None Of Your Damn Business

In honor of today being Halloween, I am going to tell you a true spooky story. This happened last fall. Flynn, James, Vince, and I had all piled into the Huck mobile to do some resort shows in the Pokonos. It was a great time, we were regaling each other with how much we loved the hot tub that's shaped like a martini glass and the heart shaped beds. Vince was driving and was in a nostalgic mood so he took some back roads in Pennsylvania. He calls them short cuts.

We had been on this one dirt road for at least 10 miles when James saw this old man by the side of the road. He was wearing an army jacket. Some dusty corduroy pants. A pair of red leather cowboy boots. He was carrying this wrinkled, tattered brown paper bag. And he had his thumb out.

So naturally, James wants to pick him up. Flynn immediately said, if you pick up that man, he will be crazy. I said I didn't care as long as he wasn't sitting by me. But Vince thought it would be interesting to do as well and James got his way. So Vince pulled over to the shoulder and picked the old man up.

He sat in the back with James riding the hump seat and me by the other window. Flynn was 'navigating' up front. Flynn asked him where he was going. The old man growled, "stop being so nosy!" So James started chatting him up, mentioning how nice it was and how traveling by yourself must be an adventure.

The old man softened a bit at that. The whole time he had been clutching that brown bag like something might escape from it. Vince asked him, "Hey man, what's in the bag?"

"NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS!" the old man shouted.

Flynn and I exchanged nervous looks. While James said, "Yeah, man----don't hound the guy." I almost laughed. The car was in silence for about a minute or so. Vince turned on the radio.

Somebody broke wind. I think it was the old man. But who knows? James had eaten chili for lunch. You never know. Everyone groaned and we rolled down the windows.

Once cabin pressure was reestablished, we got moving again. I was pretty curious about this dude and his bag. So I asked him again, "Hey, come on----what's with the bag?"

"NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS!"

Even louder this time. And after that we all exchanged glances at each other. This probably wasn't the smartest thing to do. Who was this guy? We didn't know. So with the subtlety of a band improvising with themsleves, we all tacitly agreed to booting the old man back to the curb.

Vince slowed down the Huck Mobile, and Flynn said, "Alright, dude---end of the line." The old man protested but Flynn opened the door from the outside and I pushed James who pushed the dude right out the door. Flynn got it and Vince hit the gas.

Two hours later, we were safe home at Huck Junction. When James was rooting around for smokes, he noticed that the old man's brown bag was in the back seat. We all exchanged big shit eating grins and opened the bag....







This is where you're supposed to ask. Well, what's in the bag?

NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS!

Strange Days Indeed

"May you live in Strange Times."

So I come into rehearsal last Wednesday like at biscuit under a gravy sky. Just sopping. Had I been a magazine, I would have looked like a phone book by the end of the night is how water logged I was. But the boys had cheshire grins on their faces, and all because somebody had anonymously responded to my last blog. After some debate, I decided that anonymous is none other than my ma. I can think of nobody else who would beef with my using the word shit for my gear, be so worried about my housing sitch' and bring up Stephen King and Tom Waits in the same sentence. Even Al Capone had a mother, and mine's been a real Ma Barker when it comes to these artistic pursuits of mine. So thanks ma. The guys rib me that it's some sort of secret admirer, which opens so many Oedipal cans that I don't even want to discuss the worms -but hey, maybe. Whomever anonymous is, that's what they said, "May you live in strange times."

Vince and I are big believers in the Mayan Prophecy. And it was only a matter of time before this made its way into the blog so here it is. The Mayans were a super advanced civilization down in the jungles of South America long about the time of all them other civilizations that you read about. And they had a much more accurate calendar than ours -it was based on the sun, you see. None of this Roman 30 Days hath September tricks to remember the months. It was all much more straight forward than that. And to this day, their ancient calendars predict eclipses and such. The upshot of all this is that according to their calendars, time is a bunch of cycles that are part of much larger, grander cycles -and we're coming to the end of one of them in 2012. Round about Christmas time in fact.

Nobody knows exactly what's supposed to happen at the end of one of these big ass cycles -they really only guess. Some get all apocalyptic, some go with a quantum leap in consciousness -not unlike what supposedly happened between the ape and the illustrious caveman. They just know that it's the end of one great cycle and the beginning of another. Some venture that the aliens show up and stage an X files version of the Rapture. Interesting mostly because the Mayans disappeared without a trace. Nobody really knows what happened to them. Some says the mothership came on down and picked 'em up, qua Parliament, "Swing Down Sweet Chariot Stop and Let me Ride" Others says they just gave up on civilization and melted into the jungle. Terence McKenna thinks it could be something as simple as 2012 is when we discover time travel, which would obliterate our illusion of time being a linear thang. Part of me buys 'em all.

I think that we've always had the technology that we have now. There have been radio waves and television ways flowing through the air straight on through Egypt. What good is technology when the weather's having its way with you. That's what's so amazing about the looters in New Orleans, plasma screen televisions with no electricity. Who knows? My brother was telling me about some footage he saw of a guy guarding his bicycle with a hatchet. What MAD MAX outtakes did this come from? Folks are getting displaced, as my buddy Philly says, "The dust bowl is filled with gumbo." Okay, this is a bit tangential, but let me just pose my own little theory and what happened to Mayans ...

