"The Shitty Beetles"
The jukebox glows orange and pink with warm memories, the record tabs that list the songs locked beneath the hard glass like a curio of memories, a locket of nostalgia for wax and simplicity that grows gooey and scratchy with time like taffy and the liquified corpse of a Barbie doll. The smell insinuates your way up your nostrils-- like waxed checkerboard floors n' burger joints and Elvis in the trap of jail-house rock nostalgia that to us, feels like whimsical "Chubby Checker" liberty as you lumber over to get your order basket.
Years back, my mother with the flighty consciousness of "peas and carrots" decided to wrap me some "Beatles" albums for Christmas as a young, vaguely countercultural Metallica fan with zits and a yearning for "the absolute truth" of what made the edifice of a young, post-New Left upbringing tick, going back to the source material. What did she hand me, but an anthology album, "vol. 2", no less. . . . . that delved into demos and out-takes and alternate versions and strange mixes that would leave the amateur flummoxed.
I was hardly one to dabble in the über-specialist's periphery like a clicking insectivore rustling over dead flies-- yes, a sniveling peace-sign waving pop-rock collector who still wears his hair long like John Lennon and makes a temple of his fingers for "Great Maharishi", but only "not knowing for what" as waste snakes its way out his sad alimentary canal. Such, such as it was for all of our 1960's "play-pen babies" growing old and stale like cancer and chalk drinks and a doctor's gloved thumb.
For all the rebellion, there's a strange ribbon that curls back into the past like a cat's flecking tail.
Back on the late '80s ". . . . . And Justice for All" tour you can spot Jason Newstead, Metallica's erstwhile curly-mopped bassist, wearing a black "Al Green" t-shirt of the musician making a funky, soulful "hey" with his mouth. It was sort of a goofy, Cromagnon reassurance that no one was going to leap off the stage and bludgeon the crowd with their instruments-- whatever the pacing brutality "that walked the line" and then grinned like a friendly, long-haired dinosaur. It is the strange world of "the heavy metal show", about as deadly serious as a bouncing clown-house shaped like a giant skull "where no one really gets hurt".
It was like the market for that old-style Viking drink, "mead". One could purchase it by mail-order, but it would "go down funny" and cause us to gain tons of weight all that sugar and honey and alcohol and additives in there. I need that like I pine for a goofball from "The Society for Creative Anachronism" coming after me with a sword like a cross between a Spinal Tap photography session and something out of a bad Chris Farley picture. Yes, with pouncing lion-men and "King Arthur's Sword" resting down in a stately grip by the most ludicrous of swollen archetypes of "Britannia" and the tolling of the bells from knobby church n' state.
I need a beer. . . . .
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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