Voices of the Angels

I just got an MP3 player. This is my first “personal audio” player I've had in about twenty years, no joke. My last thing was a Walkman-type deal from some company other than whoever put out the original “Walkman”, but it still played cassette tapes. Can't recall if it had radio-function. No idea what happened to it. I probably threw it under a bus.

So I completely skipped past the portable-CD-'kman period, and, lamentably, the mini-CD-'kman phase.

The 'batteries dying out after three plays' with the cassette version killed any momentum for me. Nothing like a really long bus ride and halfway through it the song fades to nothing and you're stuck there, still nodding your head to the beat (Tiny Tim, I think it was) after the music died because you didn't want anyone else around you to know that your energy supply has deep-sixed. Who needs the humiliation? So you bang your skull to Burt Bacharach or whatever but in reality you're listening to the banal jaw-motoring of mall-sprites in the seats around you and it's just a chore, really.

So this MP3-thing is like really tiny, insanely hard to navigate even with these delicate, slender girl-fingers of mine, and after a week or so of ownership, I still instinctively pull it out of my pocket after six or so songs ready to flip the tape over. Very weird sensation. 

It can play movies, but I refuse that function out of pure spite.

People spend thousands for a five-foot LCD/LED/Plasma/3D TV flatscreen then rush out and spend hundreds on a 3” screen to watch the same movies. Right there, that makes me want to kill society as a whole, not just certain segments.

Three weeks I give myself til this thing squirts out of my fingers and under that damn bus.

What has any of this got to do with people talking words on vinyl? Let me stretch my segue-fingers and I'll tell you.

The main reason I got the personal player – do people still call these a “Walkman”? In a generic sense like Band-Aids or Popsicles or martinis? Because that's two syllables, and the other option is “MP3 player”, which is a lip-tiring five syllables – is to block out everybody else. I finally became exhausted with the general ineffervescence of my lovely fellow humans (not to mention the cell-talkers. Not sure what the psychology is on being aggravated by one-sided conversations, but it seems prevalent) on certain segments of mass transit. The suburban stretches only, though. The discordant ramblings you get on the inner-city buses is like having three William Burroughs' reciting different crime-scene reports while fresh off shotgunned Lysol hits with Nyquil chasers.

Why, something like listening to THIS!

Released in 1982 on the Freeway Records label by Harvey Kubernik, this two-disc set was produced in order to capture the spoken-word/poetry scene of L.A. during what was I suppose a second-wave underground beat recital movement. Featuring a hell of a lot of people as well-known as Charles Bukowski, Pleasant Gehman and Geza X amongst nearly 80 other performers, and liner notes by some guy named Ray Manzarek.

Quality? You want quality?! You find another blog, right now.

The rest of you, click something below. I'll be posting one side over the next four blogs, perhaps interspersed with some music so I don't alienate, uh, everyone.

 Download here:

Voices of the Angels Side 1