Levitate Me: Unfinished Novellas Calls it Quits

That’s right. Your boy anti-rove is hanging up his blogging jersey. Okay, not really. I’m just getting married and changing my address, so to speak.

Most readers of this blog will know of my longtime friendship with the noiseboy of The Blank Generation. For several months, we’ve been cooking up a scheme to merge our two blogs, and we’ve finally done it.

Friends, cruise on over to getLevitation. This is the new hangout.

N/P Danny Ben-Israel – Bullshit 3 ¼

In Praise of Inventory Nerds and the Strung-Out Reptile

For years now I’d wished that I had an inventory of all of my records. I used to have one, WAY back in the day, but I gave that up ten years ago. I was working at a record store and bringing home wax practically every single day, and it just became too much. If only I’d kept it up, though, I’d have saved myself so much work!

Since then, I always said someday, someday I’ll take that project on, but it wasn’t until I sat down with my insurance agent last August that I made the decision to go forward with this colossal project. It seems that if my house burned to the ground today, they would need a little bit more evidence of my collection and its members than just my poor memory and good will.

So I drew up an Access database, wrote a quick front-end and got to work. It was slow-going, though, tedious, and not exactly the most exciting of tasks. Roundabout mid-September I halted work, for what I thought would be a brief pause, which then became an extended vacation that would last the rest of the year. It began to look hopeless that I would ever complete Project X.

But I picked it back up after Christmas, and just about every day since, I’d grab a stack of LPs when I got home from work and enter ‘em into the database. And now, finally, praise Jesus, the light at the end of the tunnel is in sight. Not quite done yet, but I’m real close, probably about a week or two out. (Long, heavy sigh of relief.)

Going through my entire collection, I’ve really enjoyed coming across records that I haven’t listened to in years. A few weeks ago I hit the G’s and H’s of my rock section, and pulled out some old Helmet records, along with one of their lesser-known Amphetamine Reptile labelmates, the Minneapolis trio Guzzard. They put out three records on AmRep in the mid-nineties, but never really got the respect they deserved. Here’s a killer track from their second album, Quick, Fast, In a Hurry. Check out those snare hits!

Guzzard – Supersonic Enemy of Evil


N/P The Moles – Untune the Sky

T For Texas, Flatlanders Redux

So I had a blast in Texas, and while I was there I managed to sniff out a used record store entirely by accident. Because we were in town only a few days, I had sworn off all hopes of making the record store scene in advance, but lo and behold, at a time when we had nearly twenty minutes to kill, we just so happened to run across one. I am blessed, or cursed, some would say, with a keen spidey-sense for used wax. Needless to say, I dragged the rest of my party in there, and boy was I glad I did.

Having only twenty minutes, I flipped through the used bins like a madman. The selection wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t exactly the mother lode either. It wasn’t until I hit the “H” section that, uh, “up from the ground came a-bubblin’ crude,” so to speak. Three late seventies/early eighties pristine Butch Hancock records on the man’s own long-gone Rainlight label, and the prices were definitely right: $12, $12, and $15. These babies are hella-hard to come by, and generally go for more like $25, $30, or more, if you can find them at all. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to snag all three, but I picked up two of ‘em: his 1978 debut, West Texas Waltzes and Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes, and his fourth, 1981: A Spare Odyssey.

Considering I was in Texas and all, I shouldn’t have been THAT surprised to find these gems, but I’ve been to Austin and Dallas a number of times and never seen any Hancock LPs before, so it’s not like they’re plentiful, even in the Lone Star State. I thought it was pretty ironic, too, as I’d just completed my Flatlanders post less than a day before, PLUS I had just been introduced to my sister’s new boyfriend, who just so happens to hail from Lubbock, the hometown of all three Flatlanders, not to mention the great Terry Allen and some cat by the name of Buddy Holly.

One of Hancock's finest tunes for your aural pleasure...

Butch Hancock – West Texas Waltz


N/P Mojave 3 - Spoon and Rafter

T For Texas

Not much time...I’m leaving for the airport in a matter of minutes...Jodi and I are headed to Dallas to visit my sister at TCU. My bro is driving down from Illinois too, so it should be a fun, if brief, coupla days. I’m not a big fan of Bush Country, save for the island of comparable sanity that is the state’s capital, Austin, but it’s all good. There is, in fact, a lot about Texas to like, not least of which is the band of brothers that makes up the alt-country supergroup The Flatlanders.



Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely—all formidable acts in their own right. Once upon a time, in the early seventies, they played together as the Flatlanders, before moving on to their respective solo careers, while still remaining the best of friends and collaborators. A few years ago, they shocked everybody by regrouping as the Flatlanders and issuing a number of new records, thirty years after their original formation. I saw them at a club in Boulder in ’02, and it was easily one of the best shows I saw that year. But while the new records were pretty damn good, they still couldn’t touch the band’s original sessions from the early seventies, some of the best tunes I’ve ever heard. Here’s a couple of my favorite numbers from those sessions, in honor of the city of Dallas and all that is good about Texas.

Oh yeah, and fuck Tom Delay!

The Flatlanders – Dallas
The Flatlanders – Waiting for a Train


N/P The Beau Brummels – Gentle Wanderin’ Ways