Let's start the day with some Sabbath, shall we?
When I first moved to LaLaLand in 2006, I'd come home every October with a small cache of CDs. Eventually, of course, technology prevailed and my travel bag got lighter with the iPod; I bought one of those handy cassette to 1/8th jacks and music could follow me even in my Dad's truck, which only had CD and cassette capabilities. So far this trip I can't find that damned device, and in a search for something to listen to yesterday on my way to see Jonathan Grimm hock his wares at the Miskatonic Brewery's most recent art show, I found this in my dad's glove box, no doubt left by me several years before:
The find dovetailed nicely with waking up this morning and finding Mr. Brown had texted me that Pitchfork's Sunday Album this week is Sabbath's Paranoid, written by Grayson Haver Currin. I pretty much hate pitchfork except for this weekly column, and if you're a Sabbath fan, this is a great read. You can find the article HERE.
All this fits, because I can't come home and not become immersed in Sabbath, so the cassette was more a spiritual omen or reminder than it was a coincidence. My parent's place breathes Sabbath to me; some of my favorite and most vivid memories of the heavily wooded property where I grew up are of my friend Jake and I getting stoned and listening to Sabbath. Not just listening; this was clinical. We reveled in it, picking lyrics apart and building the exo-skeletons of our own philosophy around some of the words in the songs - especially the ones on Sabotage - the riffs and rhythms serving as mnemonic anchors, activation triggers for me later in life (sadly, Jake did not make it to 'later in life'; that's shit I work through in my writing, if you know where to look), so that the simple act of sitting in a car behind the house at 42 years of age and hearing the opening riff of Wheels of Confusion reactivates the assuredness Jake and I had at twenty-years old that the overall pull of the Universe was a positive, loving one, and no matter what I was struggling with it was transitory because that is the nature of our reality, transition.
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Drinking with Comics tapes and (hopefully) streams live tonight on the DwC Facebook page, somewhere around 6:00 PM CST (that's 4:00 PM on the West Coast) at the Amazing Fantasy Books and Comics Frankfort store.
Playlist from 12/08:
Black Sabbath - Children of the Grave (Import version of Vol. 4)
Perturbator - B-Sides and Remixes, Vol. 1
No card today because I'm running out of time. Heading out to see this on the big screen:
