Found via Longform: check out these excerpts from Cameron Crowe’s story, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”:

Jeff Spicoli, a Ridgemont legend since third grade, lounged against the doorframe. His long dirty-blond hair was parted exactly in the middle. He spoke thickly, like molasses pouring from ajar. Most every school morning, Spicoli awoke before dawn, smoked three bowls of marijuana from a small steel bong, put on his wet suit and surfed before school. He was never at school on Fridays, and on Mondays only when he could handle it. He leaned a little into the room, red eyes glistening. His long hair was still wet, dampening the back of his white peasant shirt.

“May I come in?”

“Oh, please,” replied Mr. Hand. “I get so lonely when that third attendance bell rings and I don’t see all my kids here.”

The surfer laughed-he was the only one-and handed over his red add card. “Sorry I’m late. This new schedule is totally confusing.”

Mr. Hand read the card aloud with utter fascination in his voice. “Mr. Spicoli?”

“Yes, sir. That’s the name they gave me.”

Mr. Hand slowly tore the red add card into little pieces, effectively destroying the very existence of Jeffrey Spicoli, 15, in the Redondo school system. Mr. Hand sprinkled the little pieces over his wastebasket.

It took a moment for the words to work their way out of Spicoli’s mouth.

“You dick “

Mr. Hand cocked his head. He appeared poised on the edge of incredible violence. There was a sudden silence while the class wondered exactly what he might do to the surfer. Deck him? Throw him out of Ridgemont? Shoot him at sunrise?

But Mr. Hand simply turned away from Spicoli as if the kid had just ceased to exist. Small potatoes. Mr. Hand simply continued with his first-day lecture.

Dig this fine piece on Roy Orbison by Rachel Monroe for the Oxford American:

The Orbison family moved to Wink in 1946, when Roy was ten years old, so his father, Orbie Lee, could find work in the oil fields. Though he did eventually get hired on as a rigger, the Orbisons were late to the oil boom party: Wink’s population peaked at around 6,000 in 1929; seventeen years later, when the Orbisons settled in, most of the wells had dried up and the town had shrunk to about 1,500 residents. “It was macho guys working in the oil field, and football, and oil and grease and sand and being a stud and being cool,” Orbison said later. “It was tough as could be, but no illusions, you know? No mysteries in Wink.”

Orbison wasn’t popular; later he said he felt “totally anonymous, even at home.” He started wearing glasses at age four. When he tried out for the Wink Kittens, the junior high version of the Wink Wildcats high school football team, the helmets didn’t have face guards, and his glasses kept falling off. He didn’t make the team.

Growing up is a lonely enterprise, even more so in a town that’s past its prime. Once he made his money, Orbison left for Tennessee, then Malibu. He wasn’t one to rhapsodize about his childhood very often, but once I visited his hometown, I couldn’t help but hear a telltale hint of Wink every time I listened to his songs: that sense of missing out, of having been passed by. An absence, a longing, a loneliness.

He was a good one.

Def.

Last week I reprinted this gem by Jennifer Briggs.

I have one of the few jobs where the first thing people ask about is penises. Well, Reggie Jackson was my first. And yes, I was scared. I was 22 years old and the first woman ever to cover sports for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Up until then, my assignments had been small-time: high school games and features on father-daughter doubles teams and Hacky Sack demonstrations. But now it was late September, and my editor wanted me to interview Mr. October about what it was like not to make the playoffs.

I’d heard the stories: the tales of women who felt forced to make a stand at the clubhouse door; of the way you’re supposed to never look down at your notepad, or a player might think you’re snagging a glimpse at his crotch; about how you’ve always got to be prepared with a one-liner, even if it means worrying more about snappy comebacks than snappy stories.

Dressed in a pair of virgin white flats, I trudged through the Arlington Stadium tunnel—a conglomeration of dirt and spit and sunflower seeds, caked to the walkway like 10,000-year-old bat guano at Carlsbad Caverns—dreading the task before me. It would be the last day ever for those white shoes—and my first of many covering professional sports.

And there I was at the big red clubhouse door, dented and bashed in anger so many times it conjured up an image of stone-washed hemoglobin. I pushed open the door and gazed into the visitors’ locker room, a big square chamber with locker cubicles lining its perimeter and tables and chairs scattered around the center. I walked over to the only Angel who didn’t yet have on some form of clothing. Mr. October, known to be Mr. Horse’s Heinie on occasion, was watching a college football game in a chair in the middle of it all—naked. I remember being scared because I hadn’t known how the locker room was going to look or smell or who or what I would have to wade through—literally and figuratively—to find this man.

It’s worth your time:

 

 

I remember Pong and I remember when my Dad’s friend Marty got Atari and had Space Invaders. Then, at least in my memory, I remember Asteroids coming before Pac Man.

Over at the Daily Beast, I curated a story that David Owen wrote for Esquire back in 1981 on the Asteroids craze. It was the first magazine story Owen ever wrote and it holds up:

It’s lunchtime in Manhattan, and the Playland arcade at Forty-seventh Street and Broadway is crowded. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Playland’s traditional clientele of Times Square drifters and truant schoolboys is what appears to be a full-scale assault team from the corporate tower of nearby Rockefeller Center. You can hardly move from one end of the place to the other without grinding your heel on somebody’s wing-tip shoe. Over near the Seventh Avenue entrance, a tall thin man with a briefcase pressed between his knees is hunched over a flashing pinball table called JAMES BOND. At a change station near the center of the room, a portly lawyer type is converting the contents of his wallet into enough quarters to bribe a congressional subcommittee. There are three-piece suits everywhere. But the densest agglomeration of gray wool by far stands at the very front of the arcade by a long bank of thumping, thundering machines, where a veritable legion of young executives is lined up three deep to play Asteroids.

Asteroids, at the moment I am writing, is the most popular coin-operated game—video, pinball, or other—in the United States. It jumped to the number one spot not long ago by out-earning Space Invaders, a simple-minded but wildly successful Japanese import that swept this country after 
creating something close to mass hysteria (not to mention a coin shortage) in Japan. Introduced in December 1979, Asteroids quickly became standard equipment in bars, arcades, and airports all over the country. Tavern owners who had previously been scared away from coin-op games by pinball’s underworld reputation now began to clamor for Asteroids. Atari Inc., the game’s manufacturer, had trouble keeping production in step with demand. There are now sixty thousand Asteroids machines on location worldwide, most of them in the United States and most of them
astonishingly popular. Machines in hot locations have been known to bring in as much as one thousand dollars a week, enough to pay for themselves in a little more than a fortnight. Operators who tend fleets of machines are finding they have to make extra trips to their locations just to empty the coin boxes of the Asteroids machines.

As impressive as the sales and collection figures are, one of the most intriguing facts about Asteroids is not how many people are playing it but which ones. Continuing a trend begun by its immediate predecessors, Asteroids has helped open up the coin-op market to a brand-new clientele: not just chain-smoking teenagers with time on their hands but responsible, well-paid men in their twenties, thirties, forties, and even fifties, who in some cases haven’t seen the inside of an amusement arcade since the days when pinball games had pins. And now these men—these sober minions of the gross national product—are backing out of expense-account lunches and sneaking away from elegant restaurants to play Asteroids.

“I’ve pretty much eliminated lunch as an ongoing part of my daily routine,” says a thirty-four-year-old stockbroker. “I’d rather play than eat. Along about four o’clock my stomach begins to growl, but Asteroids has made me a happy man.”

Dig this new video series. 

Wonderful piece by the Times on Old Masters.

I dig this from Lewis Lapham:

Now I am 79. I’ve written many hundreds of essays, 10 times that number of misbegotten drafts both early and late, and I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

[Photo Credit: Robert Capa]

Funski.

Dig this terrific profile of Angela Lee Duckworth by Marguerite Del Giudice over at National Geographic:

At the moment, Angela and her team are working on clever interventions to help students learn how to work hard and adapt in the face of temptation, distraction, and defeat. The total educational challenge is to accomplish this while at the same time steering them toward their passions, making sure they run around enough and enjoy childhood, and taking care not to inflict psychological damage.

How do you increase grit and self-control, not just in children but also in teachers and people in general, beyond just exhorting them to grin and bear it? Angela cites a current “big study” in and around Philadelphia in which randomly assigned students are asked to change their house or their bedroom in some way that would make studying easier. It could be as simple as having a better light in the room or putting their cell phones on a faraway shelf. If you want to start eating a healthful breakfast—oatmeal instead of a doughnut and coffee, say—you might decide to put the oatmeal out where you can see it first thing in the morning, take a route that doesn’t go by the Dunkin’ Donuts, or simply cover up any intrusive pastry with a napkin to make it less appealing. “Even young children know these tricks,” Angela says, “but adults sometimes forget them.”

These ideas, and her findings about hard work and persistence, are so plain and seemingly self-evident that Angela sometimes has a heck of a time getting across what a profound difference they could make in expanding human potential.

“It’s so simple,” she says, “that it’s hard to explain.”

At the University of Chicago, before a group of professors, she was asked why she studies perseverance. “Why?” she said. “Because life is hard. Because there are just obstacles every day to everything that we want to do. If it were easy, it would be done already, and I think that goes for any work that’s worthwhile.”

