We wait for the sun to drop. Then Craig turns to me. “Here’s what you do. Get out of the cab and up on the back of the ute with this spotlight here. I’ve got on on my side as well. You move that light nice and slow over the left side of the road while I drive and do the right. You see any ‘roos with that thing, tap the roof with your hand.”

Simple enough, it seemed. The hard stuff came along pretty quickly. We stopped with a jerk, Craig mashing the brakes with his feet as he loaded a shell into his rifle and took aim. A kangaroo sat frozen in my spotlight’s cone of light, its eyes two tiny reflectors and its jaws the only movement.

When a kangaroo gets shot in the head, it jumps straight up and flips over backwards like some kind of weird 3-D Atari game. One leg vigorously pumps the air, a flailing faucet draining away the last of a kangaroo’s energy until it drops into the dust with the rest of the body. My job was then to leap off the Ute, run up to the kangaroo, grab it by that same recently-kicking leg or the tail and drag it back. Ninety percent of the time the animal was dead by the time I made it to the truck.

As I walked slowly to my first dead kangaroo, processing all of what had just happened and what I was about to do through thin filter of functioning emotional shock, Craig barked at me from the Ute.

“Let’s get a wriggle on, we haven’t got all bloody night!” His shouts were punctuated with the rhythmic clacking drags of a knife on steel.

I dragged the dying beast as fast as I could, trying to block out the little shakes traveling up my arm as its shattered head bumped over uneven ground. This was even harder than it sounds because I was also trying to block out the distinct thought that I had seen something writhing in the kangaroo’s pouch as I grabbed its leg.

I didn’t have time to dwell for long. As soon as I got to the truck, Craig handed me an enormous machete and a bloodstained wooden block.

“You know how to use these? You’re gonna learn fast, mate. Watch close and listen carefully. I fuckin’ hate having to repeat meself. First, we get in there and split the heart. If ‘e’s not quite dead, that’ll do him quicker than anything. It gets all the extra blood out too so’s you don’t have such a fuckin’ mess later. Then we get the head off and put it out here.”

With this, Craig stabbed the kangaroo in the neck, rummaging around in the spine for what seemed like a particular juncture of vertebrae. Upon finding it, he quickly slashed through the remaining neck tissue, grabbing the poor creature’s head by its long ears and flinging without even looking into the dark bush, where it hit the dirt and rolled with a series of sloppy wet flopping sounds.

With maximum efficiency, he turned to the tail, severing it from the ‘roo’s rump with a few deft strokes, grunting “these’re worth a dollar apiece. Coons buy’em and make soup out of em. Bloody beautiful soup, too. Lotsa guys don’t save ‘em, but I say why throw money away? Now get over here with that block and machete.”

I was responsible for hacking the forepaws off of each kangaroo while he beheaded and be-tailed them. Craig reckoned I’d pick this skill up quickly enough. I had no prior machete experience, and found that I had to hack repeatedly at the animals’ wrists, sending a fine spray of blood and bone splinters onto my face and into the night sky. I learned very quickly to keep my mouth shut at work, both literally and figuratively.

“Yeah, you’re crap at that, alright,” Craig said. “Now, take this knife and cut that bit of skin there on the back leg.” Although longer, the bit of skin Craig referred to is analogous to the skin between a human’s Achilles tendon and the bones of the ankle. Under Craig’s guidance, I guided a large, S-shaped meathook tipped with very sharp points through the hole. Surprisingly enough, I had not yet vomited.

“Now, for the big boomers, there’s no way you’re gettin’ ‘em up by yourself. I’ll help you with this’n and the other big boys. But the does, you can get those alone. That’s why you’re here. Me arm is all fucked from years of this shit.”

Female kangaroos, however, pose their own problems. Although easier to lift than male ‘roos or “boomers,” the does are often pregnant. And in those cases, the only humane thing to do for the joeys that can’t survive outside the pouch is to kill them on the spot, quickly and decisively. It can be an emotional challenge. Even for Craig, who accepted this part of the job decades ago.

