acrid folk

mood: hah hah hah hah hah
music: Sons and Daughters - the Repulsion Box

Today’s post fulfills this blog’s subtitle, being a sour-grapes folk darling anecdote I got from a friend in the USA who is in a band called Baltic Knot. All names and locations have been changed to protect the guilty.

“Last summer James and I played a show in Boston with the Beltane Yews and Snakedial. When we got there this guy came up to James and was like "James?!? What are you doing here? Did you move to Boston?" (I can't remember the dude's name so let's call him Mo. I think his stage name is like Gandalf Pendragon or some shit) and James’s like "no, Mo. I'm playing a show here with my band. What are you doing here?" and he's like "oh, I'm in the Beltane Yews".

”So it turns out that this guy and his band used to all live in Portland and when they were in high school they would come in to the record store where James worked and made fun of him for listening to "pussy-ass-shit" like Pearls Before Swine and Vashti Bunyan. At the time, they were in a band called "Backdraft" that apparantly sounded like Fugazi. But then they moved to Brooklyn and bought some folk albums and you know the rest.

“So the capper of the evening was when I wandered down to the greenroom and smoked a joint with these a-holes and overheard the following conversation:

Snakedial guy #1: "so what's with this Baltic Knot?"
Snakedial guy #2: "oh, you know... just another one of those psych folk bands"
Beltane guy # 1: "ugh. I'm so sick of that shit."
Beltane guy # 2: "no man, they're the real deal. their guitarist James, he used to follow the Dead and sell acid in the 80's."
Snakedial guy # 1: "huh. whatever."

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Guy Bartell phoned me up the other week to tell me he had been suffering a recurring dream that he had died, and in the film of his life he was played by Judge Rheinhold.
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Simplistic peaceniks churn out Ghandi quotes at times like this.Here Guy and I offer some alternatives:

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world seeing eye to eye”

“An eye for an eye means the innocent have nothing to fear”

“An eye for an eye leaves me feeling a lot better about the little f*cker that broke into my car”

“An eye for an eye ensures equal rights for the visually impaired”