In our talent-obsessed culture, talent has been studied and is well understood. Perseverance? Not so much. Meanwhile, what college admissions officers and business leaders have told her they’re looking for these days from applicants is in keeping with her findings. It’s no longer students who’ve padded their résumés by doing a little bit of everything or just prospects with the best college grades; they want people who stuck with something meaningful to them over time and demonstrated some level of mastery, and it doesn’t necessarily matter in what. In a grit presentation by Skype with a group of educators from the Southwest that I sat in on, Angela quoted Martha Graham talking about what it takes for a mature dancer to make it look easy: “Fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep” and—here’s Angela’s favorite line—”there are daily small deaths.”

In other words, children need to be taught to appreciate that they’re supposed to suffer when working hard on a challenge that exceeds their skill. They’re supposed to feel confused. Frustration is probably a sign that they’re on the right track and need to gut it out through the natural human aversion to mental effort and feeling overwhelmed so they can evolve.

[Photo Via PBS]

HD.

And if you haven’t seen it, check out Margaret Talbot’s 2007 New Yorker profile of David Simon.

Here’s a treat from Longform, an excerpt from Studs Turkel’s 1974 book, Working:

You get up at six, you fix breakfast for the kids, you get them ready to go on to school. Leave home about eight. Most of the time I make biscuits for my kids, cornbread you gotta make. I don’t mean the canned kind. This I don’t call cookin’, when you go in that refrigerator and get some beans and drop ‘em in a pot. And TV dinners, they go stick ‘em in the stove and she say she cooked. This is not cookin’.

When I work, only thing I be worryin’ about is my kids. I just don’t like to leave ‘em too long. Wlien they get out of school, you wonder if they out on the street. The only thing I worry is if they had a place to play in easy. I always call two, three times. When she don’t like you to call, I’m in a hurry to get out of there. (Laughs.) My mind is gettin’ home, what are you gonna find to cook before the stores close.

They want you to get in a uniform. You take me and my mother, she work in what she wear. She tells you, “If that place so dirty where I can’t wear my dress, I won’t do the job.” You can’t go to work dressed like they do, ‘cause they think you’re not working—like you should get dirty, at least. They don’t say what kind of uniform, just say uniform. This is in case anybody come in, the black be workin’. They don’t want you walkin’ around dressed up, lookin’ like them. They asks you sometimes, “Don’t you have somethin’ else to put on?” I say, “No, ‘cause I’m not gettin’ on my knees.”

I had them put money down and pretend they can’t find it and have me look for it. I worked for one, she had dropped ten dollars on the floor, and I was sweepin’ and I’m glad I seen it, because if I had put that sweeper on it, she coulda said I got it. I had to push the couch back and the ten dollars was there. Oh, I had ‘em, when you go to dust, they put something . . . to test you.

You know what I wanted to do all my life? I wanted to play piano. And I’d want to write songs and things, that’s what I really wanted to do. If I could just get myself enough to buy a piano … And I’d like to write about my life, if I could sit long enough.”

[Photo Credit: Brandon Stanton/Humans of New York]

David Carr writes about the way it is:

For the last six months, my magazines, once a beloved and essential part of my media diet, have been piling up, patiently waiting for some mindshare, only to be replaced by yet another pile that will go unread. I used to think that people who could not keep up with The New Yorker were shallow individuals with suspect priorities. Now I think of them as just another desperate fellow traveler, bobbing in a sea of information none of us will see to the bottom of. We remain adrift.

As Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic, “it is easier to read ‘Ulysses’ than it is to read the Internet. Because at least ‘Ulysses’ has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished.”

Some days, when I board the bus or train to the city, I’ll stash a print copy of The Journal in my bag with a magazine or two, in high hopes of reading them. And after I settle in, I will check my email on my phone. The relevant message usually comes in faster than I can get rid of it. Sometimes when people ask what I do for a living, I am tempted to say that I write emails.

…Still, there was some trouble in paradise on the Ethan Allen Express. More than a few people around me were cursing the indifferent Wi-Fi as they desperately tried to remain tethered to the grid. Behind me, a passenger made serial phone calls in a mind-erasing loud voice. “I’m on the train!” he would always begin.

It struck me that part of the reason we always stay jacked in is that we want everyone — at the other end of the phone, on Facebook and Twitter, on the web, on email — to know that we are part of the now. If we look away, we worry we will disappear.

We are all on that train, the one that left print behind, the one where we are constantly in real time, where we know a little about everything and nothing about anything, really. And there is no quiet car.

Bzzzzz.

[Picture by Bags]

Great rock n roll pictures found here.

I tried to read The Hobbit when I was a kid but I thought it was boring and I didn’t make it too far. I never read J.R.R. Toilken’s famous Lord of the Rings triology. But I did enjoy Joan Acocella’s review of Toilken’s newly-published translation of Beowulf:

As an adult, Tolkien could read many languages—and he made up more, including Elvish—but the number is not the point. Even in secondary school, Carpenter says, “Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that were common to them all.” Or, in the words of C. S. Lewis, his closest friend, for a time, in adulthood, he had been inside language. Perhaps he couldn’t come back out. By this I don’t mean that he couldn’t talk to his wife or his postman, but that Old English, or at least that of “Beowulf,” was where he was happiest. He knew how it worked, he loved its ways: how the words joined and separated, what came after what. Old English is where he spent most of the day, in his reading, writing, and teaching. He might have come to think that this language was better than our modern one. The sympathy may have gone even deeper. Like Beowulf, Tolkien was an orphan. (He was taken in by his grandparents.) He grew up in the West Midlands, and said that the “Beowulf” poet, too, was probably from there. He did not have difficulty living in a world of images and symbols. (He was a Catholic from childhood.) He liked golden treasure and coiled dragons. Perhaps, in the dark of night, he already knew what would happen: that he would never publish his beautiful “Beowulf,” and that his intimacy with the poem, more beautiful, would remain between him and the poet—a secret love.

[Picture by Jeffrey Alan Love]

Put the Needle to the Groove…

[Disclaimer: This mix is rated R for “Dirty Words.” Not safe for work. Or, as Richard Pryor once put it: “Fuck censorship and its Mama.”]

I listened to a lot of rap records starting in the late ‘80s throughout the ‘90s. I bought vinyl, collected mixtapes, and stayed up late to record mix shows on WNYU (89.1) and WKCR (89.9). I’d put aside enough material to make a half-dozen mixes, and so when my old chum Alan (a/k/a illchemist) approached me last December about doing another full-length mix project (our last one, Borough to Borough, was made in 2000), I had plenty of material to choose from.

My idea for this one was to re-create the feeling you get listening to late night radio show featuring beats, rhymes, and scratching, movie dialogue and comedy sound bites. At the start I had only a rough idea of how I wanted it to go: light and bouncy to start, boom bap head-bangers in the middle, segueing into an extended cool-out section to wind out.

The way Alan and I work is that I bring all the records and a whole bunch of scenes from movies and comedy albums. We start building one track at a time and then begin to stitch a few songs together and get an idea of blocks and what the overall form will be. There are at least 6 or 7 songs that we had in early versions of the mix along the way—songs that I was begging to find a place for like Primo’s original version of “Memory Lane” or my friend Jared’s remix of Freeway’s “How We Do”—but had to be cut because they didn’t fit. One of the many nice things about collaborating with Alan, is that we’re cool with losing something if we agree that it is not working.

Alan’s approach to adding samples to a mix is like returning a serve. He doesn’t have anything particular in mind but picks up on whatever I send him and then goes from there.

“That way,” he says, “the mix really becomes a dialogue instead of a debate. It really is like volleying back and forth, because you never quite know where it is going.”

While I love lyrics and the flow and quality of different rappers’ voices, Alan hears records more as collections of frequencies, and how they add up to make the right vibe. He concentrates on the sonic content than anything else” he says. “A mix can contain anything. Music is only part of the spectrum. The vibe is the overall directive, made out of everything put together: frequencies, rhythm, and cadence. The sound of a record speaks it’s own language. Everybody knows what bass and treble are, and you know what happens when you turn one up. Get a good bassline, get a good drum part and it becomes its own mantra.”

“Once you have a foundation,” he continues, “adding bits of spoken word gives new context to the track as well as to the bits of dialogue you use. Making these bits fall in rhythm adds a weight to them, like a speech or a sermon, or a lyric.”

The samples and dialogue we like never strays too far from a basic core of funky records, old movies, cartoons and funny, cool shit of any variety. Some of it is stuff that we’ve had stuck in our heads for decades. A sound bite might be an in-joke to us—all of our samples are autobiographical, really—but we think everyone will get it (and if they don’t, whaddya gonna do?)

When we made Borough to Borough, I’d bring records and videotapes to Alan’s house (we both lived in Brooklyn at the time). We’d digitize the material in real time and go from there. We spent about 120 hours working together on it. This time around, I thought we might be able to make a full-length mix album in half the time. Turns out we spent just as many hours on it. The difference is the ease of the workflow. If Alan thinks of an idea he doesn’t have to get up, go hunt around for the record, find it, bring it back, put it on the turntable…by the time he’s done all that the idea is gone.

Now, we had the luxury of having more time to think of it instead of laboring to do it. It’s a different time warp. We had more time to live with it. We could have done it in a month but it wouldn’t have been nearly as good. We needed to hear it repeatedly—me listening on my iPhone on my subway commute to work, and Alan, seemingly, just hears it in his head all the time, and is always thinking about what to add or subtract—before we could really fill in all the blanks.

The technology freed us up to ponder it. We were able to float for days at times and let things come us instead of fretting over it. And we didn’t spent one minute together in the studio. We Skyped every week but mostly I’d send Alan an email with notes, he’d take a pass at it, put it in Dropbox. I’d listen, give more notes, and back and forth like that we’d go, volleying until we were satisfied.