The best methods for dispatching joeys include beheading them or stomping them beneath your boot. The bigger ones you grab by the back legs and smash against a nearby rock or even the truck’s tire. After we killed five or six ‘roos, Craig would stop to gut them, pulling the babies out to dispatch them en masse. After one such performance Craig peered at me through the swirling dust and sighed.“Mate, I’ve been doin’ this for fifty years, and this part always makes me feel like such a cunt.”

Let the record show that I didn’t participate in this part of the job. The one time that I did, I made a horrible mistake. I was dragging a doe up to the Ute and could see something wriggling in the pouch. All of a sudden two legs stuck out. I grabbed them, pulling the joey free. I meant to hold it up and shout to Craig, “Hey, what should I do with this one,” but it leaped out of my hand and hopped into the distance with a chirping scream.

“You stupid fucking fuckwit, that joey’s not big enough to survive on its own out here! E’s gonna go off and get eaten or starve to death all alone all because you think you’re such a fucking animal lover! Now chop that cunt’s paws off doubletime and help me get these fuckas up on the Ute!”

*********
This is part 3 of a five-part story. Click here for parts one, two, three, four, or five.

Popularity: 3% [?]

My girlfriend took care of me the best that she could, and I managed occasional work as a dishwasher, furniture mover, and stonemason. But my meagre income was eating into my pride. I was tired of the wide, silver paint-lined grins that the Aborigines at the city center always flashed when they saw me shoplifting my meals. I was tired of shoplifting my meals.

Then Craig rang.

“G’day…is that Jeff?” It was.

“This is Craig Murphy. Steve Evans told me you was looking for a bit of work as an offsider to a ‘roo shooter.” That was true, yes.

“Well, I’m getting’ ready to go up to Nookawarra out bush for a couple days and I could use a bit of help. I can’t lift the boomers onto the Ute like I used to, and I’m lookin’ for someone to work the light and go get the ‘roos after I shoot ‘em. I’ll take you up there, take care of all your food, and offer you 400 bucks flat.” Sounded cool to me.

“I’ll meet you Monday at the train station,” Craig said. “Bring a couple pillows and a towel and some clothes you can get messy. We leave Tuesday morning, first thing.”

***

The kangaroo is a striking, strange creature, at once silly and majestic like the moose. It’s also the primary symbol of Australia. Portrayed on the national coat of arms, the creature has been used to advertise and anthropomorphize the Australian psyche all over the world. Not only does it adorn everything Australia produces—from postcards to foodstuff logos, from children’s books to novelty t-shirts—but it has proudly crept into the vernacular. In a nation that derogatorily calls its aboriginals “boongs,” its Asians “slants,” and its Italians “wogs,” white Aussies are referred to as “skips.”

For the Australians, the kangaroo is both a boon and pest, a national icon and creature to despise. The country is overrun with them—58 million, according to the latest census, making the species amongst the most common wild land mammal on earth. This, ironically, is mostly thanks to a sheep and cattle industry that have created an abundance of man-made pasture grasses and watering holes, and have driven dingoes—the kangaroos only predators, but “vermin” to sheep farmers—into the center of the country. These cute, fuzzy hoppers now pose a serious environmental threat to the rangelands. Travelling in packs of several hundred, they can easily cover up to 500 kilometers. A pod can bisect a farm on one of these journeys and cause thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to valuable crops in a single night, wrecking fences and outgrazing cattle for rare desert grass.

Consequently it’s perfectly legal in Australia to kill kangaroos, but not all kangaroos. Only the four most plentiful species can be commercially harvested. And it’s not indiscriminate, but part of a far-reaching Management Plan drawn up by the Federal conservation Department. The Plan is basically a system of population monitoring and quota setting. After deciding on a maximum allowable “take” for a given year,the States Authority sells individually and sequentially numbered plastic lockable tags. To qualify as a legal kill each kangaroo must be tagged, and he circulation of these tags are also closely watched to ensure the harvest in any one area doesn’t top the quota.

