We stopped in Niantic on Sunday afternoon and I had an hour to browse the downtown outposts of the formidable Book Barn there. The main multi-building sprawl of books on the hill was just out of reach this trip, but I made some fun finds at the Book Barn Downtown (where the movie, theater and sci-fi books are at) and Book Barn Midtown (the new repository for mysteries and children’s books, less than a block from Book Barn Downtown, which in turn is less than a mile from the main Book Barn).

The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson (Everyman’s Library, two volumes, 1935 edition): Jonson anthologies are plentiful. But his masques, which were at least as important as his poems and full-length plays in terms of what made him cool in his own time, are often left out. This tidy little set also excludes the masques, but lets in a few plays which don’t make many other anthologies. My favorite is The Staple of News, a satire of the then-brand-new newspaper industry; parts of the play began in Jonson’s royal masque News of the New World Discovered in the Moon. Why regional theaters never deign to do Every Man in His Humor, Bartholomew Fair and undeserved obscurities like The Case is Altered and The Sad Shepherd (or A Tale of Robin Hood)—all contained herein, not to mention free online—is beyond me.

The Bookwoman’s Last Fling by John Dunning (Pocket Books edition, 2006): I am blessed in that I have a faulty memory when it comes to how mystery novels end. I simply forget what happens. I have little patience for plot, but I love atmosphere. John Dunning’s novels, set in the simultaneously scholarly and scurrilous world of antiquarian bookselling, tend to have alarming contrived denouements, but everything leading up to those warped endings is smooth and polished and entrancing—especially to book collectors.

Death Stands By and Menace by John Creasey (Popular Library editions from 1966 and 1971 respectively): I love his Toff and Baron series too, but John Creasey’s Gordon Craigie/Department Z books have aged far better. Each begins with an international crisis—a plague, a political assassination, a new strain of fast-acting poison—which must be solved immediately by the quirky agent and the even quirkier assistants he handpicks to help save the world. Creasey wrote over 600 novels, and many of them are quite thin. But the Department Z books have a natural flow and momentum which hustles you through the plot holes briskly. Lots of suspenseful action scenes and face-offs with villains. This is the kind of book I always have with me in case I need to ride a bus or sit on a bench for a while.

The Glob by John O’Reilly and Walt Kelly (Viking, 1952): This is a short story about evolution which was appeared in slightly different form in the Feb. 18, 1952 issue of Life magazine. It was slated to be the magazine’s cover story but was bumped to inside by the death of King George VI. Both the mag and book versions are worth owning since each has artwork not found in the other, and the artist is the genius creator of the comic strip Pogo.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #13—The Rainbow Affair by David McDaniel (Ace Book, 1967): I was an U.N.C.L.E. collector from a very young age, and at one point had not only a complete set of the novels based on the TV series but nearly all of the much harder to find Man from U.N.C.L.E. digest magazines, and tons of other board games and paraphernalia besides. That stuff’s all long gone now, but I still pick up U.N.C.L.E. material whenever I can get it cheap. That includes the DVD box set once its price got lowered to $100 or so—I’ve had it two years and have only just finished watching season one, but enjoy it thoroughly. I was also extremely impressed by Robert Vaughan’s recent autobiography. Many of the paperback novels, written by decent adventure novelists of the ‘60s, are based on episodes of the series, often with intriguing changes. In the first book, for instance, based on the series pilot, when Napoleon Solo is strung up on a water pipe and left to die from scalding steam or somesuch, the book has him naked.

An Unnatural Pursuit & Other Pieces by Simon Gray (St. Martin’s Press, 1985): I picked this up in preparation for the impending production of Gray’s The Old Masters at the Long Wharf Theater. This book predates that play by some 20 years, but is a fascinating glimpse into a pivotal moment in Gray’s career. It’s a journal about the creation of The Common Pursuit, his follow-up to the major international hit Quartermaine’s Terms (the U.S. premiere of which was at Long Wharf). The diary, which takes you right through to the play’s opening night, is supplemented with context-setting philosophical essays such as “My Place is Cricket History,” which originally appeared in the October 1979 issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly.

The Groucho Letters—Letters From and To Groucho Marx (Da Capo, 1994 edition): No reason to have gotten another copy of this at all. I have an old hardcover edition (the book was first published in 1964) and at least a couple in paperback, and I don’t even have room for this one on the crammed bedroom shelves dedicated to Marxiana. But there it was, and what if I need to lend it to someone sometime?