So, there you have it. We’ll post three singles and a mini-mix–12 minutes of just the sound collage stuff–throughout the week.

We hope you dig it. Happy Spring.

Another Fine Mess 

Side One

Maracas Beach (1978)–Grover Washington Jr.

The Emcee (1998)–MC Lyte with Milk D

Illusions (1993?)–Cypress Hill (Q-Tip Mix)

Devotion ’92–Charizma and Peanut Butter Wolf

Behind Bars (1992)–Slick Rick (Prince Paul Remix)

Skinz-Yabba Dabba Do (1992)–Pete Rock, C.L. Smooth, Chubb Rock

Moon River (1985)–Fletch, Nelson Riddle

Meat Grinder (2001)–MF Doom and Madlib

Time’s Up (1994)–OC (Jared Boxx Mix)

Friend or Foe ’98–Jay Z (produced by DJ Premier)

B Ball Interlude (1998)–The Beastie Boys

New York Love (1996)–Sun Dullah, Doo Wop (Stretch blend)

’95 Wake Up Freestyle–Tha Alkaholiks with Xzibit

Rework the Angles (1999)–Dilated Peoples, AG, Defari

Fargo Silence (1996)–Steve Buscemi

Lemonade (1992)–Gangstarr and Madlib (Al and Ill Blend)

 

Side Two

Leflaur Leflah Eshkoshka (1996)–Heltah Skeltah

Day One (1997)–D.I.T.C.

Maracas Beach Reprise (’78)–Grover Washington Jr.

Can I Kick the Wild Side? (1989)–Lou Reed and A Tribe Called Quest (inspired by J Rocc)

Soul Flower (We Got) (1993)–The Pharcyde and Quest (Gummy Soul Mix)

On Wid Da Show Skit (1996)–Kardinal Offishall

When it Pours it Rains (1999)–Diamond D

I am Me (1994)–Common

Eye Patch Skit (1993)–De La Soul

Open Your Mouth (1997)–Prince Paul

Haagen-Daz (1998)–The Blvd Connection featuring Tame One

Animal Crackers–Chico and Groucho Marx

Sunrays (2001)–Yesterdays’ New Quintet/Madlib

 

Another Fine Mess (Track By Track)

Maracas Beach (Grover’s Theme). In 1996, Siah and Yeshua daPoED, a duo from New York, released their LP Visualz on Bobitto’s Fondle ‘Em label. The first cut on the album used this Grover Washington record. I could never find an instrumental version though I knew one existed because I heard it one night on DJ. Riz’s show on 89.1. It felt like the perfect late night groove for a hip hop radio show. A theme song. I’ve wanted to use it ever since and it was the first thing I talked about with Alan for this project. I knew I wanted to use it at least twice, maybe even three times (in the end, we used it just the two times). I downloaded a re-created version of the Siah instrumental that I found on You Tube a few years ago and that’s what we use here.

We tried a few different movie bits to start the mix. The first thing we came up with was Myrna Loy and William Powell from The Thin Man. For a long time we introduced that with Bill Murray from Stripes. It was fine but not inspired. Eventually, we tried Lauren Bacall’s famous bit from To Have and Have Not. It wasn’t just her line—“you just put your lips together and blow”—that makes the scene memorable, it’s all the other dialogue leading up to it. I was leery at first about using such a well-known quote because we don’t want to hit things too squarely on the head, but Alan knew exactly what to do with the clip and when he rearranged it in a new order he made it shine.

The Emcee. This is something I came across on Oliver Wang’s beautiful site Soul-Sides. He ran a series of posts a few years ago called “The Great Rap Purge” featuring some lesser-known but quality songs. Lyte is one of my favorite emcees and this record spoke to me with its re-working of the “Top Billin’” beat.  We augmented it with: Audio Two – “Top Billin’”; Carmen Miranda – “Mama Equiero”; The Dramatics – “Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get”; The Honeydrippers – “Impeach The President”; The Jacksons – “Blame It On The Boogie”; Public Enemy – “Bring The Noise”; Shirley Temple – “On The Good Ship Lollipop” and Shirley Temple – Poor Little Rich Girl.

Alan: On “The Emcee”, MC Lyte opens the track with the lyric “My my my ghetto” which is a twist on the song “Mama Equiero” which most people know as a signature Carmen Miranda song, often used in cartoons as well as a lip-sync routine that Jerry Lewis did at the beginning of his career. MC Lyte then quotes the melody from “The Girl From Ipanema” (coincidentally also Brazillian) but I didn’t want to cover all the vocals from the get-go. “Impeach The President” by The Honeydrippers has one of the most sampled beats in the hip hop lexicon and is at the root of where the MC Lyte track comes from.

 

Illusions. I first heard this on a compilation of Cypress remixes. Q-Tip did the production and the bounciness of it all always hit me right. I’d almost forgotten about this record but when we were first thinking about tracks for this mix I scoured my collection and was happy to find it again. The vocal is a clean edit so there are a few gaps that we filled in—with sound bites from Nina Simone, George Carlin, Chris Rock, and Bill Cosby, of all people, saying, “Titties” from his For Adults Only LP (Hard to find, but funny as hell.) The last bit is an uncredited actor and Woody Allen from Take The Money And Run.

Alan: Stitching MC Lyte and Cypress Hill together is “On The Good Ship Lollipop” by Shirley Temple, and “Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get” by The Dramatics, which has lyrics that are common in the first two songs (“Some people.. are up to no good). This record has been a favorite of mine forever.

Devotion ‘92. Charizma had passed away by the time his production partner Peanut Butter Wolf put out the LP Big Shots on his Stones Throw label in 2003. Wolf also released a 45 with two different mixes of “Devotion” in 2000. “Devotion ’92” had a 3^rd Bass kind of vibe and “Devotion ’93” has a Pharcyde “Otha Fish” feel. When I brought up the idea of using it Alan found a place between the transition we already built between “Illusions” and “Behind Bars” so we just stuck the first verse in the middle.

Alan: The organ part in “Devotion” reminded me a lot of “Whap!” by Brother Jack McDuff, which, if I ever had a talk show, would be the theme song (if only the first 30 seconds).

Behind Bars. I met Prince Paul one day in the late ‘90s at the office/studio of my pal Steinski. Paul had put out a small mix tape cassette to promote his concept album A Prince Among Thieves. The first portion was a highlight reel of his finest production. Sandwiched somewhere in there was this beat for “Behind Bars”, a version that had never been released. When I e-mailed Paul about it he said maybe one day he’d put it out and then ended his email with, “Muh-huh-ha-ha.” More than a decade later he made good on his promise and posted the song on Spotify.

Alan: The chord progression on “Behind Bars” is a little bit of vaudeville, so adding Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up” to it seemed just right. We had used Nilsson’s “Me And My Arrow” in “Borough To Borough” so there was a bit continuity, even if it was only me and Alex who noticed. Billy Eckstine’s “I Love The Rhythm Of A Riff” is in there toward the end. One of the first swing records I ever remembered seeing on a “soundie”, the precursor of the music video. That’s Jackson Beck at the end, from Take The Money And Run.

Skinz-Yabba Dabba Doo. I always dug “Skinz” the final track on Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth’s debut LP and for a long time thought it’d be cool to see if it could be blended with the Chubb Rock verse from “Yabba Dabba Doo.” We tried it and it fit seamlessly. In order to extend the beat some, we went to the original sample, “Down Home Girl” by the Coasters, and laid over a bit from Young Frankenstein featuring Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn. That’s Allan Lane from “Mr. Ed”.  The bell sound is from De La Soul is Dead.

Alan: As “Down Home Girl” by the Coasters was the foundation of “Skinz” and “Yabba Dabba Doo”, I added some extra Coasters (“Little Egypt”), and some extra Flintstones bits, from the episode “Ten Little Flintstones” where aliens who look like Fred are walking around saying the only thing they know how.

Moon River. There’s a bunch of stuff I thought about pulling from Fletch but this exchange between M. Emmett Walsh and Chevy Chase stands out, don’t it? Originally we tried it in the clear but Alan thought we should lay some music behind it. And since we already were messing with a segment from Lolita later in the mix, we tried the movie’s “Ya Ya Theme” by Nelson Riddle and that worked for us. Also threw in the “comedy is not pretty” line from Steve Martin’s stand-up album of the same name.

Meat Grinder. I first heard the Madvillian collaboration between MF Doom and Madlib on a bootleg CD six months before the record was released. My pal Jared Boxx at the Sound Library gave it to me and I prefer the less polished demo to the final album. Doom’s cadence and the vibe of this record is just so murky and different I thought it’d be a perfect transition record to the tougher part of the mix. We’d tried the Steve Martin “Comedy is not pretty” line in the intro originally but found it’s natural home following the Fletch routine.Doom’s line about Rod Lavers/quad flavors is so fresh it just called us to add something. I thought of the line from Bill Cosby’s street football routine: “Stop on a dime and give you nine cents change.” Alan added a little echo and it worked like a charm.

Alan: I added a bit of old Hawaiian music (Nelstone’s Hawaiians – “Fatal Flower Garden”) to add to the guitar in the track. Adding “Tom Sawyer” by Rush seemed obvious but it took up too much space in the track.