So if you’re a licensed hunter, you buy tags from the government, load up a truck with a weeks’ worth of food, water and fuel and drive out into the bush to slaughter as many kangaroos as you can safely carry. You then lug the carcasses into town and sell them to a kangaroo processor. Processors will only buy those beasts you’ve humanely killed (i.e. head-shot as opposed to “skin only” which targets the legs and the neck). It works in everyone’s best interest this way: the ‘roos are killed humanely, and processors don’t buy meat that’s been contaminated with lead bullets.

The culling is vast. At its highest, in 2002, total deaths hit seven million. Twenty percent of Australia’s kangaroo population was wiped out in a single year. Little surprise, then, that the animals are now seen by many as natural resource, with the processing of their body parts one of Australia’s fastest-growing industries. Kangaroo meat is now considered a delicacy outside of Australia and exported to fifty-five countries. The soft hides are highly prized by tanneries for being very durable, yet light in weight. The kangaroo economy brings in over $200 million dollars per year and employs about 4,000 people.

Craig is a professional “harvester”, and has been shooting the animals since he was eight years old. “Most weeks, if we wanted to eat meat, we shot a ‘roo. That’s how it was in early days, mate.” After finishing high school, Craig trained as a roof carpenter, supplementing his income with money earned from ‘roo shooting trips and occasional work as an oil driller. Apparently he had never worn a shirt to work, either—the man looked like a crocodile hide stretched over giant sack of rice.

I imagine that most licensed hunters are like Craig, men who grew up in the bush their entire lives with kangaroo killing as part of the lifestyle. The most vocal of the four kangaroo shooter associations—The NSW Professional Kangaroo Cullers—have stated they’d like to see shooters recognised as a full time occupation, much like fishing. And interest does seem to be high: 6,236 occupier licences were issued for the commercial zone in 1999 and 5,130 in 2000.

That said, no one in their right mind would classify commercial kangaroo shooting as a career with long-term prospects. It’s certainly not the type of work you’d take up if there was something better to do. Nor is kangaroo shooting an aspect of Australian culture that is particularly revered or immortalized. Even the gruffest, grizzliest shooter recognizes the job has some nasty aspects and puts it behind him as quickly as possible. Craig confided in me that he no longer dreamed when he slept.

*********
This is part two of a five-part story. Click here for parts one, two, three, four, or five.

Popularity: 3% [?]

the three amigos
Originally uploaded by eatsdirt.

It was free cone day at Ben and Jerry’s stores across America today. This garnered a small amount of media attention on what must have been an otherwise slow news day.

Every year when I hear about free cone day, I think about the best and worst excuse in the entire world.

I was in college, visiting my friend at the University of Greensboro. Greensboro, N.C. is not without its charms, but it also has no shortage of heroin addicts, shady massage parlor and “health spas” and an extremely gregarious selection of street characters.

Greensboro is ground zero for the tobacco industry, and many stores sell individual cigarettes for maybe a quarter apiece. It is entirely likely that when someone asks you for change to get a cigarette, he is going to spin around and do exactly that as soon as you give him the quarter.

At least, the Marinator always did. The Marinator kept one cigarette behind his ear at all times. Whenever he got another one, he would take the cigarette from behind his ear, light it, and replace it with the fresh cigarette.

It was the kind of afternoon where you have to drive the temperature instead of the speed limit. The hot dog’s breath of southern summer had not yet kicked in, but two bottles of Thunderbird had. Eric and I were draped in full effect over the park bench in front of the Ben and Jerry’s, idly discussing the concept of an ice cream cone.
The Marinator hustled out of the alleyway like he was late to work, barely saying “a-ight, fellas” on his way into the ice cream store. We sat up, ready for action.

The scene played itself out in silent pantomime. The Marinator was pleading at the counter with hands clasped and slumped, humble posture. The clerk shook his head slowly, resolutely, saying No.

The Marinator grew agitated, hopping up and gesticulating wildly. He was shouting, but we couldn’t hear a damn thing. He pounded on the counter with his fist, marched up to his favorite flavor and punched the glass in front for emphasis. The clerk shouted back, pointing to the door. Cords stuck out of his pink neck. People came out of the back.

The Marinator made to split, then did a wicked pump-fake and bum-rushed the man behind the counter. Two guys from the back grabbed him and frog-marched him to the street, kicking and silently howling behind the thick glass.

