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Entry date: 10-31-2024 – Happy Halloween Ergonomic Friends – Letters to My Friends

Dear Friends,

 

Trick or treat

Gimme something good to eat

Ashes, ashes

We all fall down

 

Trick or treat

Smell my feet

Assholes, assholes

Don’t vote for clowns

 

Trick or treat

Blame the creeps

Antics, antics

It’s all burning down.

 

***** 

 

There is very little joy for me in Halloween this year. I miss my wife. She should be home now. Doug should be in his condo, and we should have had the same discussion that we’ve had in previous years about whether or not he wanted me to get him candy to pass out.

 

I like getting candy for the trick or treaters. It’s something I usually enjoy, but yesterday when I finally broke down and got some, I just didn’t care. I bought it, but I just don’t feel anything about it.

 

It’s not like I had a bad day yesterday, either. I mean, it wasn’t great at work, but that was my own damn fault. I think I was able to avoid a really embarrassing situation with regard to our upcoming field trip…which I had forgotten about, and I’ll use it as a learning experience…but work was just not happening for me.

 

Other things were good, though, and that’s what matters.

 

My children know exactly how to work me. Teresa texted and asked me to deliver her some dinner by appealing to my distaste for food that is too old. When you don’t have a sense of smell, you end up throwing a lot of things away that might still be good, but you’ll never know. All she had to do was write, “The food in the freezer is all freezer burned” and Daddy ran right over with some chili.

 

I made chili on Tuesday night, and it turned out pretty good, I think. It’s basic, but it works. I don’t know if I ever made chili from scratch before. I don’t think I have. It was easy. Time consuming, but easy.

 

Fuck this Halloween shit this year, though. I’m over it.

 

***** 

 

At some point in 1985, I was given a copy of Bad Music for Bad People by The Cramps. They have been one of my favorite all-time bands ever since. At the time that I got the record, I didn’t know anything about them other than the fact that I had seen them on Urgh! A Music War a few years earlier and a lot of people I knew wrote their name on notebooks, backpacks, and wore their shirts.

 

It was a few years before I learned that this was a compilation of previously released material. I just thought it was a great record. Maybe one of the greatest punk rock records of all time.

 

The thing about The Cramps, though, is that they transcend punk rock. They have strong and wonderful elements of garage, psychedelic, rockabilly, and horror, as well. While many other bands would have loved to have been like The Cramps, no one else was or is like them. Everyone else in those genres pale in comparison.

 

This is why Bad Music for Bad People is the perfect record to celebrate Halloween with this year. I couldn’t think of another record that reminds me more of what the candy holiday feels like to me. It’s also, as mentioned, one of my favorite records and if I didn’t get to it now, it would be very, very soon.

 

It feels like a broken record, but this was yet another record where it was love at first listen. “Garbageman” kicks off the just over half an hour of great songs. “If you can’t dig me, you can’t dig nothin’/do you want the real thing or are you just talkin’/do you understand?/I’m the garbageman.”

 

Lux Interior wrote some great lyrics in his day, and these are right up there. I know every lyric on the record. I have known them all for almost 40 years, too. “New Kind of Kick” is another favorite of mine because when I first heard it, it was something “I ain’t had.” I was right there with Interior and Poison Ivy and Kid Congo Powers and Nick Knox. I wanted something new just like they did.

 

“Love Me” is another favorite, but “I Can’t Hardly Stand It” and “She Said” are the motherfucking shit. I love those two songs as much as any other songs. They get me going to this day and I am so thankful that I got to see The Cramps play these live a couple of times.

 

‘Ooh, ee, ah ah.”

 

When I was 15, I thought the cover art was a depiction of the “Goo Goo Muck.” Someone brought me in on the truth eventually, but for a while there, I thought the caricature of Interior was the actual Goo Goo Muck. That memory still makes me smile.

 

“Save It” just moves and shakes all over the place and “Human Fly” is one of the first songs by anyone that I taught myself to play on my own. I have this great bootleg from a 1979 show in San Diego that I used to play along with in my apartment on 7th Ave. I was pretty proud of myself.

 

“Drug Train” is one that I enjoyed the hell out of as a teenager, back when I rode the drug train a lot myself. I could identify with these lyrics a lot. “I used to know where I was going til I got onboard the drug train.” This one has Bryan Gregory on guitar, I believe, and it sounds so damn good.

 

“TV Set” is another one I learned to play. I would mess with that all the time into the late 90s and Hillbilly Devilspeak entertained the idea of covering it around 1999. I wish we would have. I had a good idea for how to do it our style.

 

The last song is “Uranium Rock” and it certainly ends things with a bang. The Cramps were one of the greatest bands happening in the late 1970s and early 1980s and most people had no idea of the greatness that was out there waiting for them. I’m thankful to the people in my life who helped me discover The Cramps.

 

***** 

 

See you tomorrow.



Batman joined the Cramps. AI is bitchin'!

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1 Comment


jfloydbennett
7 days ago

I've often said "Human Fly" is one of the 20th century's greatest artistic achievements.

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