Time’s Up. OC’s debut single in 1994 is masterful. The Queens-bred Emcee reportedly spent a year writing the rhyme and it stands as one of the most fully-realized rhymes—let alone debuts—ever put on vinyl. In the early 2000’s, Jared made a CD of remixes—laying accapella’s over beats—and this one always spoke to me. The music is an instrumental version of Latee’s “Brainstorm” which was produced by the 45 King. The sound bite at the beginning is Harold Peary from Arch Oboler’s “The Laughing Man” routine and Mel Blanc from “Chow Hound”. 

Friend or Foe ’98. My favorite track on Jay Z’s sophomore album. Like the original “Friend or Foe” it was produced by DJ Premier. The driving beat, the cinematic nature of Jay’s rhyme, the economy of it all—the full track is under two-and-a-half-minutes long—make it a favorite. That’s Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schruete at the head. Yeah, the goofiness of the sound bite is incongruous with the mood of the record but I just had to use his “Those are the money beats” sample somewhere and it fit here. After Jay’s verse, that’s Gene Hackman from Mississippi Burning. Gene’s good at punctuating, you know?

Beasties Interlude. This is two different bits from the Beasties’ fourth record, Hello Nasty. Just things I always earmarked to use one day. Figure why not mash them together? This was another case of something finding it’s proper place. I originally tried using Marty Feldman saying “Bluecha” with a horse neighing from “Young Frankenstein” earlier in the mix but Alan found it’s proper shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits place here. It’s our big fart joke of the record. The cheapest, slap you in the head funny.

New York Love. Back when the East Coast/West Coast tension was at its height, Sun Dullah, formerly King Sun—whose “Blackberry Brandy” was an underground favorite—put out this Tupac diss record. Doo Wop did the beat. It’s a real head-nodder and I love the directness and common sense of the lyrics. It became a cult favorite around New York. I recall being in Fat Beats, the record store on 8^th Street, the day Tupac died and the house DJ spun this record.

The first time I heard it was on Stretch Armstrong and Bobitto’s radio WKCR radio show. It was late May, 1996 and I happened to be up late listening to the show—which ran from 1-4 am—with my finger on the pause button of my cassette machine. I taped Stretch’s blend and last summer I went through a box of old tapes, found it and digitized it. It still sounds great. So we used Stretch’s blend here, with a few edits. The routine at the start pits Kevin Hart against Romany Malco, with a little bit of Steve Carrell, from The 40 Year Old Virgin. I was looking for something hard, dialogue from a gangster movie or something, for this song. But when I heard the fight in The 40 Year Old Virgin I thought, Nah, this is even better. 

Alan: The guitar and grunt part from the bridge “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly” (the hit version by Hugo Montenegro as opposed to the original soundtrack) seemed a good add to “NY Love”, wild west shootout drama and all that. To the mix we added, “Dr. Jerry” Carroll from a “Crazy Eddie” TV commercial, Jay Bird singing “Rockaparty” and Lee Dorsey’s “Get Out Of My Life Woman”.

’95 Wake Up Freestyle. I first heard The Wake Up Show on vinyl. They pressed a few records featuring freestyles from the show. This one features tha Alkaholiks right around the time their second album, Coast II Coast, was released. I love the stripped-down beat and just how these guys jumped on it with their rhymes. The sound bite at the head comes from a skit at the end of “Smoke Budda” from Redman’s third LP, Muddy Waters.

Alan: The samples added to “’95 Wake Up Freestyle” were some of the last things we put in. Bits of late ’40’s and ’50’s R&B: “Such a Night” by the Drifters, “Happy Feet” by Red Prysock, “(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66” by the Nat “King” Cole Trio, and the original “In The Mood” by Edgar Hayes. Really brought a new context to this.

Rework the Angles. One of the last songs we added. I like all 5 verses on the record but we cut out the last two for economy not because they aren’t good. In fact, losing Rakaa’s verse (the fourth one) was one of the toughest cuts we had to make. I dig Xzibit’s final verse too but was able to live easier with cutting it because his verse ends the previous track. The spoken word at the start of the track is William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man.

Fargo Silence. We did a lot of work on this scene from Fargo featuring Steve Buscemi. A lot of cutting, rearranging, making sure the timing was just right. It was fun adding an old-timey Coen brothers kind of tune like “Will There Be Any Yodelin’ In Heaven” by the Girls of the Golden West in the background.

Lemonade Was a Popular Drink. I remember going to The Sound Library sometime in 2000-2001, and seeing a white label Madlib record. It was a compilation of beats and little sketches. This one, “Beat Number Ten” flattened me. A few years later, Alan and I were messing around and we blended Guru’s first from “Dwyck” with “Beat Number Ten.” We never did anything with it until now. After we came up with a name for the mix–“Another Fine Mess”–we figured we had to snake in a little Laurel and Hardy somewhere. So here they are,  the dialogue is from Busy Bodies. And to close out, that’s Mel Blanc from 8 Ball Bunny.

Leflaur Leflah Eshkoshka. This track was from Heltah Skeltah’s debut record during Boot Camp Click’s heyday in the mid-‘90s. The rhymes are fun but in this case we were looking for a transition beat from the more up-tempo songs that precede it and the more mellow beats that follow. That pitiful little “Yeah?” that we use at the beginning is Leo DiCaprio from The Wolf of Wall Street. And then Margot Robbie from the same movie (in a supporting role she stole the show). The come-on bit is Madeline Kahn from Blazing Saddles, followed-up by Frank Gallop’s “The Ballad Of Irving.”

Day One. Another mid-‘90s classic. A true head-nodder. This was the first single off the D.I.T.C album. It’s perfect backdrop for a sound collage sketch. I wanted to use the scene between Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston in Prizzi’s Honor when she invites him to screw on the rug—“the Oriental.” We added the Catherine Scorsese stuff from Italian American. It’s one of my favorite Scorsese movies, a short documentary featuring his parents in their apartment in Little Italy talking about their lives in New York. His mother is especially hilarious. I love way she speaks and the way she sounds. I could listen to her talk all day. And since food is right behind sex as a preoccupation I figured what better way to introduce the love-making between Jack and Anjelica than to have Scorsese’s mom talk about meatballs and sauce. We also snuck in Lily Tomlin.

Grover’s Theme Reprise. This time we lace our theme with Cary Grant & Mae West from I’m No Angel, Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners (“The Safety Award”), Margot Robbie from Wolf of Wall Street, Richard Pryor (“Have Your Ass Home By 11″), and Lord Buckley’s “The Hip Gahn” off Euphoria, Volume ll.

Can I Kick it? We ripped off this blend of Tribe’s “Can I Kick it?” and its source record, “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed from a J Rocc mixtape. It was one of the first selections for this project and initially we used a whole block of songs from the J Rocc mix. But as we worked on it we decided we didn’t need to grab so much from J Rocc just use it as a starting point. So we used his stellar work as inspiration and added our own thing to it. The refrain we built when Tip first sings “Can I kick it?” features the voices of Jack Nicholson, William Powell and Gene Wilder. When Phife sings, “Can I kick it?” the voices belong to Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth.

Alan : Expanding on the elements already present in “Can I Kick The Wild Side”, Lou Reed, A Tribe Called Quest” and Lonnie Smith, who’s record of “Spinning Wheel” is where the drums come from. If you’ve ever seen the ATCQ documentary, there’s a scene where Q-Tip takes out the album and plays it, and shows his reaction when he first heard that beat. That’s the kind of moment you never forget if you spend a lot of hours placing a needle on a record expecting something magical to come out. I’m also a big Lord Buckley fan, and his use of the phrase “spinning wheel” made it mandatory to use in the track. That’s how it is with sampling. When you find something that good, you HAVE to use it, it’s the LAW.

Soul Flower. This is from Gummy’s Soul’s remix project that blending vocals from the Pharcyde’s first record over instrumentals by a Tribe Called Quest. Gummy Soul always does good work but this mix is my favorite. There were a couple of songs we considered using but this one seemed to work really well out of the previous track. So we expanded the idea and made an 8 minute Quest tribute. This one went through a lot of changes. In the end, Alan added a patch of the awesome beat of “Don’t Change Your Love” by the Five Stairsteps (more famous for the record “O-o-h Child”) and some Sun Ra (“Outer Spaceways Incorporated”). Then brought back the “If you find earth boring” over the chorus. Alan also found a way to sneak in Richard Pryor, “Shot him in the ass on the down stroke.”

On Wid Da Show. I worked in L.A. from November of 1996 to April of ’97. I used to drive to east Hollywood and buy records at the small Fat Beats outpost that occupied a cozy second-floor space in the Beastie Boys’ clothing shop. That’s where I bought this single by Cardinal Offishall. The rhyme was fine but not memorable on its own but the beat was infectious. Another one I’ve always wanted to put to good use. We augmented it with “Luv Is” by Bill Cosby, “Around the Way Girl” by LL Cool J.

The dialogue blends Gerry Bednob’s hilarious advice from The 40 Year Old Virgin with Shelley Winters and James Mason from Lolita (with a touch of Albert Brooks from the “Phone Calls From Americans” off his Star is Bought album).

Alan: A little bit of “Rapper’s Delight” and “Hikky-Burr”, a Quincy Jones piece that was also used as the theme song for the first Bill Cosby Show, leads into “Luv Is”, a track from one the odd music albums that Bill Cosby did.

When it Pours it Rains. This came from the second Rawkus Soundbombing album. I’ve always been a sucker for Diamond’s rhymes. He isn’t profound but I like his phrasing and the sound of his voice. Plus, he makes me smile. That’s Sue Lyon counting at the start from Lolita.

