I'm going to write a little about today. I'm not going to write about the amusingly rude gestures the crazy (young, soccer-mom-ish) broad in the white Taurus wagon made at me after I gently beeped at her as she made an illegal right-on-red into my lane. I'm not going to talk about the great exchange I had with a cab driver at a stop light, after we'd both watched a souped-up Mustang zoom away in a cloud of oil smoke and tinny dime-store custom exhaust noise....
Well, maybe I will talk about that a little, because after the soccer-mom screamed at me and mimed fellatio (and not in a good way--trust me on this) while giving me the finger, the taxi driver (of all people) somewhat restored my sense that not everyone is crazy...
So, he yells over at me and says, "I hope your car doesn't sound like that [meaning the 'Stang] because even though it was a nice car it sounded like shit, and was burning oil like crazy, because he ain't changing it often enough."
"No," I replied, "this sounds a whole lot better than that, and it doesn't burn a drop." When the light went green, he hung back so he could listen to me pull away. I heard him yell "Oh YEAH! Sweet!" Then he caught me in the tunnel under the Science Center and stuck his head out to hear more. So I hit the gas again and zoomed (rather faster than I'd planned) to the light at the top of the hill. The taxi caught me and flew by (through a yellow) while giving me a thumbs-up out the window. (His hand was in some kind of splint, so I guess he couldn't use it to hold the steering wheel.)
So that was cool.
Anyway, I'm not really going to talk about all that. I'm going to talk about Bob Log III, a brilliant one-man-band psycho (video links thereupon are very likely NSFW...) who wears a leisure suit and an open-faced motorcycle helmet with a telephone receiver stuck in the eyeshield. He plays slide guitar, bass drum, hi-hat and drum machine, and is quite unlike anything you've seen before.
More after the jump.
I've actually seen him play twice. Once, was at the Duke Coffeehouse about 10 years ago, when he was in Doo Rag.
Such a noise you never did hear!
Until 2003 (was it that recent? wow....), when Bob Log III came to Cambridge. The overly-bizarre Bebe and Serge opened, but Bob Log was the main attraction. He told jokes (all of which were too funny for me to have any hope of remembering), he flailed amazingly on his beat up guitar, and just generally tore the place up. Now, keep in mind that he wears a helmet at all times, and is mic-ed through a telephone receiver stuck in his facemask. The receiver is plugged into a guitar amp, and then run through the PA.
Which means it sounds absolutely terrible, and is very loud.
But it was seriously one of the best shows I saw that year. He played his "hit," Boob Scotch (the video is side-splittingly funny, and not at all SFW, unless you work at home; or want to share an uncomfortable moment with your co-workers--and then work at home, maybe?), and a couple of other songs that I didn't know (but are apparently much-favored by the Japanese).
Didn't know, that is, until today. Because the on Tuesday evening I wandered over to the Fat Possum site (home of T-Model Ford, Junior Kimbrough and other geniuses, and profiled in the NYer a few years ago), and got myself all of the Bob Log III stuff I could. They FedExed it yesterday, and it got here today, and goddamn....
...I am really pleased. The guy's a genius. Psycho, and weird, but in a good way, and generally really fantastic.
So, I'm finding it really comforting that in world where illegal-right-turning-finger-giving-fake-fellating-psycho-bitch soccer moms roam, there's a guy wearing a mask and a helmet, playing Delta blues with all four of his limbs and yelling into a telephone and making recordings about about scotch, on the rocks.
"Stir it up!/Stir it up!/Hold it in as long as you can!/Then put it back in Bob Log's hand"