They shoved him into the road and jerked the door shut behind him, locking it. One clerk grabbed the phone and quickly dialed.

The Marinator bounced off the pavement like he had a rubber ass. He smoothed his hair, touched the cigarette behind his ear and looked at us for a second, shrugging. Then he did a rapid about-face and screamed at the store, shouting,

“Motherfuckers! I was SICK on free cone day!”

Popularity: 2% [?]

You may recognize this story from this blog, over a year ago. Since then, it’s developed to a publishable state, been published, and been forgotten. In the absence of any other content, I’ll be running this in installments on here over the next couple of days…

We’ve been hammering at the Outback highway since dawn. Red dust and spinifex grass run to the horizon in every direction, forming a long ribbon of alien terrain under a technicolour blue sky. Craig hasn’t said a word for the last six hours. He’s already played both his Elvis tapes and is saving Jerry Lee Lewis for the all-night drive back. On the way home from a shooting trip you’ve got to drive all night so the meat doesn’t spoil.

We turn off the paved road into dirt tracks that lead us deep into the bush. Soon, we pull up to a long corrugated tin shack graced with a concrete slab porch. Two giant refrigerators sit out front like fat metal marshmallows dotted with faint crimson stains.

“Go on, pick your room, mate, just not the one with me cooler in it,” Craig orders. “I brung that up special.”

My bedroom has a low metal cot and a foam mattress. Red dust covers everything: my bed, the table, the toothbrush and wadded-up tissue the last guy left behind. A table scarred with the cuts from a million knives, stained with oil and dried blood, sits next to a dusty generator out on the front porch. Imagine an abandoned prospector’s cabin on Mars, or an axe murderer’s holiday home.

“Craig, this is so cool,” I shout. “It’s the most godforsaken place I’ve ever seen in my life!” I mean it with the sort of artificial exuberance my friends back home in Richmond use to describe roller-skating, duckpin bowling or their supposed love for Journey. You know the tone.

Craig grunts “Call it what you want, mate, but it’s me fuckin’ life, and I like it.”

Embarrassed, I stutter out an apology. I later learn it’s impossible to hurt a ‘roo shooter’s feelings with a bunch of tiny words. And as I’ll discover when I chop the paws off of my first kangaroo, its blood spraying into my eyes and open mouth, my own life had already become more different than I could ever have imagined.

***

Richmond, Virginia is the sort of town that’s friendly to boredom and torpor. For a couple of years after college, I scraped by on nine bucks an hour, did my laundry at my parents’ and claimed to be a writer and musician.

After a major lifestyle hemorrhage wherein I realized how closely to squandering my twenties I had come, I donated my drums to the thrift store, sold my records and my van and bought a ticket to Sydney.

Within an amazingly short amount of time, I had a girlfriend on the other side of the continent and one of the most beautifully isolated cities in the world. It was a dream come true—my frustration and loneliness suddenly replaced with the picture-book perfection of life on a foreign beach with a gorgeous lady by my side.

Then I ran out of money.

**********
This is part one of a five-part story. Click here for parts one, two, three, four, or five.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Kicking the DogBot
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

I’ve found this oddly terrifying video (via WFMU) of a four-legged robot being tested out in a variety of field conditions — mud, snow, and tall grass. The robot itself is oddly familiar, a doglike android with a mincing, prancing step. All four of its legs have reversed knees like a dog’s front legs, and the android’s high, prance is perfect to allow it to navigate uneven, slippery terrain. In perhaps the most arresting sequence of the video, a man gives the Prancing DogBot a good hard kick to the side, and it regains its balance exactly the way a dog would. It’s hard not to feel a wave of sympathy for the kicked machine.

Afterwards, all my sympathy turns into an odd, gnawing fear. This creature moves exactly the way that certain puppets on Sesame Street did that scared the unholy bejesus out of me as a little kid. When things that moved like this Prancing DogBot’s legs came on TV, I couldn’t even get close enough to turn the thing off — I’d just bury my head under the couch cushions and try not to hear or see.

Here’s the video itself:

As a small child, I had dreams and daytime visions of an army of faceless, soulless creatures marching to kill me and everything good in the world. The creatures would kill me and my teddy bear straight away, but I knew that they would enslave my parents and grandparents and make them do horrible, repetitive things.

Sometimes when I lay very still at night I could hear them marching in lockstep through space and time, getting closer and closer to my closet door which as well know was the gateway to other, more evil dimensions. If the door was shut tight, somehow the creatures from the other dimensions couldn’t bust through. Doorknobs, you see, although simple on Earth, were completely alien to the army of prancing dogbots.

it was not until years later that I realized the steady thudding march of the dogbots was just my heartbeat thudding behind my eardrum on a pillow.

Now when I see this video, I am possessed with a similar vision. It is the year 2080, and the cold of winter is just beginning to recede into spring. The last straggling packs of humans have tired of sleeping in caves. Some of the braver souls in our camp spent last night out by the mouth of the cave, exposed to the robots’ heatseeking devices and not even hidden by foliage, as the trees are still bare.

We all wake at down to the shrieking, beelike diesel chorus of a dozen dogbots in the not-so-distant distance. From my vantage point on a granite outcropping, I can see a dozen dancing digital dogs nimbly picking their way uphill towards us, the heatseeking laser turrets on their backs sweeping the area.

They haven’t found us yet, but they are advancing with their merciless, silly march. I try to shout ‘run’, but the words will not come. A dark stain spreads across my crude tunic as I realize our fate, even as I ready a boulder over my grey, balding head to crush the first wave of attackers.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve been experimenting with Not Blogging lately. It’s been great, but not without its drawbacks. When you really get into Not Blogging, the air is fresher and cleaner — you have more time, more energy for friends, a more leisurely approach to life beyond the glowing rectangle. When I am Not Blogging, I don’t compare myself to peers in the area with narcissistic blogs about partying, dating, and how hot the blogger is that are nevertheless insanely popular.

In my darker moments, I want to see what would happen to certain DC bloggers’ traffic if they gained 30 pounds, posted the photos, and didn’t mention dating for a month.

Not that I am bitter.

The problem with Not Blogging is that it doesn’t address my vain, egocentric side, the side that craves constant attention and the validation that comes from metrics PROVING how fabulous everyone thinks I am. My tiny Puritan work ethic shrieks every time it is neglected, screaming “do you want to work for someone else forever? Do you really think that enjoying life ever got anyone anywhere!?”

So yeah — yin and yang and all that. Life’s a rich tapestry and you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Who wants to see something weird?

This video from fantastic photographer Charlie White (thanks again, BoingBoing) certainly fits the bill. It fits really perfectly into my aesthetic world as it is both creepy and light, pink and terrifying.

I’ll be back to blogging soon enough. In the meantime, let’s all get outside, enjoy some deep breaths and remember that when the going gets rough, doing something weird is usually the answer. AAAaaahhh…

Popularity: 2% [?]

It was Easter this weekend, and I spent it up in Norfolk, Virginia with my family. Since I don’t have a car, I use a form of digitally enabled hitchhiking made possible by Craigslist. Every ride is some sort of adventure. This time I caught a ride with an incredibly kind, stoic grandmother who listened to contemporary country and a CB radio at EXACTLY THE SAME VOLUME the entire ride down. A chain-smoker, my ride and I whiled the time away talking about real estate, the weather, and the god-awful traffic we were quite literally parked in.

There could not have been more traffic outside of the city if Godzilla has appeared at the White House, wearing a turban and breathing anthrax instead of fire.

A tremendous thunderstorm hovered next to the interstate on the drive home. We stared down the heavy setting sun while thick ropes of lightining lashed across the sky just to the right. My driver got noticeably more nervous, rolling up her window and crushing a smoldering butt out, saying “I need a cigarette.”

“Don’t mind me,” she said with forced cheer. “Ever since I got hit by lightning, I get a little nervous during electrical storms.”

Everyone’s got a story, man — you just got to talk to people long enough to find out what it is.

