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"Radio, Radio" by Kurt Hernon for bangsheet.com "What the fuck are you doing down there man?" a familiar, queer voice asked. My fingers ran smoothly, all index digit and thumb, up a pair of wires following them map-like to their respective ends. "Fuck!" I grunted. "Hand me those pliers," I said to the voice hovering above the car's steering wheel, never bothering to glance up and acknowledge my friend Lucas. "Which pliers?" "The fucking pliers man, the only pair I have," my agitation blurring Lucas' stupidity and inability to process anything remotely mechanical. "Fuck, I don't see no pliers here man. I just don't..." The sound of a toolbox tumbling over and spilling its neglected content onto concrete cut Lucas' confession short. "Fuck!" "Shit man!" My aggravations shot straight down my arm, past my crooked elbow, over my wrist, and out through my wire bound fingers. I yanked and pulled at them, grunting hard while trying to dislodge them from whatever vicious grip held them so taut in place. "Fuucck! Fuck fuck fuck! Gimme something to cut these goddamn things with," adding a short sharp "right fucking now!" My hand slipped and my knuckles smashed into a harness that held a rainbow of wires together under my shoddy vehicle's dashboard. The pain hit about a split second before the blood. In angry haste I swirled up and out from under the dash, popped quickly onto the drivers' seat, and began kicking the radio portion of the dash with ungoverned childish rage. I swore a streak that even took Lucas by surprise and sucked on my bloodied sore knuckles. "Christ man, what's happened to you?" Lucas asked, probably not wanting to hear my answer. "Do you need something? A pill or something, maybe a drink?" "What I need," I said in the methodical and condescending manner in which one would growl at a child, "is for you to shut the fuck up and for me to find my goddamn pliers so I can rip this godforsaken radio the fuck out of here and hurl it into a fuckin' lake somewhere." Lucas just stared. I got out of the car and calmly grabbed a beer from the cooler around back of the house. Tossing one to Lucas, I then grabbed my hammer from the mess of tools on the driveway, calmly set my beer on the car's roof, leaned into the driver side, and swung the hammer with everything in me at the radio's face. Over and over. Bits of plastic scattered around each blow. My assault was five minutes old when I turned the key over to see if I had silenced the damn box. Some pathetic rockroll voice that may or, more than likely, may not have been Eddie Vedder (aren't they all?) droned over a toneless guitar about arms akimbo, or wide open, or whatever the fuck he was singing about. My mind went red and I began hurling the hammer at the dash. Lucas pawed at my shirt, pulling me out and away from my battered car. "Jesus man!" He was getting pissed. "What the fuck is wrong with you? What, exactly, do you think you're doing you dumb sonvabitch?" I must have been quite the site; Lucas looked at me as seriously as I'd ever seen. I closed my eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and sighed heavily. "The radio," I muttered. "The radio has got to die. It must suffer and die," I said in a calm and weirdly lucid voice. "It must die a miserable and ugly death." Lucas calmed me down (or rather the beer took the edge off) and we sat around that cooler for a few hours ridding ourselves of its contents. After awhile (and more than a dozen now empty bottles) Lucas seemed to gather himself in courage and look me straight in the eye asking, "So, what was that all about earlier?" He paused, then added, "I mean, that was pretty ugly. I'd never seen you so wild-eyed." Met with silence, he backtracked a bit. "Ahh, ferget it. I don't wanna know anyways," he said, looking away, using his shirt belly to grip and twist off another bottle top. "No," I said, "no, you're right. You deserve an explanation. At the least." "Naah, don't sweat it man. It's no big deal, really." He handed me the beer he'd just opened (this is why I liked Lucas so well) and grabbed another for himself. I took a long swig, wiped my lips with my wrist, and handed Lucas the object of my scourge. "This...," I paused as his pudgy paws fondled the CD case, "this is what finally did it to me." Lucas investigated the package and read the title in silence. "This?" he asked. "American Diesel Machine? What the fuck are you talking about?" "That," I shot back, "that is what the fuck I'm talking about. That record has more goddamn good music on it in sixty-minutes than any forty fucking days of radio listening will get you. That compilation, by some hopped up and crazed music freaks down in Georgia, has more intrigue, more fun, more goddamn music - rock and fucking roll music, than any lousy radio station I've heard in ten god forsaken years!" I could sense my own voice rising. "They took our FUCKING RADIO and turned it into a puddle of runny shit!" I was nearly panting, short of breath. "Easy there man," was Lucas' half-hearted attempt at pushing the scene aside. "No, no, no, NO! I've had enough of easy for one goddamn lifetime! I can't sit back anymore. I can't