I Am Me. Common’s second album, Resurrection, came out in 1994 when he was still known as Common Sense. It quickly became one of my favorites, partly for the clever and sometimes penetrating wordplay and mostly for the production. This was the final track we selected and really it was because I wanted another rhyme at the end of the mix. The sound clips towards the end of the track come from Bill Murray and Roberta Leighton in Stripes.

Eye Patch Skit. I love being able to use a skit as a transition and this was always a favorite queue off De La’s third album. I like the sheep sound and the French. Again, that’s Bill Murray from Stripes. I wasn’t sure about having it back-to-back skits. The next track is also a skit, but they were both produced by Prince Paul so I figured we could fuse them together as one.

Open Your Mouth. A skit from Pyschoanalysis, Prince Paul’s self-released record. Figured it’d be fun to work some food dialogue to play against the “Open your mouth, I’m going to put something nice into it” refrain. So I turned to my favorite scene from Fatso, Ann Bancroft’s 1980 directorial debut starting Dom DelLuise. The other voices are from Ron Carey and Richard Karron. And the Homer Simpson line is from Dan Castellenetta, of course, from “The Principal and the Pauper” episode of The Simpsons.

Haagen-Daz.  I got this EP in the late ‘90s down at the Sound Library and my man Jared used to spin the instrumental all the time. It’s long been one of my preferred late-night, hypnotic tracks. Plus, I love Tame’s verse so had to include that. As for the spoken word, it was natural to think of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a possible source for this project. He died just a few months ago and even when he was alive was a guy worth searching on You Tube just to enjoy his robust, sometimes hammy acting. I thought there might be a good quote relating to music from his turn as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. I found this scene with him on the phone. It is in the clear, meaning there isn’t music in the background (one of the biggest considerations when hunting for movie clips is to get dialogue in the clear). I love Hoffman’s sweetness and vulnerability. The intimacy of his voice complemented the music nicely.

Also figured this was as good a time as any to slide in some Jeff Bridges as the Dude from The Big Lebowski. I worked as an assistant film editor on that movie and one of Ethan’s favorite lines while they were editing was the Dude moaning, “Awww, man.” (we also used to say, “Yeah, I gotta rash, man” all the time, too). So that’s why I used it here. And we finish the track with Robert DeNiro, Charles Grodin and Joe Pantoliano from Midnight Run with a “Hello?” mixed in there from Albert Brooks.

Animal Crackers. Chico and Groucho Marx from their second movie, Animal Crackers (1930). This is part of a longer sequence where Chico annoys Groucho even longer playing “I’m Daffy Over You.” It’s one of the great smart ass musical comedy bits of them all. Always wanted to use it for a mix. Joining them is Catherine Scorcese from The King of Comedy. We ended up cutting Chico and Groucho’s final lines when Alan found a better transition from The Seven-Year Itch. It was one of those cases where both pieces worked but we thought The Seven-Year Itch stuff was fresher and also made more sense with the rest of the spoken word material on the final cut.

Sunrays. We were stuck for a finale. Tried a bunch of different songs and nothing worked. I couldn’t get it off my mind for days. It wouldn’t let me alone. I knew once I stopped pressing I’d find the right song and that’s just what happened when I came across “Sunrays” from Yesterday’s New Quintet’s ep, Elle’s Theme. My friend Steven used to manage a bistro on 22^nd Street and 2^nd Avenue. Thursday night was DJ night and I use to play a couple of times a month. “Sunrays” was always part of my rotation. Hearing it again I was struck by how ideal it is for being lacing with spoken word, especially for the last track on the mix which we wanted to have an ethereal, dreamy intimate feeling. So we added the following: Marilyn Monroe & Tom Ewell: The Seven Year Itch; Henry Winkler: Happy Days (“Mork Returns”); Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda:The Lady Eve; Walter Matthau: from a documentary on Billy Wilder; Mae West and Cary Grant: I’m No Angel; Humphrey Bogart: To Have And Have Not; Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin: All Of Me; Notorious B.I.G.: “It Was All A Dream”; Myrna Loy and William Powell: The Thin Man, and Marvin Hatley: “Dance Of The Cuckoos”.

Complete list of samples:

Lauren Bacall & Humphrey Bogart: To Have And Have Not.

Myrna Loy & William Powell: The Thin Man.

Audio Two: “Top Billin’”.

Carmen Miranda: “Mama Equiero”.

The Dramatics: “Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get”.

The Honeydrippers: “Impeach The President”.

The Jacksons: “Blame It On The Boogie”.

Public Enemy: “Bring The Noise”.

Shirley Temple: “On The Good Ship Lollipop”.

Shirley Temple: Poor Little Rich Girl.

Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddamn”.

George Carlin: “Toledo Window Box”.

Cheech & Chong: “Pedro’s Request”.

Chris Rock: “Women”.

Bill Cosby: “Bill’s Two Daughters”.

(uncredited actor) & Woody Allen: Take The Money And Run.

Brother Jack McDuff: “Whap”.

Nilsson: “Gotta Get Up”.

Art Carney: The Honeymooners (“The Sleepwalker”)

Billy Eckstine: “I Love The Rhythm In A Riff”.

Jackson Beck: Take The Money And Run.

Allan Lane: Intro from Mr. Ed.

The Coasters: “Down Home Girl”.

Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder:Young Frankenstein.

The Coasters: “Little Egypt”.

(uncredited voice) from The Flintstones (“Ten Little Flintstones”).

U-Roy: “Wake The Town And Tell The People”.

De La Soul: “De La Skit”.

M. Emmett Walsh and Chevy Chase: Fletch.

Steve Martin: “Comedy Is Not Pretty”.

Nelstone’s Hawaiians: “Fatal Flower Garden”.

Bill Cosby: “Sneakers”.

Harold Peary from Arch Oboler’s “The Laughing Man”.

Mel Blanc: Dialogue from “Chow Hound”.

Rainn Wilson: The Office (“Money”).

Gene Hackman: Mississippi Burning.

Marty Feldman: Young Frankenstein.

Kevin Hart, Romany Malco and Steve Carrell:The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Hugo Montenegro: Theme from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

“Dr. Jerry” Carroll: TV commercial for “Crazy Eddie”.

J. Bird: “Rockaparty”.

Lee Dorsey: “Get Out Of My Life Woman”.

Redman: “Smoke Budda”.

The Drifters: “Such A Night”.

Red Prysock: “Happy Feet”.

Nat “King” Cole Trio: “(Get Your Kicks) On Route 66”.

Edgar Hayes: “In The Mood”.

Yes: “Long Distance Runaround”.

Steve Buscemi: Fargo.

Girls Of The Golden West: “Will There Be Any Yodelin’ In Heaven”.

Laurel & Hardy: Busy Bodies.

Mel Blanc – Dialogue from “8 Ball Bunny”.

Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio: The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Madeline Kahn: Blazing Saddles.

Frank Gallop: “The Ballad Of Irving”.

Catherine Scorsese: Italian American.

Lily Tomlin – “This Is A Recording”.

Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston: Prizzi’s Honor.

Cary Grant and Mae West: I’m No Angel.

Jackie Gleason: The Honeymooners (“The Safety Award”).

Richard Pryor: “Have Your Ass Home By 11”.

Audience response from Lenny Bruce’s “How To Relax Your Colored Friends At Parties”.

Lord Buckley: “The Hip Gahn”.

Lonnie Smith: “Spinning Wheel”.

LaWanda Page: “Husbands And Whores”.

The Treniers w/ Willie Mays: “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)”.

Jackie Robinson: “On The Eve Of The 1949 World Series”.

Babe Ruth: Fancy Curves.

Richard Pryor: “Eulogy”.

A Tribe Called Quest: “Pubic Enemy”.

Five Stairsteps: “Don’t Change Your Love”.

Sun Ra – “Outer Spaceways Incorporated”.

Sugar Hill Gang – “Rapper’s Delight”.

Quincy Jones and Bill Cosby: “Hikky Burr” (studio version).

Bill Cosby: “Luv Is”.

LL Cool J: “Around The Way Girl”.

Gerry Bednob – monologue from The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Shelley Winters and James Mason: Lolita.

(uncredited voice) from Albert Brooks: “Phone Calls From Americans”

Sue Lyon: Lolita.

Betty Wright: “I’m Gettin’ Tired, Baby”

Boogie Down Productions – “Build And Destroy”

Roberta Leighton & Bill Murray: Stripes.

De La Soul: “Eye Patch”.

Dom DeLuise, Ron Carey and Richard Karron: Fatso.

Dan Castellenetta: The Simpsons (“The Principal And The Pauper”).

Myrna Loy from Another Thin Man.

Del Close: “The Do-It-Yourself Psychoanalysis Kit”.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Patrick Fugit: Almost Famous.

Jeff Bridges: The Big Lebowski.

Robert DeNiro, Charles Grodin and Joe Pantoliano: Midnight Run.

Albert Brooks from A Star is Bought.

Groucho Marx: “Hooray For Captain Spaulding”.

Chico Marx and Groucho Marx – “I’m Daffy Over You” from Animal Crackers.

Catherine Scorsese: The King Of Comedy.

Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell: The Seven Year Itch.

Henry Winkler: Happy Days (“Mork Returns”).

Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda: The Lady Eve.

Walter Matthau: Dialogue from Documentary on Billy Wilder.

Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin: All Of Me.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall: To Have and Have Not.

Myrna Loy and William Powell: The Thin Man.

Notorious B.I.G: “It Was All A Dream”.

