Rick Johnson Reader: ‘Tin Cans, Squeems & Thudpies’

Hold the prunes! Here’s a prosaic purgative to fuel your next bog reading session. ‘Rick Johnson Reader: ‘Tin Cans, Squeems and Thudpies’, cleanses your colon of the ‘smell bag’ residue of the mainstream musical press. As a reviewer for sadly defunct ‘Creem’ magazine, the late ‘Reeek’ (Rick) Johnson dishes up a nutritious blend of ‘deedle-deedle’, ‘aural burp-guns’ and ‘stomach reprisals’  to reduce pop culture down to its most corporally flatulent. Dig this from a rock crit. of Thunderpussy’s, ‘Documents of Captivity’,   

 ‘Illini bands tend to sound like a cow in the last stages of Bang’s Disease squatting on a steel guitar, play ‘bout as fast as a drugged leech on a sticky driveway, and record their albums in green-houses…Then along comes Thunderpussy like a beer fart in Sunday School, really cleaning the air. There’s a lotta’ slice guitar…bat bleep guitaro attacks (lotsa those)…and even a jazzbo or two.’

 April, 1974

 

A Taste of Sweden

Sniping at Swedes is like shooting fish in a barrel, and in Sweden shooting those fish is even easier as they’re already dead, then left in a barrel to ferment for two months, canned, and eaten. It’s called ‘Surstromming’ and, like Swedish retail giant IKEA, could best be termed an ‘acquired taste’ (similarly, Nordic Death Metal bands and Swedish tennis players though, if made to choose, I’ll take Opeth’s ‘Bleak’* over Mats Wilander’s ‘den lekfulla lognen’** any day). Yep, when it comes to ripened seafood and  assemble-yourself  furniture, what may smell Swede-y-sweet to one may smell waste-bin whoofy to another. And while, admittedly, I’ve no experience of the olfactory delights or otherwise of Surstromming (I’ll defer to the video on that stuff – make up your own mind***), I can say, with a degree of certitude, that shopping at IKEA Richmond is on the nose.

 

Of Dentistry, Cannibalism and the Congo

Travel spells danger. I’ve seen a turbaned Sikh cracked on the nut by an aircraft baggage compartment, the moorings loosened, no doubt, by a lifetime of dodgy landings and equally dodgy budgeting. I’ve helped a Japanese tourist to retrieve his specs; me and him, on all fours, fumbling myopically across the deck of a lurching ferry off the Thailand coast; a situation made more taxing by the surging bile from a too nauseous – and way too near – German hippy. On one occasion I even spat out the sad amalgam of turbulence, air meal fork, and twelve hundred dollars of bridge-work, twenty thousand metres above the Pacific Ocean (Air travel these days is much safer…fears of fork-effected Fetwahs have largely been assuaged, post 9/11, by plastic cutlery…and it’s easier on dentistry than steel!). Yep, travel has afforded me proof that any abrupt renegotiation of the spatial relationship between body and object can result in suffering – but I’ve yet to experience anything like this;

 

Moving Forward Into History

‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…And one fine morning – so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ (The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald) 

Hope is timeless; as is futility – a glance back at the bow wave of history says as much…and therein lays the trick.  Do you see it? Twenty odd years ago I didn’t, my gaze more commonly drawn to the stern of a shapely woman rather than to the flow of a fine writer. But I see it now – there – in all its’ carnal beauty – the word, ‘us’. 

 

Vale Lux

 

 I’ve got the cramps. They announced themselves twenty-three years ago and they remain with me to this day; monstering my wife, my neighbours, and my stereo. I recall when they first bonded to my DNA; it was the instant needle kissed vinyl on my copy of The Cramps Gravest Hits EP, all the way back in 1984. That record was warped from the get-go – literally – a dodgy pressing inciting the stylus arm of dad’s ‘3-in-1’ to buck and lurch like some half-cut harlot. Still, no matter (or none, at least, when the old man wasn’t around), that first track, Human Fly, remains, to my mind, proof positive of how compromised surface geometry can, on occasion, serve to accentuate sound etched into vinyl. And, oh, what sound! When I play that song now the fumbling of Poison Ivy’s ‘who-gives-a-pluck’ rhythm guitar, followed by the crunch of the band lurching into life, still sends shudders through my plumbing…all the way down to my pelvic bone.