My grandmother and I had another fantastic flying carpet ride of a conversation this trip. She is astonishingly sharp for a woman in her early 90’s, but the part of her brain that secreted the “don’t say that” hormone is loOong gone. It makes conversation really fun, actually, because she’s still sharp as a tack, just a little handier with the non-sequiturs. She’s mentally quite agile, and really keeps you on your toes.

We sort of talked simultaneously about Easters past and U.S. immigration policy. She reminded me of a lot of great times we had had in years long past, and how much fun she and the rest of the family had putting together Easter baskets for me and my sister.

For many years, I could count on the Easter Bunny aka My Mom to put a yo-yo and a copy of Mad Magazine in my Easter basket.

Another year, my sister and I were given stuffed animals and animal puppets.

Daro, Jess and I used to make tents out of blankets and play circus with stuffed animals. Daro loved to be the elephant and lumber around the room on all fours, which cracked Jess and I up to no end.

One year, we actually raised ducklings and released them into the wild a month or so after Easter. That was the same year I learned that many mother birds actually regurgitate food into their young’s mouths during their formative stages. You can see me getting ready to feed the ducklings here:

All of a sudden, we veered over to immigration policy and stayed there for a good while. Daro is the sort of red-blooded American that survived the Depression, sent her husband off to World War II, fought for integration in the schools during the 60’s and now listens to Rush Limbaugh and think he’s a newscaster. Me, I’m a knee-jerk artsy-fartsy liberal, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Nevertheless, we were able to have an intelligent, reasonable and respectful conversation despite the fact that neither of us actually knew what the hell we were talking about.

That’s the beauty of my family. We operate on a series of respectuful, delicate fictions, and are able to love each other so dearly partially because we have entire areas of experience that we never, ever discuss. It always amazes me how we can be so close and know so little about each other — it’s an act of blind faith that gets rewarded every time we greet each other with a great big hug, and I never want to completely understand it. Some things you got to just accept as awesome without ever monkeying around under the hood, and that’s even coming from a deep-thinking self-conscious liberal.

Popularity: 2% [?]

There’s a lot being written and said about Gnarls Barkley, and none of it’s bad. The super-combo of Cee-Lo Green and hip-hop producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, has risen to the top of the UK Music charts powered solely by download sales.

“Crazy,” arguably the single of the moment is a seductive, sexual, funny, and infinitely repeatable. In the words of Alexis Petridis in the Guardian,

“It echoes all kinds of apparently contradictory music - the exquisite misery of a southern soul ballad, the tempo and spacey euphoria of an old vocal house anthem, the clanking, unfunky bassline of a 1980s indie band - but the cumulative effect sounds like nothing else.”

She makes a strong case. I only just downloaded the album Friday morning, and am away from my computer for a much-needed Easter weekend with the family, but I can’t think about anything else. I though Wolfmother was the new heat, and in the rock world they are. But this stuff is gospel-silky and electro-indie and so, so cool. Gnarls Barkley fits perfectly into the new canon of poppy hipster rap, right along with DangerDoom, Outkast and Doctor Octagon. It may be a stretch, but “Crazy” could elbow its way onto wedding dancefloors and bar mitzvahs until the end of time, right along with “brick House” and Outkast’s recent addition, “Hey Ya.”

If nothing else, Gnarls Barkley is the new gold standard for pimping out a Myspace profile. How do you even do that to a Myspace page? And why has nobody else bothered?

The entire album is available in stores on April 24th, and it’s all but guaranteed to be the first huge album of the summer. But since you people put up with my verbose vomiting of musical memories, I’ll give you a free download of Gnarls Barkley’s album “Saint Elsewhere,” available until Friday, April 23rd. All I ask is that you show me some love, tell your friends, and keep commenting.

Gnarls Barkley: “Saint Elsewhere.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

hysteria
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

For some reason, music gets good in springtime. Songs have more hope. They inspire huge flights of fancy and big dumb projects that either flop miserably or change your whole life.

We all have springtime songs from the past that just do it for us.And that’e the next best thing about spring, apart from the weather: it gives meaning to a whole new batch of music.

