Getting Old Is Weird as Shit

After I didn't pick up, he started talking anyway, telling a long and complicated story about his recent luck in finding a musical album at a Chicago record store. The more he told me about the album?reading off song titles and reciting lyrics?the more he started laughing. Pretty soon, he was in hysterics?and that's when he decided to tell me the name of the album, and who it was by?"It's called Racially Yours," he said, "by the Fugs."

That's odd, I thought. I was pretty sure I had all the Fugs' albums. But something called Racially Yours? That's one I never heard of. Grinch, being as big a Fugs fan as I was (their first album was the Nihilist Workers Party soundtrack), wouldn't get something like this wrong. Well, leave it to the Fugs, I thought. It didn't sound like them at all, but who knows? Maybe that in itself was proof that it was.

I erased Grinch's message and went to bed.

But the next morning, for some reason, I was still thinking about it. I can be a completist geek?and if there was some rare Fugs album out there that I'd never heard of, I had to find it. So I did some poking around, checking and cross-checking Fugs' discographies. Nope. Nothing even close to Racially Yours. Maybe I misheard him, but I didn't think so. Not that badly. So while at the office, I went down the hall and asked Strausbaugh if he'd ever heard of it. I knew he was a Fugs fan, too.

"Hey," I said, "you familiar with a Fugs album called Racially Yours?"

He thought a second, then said, "Nooo...but it sounds like something they might've done in the 80s, when they were putting out all that weird shit."

"Yeah, maybe...but I dunno. It just doesn't, y'know, sound like them."

"You know what you do?" he suggested?he always suggests the most straightforward method?"You call Tuli."

This thing was no big deal, really. It was just something I'd heard on an answering machine message from a sociopath. But for some sick, twisted reason, I had to know for sure, and I wouldn't stop until I did. It happens a lot. For the past three months, I'd been trying to place the line, "?to destroy the young people of today." I could hear it clearly in my head, knew the voice, but didn't know where it came from?whether it was a record, a movie, a tv show?or how the sentence begins. Driving me nuts, it was, until finally it came to me in the shower. Reverend Gary, in the sample that opens the one and only Suburban Mutilation album: "What tools do you think Satan will use to destroy the young people of today?" the good reverend asks. "He will use rebellion and violence..."

Anyway. I thought briefly about calling Tuli?Tuli Kupferberg, cofounder of the Fugs?but decided against it. I'd never spoken with him?though he'd been in the office, and from all accounts sounded like a very nice man. Still, I wasn't sure if it would be the wisest thing to call him up out of the blue and say, "Hey there, Tuli?say, you guys ever put out an album called Racially Yours?" It just didn't seem, y'know.

That night, still more than a little fixated, I called Grinch back.

"Grinch, goddammit?" I began when he picked up the phone. "What's this shit about a Fugs album called Racially Yours?"

He started guffawing that guffaw of his again. "Not Fugs. Frogs. The Frogs."

Jesus. Of course. We'd run a cover story on them a few years ago, when the album first came out. Of course it wasn't the Fugs. Thank God I didn't call Tuli. I'm such an idiot. But I guess it's no surprise.

See, every few weeks or so, one of the youngsters here in the office will ask me if I'm listening to anything new and interesting. I mostly have to shrug my shoulders at that one. I took it as a point of pride when I could read through the Billboard Top 100 and definitely state that I had never heard a single song by any of the artists on that list. Most of the names meant absolutely nothing to me at all.

"I dunno," I tell the youngsters. "Been listening to a bunch of old Toho Godzilla soundtracks, I suppose, and some Marty Robbins. And a lot of Fats Waller. And Bobby Beausoleil. He's on the other side of the Fats Waller tape, for some reason. But that's about it." I mostly get blank looks in response.

If I were to stop to think about it, though, I guess I had been listening to recent releases by a few contemporary musical groups?Hangdogs, Reid Paley, ummm. Asylum Street Spankers, ummm...

Still, even those, in a way, aren't new. New music, maybe, but in an old style of one kind or another. The stuff these kids today listen to, I just don't know.

Though I'll tell you a funny story that comes from someone else. And I can tell you right now that I won't do it justice.

My friend Gary was at a big party at a big club, with a lot of live music going on. At one point, he snuck off to a quiet (well, relatively) bar away from most of the action, and ordered himself a drink. Shortly after a rap act took the stage, the door to the bar opened, and Kurt Vonnegut came in, his hands over his ears. He looked like he needed one, so Gary bought Vonnegut a drink.

After a bit, Vonnegut, gesturing to the noise that was going on in the room behind them, asked, "Can you explain this to me?"

"Well, Mr. Vonnegut," Gary said, "the way to think about it is that this is the new folk music."

And that did the trick, as well it should have, being a very good answer. Made sense to Vonnegut, and it makes sense to me, though I still don't care much for the rap music. Or the folk music, either. Goddamn kids.

Getting old is weird as shit.