rhinosplode

The Best True Story I Can Tell

by Bryan Shaffer

Circumstance. That’s what this story is all about; there is no moral or message. I firmly believe that life is a series of experiences based on circumstance. This story echoes that idea.

It was the evening before my flight to Atlanta. I wasn’t supposed to go to Atlanta for spring break, but it turned out that my funding was well shy of what was needed to fly to Spain. So my mother, being typically generous, bought me a plane ticket to Atlanta for my birthday to see my friend Dan instead. Since I hadn’t seen Dan in a few years I was pretty happy with the arrangement.

I was in my living room with my friend Brett, just after dinner, watching the TV when my mom decided to call the airline to make sure we had the flight numbers & times right. I knew something was wrong right away by the tone of her voice. As it turns out, the travel agent had reserved a seat for me on the flight, but then had never actually booked it, so it was sold to someone else. They could book me a seat on another flight that day, but it would have cost over seven hundred dollars. My mom, knowing I was going to be disappointed, started to cry. This situation was no good.

Allow me to introduce you to Brett, who jumped right in with the easiest and least expensive solution to our dilemma: He had nothing to do the next week, so he offered to drive me to Atlanta. I was in disbelief until I looked at him and realized he wasn’t kidding. No one ever talks about the good things that go along with being friends with an unemployed, bi-polar introvert.

Brett did a lot of things most people would never even think of doing. More than once drove to the L.L. Bean Store in Freeport, Maine from Lancaster, Pennsylvania (an 8+ hour drive) because, in his own words, “It’s open 24 hours a day and [he] had nothing else to do.”

So with my bags packed, a cooler full of eats and drinks, and our directions in hand, Brett and I set off at 6 the following morning in his ’88 BMW 325IS. We were in the car for about 7 minutes before I fell asleep again. About 2 hours later I woke up, somewhere on I-95 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Things were going well so far.

We took the Capital Beltway (I-495) around D.C. I think this is where the signs for South of the Border started.

There are mountains in Virginia. Who knew?

We stopped at a rest stop somewhere near Richmond, Virginia to use the facilities and stretch out. I saw a young woman who looked familiar and I noticed she was wearing a Clarion sweatshirt. She and I went to the same small state school back in Pennsylvania, and we ran into each other outside Richmond, Virginia, the home of boiled peanuts and country hams. It was my turn to drive so I got in the pilot’s seat. We merged onto I-85 South.

Just to note here, the Carolinas are really “tall” states. They take forever to get through. But gas and cigarettes are really cheap in the Carolinas. In fact, the gas was like 68¢ a gallon, and cigarettes were somewhere around $1.75 for name-brands.

We then went to the BMW Factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina. It was pretty interesting, they had all kinds of crap there. Did you know that BMW made the first jet engine? Unfortunately for BMW, but good for everyone else, the Nazis lost and the allies slapped a 3 year ban on all BMW productions. Now they build the Z3 in the USA. As we pulled out Brett was back behind the wheel.

I decided I was ready for a nap, so I kicked off my shoes. This decision didn’t sit well with Brett. He immediately confronted me concerning the odor of my shoes/feet, and I was quick to defend their age. This is where things got interesting.

In an effort to lessen the effects of my stinky shoes, Brett put down both windows and opened the sunroof. As I leaned forward and scrambled to get my shoes back on, the directions, with Dan’s phone number written on them, flew out the driver’s side window. Brett and I just looked at each other. Confused and concerned, we were now lost, with no means by which to contact our friend Dan in Atlanta, and no idea how to find his house.

We were thinking of ways to contact Dan, his parents, or anyone else who might know his number for about 10 frustrating minutes when Brett, looking in his rear view mirror, quietly said, “Ummm, there is a brown Grand Cherokee approaching real damn fast in the left lane with a white piece of paper stuck in it’s grill…”

We figured it was worth a shot, so we hit the gas and followed as the Cherokee at a high rate of speed. In and out of traffic, Brett was loving every minute of it. The Cherokee headed off of I-85 and went back into the depths of rural South Carolina. We followed and after about a 10 mile drive the Cherokee pulled into a driveway in front of a nice, two-story home. Brett pulled off the road to the right, opposite their driveway and opened his door. He approached the driver of the Cherokee, a middle-aged man returning from a trip to Wal-Mart, and told him what was going on. Brett explained that he thought our directions were stuck to the front of his Cherokee.