By the spring of 1988, my relationship with the trombone was officially on the rocks. It was the silliest instrument the sixth-grade band had to pick from, which made it a major plus when I chose it that fall, and I figured that since I didn’t have to learn any complex fingering, it would be that much easier to learn. Boy, was I ever wrong. It turned out that you had to actually be good at the trombone to do all of the fun stuff with it, and getting good meant practicing, which I was definitely not into.

I was too busy caring about breakdancing and drawing my own Super Carrot comics to pick up the trombone like my parents forced me to, five days a week for half an hour a day. Christmas vacation had been a nightmare of parentally mandated two-hour practice sessions to make up for all my lost time. One can neglect ones’ homework pretty quietly, but the sound of a kid not practicing his trombone is aggressively inaudible.

By the time the spring concert started rolling around, things were getting pretty heavy between me, my dad and the trombone. My dad was of the opinion that once you commit to something, you see it through… a good lesson for a growing boy. However, he was also determined not to be the father of the kid who screwed up the band’s spring concert. There was no explaining to him that no matter how little I practiced, there were plenty of kids in the band than I did.

The thing about being in the sixth grade is that these tiny things with tremendous implications that change your whole life happen every day, and you barely notice them. I felt the full weight of this transformation the moment it happened, and I’ve been fully aware of it ever since.

I was polishing off the back end of an old chocolate rabbit during a little break before settling into the onerous business of learning some Bach, when I decided to flip on the radio. Terence Trent D’Arby was on his way out, and the DJ’s faux-breathless voice kicked in. I was so young, I couldn’t tell his voice was a beard for his boredom… I got a little excited every time the DJ said anything. But that night, what he said helped change my whole thing…

“Now, debuting at number one in tonight’s Hot Eight at Eight: Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’!!”

The opening chords and steady, relentless beat poured out of my amp and right into my tiny prelibidinal mind. I didn’t know what was happening, who was in charge anymore, or which way was up. All I knew was that from now on, things would be different. My second instinct, following the urge to crank the radio (which I did) was to grab the nearest instrument and try to catch this amazing, rockin’ wave.

I blew my hardest, pumping the slide of the trombone in rhythm to the drums while mimicking the lyrics’ rhythm with my breath. I had never heard that song before, and as I mentioned previously, I sucked at the trombone. All that pent-up frustration, all that sixth-grade springtime energy just flew, unchecked, out of my lungs, around the golden loops of the horn and right into the living room to willingly, achingly, pour some sonic sugar onto Joe Elliott’s rockin’ creation.

My dad came into the room and turned the radio down. He looked at me with total confusion and said, “Jeffrey. I may regret saying this later, as it totally contradicts all that I stand for. But your mother and I would love it if you would stop playing the trombone tonight.”

So I’m curious, readers — what songs do you love, and what dumb stuff did they make you do?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Wolfmother Poster
Originally uploaded by The Kozy Shack.

Mark my words, people: these guys are serious.

Australia has a pretty nice cultural tradition going for itself in that it produces bands that are never terrifically innovative, but do what they fuck they do better than anyone else on earth. Wolfmother fits squarely within that tradition.

Think about it: AC/DC — straight ahead balls-out rock. INXS, same deal, but cokier. Now Wolfmother, the sonic fusion of Zeppelin, Trail of the Dead, and every picture your friend’s older brother ever drew on the cover of his math book.

I hear Wolfmother and I think of springtime in Norfolk, rolling out to the Boathouse in my man Phil’s crappy Chevy Manza. I think of skipping school to smoke dope on the way to the beach and summoning up the nerve to crash the preppy crowd’s parties and talk to the girl in my math class. Given my prowess at the time, I would have asked about the killer test that week, but you know, baby steps.

These guys are like Sabbath and the lone shred of hippies that are still cool all rolled up into one psychedelic thundering explosion. They played South By Southwest, a few club show here and there…

If anyone’s gonna bring the magic of hesher stadium rock back to America, it’s gonna be these manic Aussies. Mark my words, it’s not going to be long before you start seeing Wolfmother tattoos. On people’s FACES.

Here’s an incredible video, and the making of said video, with a little interview…

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