have that goddamn dial in my car anymore. I can't stand the whole muddled fucking concept. They can have their miserable airwaves for all I care." I felt myself becoming frantic as I grabbed the American Diesel Machine disc from Lucas. I stumbled toward the CD player in the garage, dropping my beer in a terrific crash along the way. I didn't care. My hands were shaking now, in near violent fashion. "Are you okay man?" Lucas gulped from his lawn chair. "I will be once I get this thing in here." I eased the disc into its bed and watched it slide into the player. I clicked the forward button four times to get straight at Oldsar's "Pushed You Away". Knowing damn well I'd be back for the insatiably cool Audra & the Antidotes "Jenny's Got a Boyfriend", Atomsplit's jaunty "Pedaling Backwards", and the new wave edge of some cut called Dog's Life" (right on!). But right now, Oldstar seemed to be right up Lucas' alley, and served a singular purpose of showing exactly what had me in such frenzy. "Isn't that," I turned to see Lucas bent over the cooler fetching a pair of brews. "Isn't this what you'd rather hear some-fucking-place on your goddamn radio dial." I was yelling over the music. "What'd you say?" Lucas winced. "This," I pointed at the stereo, "this is what we should be entitled to hearing on the goddamn radio." I grabbed a little transistor AM/FM radio off of the workbench and held it up for Lucas to see. "This is good," I said, holding the CD case up in my left hand. "This on the other hand," I raised the little radio, "this is a piece of useless shit!" I hurled the radio across the driveway. It met the side of the house with a shattering crash that sent bits and pieces everywhere, some showering Lucas who now had a look of irritated fright. Pat Dull and his Media Whores roared off with their "Declaration". The moment couldn't have been scripted more perfectly. The song seemed to suck the angst right out of me and I began my usual clumsy, manic, and convulsive version of dancing. Arms attached by thread flailing around my head, hips jutting and gyrating completely out of sync with my bopping head and sprightly feet. I wound up spinning past Lucas and grabbing a beer right out of his hand. I took a swig, spun, then covered the mouth of the bottle with a thumb, shook the damn thing, and let her fly! Joyous rock and fucking roll! Lucas eyed me suspiciously as I worked up a drenching sweat to furious tunes by bands called Weed Puller, Glide, Wonderlust (a jittery and superb tune I'd already heard a couple a hundred times from their long player), Psychonaut (Joey Ramone baby, I hear it, and I miss you), The Second Sky, the Indicators, and so many others. It didn't take long for my old friend and I to be slamming into each other, swigging beers, sweating, kicking the now completely decimated transistor radio all over the place, and racing into the garage to see who exactly it was that plowed through that song about beauty being "a whore" (it was the venerable Indicators), or who the insane bunch playing that raucous garage noise were (Lucas, particularly enamored with the tune, played cut 16 four time before being able to focus enough to figure out it was a bunch who called themselves the Eskimos). Twenty-three songs later, and many of them repeated several times, we'd wasted our beer supply, were dripping in our own sweat, and found ourselves singing along to American Diesel Machine one last time. "Well I'm a little to drunk to hold up my end of a conversation / that's all right I'll just speak in quotations / singing beauty is a whore..." Amen to that brothers and sisters, amen to that. "You know," Lucas slurred his lines. "You're a pretty fucked-up dude" He smiled and looked up at the afternoon sky. "You're a really fucked-up dude. Really, really, really..." He broke into his cackling laugh. "Reallllly fucked-up. But you know what?" He paused; then lifting an empty bottle to his mouth (scowling when he realized there was no more to drink) he added. "But, you know what? You're com-fucking-pletely right my friend. So very, very, very right. Those rotten bastards took our radio away from us and turned it into a can of processed shit." "Eh, fuck'em," I replied. I held up the American Diesel Machine disc, "At least we got this." Check out the artist's website: http://www.shuteyerecords.com Track List: 1. Audra & the Antidote - Jenny's Got a Boyfriend 2. The Ajax Heavies - Dog's Life 3. Atomsplit - Pedaling Back Words 4. Oldstar - Pushed You Away 5. Pat Dull and his Media Whores - Declaration 6. Weedpuller - Dream Me 7. Siamese Left - I Know 8. Glide - Soul Shoes 9. Splendorgrass - Prick 10. Reactavox - Terra Haute 11. Mindseye - Interdemensional Transit System 12. Wonderlust - Only Human 13. Dimmerswitch - Photosynthesis (radio edit) 14. Levagood - First Semester 15. X-Ray Roger Jimmy - Anthology 16. The Eskimos - Splinter's Waltz 17. The Indicators - Moviegoer 18. Psychonaut - You Make Me Feel 19. Clang Bang - Firecracker 20. Venus Bleeding - Rubber Love 21. Velveteen Snackcake - Late Night Call 22. Grand Fury - Runnin' For Shelter 23. The Second Sky - Half For Sale Suggested CDs:Other Genres:
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