At one point in my life I was at an age when I was capable of distinguishing between what I liked and disliked concerning music, but wasn’t able to search and find things on my own. I was sure that I liked songs that told stories, and I was sure that I could get away with anything I wanted. Those were the two things I was absolutely sure of. That and the fact that dragons were real, unicorns were fake and wizards lived in my backyard. When it comes to songs that tell a story, there is no man better than Marty Robbins, and no song better than “Big Iron.”
Crooning is an ability few are capable of achieving. Elvis did it, Buck Owens did it, but Marty Robbins did it best. It takes quite a bit to gain complete attention from a growing young man, but when Robbins has a story to tell, he does it in a fashion that erases any sign of distraction and draws the listener into such complete attention it’s impossible to let your mind drift away. “Big Iron” tells the story of a stranger coming to town where the outlaw Texas Red (thought to be an insinuated Billy the Kid) is holding up. Texas Red calls him out to the street for a showdown. The time is 11:20 (forget about high noon, it’s too damn hot) when the two face each other.
The first time I remember hearing “Big Iron” was approximately 15 minutes after my first experience with looting. I’d walked out of a mom and pop shop in Estes Park with a California Raisin toy, unpaid for and unscathed. I was free. When my mother noticed me playing with it in the back seat (why I thought I’d get away with it while sitting a mere two feet away from her is still a mystery to me) she grabbed my arm and interrogated me. Suddenly, freedom was looking like a far-off place, and the only discernable future I could see myself in involved a small western town, a bottle of whiskey, and a stranger coming to town to shoot me down.
As my mother began to scold me and my father turned the car around, Robbins crooned on, “20 men had tried to take him/ 20 men had made a slip/ 21 would be the ranger/ with the big iron on his hip.”
My mind was racing so fast I wasn’t paying attention to my mother yelling. Could I become the outlaw that Robbins spoke of? Was it possible that little old me, stealing California Raisins, would someday become an Arizona ranger’s prime target? Is it possible I could kill 20 men?
In the end the ranger kills Texas Red, and his gunslinger speed is still talked about to this day. I have yet to make it out to the old west, and after returning the raisin and apologizing for my actions, I was once again returned to freedom. What the future holds at this point is still questionable, but with Texas Red out of the way and Calfornia Raisins still locked in 1992, it would be a difficult task for me to end up an outlaw in Mariposa County.
So, we here in Thoronia are busy busy with school projects, one of these projects was to combine a new medium to an old audibiographical text. Never to be outdone I created this bizarre… thing… volume isn’t great as it was never mastered, nor really even recorded properly, but, well, there you go. “The Hall of the Old Ladies Recorder” as “performed” by a highly caffeinated King Thor.
“The machine was open. No kidding, just sitting there, wide open on a Sunday, a hundred quarters just sitting there.” My pulse was beating hard when I spoke these words to my friend Andy over the phone, “And I got a free issue of the Sunday Rocky Mountain News.”
“Enough of the Rocky,” he said to me, “how much did you get?”
It was a wide-open change box of the Rocky Mountain News newspaper box that enabled me to purchase my first Sonic Youth album, 1995’s Washing Machine. Living in a small town the box probably wasn’t cleaned out too often; in fact, it seems like we only received the Sunday edition of the Rocky, they never bothered bringing us the news during the week. In this open box was 140 quarters, probably all from that day alone. So there I was, $35 right in front me, faced with a decision that, I’ll be honest, wasn’t too difficult to make. I packed the quarters into my backpack and biked home. My parents were gone for the day, so I dumped the money out all over the bed and began to count. That’s when I called my friend Andy. He’d just picked up Washing Machine and was listening to it while I talked to him.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s Sonic Youth. It’s amazing,” he said.
I was hearing, I found out later, the last track “Diamond Sea,” a 19-minute freakout that would later blow my mind with face-melting noise riffs that I can honestly say I never thought I’d hear in my life.
So I went out with my quarters and bought the album. The clerk, a face that I’d learn to know over the next few years, congratulated me on purchase, but looked at me with a distinct air of annoyance as I plopped down the $15 worth of quarters.
“You give up collecting them or something?” the clerk said to me.
