Tom Waits: Desert Oracle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ Leave a comment
Not Tom Waits. Or Ken Layne, for that matter.

My man Ken Layne says in his latest episode of “Desert Oracle Radio” that he got the idea for his podcast from (wait for it) Tom Waits.

Somehow this fails to surprise me. Mr. Waits casts a wide loop. Wasn’t that long ago that people thought he was Leon Redbone. Turns out he was Ken Layne. Frank Zappa was Leon Redbone.

Not really.

Here’s Ken Layne:

One of the initial inspirations for this radio show was a Tom Waits interview I read in an alt-weekly newspaper three decades ago.

So Tom Waits has these bits that he’s doing for the press tour so the reporters aren’t too annoying. They can’t keep up because he’s just rolling out these little stories, tall tales, routines. And one of them went something like this. He says, and I’m quoting incorrectly for memory:

‘Oh, I’ve got a radio show now, out in the desert, in a little desert town, it’s called ‘Strange and Unusual Facts.’ And then he’d say some oddball factoid about lemurs or the height of Big Ben or how many legs a centipede has, which is variable, turns out. Then, Tom Waits tells the music writer for the alt-weekly, ‘It’s a small station and the signal doesn’t get far, but people are enjoying the show, and, in fact, a number of people are moving to this desert town just to hear it.’

That always sort of stuck with me. Because somewhere up ahead would be this radio show in the little desert town of Joshua Tree.

And you know what? I’ve had a number of people tell me in person, to my face, that they moved here because of this radio show.

So, Tom, if you’re out there tonight, thanks for the idea.

I’ve taken a few ideas from Tom Waits myself, not all of them good. Never went with the soul patch, though. That was Frank Zappa. Or was it Leon Redbone?

Space oddity

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
“Good, good … now, bend over.”

More than a few folks in the media have expressed surprise that NASA’s reboot of a flyby round the moon hasn’t engaged more eyeballs.

Huh. Well. …

It could have something to do with the fact that we are at wa … pardon, on “an excursion” … in the Middle East. Again.

Or that a third-tier reality-TV character put us there, when he wasn’t busy cheating at golf, stenciling his accursed name on everything, and/or lying through his false teeth.

We’ve cracked the $4 mark here in ABQ.

Maybe the suckers that voted for him are too busy trying to squeeze their eyeballs back into their sockets after a glance at the latest gas prices, or a peek at his 2027 wish list for the Pentagon — $1.5 trillion, about a 40 percent jump from the last military-industrial goodie bag.

Can’t have guns and butter, of course, so better learn to like your toast dry. If you still have the bread to buy bread.

Me, I still like watching our tentative steps at space exploration. We caught the burn that took Artemis II — or Orion, Integrity, whatever the fuck this thing is called, Christ, no wonder nobody’s paying any attention to it — out of Earth’s orbit and toward the moon just before dinner last night. A missile launch that isn’t intended to kill someone, or a bunch of someones. Feature that, if you can.

So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how very unlikely is your birth. And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.

Rocket, man

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Off we go, into the wild blue yonder. … Photo courtesy NASA/Bill Ingalls

It was nice to take a break from the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus yesterday to watch NASA pitching a high hard one at the moon.

When my sis and I were sprouts we often got to catch NASA’s act. The old man was a big fan of the space program (three of the seven Mercury astronauts were Air Force flyboys like him). So I remember the Mercury and Gemini programs from our time at Randolph AFB at San Antone. And of course Apollo, which took off after we’d transferred to Bibleburg, with the first crewed flight in 1968.

The old man collected autographed pix of the astronauts, and I built models of the craft they flew, even got into model rocketry for a time. Also, and too, “Star Trek,” because of course “Star Trek.”

Apollo 11, the first time a human set foot on the moon, was the crowning achievement. Nothing NASA did afterward thrilled me in the same way, possibly because I was too busy being a space cowboy with Major Tom.

Too much science fiction, I suppose. No lunar colony, no base on Mars, no interstellar travel … did my old B-burg bro’ Robert A. Heinlein live in vain? Here it is 2026 and we’re still stuck down here with the eejits, murdering each other and crowing about doing a hot lap around the moon, samey same as in 1968, when we got the famous photo “Earthrise,” from Apollo 8’s William Anders.

Ah, well. I still like to watch. And dream.

April pool

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
No foolin’.

¡Agua free-, ahhh!”

They said it might rain. But then they say a lot of things, don’t they?

I don’t see any mention of precip’ in my 2026 training log since a bit of snow on Jan. 25. This morning, our weather widget reports 0.08 inch of rain overnight, and we will take it, with gratitude.

Maybe some of this will fall on War Piggy’s parade this evening, when he is expected to either declare victory in his oil-burning Excursion and then run away with his armor all soiled like Sir Robin, or go full Curtis LeMay on Iran, bombing it “back to the Stone Ages,” which I suppose is where he thinks Fred and Wilma live.

Either way, the goal is getting back to the important stuff: turning the White House into a whorehouse with casino attached; flushing our health care down his golden loo to pay for all his impeachable offenses; and slapping his punk-ass name on everything, including the money he’s stealing from us.

The only good part about having this pendejo as president is that it frees up a lot of time you might otherwise waste listening to, reading about, or watching anything he has to say. If you see his name followed by a verb like “says,” well, you can just go about your business. Because whatever he says will be (a) incomprehensible without Mr. Spock’s Universal Translator, and (2) what George Carlin described in “40 Years of Comedy” as “bullshit” — top to bottom, stem to stern, inside and out.

Of course, George was speaking back in 1997, when American presidents cared enough to put some thought into the tales they told, a soupçon of savoir-faire, delivering what he called “high-quality bullshit, world-class designer bullshit, to be sure. Hospital-tested, clinically proven bullshit.”

War Piggy just brings the stink, and it’s hard to tell which end of him smells worse.

That’s just the way it is

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The title track from Bruce Hornsby’s new album.

Bruce Hornsby is having a moment, and good for him.

Once you start looking beyond his only No. 1 hit, “The Way It Is,” you realize the guy has been playing in your background for years. Decades.

Hornsby has worked with almost everybody worth listening to. Leon Russell. Clannad. Bonnie Raitt. Bob Dylan. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The Grateful Dead.

He co-wrote “The End of the Innocence” with Don Henley and played on the track with Henley and Wayne Shorter.

That’s a tune with legs, and you can still hear them kicking ass 37 years later:

O beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They’re beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie

Some of Hornsby’s playmates appear on the new album, “Indigo Park,” due out April 3. Raitt, who sings on “Ecstatic,” told The New York Times that she treats herself to a live recording of her friend performing “Dreamland” before taking the stage each night.

“The guy is just still diving deep and improving and playing hours a day and stretching,” she said. “He’s the one musician I would have if I could only have one on a desert island.”

The new album came, as new ideas often do, when Hornsby had been hoping to take a break. Nope. The title song arrived first and dragged the others along to keep it company.

Hornsby told The Times that “Indigo Park” is something of a glance at the rear-view mirror.

“This is the first record where I’ve really dealt with looking back,” he said. “On a lyrical level, I’ve always been kind of pushing forward. But this time I thought, ‘OK, you’re 70, [expletive]’.’”

Sounds like he’s still moving forward to me. Don’t give up the driver’s license yet, Bruce. Try to make the ecstatic last.