Dumb cargo bike adventures part ???

 

I went to a rummage sale on the cargo bike today. I saw an upright vacuum and asked myself, hmm, will I be able to get this thing home safely? Answer: OF COURSE. And drivers, for some crazy reason, seemed to give me more room than usual! Memo to myself: always carry a vacuum cleaner on bike

"When the Song Begins"

Always interesting when something you did twenty-five years ago comes up on shuffle. This 10-minute number was recorded, if I recall correctly, on my blue Tascam Porta 02, probably using a single microphone. The title is the first line uttered, nearly five minutes in, and I like how the coda is actually kind of pretty. I also like how my guitar is borderline inaudible, but it is clearly providing invisible structure to the proceedings:

Not my favorite album by said group, but definitely the edgiest GW album cover, Wegman weimaraners photoshopped onto that infamous gun photo, with faux-Crass typography to boot. And in any case GW's albums don't necessarily function to be good or bad, they just are, they exist to propagate themselves in used record bins. This one was particularly good at that function since it was on what I recall being a pretty hip record label? And I appreciate how this particular song has a whopping 16 plays on YouChoob.

Early September / Herbie Flowers

I took the last couple days off work. Burning off some PTO. Felt good.

Yesterday I rode my bike to hike on Mt. Talbert, which I don't think I'd been to since my kid started going to daycare. It felt weird not having 25 pounds of snoozing toddler in a hiking backpack on my person. I felt free. The dappled sunlight, overmemorized paths, and hyperactive squirrels pleased me greatly. It smelled like September 10th. And now that I know I can bike there, hike from the bottom to the top, and get back all in an hour and a half, I may need to go more frequently.

On Monday I biked up to Little Axe Records, always a good time, both the biking part and the record store part. The clerk was playing his personal (original!) copy of Pari Zangeneh's The Series of Music for Young Adults, part of my soundtrack from Cargo Bike Summer 2023, and I was soaking it up. I bought a reasonably-priced copy of Jody Harris/Robert Quine's Escape (c.f. this blog in May)

I also bought a reasonably-priced copy of the Craven Fops' Pleasure. I love saying the name "Craven Fops" and it's a good record in the inconvenient 10" format.

I looked for anything on them besides the singles I'd heard previously. This ended me up on r/vintageobscura, which showed me that session bassist par excellence Herbie Flowers died a week ago. RIP to the man whose lateral-thinking downtuned floppy heavy bass solo on Nilsson's "Jump into the Fire" showed me that another world is possible.