Marvin Hatley: “Dance Of The Cuckoos”.

[All images by Alex Belth]

[From my man John Ed Bradley. Dig his 1991 GQ story about the Neville brothers.]

Tipitina’s in the warm blue fog, squatting beneath a crescent moon so sharp and clean you could shave a wild hog with it.

Art Neville enters the famous New Orleans honky-tonk wearing a hipster’s suit and studded leather boots, his wife, Lorraine, in hand. What resembles a fishing lure dangles from his ear, a spinner bait designed to attract bass. At 53, Art’s the eldest member of the Neville Brothers, a hometown band legendary for the kind of musical voodoo it practices on whoever comes to catch its midnight show. The Nevilles play Tip’s and a spooky magic happens: Fruit juice becomes a Hurricane cocktail, the fat of foot can suddenly hoof it, the blind, by God, can see.

“I’m tired,” Art moans, upstairs now, in the roped-off section reserved for VIPs. “I mean, I’m tired tired. I’m hurting tired.”

“He got in from Europe yesterday,” Lorraine says, “and at midnight we had a candlelight dinner: a big turkey with all the trimmings. It was very romantic, even if he could hardly keep his head up.”

Like his three brothers, Art, the Nevilles’ keyboard player, has his thing on the side—the Meters, the band he took to Europe. Saxophonist Charles has a jazz group called Charles Neville & Diversity; Cyril, the percussionist, has a funk-reggae outfit called the Uptown All-Stars; and Aaron, the one with the golden pipes, has himself.

“Been four, five, months maybe, since we played Tip’s,” Art is saying. “I don’t know how long it’s gonna go tonight. We start at midnight and we’ll probably play until around four. In the old days it sometimes was daylight before we got out of here.”

Downstairs, a band called Def Generation, composed mostly of Neville progeny, is killing the hour before the brothers come on. The opening act, their sound is part jazz, part rap, part second line, the bluesy brass-band music that traditionally accompanies black funeral processions through the streets of New Orleans.

“Don’t do drugs,” one of them keeps barking into a microphone; and an occasional drunken echo from the crowd barks back “Just say no!”

It’s so god-awful loud in here you have to shout to be heard. So Lorraine shouts: “This is their place, you know. The Nevilles play Tip’s and it’s crazy. They own it. So prepare yourself. I mean it.”

Tipitina’s opened about 14 years ago, the same year the Neville Brothers formed. Named after a song by the late New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair, the club was started by a group of folks who liked to party hard and “gator.” To the uninitiated, gatoring is a dance that imitates coitus: It’s dry humping to a drumbeat. But to these people, it’s a religious rite ranked right up there with First Communion—or Mardi Gras.

The Nevilles played their first gig at Tip’s, to an audience that gatored so long and furiously, the beer lights dimmed and dust rained loose from the walls. The Nevilles’ music, inspired by the ancestral rhythms of their city, is mostly pop, funk, and soul. One moment they’re likely to sing an original composition about wild Injuns or yellow moons, the next a Cole Porter standard or The Mickey Mouse Club song. A rap anthem lamenting racism and urban violence might follow, or maybe some gospel bit rarely heard even in church anymore. Their repertoire apparently knows no limits, nor does their energy onstage. While the debut at Tip’s is now regarded as damned near mythic, few people actually remember it. Most everyone, I understand, was drunk or stoned.

“Buy me a beer,” someone is saying now, “and I’ll give you everything you need to know about these guys—everything!“

The man introduces himself as Tyrone Lewis, a singer of gospel music. For enthusiasm alone, he’s awarded a draft with a two-inch head of foam. He winks, smacks his lips and frantically drains the go-cup.

“My new album’s called Look for God,” he says. “Me and Aaron’s son Ivan—you know Ivan, he’s a recording artist himself—we grew up together in the thirteenth ward. We used to steal shit from the Winn Dixie supermarket.”

A commotion has erupted in one of the dressing rooms, sparing me more reminiscences from Tyrone. On a wall already covered with graffiti, someone has written “AARON NEVILLE WEARS PANTYHOSE.” A couple of ladies, standing on tiptoe, are scribbling over it with eyeliner and lipstick.

“He’d laugh about it,” one of the women says. “But best he doesn’t see it at all.”

If Aaron Neville wears pantyhose, then I go for those pointy Madonna bras with little link chains hanging from the nipples. Aaron is a devotee of professional wrestling who drives an all-terrain vehicle and sports tattoos on his face, chest and arms—arms that from any angle resemble dimpled Sunday hams without the honey glaze. In 1967, he had a hit song called “Tell It Like It Is,” and two summers ago he scored big with Linda Ronstadt on “I Don’t Know Much,” a Grammy award-winning ballad that in one clean stroke seemed to resurrect the Neville name from oblivion. In the more than twenty years between the two hits, Aaron managed to pull a couple of hitches in jail, for attempting to rob a Los Angeles furrier.

Tonight he’s dressed all in black, except for his white half boots. He walks around muttering “Yeah, all right” to all the friends and family members who have come to celebrate the band’s triumphant return to Tipitina’s. He hugs his sister, Athelgra, hugs his daughter, Ernestine, hugs his niece Arthel. A man in a pinstriped business suit approaches and digs into his pocket. “Let me give you my card, brother.”

“Yeah, all right,” Aaron says.

“I tried to call you.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“But I never could get through.”

Apparently Aaron is in no mood for business cards. He accepts the token without looking at it, brushes past the man and walks right by the painted-over pantyhose rap. He enters a back room, sits at a round café table and sips from a bottle of mineral water. A curtain of smoke billows a few feet above his head, hugging the ceiling. In a minute he’ll yodel like the singing cowboys in the movies he loved so much as a kid. This, while limbering up his voice box, also demonstrates his range, which, in the idolatrous prose of than one music critic, sounds like that of “an angel singing unto the Lord.”

“Aaron and his brothers want to give a tough image,” a friend of the group’s is telling me. “It’s part of the mystique—like they could blow down the walls if they wanted to. But they’re really very nice men. They’re pussycats, in fact. You stroke them a little and they all start to purr.”

Before they cleaned themselves up, the Nevilles were thieves, thugs, and junkies. Practically everyone here tonight knows this, and most are delighted by it. The music is best heard live, and though it would be great played by a bunch of priests from nearby Loyola University, coming from a clutch of reformed outlaws it takes on an element of mystery and danger. Except for Art, the Nevilles were heroin addicts and alcoholics—hoodlums, even they have often said. Back in the neighborhood, it was not uncommon to see one of them on any given weekday morning sitting on the hood of a junked car, holding a gallon jug of high-proof wine. They fought a lot and stole things. They dressed like rogue gangsters and talked through tightly clenched teeth.

“Why didn’t Art mess up like all the others?” one of his pals is saying. “Because he was far too busy playing his music and screwing women is why.”

Def Generation is doing an encore, and the brothers, crammed into the back dressing room, are going over the payroll, ripping out checks and handing them to band members. Charles walks over to the corner and loosens up with some T’ai Chi Ch’uan exercises, Cyril’s making sure his Mother Africa outfit is all zipped and tucked, and Art, still full of midnight turkey, tries to keep from falling asleep.

“Showtime!” a yellow ponytail says now with more zeal than seems necessary.

Aaron stands and tugs at the bottom of his denim vest. “Yeah, all right,” he mutters, then follows his brothers out of the room, down a rickety flight of stairs and into the crucible.

* * *

It’s a few weeks earlier, and the brothers are staying in a Los Angeles hotel just up the street from the bare-assed Hollywood Hills. This is one of those incredibly hip places that looks like a low-rise apartment building. A hotel with attitude. Limousines line the curb; enormous men with walkie talkies mill around the lobby, looking for heads to crack. The Nevilles have come to town to play the Universal Amphitheatre as Linda Ronstadt’s opening act. This is high irony, that four hardened soldiers of the street have been embraced by a fading pop queen, but apparently yuppie chic knows no shame.

All their rooms are up on the third floor. Charles, on this resplendent morning, is telling me his life story. He’s wearing his usual beret, tie-dyed T-shirt and parachute pants. Charles is 52 and a great-grandfather, which in terms of simple mathematics is quite a feat. He has just finished relating the part about how he worked for a time as a porter in a bowling alley and how in the early ’70s he spent three years in the Louisiana state pen for possession of two joints of marijuana.

“I started using drugs when I was in the navy,” he is saying. “I started with morphine and codeine, then went to heroin. It took me more than 20 years to get out of it. When I started playing music, in the ’50s, if you were going to play bebop, you almost had to do it because all the other musicians were. To support my habit I stole; I was into shoplifting and got busted a couple of times for that. I’d steal clothes, whiskey, meat. Once, I put on a khaki shirt with ‘GEORGE’ over the pocket. I had a clipboard with a yellow piece of paper on it and a pencil over my ear. Me and this other fellow went to a store on Canal Street, strapped a refrigerator onto a hand truck and walked right out with it. One of the people who worked there actually held the door open to help us out. Just some black cats in khaki, they figured. They couldn’t be stealing.”

He tells a few more drug stories, then walks to the closet and returns with a load of books. One is on African primal religions, another on the tao of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, another on the path to total rejuvenation.

“I practice T’ai Chi every day,” he says. “It’s a martial arts form as well as a Chinese internal-healing system. T’ai Chi is internal and soft, versus karate, which is external and hard. T’ai Chi teaches you how to identify your internal life source and guide it with your mind, how to manipulate it to rejuvenate your system. Exercises in the system are called chi kong. Kung fu is not the name of a martial-arts form; it means ‘something with diligent applications.’ To learn a martial art requires kung fu.”

