Vintage, Retro, Revolutionary, Errant, Ancient, Infantile, Ed Sanders, wanderlusting poet, singer, classicist, malestrome writer, left his solo lp “Truckstop” in the epicenter of a mercurial career. Fair warnings are included on the rear cover as a system of traffic lights stand in judgement of the material included with options running from green to yellow to red as to its moral fiber for broadcasting advisability.
Hard to believe any restaurant architecture could provide chili, shrimp and spaghetti on a convincing neon sign, with glass block and a striped awning window frosting. A nameless country western diner with Ed shielding his eyes in the high heat of the day. Almost a personification of the uphill climb that was Mr. Sanders journey as a forever Fug. The Fugs, that primal American band who goosed the moral turpitude of the country during the flailing 1960’s.
Incidentally, here’s what Pindar wrote long before Christ had pimples:
“Creatures of a day! What is anyone?
What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days”
Listen instead to the “talk-sing” manner he employs as “Pindar’s Revenge” closes this period defining record. And lyrics to the spoken recitation found in the piece.
I know that the sun rising
Is a temporary thing,
That the sun obtuse on clouds
At 30 thousand feet from the
Airline windows is an
Equal particle, that
Ra is a shard, an
Ostracon from a forbidden
Cycle of the acons.
Nor god nor pulsing phantom forever
But that I live at the mansion of earth
For 80 years in the warmth,
The children off to space,
The chickens still crowing
At sunup, but our
Hearts beat lugubrium lugubrium lugubrium
At Ra’s pink-fingered sinking
42 billion years
Then zap
Then 42
Zap
We are caught
The meat chain
Born of the prostate,
Born of the
Cusping egg-
Caught, ended,
Slashed. We are
Led by the calf
To the thin
Arroyo
To be slaughtered in droves
Driven into the eyes and
Slashings of the manglers,
That little drama,
No matter,
42
Zap
“we are now
In the
Electromagnetic
Cycle”
IT lives.
Enormous breathings
& compressions
Of IT
Maybe print out a copy of this cover, make a postcard of it. David Bromberg provides guitar accompaniment. Pindar never forgets what his accompany meant.
“Now the old country school is now a crashpad and you’re gone,
yes you’re gone.”