Groucho Marx, Private Eye by Ron Goulart (St. Martin’s, 1999): I own several shelves of books on the Marx Brothers (see above), but avoided getting Goulart’s series of Groucho Marx mysteries when they first starting coming because he’s so damned prolific and I just didn’t have the money at the time. So I’m playing catch-up now, and have three of the six. Goulart has a good ear for Marxesque one-liners—better than, say, Peter DeVries in his (non-mystery) novel Madder Music or Stuart Kaminsky in You Bet Your Life or even George Baxt in The Clark Gable and Carole Lombard Murder Case (though Baxt’s Algonquin Round Table-based The Dorothy Parker Murder Case is the gold standard for celebrity-starring mysteries).

More Old Jewish Comedians by Drew Friedman (Blab! Books, 2008). I had the delight of engaging in a brief email exchange with Drew Friedman a couple of years ago, for an article about how cartoonists were dealing with the fact that Barack Obama wasn’t very funny. I was struck by how gentlemanly and professional Mr. Friedman was. I wanted to thank him for all that his work has meant to me, but that would have taken hours—I’ve been a fan of his since his National Lampoon days, not just for his pores-and-all caricatures but for the pop-culture cunning behind them. The two Old Jewish Comedians collections are a kind of culmination of his obsession with a certain school of old-world show business. They’re just portraits. He doesn’t need to dress them up with captions and fantasies and set pieces where these icons rail against the world that made them. He shows dim, sparkling contentment on the faces of cuddly (or in some cased bloodcurdlingly ugly), crotchety old men. Volume one had a triple portrait of Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx. This one shows Zeppo and Gummo.

Also got a couple of Encyclopedia Browns to share with Mabel and Sally.

Total cost for the above: around $35. An hour well spent.

We’re all here for different reasons. Not to mention different times. You may not find yourself at the Finch at one in the afternoon all that often, but we occasionally imbibe—or, rather, do weighty journalistic interviews with local artists— there at lunchtime.

You remember that guy Joey? Fifties, glasses, always at the back booth near the door on New Band Nites? Well, Joey was at the Finch every weekday afternoon, too, same booth. Worked there, you could say.

“Who’s playing tonight?,” you’d hear him ask. “How d’you spell that? Medieval what? Who?” Took an interest. More concerned about how the bands spell their names than the bands were themselves. (Mess’o Pot-amia, we need to talk.)

We knew a guy once who went to all the theater shows in our town, collecting autographs. The actors would be thrilled. Then they’d see him getting an autograph from the box office manager, the custodian, everyone in the audience. Filled an autograph book every night, for no apparent reason.

We feared Joey was one of those random-info hoarders. We mean, did you ever see him take a real interest in a band other than asking who they were? So we followed him one day—less suspensefully put, we just asked if we could walk a ways with him when we saw him on one of the rare times we saw him outside the Finch.

Not unusually for barcrawlers on that end of town, he was making tracks for BetTrack. Why don’t more gamblers don’t drink there, we wondered aloud? Instead, they fan out to all the little joints a few blocks away.

We forget his exact term for it—something colorful and unprintable, even here—but Joey’s basic response was “bad vibes.” He explained to us how he soaked up the atmosphere at the Finch, how it helped him marshall his strength, made him feel lucky.

We jotted some of this romantic spiel down, old-man slurs and all:

“When I sittataFinch, I feel grand! I feel luck’! Ver’ luck! I tell you, ‘s a great place. S’a great place. Who’sat band? Who’sat band? Tuck Lock? They’sh very good to me. Vergoodame.”

Next time I saw Tuck Lock, I gave him (them) the other Joey’s regards? Who?, TL wondered. That guy in the corner?, I coaxed. Never noticed him? No.

Took us a few more reconnaissance missions to figure out what our friend Joey Corner was up to. We peeked while he was scribbling charts and numbers in his little notebooks. We saw him heading to that betting parlor a few more times. When, one another day, we met him at the corner store buying like a dozen lottery tickets, something clicked.

Then we spent a few of the more boring band sets on a Thursday with a pen and pencil ourself, testing our assumptions.

Band Name: MontyMart. The numerological possibilities are massive. Or you can simply assign each letter a numerical value. Turn the two capital Ms into sideways 3s. The lack of a space in the name has untold significance.

We sidled up to Joey at his booth, and told him we knew what he was up to. He seemed shocked—not that we’d found him out, that he’d been exploiting rock monikers for his gambling habit—but that we’d bothered to think about him at all. He could’ve told us all along. Then he proceeded to do just that, filling us in on the filling-in he’d become accustomed to doing.