By now I’m so overwrought with chi‘s and fu‘s and kong‘s and kung‘s that my eyes have about crossed. But the point of it all is that T’ai Chi, along with a number of drug rehab programs and the loving support of his family, helped Charles Neville get off heroin and start his life again.

He’s talking about the music now. “I never really cared about recognition. Doing the music was the reward. I started with a minstrel show, making eight bucks a night, three nights a week. But even then there was a link with the others in the band, and it cycled around to the audience and came back, and that was the reward. It was a religious experience, and later it occurred to me that this was my way of communing with God.”

The phone rings and it’s Art, down the hall. “He wants to see you,” Charles says. “I think I’ll do more reading now.”

* * *

Art’s in room 346, talking to a maid in a neatly pressed uniform and a cardboard hat. For the last hour or so she’s been trying to get into his room to clean it. “Come back later,” he tells her. Then to me: “They’re just trying to do their job, I understand that. But I think I’ve finally learned how to keep them away.”

“How’s that?”

“Just answer the door without any clothes on. That’ll do the trick every time.”

The maid leaves, carrying her vacuum cleaner.

Art’s wearing a New Orleans Saints cap. Sitting in the den now, he says he’s a little concerned about the team’s quarterback situation but that there are too many other things in the world to worry about. The Persian Gulf mess, for one.

“It’s scary where our country’s going. I have to believe the end of the world is coming.”

Lorraine enters the room and puts a frozen cocktail on the coffee table. For the moment, at least, everything seems fine with brother Art. No war, famine, pestilence, disease, and all the hell else. But Phil Donahue comes on the television, and who is he talking about but Saddam Hussein.

“It’s all in the Bible, the Book of Revelation,” Art says. “You can see it all right there in black and white.”

As a kid Art went to Catholic schools, so it would follow that he’d know about that sort of thing. His first gig was with a drum-and-bugle corps put together by the parish priest. They marched through the neighborhood, everybody running outside to see what the racket was all about. He started a group called the Hawkettes, which in 1954 recorded “Mardi Gras Mambo,” a song still popular around New Orleans. In 1966, he formed the Meters, a hometown group that recently re-banded and is touring again. Art isn’t quite sure whether to trust the good fortune that has finally caught up to him and his brothers.

“In Europe, they always went insane over our stuff,” he says. “But here in America, no one would book us, except in Louisiana and Texas. We had a gold record in France and were practically unknown here. Even Japan paid more attention. Once we played in Seattle, and this Japanese group was there, and it sounded just like the Meters. A girl singing with the group said, ‘America is a wonderful country, but they don’t recognize and appreciate their own treasures.'”

A commercial comes on and Art calms down. He’s sounding more optimistic. “If I had to say what really got the Neville brothers to be a group,” he begins, “it’s our Chief Jolly, our uncle George Landry. He knew that if we got together as a family, it would happen. They called him Jolly because he was always happy, singing and whistling. When he died, all the black Mardi Gras Indians came out and kissed the ground in front of his house. He had one of the biggest funeral parades I’ve ever seen. I’ve got it in my head that I’m going to have one before I die—a second line, I’m talking about. That’s if I can afford it. I’ll be up in front with an umbrella, dancing. I figure you just as soon live to see your own funeral. If the end’s coming, why not have some fun?”

Maybe Art isn’t feeling so optimistic, after all. Presently, he gets onto the subject of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klansman from Louisiana, now a state representative, who received nearly 44 percent of the vote in a losing bid for a U.S. Senate seat and is running for governor this fall.

“When l heard you were a white guy and from home, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to talk you,” Art says. “You didn’t vote for ‘the boy’ did you?”

“’The boy’?”

“Duke.”

“No,” I say. “I did not.”

“It just shows you where the spirits and minds and hearts of people, where they’re all going.” Art and his brothers have threatened to move out of Louisiana if ever Duke were elected to a higher office.

“When you have family, you can pull together in times of crisis,” Art says. “Family is what’s important. Every time I look at my brothers I see all the people that’ve passed but are still with us spiritually. l see my uncle Jolly, my mother and my father. They’re all there, as my hands and feet are there. Two of my grandmothers lived at home with us when us I was growing up, and they’d always say, ‘Son, your pa ain’t never gonna die as long as you’re alive.’ I didn’t know what they were talking about until I had my son Ian, who’s 9 years old now. I have another son, 31, and a daughter, 28. But the little one, l see immortality in him. He will never forget about his father, the way I will never forget about mine.”

Yes, Art is hopeful now. The world might not end tonight after all.

The maid is at the door again, ringing the bell.

“Come in,” he calls to her. “Please, come in, come in . . .”

* * *

The next day, Cyril shows me the books he’s been reading. They’re all there on the coffee table, lined up in a row: The Holy Bible, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Koran, The Gospel of the Red Man, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America.

As he reaches to pick one up, his star-shaped Malcolm X medallion clatters against his necklace of wooden beads. People say this about Cyril: At 42, he’s the most outspoken and politically active of the brothers; he’s what conservative whites called a “militant black” 20 years ago. Ask him about the weather, and he’ll pound you with tales about white racism. Cyril dresses a little like a Rastafarian and almost always wears a hat, an expensive Italian job with a black velvet band and a red feather. While the hat is the kind Uncle Jolly used to wear, it also covers up Cyril’s ever expanding bald spot.

I have been in his room less than three minutes when Cyril commences what will be a two-hour-long history lesson. “Ethiopia,” he says, “was a Christian nation 150 years before Rome took it over.”

Ten seconds later, he adds, “The worship of the Black Madonna existed long before Michelangelo ever painted his things.”

Cyril is a teacher, he says, determined to pass on what he calls “the black people’s story” to future generations. Yellow Moon, the Neville Brothers’ 1989 album, includes a song he helped write thanking Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the back of the bus. Brother’s Keeper, their latest, contains a creation of his that canonizes a list of New Orleans musicians whose work inspired him and his brothers: “Saint Shine, Saint James Black, Saint James Booker, Saint Professor Longhair and Saint Gerald Tillman.”

“At one point,” he says, “I considered wearing a vest of dynamite and going into a police station and blowing up myself and as many cops as I could. Millions of black men in my generation have gotten to this point of total frustration, of committing revolutionary suicide.”

He explains that his anger is a result of the racism he witnessed as a youth. “I couldn’t walk a block away from my house without being harassed by the police—I mean humiliated,” he says. “In school I couldn’t go for them teaching me that everything evil was black and everything pure was white. The meanest person I ever met in my life was a white nun. Whatever desires you had as a young black person, the Catholic schools would pump it out of you. This is why I write the kind of stuff I do. One of my punishments was to kneel before a big white crucifix of Jesus, and sometimes it felt like the blood was dripping off of him and right onto me.”

One of Cyril’s oft-quoted lines is this: “The first shit I ever learned how to read was a ‘WHITES ONLY’ sign.” And he repeats it now, his voice filled with rage.

“I still fear for my life when I walk out of my house in New Orleans,” he says, “and I fear for my son’s life. I deal in reality, and I know that collectively in America the white man is the black man’s enemy … I have legal tablets full of names of people—black people—who are dead, locked in the penitentiary for life, or a member of the walking dead.” He points to his chest and taps it. “I could have been one of those casualties.”

This is one of the last things he tells me: “On every level, we as blacks are being attacked. At some point in the future the white Anglo-Saxon male ego will submit to the truth, and fairness will be shown.”

Cyril folds his hands into tight, hard knots and beats them quietly against his knees.

“Two hours have gone by,” I say, “and we still haven’t talked about the music.”

“Sometimes that happens with me,” he replies, sounding almost apologetic.

* * *

Aaron, down the hall, is in a different mood altogether. He looks as if I’ve just awakened him from a nap.

“No. I was watching Fred Flintstone on TV,” he says, muting the volume with the remote control.

Earlier this morning he and his wife, Joel, went driving around Beverly Hills, looking at all the beautiful houses, the palm trees that chase the sky. They themselves recently moved from Valence Street in Uptown New Orleans to a suburban-type subdivision in the eastern part of the city. Joel is here in the room, over by the bed with Aaron’s sister, Athelgra. They’re folding clothes and putting them away.

Asked if, like Cyril, he was harassed and humiliated as a kid, Aaron says, “Some drunk boys from Tulane threw eggs a few times, riding in their cars through the neighborhood, but nothing else I remember.”

He sits with his elbows on his knees, his jailhouse tattoos a pale blue against the field of copper flesh. Aaron wears sleeveless denim vests because he can’t stand to have his muscular arms confined. Of the four brothers, Aaron, 50, is easily known, mainly because of his work with Ronstadt.

“Success to me,” he is saying now, “is being together as brothers and still looking out for each other. We lived together as kids, and now we’re taking care of each other as men. I may get more attention than them, but it’s still Neville, it’s still the Neville name.”

* * *

Unlike Charles and Cyril, Aaron doesn’t have any books to show me. He likes to read, though.

“What’s the kind I like?” he asks Joel now.

“Inspirational and positive-thinking,” she replies, then names a couple of authors.

“The Greatest Salesman in the World,” he says. “You ever hear of it?”

“No.”

“What about The Greatest Miracle?”

“I don’t know that one either.”

