeping up with the cool new bands. Several times a year we would road-trip down to the Cat's Cradle and see some show or other. One time, this guy got left down there. There was a girl - she went by many names: "Frolina," "Martha Washington" - she was basically a hanger-on, a coat-tail rider. She decided she needed to go to some show because all the cool kids were going, and a friend of mine needed a ride, and they ended up taking this border-line nut-case who wandered in and out of our scene. What went down is that the nut-case freaked out Frolina and she left both guys in Chapel Hill. My friend hitched back the next day. The nut-case wandered around Chapel Hill for a week. I can't remember how he finally got back.
I kept up with these people until about the mid-nineties, and when I lost track of them, I stopped hearing about new music for several years. Luckily, around this time they started playing some cool stuff on the radio. This is also when I started buying movie soundtracks. That's a bad sign.
I have new friends now who introduce me to new music. They visited me last weekend. Saturday night they plied me with their CD's to play, and I played old records of my own for a while and then passed out.
He's so . . . what's the word? Unpredictable.