Mary Attaché = 27 (the accent doubles the value of the “e”). Wet Pack = 15. TPR = 3. The Pullmans = 42; go figure. YKK Zippers? Off the charts. If you’re in a band Joey saw and are feeling used—just a bunch of numbers to him—well, don’t. He’d be back there figuring in how many fans you drew to your gig, how many blondes there were (a major signifier) and even how many times you repeated a word in a chorus, if he could keep up. We let him know authoritatively how many times Hand Leather screamed “Rollaboard” in their song of the same name once, and you know what? Joey slipped us five bucks for the info.

Don’t think we were back there conspiring. Actually, once we figured out his game, Joey and I didn’t have much to talk about. Or too much—it quickly got arcane, and we learned to just nod and smile from across the room.

A friend down the tracks told us Joey blew town last month. Packed his bag and bolted. Won’t be coming back. This is our memorial. If you see us scrawling an idle math theorem when Skid Plate, D-Ring, Ballistic Cloth and Number Ten Zippers—excuse us, that’s #10 Zippers—play the Finch tonight, you’ll know why.

• I thought I’d thrown out my reading glasses with the trash, then I found them in the sink.

• Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed, which I think is great even though I’m a Pacifist.

• Archie & Friends #150: Return to the Comic Shop—Meteor Madness (A Night in the Comic Shop Part Three) features Jughead’s long-dormant young cousin Souphead.

• All the presents I ordered online have arrived.

• Total lunar eclipse occurs on the Winter Solstice.

Short deadlines and lots of wrapping to do, so some random items for now…

If you’re one of those purists who can’t imagine changing a single word in the lyrics of an established song, Wacken Faith would drive you nuts. Wacken (pronounced wah-keen), who also goes under the name Art Books when he plays keyboards and sings backup with the lower-case band custom framing, says he’s written as many as a dozen separate sets of lyrics to the same song. Not verses, mind you, but whole different songs with their own inherent themes and rhymes and meanings.

Granted, many of these songs are roadhouse anthems along the lines of “he/she’s a [adjective] wo/man,” but still a distinction. One which has just been cited by Slambang magazine (often referred to in these parts as “Slam Band”), which deems Wacken Faith to be the “Biggest Self-Plagiarizer” of the year in its annual “Biggest and Bangest” issue. We called Wacken Faith, who had no comment. Then he did have a comment. Then he changed it. Then he told us earnestly that he’s both thrilled and embarrassed, and that’ll have to do. Wacken Faith has a show coming up in a couple weeks at the Bullfinch, when you can give him and his amorphous supersongs the support they deserve…

In other periodical huzzahs, our little scene has been acknowledged in a major national magazine. A Top Ten band that appears to enjoy making Top Ten lists actually remembers stopping here, though the context has caused some concern. Seems that we boast “the skankiest groupies” found on the band’s most recent tour. And everyone in the scene thinks they know who the skanks in question are. I will maintain a shred of dignity by not telling them whether they have guessed correctly. …

No, it’s worse than that: It’s not that we missed last night’s 219 show, it’s that, until now we’ve never missed a 219 show ever. That’s an impressive 34 shows in a row, every one the band ha ever played. Now we’re back to zero. Someone saved us the set list, but you know what? Just not the same…

The annual MAD magazine “20 Dumbest People, Events and Things” issue is out. To borrow a common sort of MAD logic, its editors are the dumbest thing about it. Not because the list isn’t spot-on and hilarious, as it has been for the half-decade that the annual project  has been around. The editors are dumb because they they repackage MAD material so many different ways now, but they still stick this in the regular magazine and not make this some sort of special edition. My wallet thanks them, but their accountant probably thinks they’re morons.

With “it takes one to know one” savvy, this index of dumbness usually brings design and illustration talent on par with National Lampoon in its prime

MAD’s “20 Dumbest People, Events and Things” section is interrupted in the magazine’s centerfold. Not by an advertisement, though some of us still can’t get over that the once ad-free MAD has accepted paid advertisements for over a decade now. No, it’s a 2-page pull-out “Spy vs. Spy 50^th Anniversary 2011 Calendar,” with illustrations not from the feature’s current artists Peter Kuper (the force behind the venerable underground political comics journal World War Three Illustrated) but by its late creator Antonio Prohias.

This reminds of another wintertime cartoon humor mag tradition—the Viz pin-up calendar. Viz began 30 years ago as a savage and salacious lowbrow parody of British comic books. The classic style of comics in which a child rails against his teachers or parents become, in Viz,  bouts of rampant unhinged swearing and violence. The sort of strips where kids have a magic device that fuels countless identical adventures inspired such Viz features as “Felix and His Amazing Underpants” and Tin Ribs, the useless faux-robot who invariably gets used by his clever young owner to lacerate, disembowel or castrate his bad-tempered schoolteacher.