Cherokee driver walked to the front of his car, leaned over, pulled out the paper , and handed it to Brett. Brett thanked him and turned back to the car. With his eyes wide Brett gave me the thumbs up, our directions had been recovered.

We continued on without incident from there to Atlanta, finding Dan in good health and good spirits. We quickly told him the story of our directions, which he found very entertaining.

The vacation was great, one I will never forget. I drank my first Guinness. I ate my first Krispy Kream and had ribs at the world-famous Fat Matt’s Rib Shack. Dan tore the oil pan off Brett’s car in the parking lot of Wolf Camera…but that’s another story.

What I'm Listening To: The Klezmatics

Does anyone bother denying anymore that the Pogues (when they still had Shane McGowan) were a punk band? I’ll admit that the first time I heard them, I thought they were just an exceptionally drunk Irish trad group. But listening more closely, I heard the sounds of defiance and ethnic exultation in Shane’s lyrics about getting drunk, wandering around town drunk, going to church drunk, and getting blown into little tiny pieces in the Battle of Gallipolli. The Pogues were so punk that they didn’t need overdriven guitar, breakneck drumming, or whiny lyrics. They, like the Clash, knew that punk was an approach, not a template, and that it found its best expression in Beat-like joy and darkness.

Now that the Pogues are no more (or maybe they still are, but without Shane there’s hardly any point), the world needs the Klezmatics more than ever. Nerdy where the Pogues were scruffy and stoned where they were drunk, the Klezmatics are the uncontested rulers of the current Jewish Alternative Movement/Radical Jewish Culture/Scare Your Grandparents scene. Sure, John Zorn releases more records in a month than the Klezmatics do in a decade, but the 'Matics do a much better job of fusing the traditional with the radical—side project Hasidic New Wave reworked a Dead Kennedys chestnut as “Giuliani Uber Alles,” but the Klezmatics would not be out of place playing a Long Island bar mitzvah.

And now the Klezmatics have finally released Rise Up!, a record plagued by delays. Is it worth the wait? Probably. It’s certainly not as out-there as their last couple of albums, but that might be because we know to expect the unexpected from this crew. It’s certainly a more mellow ride than Possessed or Jews With Horns, and maybe that makes Rise Up! as utterly bizarre as Mr. Bungle’s Brian Wilson tribute California.

The immediate standout track, “I Ain’t Afraid,” is also the only one sung mostly in English. Beginning with a Sousa-meets-Peter Tosh drumbeat, it quickly becomes a defiant declaration of religious independence. Lorin Sklamberg tells us that he’s not afraid of God, but “what you do in the name of your God.” For a supposedly religious band (my local record shop files klezmer music in the back of the Christian section), this is a 95 Theses moment. Sklamberg and his gospel-flavored backup singers implore their listeners to “rise up” against the “ones who say they know it” before they “impose it on you.” The lyrics alternate between English and Yiddish, just to make sure that all of their target audience understands the message exactly. Blam.

The rest of the record is less gripping. “Tepel” is a fast freylech with a nifty a capella intro by Sklamberg, followed by overcaffeinated faux-children’s chorus. “Bulgars #2 (Tantsn un Shpringen)” is a traditional dance tune with a driving beat and a couple of great breakdowns. And yes, it’s a bit odd to use the word “breakdowns” to describe a klezmer tune, but I don’t think anyone will mind. “Barikadn (Barricades),” which samples a 1948 recording by Shmerke Kaczerginsky, is a ballad of a workers’ revolution—“Fathers, mothers, children too / Are building barricades / Detachments march along the streets / Workers on parade”—set over a free-jazz folk dance tune. The Yiddish lyrics make the song sound like something my grandmother would enjoy, but the lyrics would fit in with no problem on an (International) Noise Conspiracy record.

The punk community has yet to embrace the Klezmatics the way it did the Ramones, and more’s the pity. Rise Up!, while not their strongest album, has some moments of pure defiance that shine brighter than 99% of what passes for socially conscious music today. You owe it to yourself to stick to the Man (as well as your overly hip friends) and pick up a Klezmatics record next time you see one.