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Wednesday, October 02, 2002 Me: no longer a virgin. My first-ever MP3 file got downloaded today, a cut by Lord Buckley. (Not Tim Buckley, not Lord Sutch -– Lord Buckley.) Admittedly, I'm way behind the curve on the MP3 thing, but I figured I'd at least get ahold of some rarities before the music industry shuts the file-sharing community down entirely. I tried hooking up with this phenomenon a while ago, but my tired Dell laptop wasn't up to the work. This new Gateway rig I picked up a couple of weeks back dug right into it with the result that I now have three Lord Buckley numbers hiding in my hard drive with a fourth in process as I type this. Why Lord Buckley? In earlier times, I passed a year in the upstate N.Y. town of New Paltz, a small community just across the Esopus River and the flood flats from the easternmost reaches of the Catskills. Fresh out of college, sort of (I took so many electives during my undergrad years that I had to do a couple of courses over what should have been my post-graduation summer and another the following autumn to finish up, meaning my university time didn't so much as finish up in the usual burst of finals/graduation/etc. as meander around until it finally petered out), I gravitated to that part of the state because both my brother's family and two childhood friends resided there. Both friends worked in the Town water department and seemed sure there'd be a spot for me if I wanted a place to hang my hat, workwise, for a spell. Minimal pay, but I wasn't feeling real ambitious at that time, so I went for it. The Water Dept. Supervisor, our boss, was a Vietnam Vet named Larry -– a hefty, bearded, capable guy who knew when to cut us slack and when to apply the spurs. An interesting, generally relaxed character. He lived a block or two up the hill from my brother in a funky little wood frame house with a good-sized back yard where he kept bees. Indoors, he kept iguanas -- two of them, mostly in a large enclosure of wood and glass in the dining room, though on winter nights when he had the wood stove cranked up, he'd take the iguanas out and let them hang out on a burl of wood he had fastened above the archway between the living and dining rooms. They'd remain up there soaking up the heat, content and motionless. Lunch hour often stretched itself out to a lunch hour-and-a-half, sometimes more, usually taking place at Larry's place. Endless conversation, music playing on the box. Larry had a few oddities in his tunes collection, including a Lord Buckley disc that he laid on us a few times. Specialized stuff, not something we wanted to hear all the time, but so striking and unique that when it got played all conversation stopped. First of all, the guy presented himself visually as a straight-looking middle-aged white Englishman, of serious, refined demeanor. The kind of gentleman who would look at home in a tux, with a cane. In contrast to his appearance, his material was verbal jazz -- wild, theatrical spoken-word stuff, entirely in the argot of the beats, the hipsters of the 50s, delivered with impeccable control by way of an amazing set of pipes. Not your usual lunch-hour entertainment. I've always remembered certain Lord Buckley cuts I heard during the course of that year in New Paltz -– The Nazz (a beat re-telling of the Jesus story), The Train (a strange, short piece about a train wreck), and Buckley's hipster versions of the Gettysburg Address and Marc Antony's funeral oration from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Might sound both weird and boring, all that, and though it may be weird, it's far from boring. This last Labor Day weekend, on my way back from a couple of days in the Boston area [see journal entries of August 30-31 and September 3-4], I stopped off to visit friends in New Hampshire, Joe, Deb, and their lethally adorable daughter Emily. Joe: an old rock and roller with a small collection that includes some hard to find gems, including an old pressing of a Lord Buckley LP. We got to talking about his Lordship, Joe slipped the vinyl disc on the turntable, I heard the Gettysburg Address and The Train for the first time in years and years. I wanted to get my hands on my own copy of that stuff, Joe suggested going the MP3 route. When I got back home here I tried to do just that, but as I've already said my laptop was not up to it. My hands were tied. Until now. Time to listen to an MP3 or two. Be well. rws 7:52 PM [+] |