We had a fun time recording a covertune on Saturday. We’re not quite done with this sucker, but it was a blast.

This was Rob’s baby, and seeing as his singing chops are much better than mine, it was really sweet of him to ask me to sing the lead melody. “Do that Kurt Cobain thing you do” were his exact instructions, also somehow flattering.

Tysonseezenforbess

Saturday was the first time I heard this tune. Since then, I’ve learned and heard a good deal more about Love.

Arthur Lee was a Tennessee boy who had a long hard life. In the 90s, he was sentenced to jail for arms possession, multiplied by a CA three strikes law (in the 80s he had an assault charge and a drug charge). He got out early, due to prosecution misconduct, but by then all the remaining members of Love, including the composer of this song, had died.

He toured in earnest with good reception in the early 2000’s. But the final year of the tour he dropped out, pissing off the band. Unknown to them was the bitter truth that Arthur was dying of leukemia.

Arthur Lee died a few years ago, but the legacy of the music has lived on. This song has been covered by countless artists, The Damned and Calexico to name just two.

The rhino has busted through the shoddy makeshift fence separating the zoo with the entrance to the adjacent hotel lobby where I worked. It wasn’t very satisfying work but full of stress, endless rides on the elevator and sprawling stairwells. Before the rhinoceros charged through those double doors I managed to summon enough courage to pet him on the head and he became peaceful–we go back, rhino and me, you see.

I was just processing that dream from the night before while walking this evening to the späti for a couple sternis. That’s when I jumped out of my skin.

Just as I approached a few guys sitting on a window ledge at a dark spot on the street, my way was blocked by a huge dog. The thing was he was the color of a Weimarer, that pretty grey coat. In the darkness, he blended in perfectly with the sidewalk until just before his huge muzzle was at my navel. So I was off in another world thinking about angry rhinos when I was snapped into reality with this huge grey dog that seemed to have just appeared out of nowhere.

I didn’t scream from the start, but I did a little spasm, I guess, because the owner said, “hi man, take easy, we’re cool.” The dog took me no mind, because city dogs are pretty mellow. But the guy didn’t get what was really my problem, so even as I was walking on, he kept on saying stuff like “really man, we’re peaceful folk! Relax, bro…”

On the way back, I opted for the other street side; not because of the dog, but because of the owners.

It’s been a downhill battle, but I continue on my quest to cleanse the world of mindless babble in the for of the letters “el oh el”.

Recently I installed a profanity filter on my Greasemonkey extension of Firefox. There’s an extensive list of cusswords in a multitude of different (mis)spellings. Profanity doesn’t bother me thought, but “el oh el” does. So I removed them all from the script, and replaced them with “el oh el” and numerous variations (lots of ohs in the middle or lots of oh els). And I set it up so that whenever someone types that, instead all I see is “I’m an idiot”.

And now that is something that makes me laugh out loud.