Based on this blog, I would suggest that the Mayans were listening to the Cowboys get thrashed by the Redskins one Halloween, when Orson Welles's famed hoax Broadcast of WAR OF THE WORLDS came through the air waves and scared them so silly, they hid out in the woods and never came back. Kind of like they did in New Jersey. Shit, if every place is like Jersey, why not the Mayan Civilization too, you know. Just shows to go what folks will do when they get wind of something through a piece of media they trust and get a little scared. Folks in New York know all about that -I guess folks every where know alot about that. So look at what happened to the Mayans and the folks in New Jersey one Halloween and take heed.

What if the folks in Plato's cave are just some folks that found a vault of well preserved Hollywood movies and figured out how to run them and decided that those movies are their history and that everything in them really happened? And it takes Plato to go, "No man, these are the just movies from that place that fell in the sea -Atlantis, Hollywood -places fall in the sea sometimes, you know? Anyways ...

I saw a statue of Columbus at the subway today. Besides my immediate reaction of disgust that they could put him up there, I thought of the story about when he came over on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The story goes that the indians couldn't see the boats. They flat out couldn't see 'em. The idea of three frigates showing up on the horizon was so outside of their perspective of what reality could possible be, they couldn't percieve the things. Finally, a shaman of some village or other noticed that the water on the shore was behaving strangely. And he began to percieve with an open mind, and that's when he saw the boats. Then he showed everybody else. Most of 'em prolly wound up wishing they'd never been shown what was happening with the water. But as my widow in Williamsburg said, "Strange things are happening ..." and it ain't just the water. I think it's in the serendipities and synchronicities around us every day and how we need to pay them some mind, and so I try and write about 'em a little bit here. And I think faith and love and hope are important in times like these, and that a great song or a piece of music has a way of cutting to the core and raising the spirit-I'm thinking of Woody, Marley, Dylan, and a host of others -lots of the new hip hop guys, and hopefully one day, Huck' Slim will be in that class. Making folks feel good, reminding them of those things about their own spirits, and showing 'em how funny that water's been acting of late. But mostly just making folks feel good 'cause that's the real blessing. But as for Chinese blessings anonymous, whoever you are, let me just say, (and I think this is just as important) "May strange times live in you."

For Fanboyz

Last night's set...

--Shape I'm In
--Paper Women
--Sissy
--Hollywood
--California
--Missing Mississippi Mister
--Ain't Got Nothin'
--West 33
--The Same Old Streets
--Halloween, 1987

(Encore: Ever Be True)

Glamour Pics

Here are a few pics from the last gig to pin up on your locker or cubicle:

Mouths wide open!

Intricate fretwork.

See the horn blower in the back there?

An important ingredient of any show: Guitar face.

When the music's a big deal, you close your eyes. It's what you do.

This hot pic for the Vince fans out there. He's singing to you.

The Burning Car Prank

Last fall, I wrote a song about growing up and Halloween. For a bit, I was trying to decide what to call it---I toyed with some titles that weren't traditional("This One's For Unicef!", "On Halloween", and "Anyone But Me") but most people realized it should just be called, "Halloween". James suggested that it be called, "Halloween, 1987" just to place it in time and I liked that. It stuck. But people are destined to just refer to it as "Halloween" much as you would be hard pressed to get people to call "Missing Mississippi Mister" anything longer than just "Mississippi".

It's a pain to spell for one thing.

Anyways, in New Jersey(see the patterns emerging?)they have a thing they called "Mischief Night". It takes place the night before Halloween. I'm not really sure why they don't just do it on Halloween. But they do.

When I moved to Woodside, Brian cautioned me about going out on Halloween or "Mischief Night". Apparently, the New York kids don't play around. Eggs are out in force! And he was right. Luckily, I escaped them but as I was walking back home after staying at my then girlfriend's apartment, I stepped over the shells of many broken eggs. Fallen in the line of duty.

It's a funny word that people use to describe all of this, "pranks". Some of the pranks are definitely funny. For instance, the time honored "burning bag of shit". I mean, that's a brilliant prank. You know, where you put it on the person's doorstep and then they have to stamp it out and get crap all over them.

And then there's "forking"---where you put plastic forks all over their lawn but you break the handles off so it's a pain when they try to get them out.

But there are other pranks. For instance...

Even though the song takes place in 1987, I'd like to fast forward to 1988, or it might have been 1989. It was near Halloween, or it might have been "Mischief Night". I woke up in my bedroom. It was hot. I walked to the hallway and there were orange lights dancing on the wallpaper. Confused, I ran downstairs after I heard my brother and sister yelling. I went to the front door(to see what was the matter) and the door was HOT.

I think about it now, and I ignored what they always teach you---if the handle's hot, you're not supposed to open it. But I did that night. And the door opened to a picture of a giant blaze. There, engulfed in flames, was our trusty crap brown Subaru.

Apparently, there was a group of kids that were going around our block and lighting cars on fire. The most interesting part of this story to me is that at first, they weren't very good at doing this.

The first thing they did, was try lighting a match and dropping it in the gas tank. Seems pretty stupid right? I guess the match goes out before it gets to the tank. So the police said. You would think the vapors would just be enough to light on fire but not that night.

Their next idea was to pile leaves into the back seats and light those on fire. They left the windows closed which thwarted the enterprise because the lack of oxygen burned the fires out.

But they had all this schooling behind them by the time they reached the Shelkey house. They rolled down the windows and that car ended up burning. And the whole neigborhood came out to watch our car burn up. The fire department came and thankfully put it out---supposedly before the gas tank blew.

I don't know if that's true or we just like to believe it was scarier than it really was. We used to keep the charred and gunked up piece of metal that used to be the license plate too.

Mostly, I think Brent and I were angry because that crappy car was to be the car we shared in high school. And instead we had to share another car with our sister.

Halloween. 1989.