Aaron is a writer himself. Over the years, after playing Tipitina’s until early in the morning, he would scribble things down on scraps of paper and toss them under the bed. Years went by and all those scraps did was gather dust. Then his friend Dynne Batson typed them up and arranged them by subject matter. Poetic Works by Aaron Neville, she called the 4 a.m. scribblings, and placed them between cardboard covers.

He’s remembering when he first became aware of his voice, the power, the wonder of it. “I used to go to basketball games and to movies, and I’d sing to the cat at the door to get in. I had a friend named Buckwheat, and he could sing, too. They all knew us. ‘Sing us a song and we’ll let you in.’ I used to sing ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ It was pretty.”

I tell him I don’t know the song. And he starts to sing it, filling the room with his sweet, fragile tenor, shifting to a falsetto that cuts straight to the heart.

“Singing is an art,” he says, “so I guess I’m an artist. I used to sing just to do it, but then Art put together a doo-wop group. They used to sit out in the park and harmonize. I’d do a cappella. We’d beat on hubcaps and Coke bottles. We’d win talent shows at the theater. Back then when I’d try to hit a note, everybody’d say, ‘Get on out of here.'”

When he was 17, Aaron went to jail for six months for stealing a car. He sang a lot there, too, figuring it was better than the other thing people did to kill time, which was to fight. After he got out, he married Joel and landed a recording contract. Then, in 1966, he cut “Tell It Like It Is,” at a small French Quarter studio run by a fellow named Cosima Matassa.

“When I first sang it, I thought it was okay but not the best I could do. It was a simple song, real simple. And I was looking for something more up-tempo. But my brother Art was with me and he could feel it. He knew I had something. Now when I hear it, it’s like brand-new all over again.”

The single climbed to No. 2 on the charts. Aaron toured the country with Otis Redding and played the Apollo Theater in Harlem. But a year later he was back home in New Orleans and back on the docks, handling freight on ships bound for the Gulf of Mexico.

“I got paid for personal appearances but not for the record,” he says. “I don’t have time to be angry about it. I’m not vindictive. Sometimes now I see the guys who got all the money. I don’t tell them anything. They were friends then. But when the record came out and it was time to get paid, everyone all of a sudden claimed bankruptcy.”

He and his brothers continued to play music in a number of different bands—sometimes together, sometimes apart—mostly at college fraternity parties and high school proms, before small but enthusiastic crowds whose applause only served to remind Aaron that, come Monday, there would be another boat to load or house to paint or ditch to dig.

Like Charles before him, Aaron got hooked on heroin.

“I think back on them days and it was all supposed to be so hip,” he says. “l was taking that stuff for about ten years. l quit cold turkey a couple of times. I went through a methadone program and it helped, but then you get hooked on that. What finally kicked it for me was that I got tired of seeing all the people around me deteriorating. You saw guys with hands as big as boxing gloves from shooting up.” He pauses and holds his hands out in front of him.

“The worst time of my life was when I was separated from my wife and thought I would lose her. Then I started praying real hard. I’d go to the grotto at St. Ann’s Shrine. This is where you go up the steps on your knees. I prayed to St. Jude for hopeless cases. I made novenas. Finally, I was saved, and I can tell you it wasn’t for nothing.”

The Nevilles’ mother died in 1975, and about a year later Uncle Jolly talked them into helping him record The Wild Tchoupitoulas, an album of New Orleans party music that still is regarded as some of the best work the brothers have ever done. Of the many things old man Jolly would tell his nephews, none was more vital than this: “Your mother and father always wanted to see you work together as a band. Why don’t you do it?”

“All the stuff that me and my brothers went through to get to where we are now,” Aaron says, “now we can tell people behind us, ‘Hey, man, it ain’t cool to steal and do drugs, it don’t work.’ We’ve been saved for something, and we’ve got a message. People tell me, ‘Man, I hear your voice and it’s like medicine to me.’ I say, ‘Yeah, it’s like medicine to me, too. I can hear it, and even if I don’t have any money, I feel rich.’”

He’s been traveling for months now, he says he misses New Orleans, his own house and bed. When he returns he’ll drive around the old neighborhood in his Ford Explorer, play with his grandkids, sign autographs for all the schoolchildren, who call him “Mr. Aaron.” During the afternoon and evening hours, he’ll watch professional wrestling on TV. “I know when they’re going at it and when they’re not. I’ve seen them where there’s real blood squirting out of their heads.”

He is happy; the thought of the stars of the National Wrestling Association seems to invigorate him. “If ever I give up my music,” he says, “you might see me on the tube one day with a hood over my head climbing into a ring.”

“What would your name be?” I ask him. “You’ll have to have one, you know.”

“The Spoiler,” he answers. “I already got it picked out.”

Over by the bed his wife and sister are nodding their heads.

“He’d do it, too,” Athelgra says.

“Just you watch,” warns Joel.

* * *

Back at Tipitina’s, the brothers step onto the little piece of ground they know best, entering with arms raised. A man with a bushy black mustache is shouting into a microphone “Welcome back to Tipitina’s”—but the crowd, pressing close, drowns out the rest.

Sleepy-eyed Art gets behind his piano, Charles behind his horseshoe of saxophones, Aaron behind his mighty red tambourine and Cyril behind his congas. “Hey Pocky A-Way” is what they start with, a local favorite that Uncle Jolly helped make famous. The song is mostly chants accompanied by whatever noise the brothers choose to make, but it electrifies. A capacity crowd of about 1,000 has stuffed itself into Tip’s this night, and every last one is standing. Upstairs in the balcony, they’re doing a kind of stand-up version of the gator. I tell myself to keep still, goddammit, but there I go.

After a few minutes of this wretched nonsense, Tyrone Lewis sidles up to me and throws a hand on my shoulder. “How much is this magazine paying you? Anywhere in the vicinity of $20,000?”

“Depends on how big a vicinity you mean.”

“Lookee here, my man. For 50 bucks I’ll give you the rest of the scoop. Anything you want to know, it’s yours. I’ll tell you what Aaron’s like at home by himself. I idolize the man, I’ll even tell you that.”

“Leave me alone,” I say after a while, leaning in close. “Can’t you see I’m trying to dance?”

 

[Photo Credit: Tim Rasmussen via  Hey Reverb]

There is a lot of good stuff to be found in Andrew Corsello’s GQ profile of Louis C.K. (never mind the “genius” part if you can). I especially like this:

“All of that”—the death of the New York club scene in the early ’90s, the Pootie Tang debacle—”has helped me form what I call my 70 Percent Rule for decision-making.” C.K. then describes a practical application of a worldview laced into many of his best routines—that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” If we just wrest our eyes, literally and figuratively, from our digital gizmos and the shitty, spoiling impatience they instill, we’ll see that this life, this planet, is amazing. That it is something just to be in the world, seeing and hearing and smelling. That for trillions of miles in every direction from earth, life really is blood-boilingly, eye-explodingly horrific.

“These situations where I can’t make a choice because I’m too busy trying to envision the perfect one—that false perfectionism traps you in this painful ambivalence: If I do this, then that other thing I could have done becomes attractive. But if I go and choose the other one, the same thing happens again. It’s part of our consumer culture. People do this trying to get a DVD player or a service provider, but it also bleeds into big decisions. So my rule is that if you have someone or something that gets 70 percent approval, you just do it. ‘Cause here’s what happens. The fact that other options go away immediately brings your choice to 80. Because the pain of deciding is over.

“And,” he continues, “when you get to 80 percent, you work. You apply your knowledge, and that gets you to 85 percent! And the thing itself, especially if it’s a human being, will always reveal itself—100 percent of the time!—to be more than you thought. And that will get you to 90 percent. After that, you’re stuck at 90, but who the fuck do you think you are, a god? You got to 90 percent? It’s incredible!”

[Picture by Randel Plowman via Just Another Masterpiece]

This is worth reading. Ben Smith on Tom Lehrer:

If you get hooked on Tom Lehrer as a kid, it’s not because you think he might be a sweet old man. It’s because beneath the cheerful tunes is an edge, a sheer nastiness and even sadism, that kids have always loved. It’s the same edge that makes Roald Dahl so appealing to children and disturbing to their parents.

Lehrer saw this Peter Pan in himself, joking about it before one of his last performances, in Copenhagen in 1967. “All of these songs were part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life,” Lehrer said. “Namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits.”

But when Lehrer is the nostalgic music of your childhood, you want to like him. He always replies politely to his fans, no less when they are journalists seeking to profile him. Earlier this year, he put up with a brief telephone conversation with a BuzzFeed reporter, whom he referred to “Mr. Google” for further research. Told that search results concerning him are full of gaps and contradictions, he just laughed. “It doesn’t matter if the answer is correct — who cares?” he said. “And I lie a lot too.”

He then replied to our letter full of nostalgia and curiosity with a genial dismissal. “You seem to have devoted so much thought to the questions you ask that you should perhaps just write what you think is the truth, even if it’s just speculation, which — judging by today’s commentators on TV — is the easiest and therefore the most common form of punditry. I neither support nor encourage your efforts, but I shall not try to thwart them,” he wrote. And he was true to his word. He didn’t respond to a second letter, nor to a fact-checking email sent to his AOL email address; his email handle includes a phrase along the line of “living legend.” When we stopped by his Sparks Street house on a cold night in February, a light was on and a Prius was in the driveway, but nobody answered the door and Lehrer wrote that he had left town for California.

 

Slow posting day here at the Banter. We’ll be round for the game tonight. In the meantime, dig this cool article on the Sony Walkman TPS-L2 over at Minimally Minimal (found via Kottke).