Startled at someone questioning the origin of the quarters, I muttered something about a crazy aunt or uncle and ran out of the store.
I popped it in my Aiwa CD player when I got home. “Becuz” kicked in and my brain felt like it was about to hemorrhage. “What is this?” I thought to myself. “This can’t be music, this is, this is something else all together.”
Then the nine-minute title track hit me in the face. My eyes opened wide, the feeling of panic hit me, and for whatever reason, I began to feel guilty about my recent treasure hunt. Thurston Moore seemed to be yelling at me, Kim Gordon slapped me in the face, Gordon sang, “it’s a woman’s face/ and she threw a quarter down at me and she said / ‘honey, here’s a quarter go put it in the washing machine.’” The rock continued to pummel me in the face, and the words echoed over and over in my head, “here’s a quarter.” They knew. I don’t know how, but Sonic Youth knew I bought their album with quarters that weren’t rightfully mine.
I took the CD off, sat down on my bed and stared at the backpack filled with quarters. I never mentioned it again, I never bought anything larger than a soda or some candy with Blackbeard’s stolen change. I even bought a few copies of the Rocky each week to pay them back. As far as I was concerned, I owed them the $35 that I stole. I think I still owe them about $25, but after they went out of business I realized it probably doesn’t matter much anymore.
It’s common I assume, for people who work in kitchens to sing songs that they know and love when the radio has come to be too much of a hassle. It is, I have to admit, a little awkward to remember this very thing happening to the tune of several grown men, Hispanic and white, metal and punk, gay and straight, to the jingle “Part of Your World,” from the Little Mermaid soundtrack.
I would go to work and sling pizza dust into the air three or four days a week. Conversations generally revolved around what we considered to be humorous phallic symbols or using the word “gay” in ways that would make us chuckle with unbridled P.C. abhorrence. It wasn’t like we were speaking to each other about William Faulkner or Maurice Blanchott; we were speaking like William Shatner and ogling Kate Blanchett. We were making fart jokes, trying to keep our minds intact in a muggy kitchen with orders stacked everywhere. The song was remarkably apropos for the environment we were in.
It seemed to come out of nowhere. One of the longhaired metal head line cooks with camouflage pants chimed in first, with, “Look at all this stuff/isn’t it neat?/Wouldn’t you think my collection’s complete?” I think he was staring at a slab of pork rear. Most of us looked on in bemused stares. It was coming back, that song, to each and every one of us at different moments. The Hispanic dishwasher joined in at, “How many wonders can one cavern hold?” I took a little bit longer to remember the song, coming in at the chorus, “I’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty/I’ve got whozits and whatzits galore/(You want thingamabobs? I got 20)/But who cares?/No big deal/I want more.” With this final line of the chorus, we all erupted into a near scream, undoubtedly alarming several, if not all, of the patrons of the restaurant.
Lightning had struck, and we were stuck with this sick and depraved, tired and bored, young and old version of a Disney song. We were all a little startled by the song’s consistent unraveling as each person would remember different sections of the song in, sometimes a reverse order of the original intention. It was happening right then, sporadically, in a restaurant, just like in the movies. We burst into song, pulling up some kind of collective unconscious from our youth of watching cartoons, the words floating from the heavens, through our mouths in a moment that marked the beginning of a new childhood. It’s true, the musical is true and it is possible for a group of people to burst into song without warning.
The song tricked me though. It wasn’t what it seemed. After careful consideration, I noticed the intrinsic and profound sadness of the tune. Little Mermaid was speaking to me, about me. I took record of my own life. I had gadgets, gizmos and thingamabobs aplenty too, but I didn’t care, I wanted more. Not more things, something more; I wanted to experience a touch, just as the mermaid girl wanted to live on land, to feel the sun, I wanted to see the ocean, to travel the world, to learn about things I didn’t comprehend.
I’m still living under the sea, I’m still wondering “what happens when a fire (what’s that word?) burns?” I’m still trying to be/part of that world.
The point is that this Toshiba commercial flew on by, featuring a Crystal Castles song (the one I actually like, oddly), and it’s worth sharing for the sheer technical expertise of it. So, there you go, someone else’s creations for today!
