Deserted Songs & Two Miller Tall Boys

Kidless. Wifeless too. I look forward to these rare moments of solitude, and then I miss everyone a few hours after they’re gone. It’s like I need the security of knowing that the kids are in their rooms, the wife’s sleeping in our room with the TV on and I’m alone downstairs relishing being finally alone. But now they’re not here, and I know it, and it doesn’t help that the music playing is Mercury Rev’s Deserter Songs.
There’s nothing better than that album, and its sister album The Flaming Lips The Soft Bulletin. I can’t believe what a place I was in when those two albums were release, these pair of approaching millennium epics. They had me considering possibilities, planting a seed of emotional self-evaluation. I don’t know if music has that kind of impact on you, and it isn’t until much later…like tonight in solitude…that I start to think about how things fell into place and what songs were playing when directions changed course.
It also helps that I’m reading Dero’s Staring At Sound, the book he did a few years ago on The Flaming Lips. So yeah, I’m continually spinning the Lips catalog, paying close attention not to spin Bulletin, but making sure to hit those moments where this band stopped by and said “I’m here!” before moving on again. Zaireeka wasn’t that familiar salutation. It was a smack to the face, demanding the listener get four cds together (ha!), I mean, how pretentious is that?!
Not very, actually. In fact it’s downright brilliant.
But the brilliance was unmistakable with The Soft Bulletin, and instead of smacking you across the face, it grabbed you by the collar and screamed “I’m here and we’re going someplace” before it threw you in the trunk of a car and sped off.
I’m sure I’ll write more on this some other time, but the point is that I’m on a Lips kick and trying to resuscitate the memories that each album created.
The book is good, Wayne’s kind of a prick, but not in the sense of Lou Reed, a man so utterly unapproachable and ill-tempered that you’d be better off not even reading about him. Wayne seems wonderfully approachable, just kind of a dick to work with because his work ethic is so much stronger than anyone else’s. He talked some shit about Robyn Hitchcock…another one of my heroes…and that kind of rubbed me the wrong way…but again, that’s not really my battle to fight.
Besides obsessing over the Lips, worrying about Robyn Hitchcock, and feeling sorry for myself, what did I do with myself? I went to a baseball game. I took the wife and kids to one last week, but I really got a chance to see about, oh, a half inning of it. So tonight, I went solo and watched the Kernels beat the Quad Cities River Bandits, and I mean watched the game. No kids to worry about, no wife to consider, just a few bears, some peanuts, and an awesome seat right behind home plate.
I wouldn’t have gotten a seat like that if there were more than just me.
And yes, that’s yet another picture of the huge eyeballs that race in between one of the innings.
God, I love that.