While having no more depth or dimension than the mainstream stuff they mocked, Viz’s snide satires—The Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist, Biffa Bacon—gradually became sustaining features themselves. Other recurring features—the Beckett-like Drunken Bakers—

And some non-comic, text-driven features have taken on a life of their own. Top Tips is a take-off on Hints From Heloise-type housekeeping frugality columns “Save time when counting to 10 by starting at the number four”), several items each issue are are current-events commentary written up in this odd journalistic format, which makes them doubly funny. From the current issue:

“Chilean miners: Take a large range of pornography and crossword puzzles to work with you, just in case.”

“Axl Rose: If turning up at a venue within twop hours of a pre-arranged time is too demanding for you, then why not consider a career with a more generous appointment window, such as a Parcel Force delivery driver or Virgin Media broadband installer?”

In the magazine’s back pages, the “Profanisaurus” of slang sexual phrases presided over by another Viz Comic icon, amoral broadcaster Roger Mellie (“The Man on the Telly”) has been getting added to for years, and is now a huge and hugely useful compendium which I imagine many academics would have been overjoyed to have compiled.

In any case, Viz does a calendar every year. A full dangly one, 24 pages. This year’s, “The Saucy Ladies of Viz,” isn’t very good and I would never hang it on my wall. But they’ve been funny in the past.

The sign outside the big room at Olympus Studios reads “All sessions start on time.” Can that be true? No. It’s about respect. Signs can do that. “Ladies will kindly remove their hats.” “No spitting.”

When Olympus’ founder and main producer Dennis “X-Max” Keynes got his first chance to sit in on a professional recording session at a well-stocked studio, in a distant land he chooses not to identify, “I’d never been so prepared for anything in my life. I’d badgered this guy who worked there to let me sit in, like literally just be in the room.” For him, the room was enchanted, and he felt he needed to earn his entrance through its hallowed portals. “I had charts, arrangements, diagrams” for every conceivable thing that might happen. “I knew every knob, I lugged in my own back-up equipment in case anything went wrong. This band had two albums out already, and I studied their sound, slowed it down and sped it up and just took those records apart, studying. And I wasn’t even the producer!

“I was barely considered an assistant. I was just in the room. It wasn’t even a big-deal studio, just a good one in a good location that’d gotten a reputation. But I’d never been around so much expensive equipment before, and I didn’t want to blow it. I was basically just in awe.

“So I show up at the studio early, like hours before the session, and there’s nothing to do but wait in the waiting room. Finally it’s time, and the band that’s there leaves the studio. I go in there and it’s just more waiting. I don’t even want to touch anything. I’m just looking at my notes, going over my homework, expecting this life-changing experience. “And I wait a really long time. So long that I’m sure that something’s gone horribly wrong, like I’m in the wrong place or the band had a car crash. What else could be keeping them? One of the engineers would sometimes look in at me, but nobody said anything. They must have thought I was crazy.

“Like two hours later—really, two hours, of course to me it seemed like 20 but two is a lot—the musicians finally arrive. They’ve got their manager with them, and some guys who I think were just friends, not anybody, you know, important to the organization. And girlfriends. They brought girlfriends! That was just a mindblower for me, an abomination, the most unprofessional behavior I could imagine. Like, who brings their girlfriends to work?

“They talk forever, about nothing, at least nothing to do with the recording. One of them had just bought a car, and couldn’t get bucket seats because they were being phased out—I remember the exact stupid details, all these years later. I get introduced, but nobody seems to want to hear my ideas and I’m too intimidated to offer any. They finally can the chit-chat long enough to, no shit, order lunch. I’m dying. Every illusion I’ve ever had is shattered. Telling it now, it seems extreme, but I was a kid and I was that kind of passionate. I couldn’t imagine anyone walking into a place like that, where every treasure I’d ever wanted was just lying around waiting to be used, and not bow down in gratitude.

“I spent four days with that band: running out for coffee, cleaning up spilled drugs, fixing mic stands with duct tape. I think maybe they recorded one song in that time, and it was one they hadn’t even written when they’d shown up. Now I know you could see that a different way—the creative mood striking and all that. But I thought it was bullshit. You know, the nerve! To waste the session by sitting on a couch writing something you could have written at home.

“The whole experience was like slopping hogs in hell. I didn’t resent my, uh, lowly position. I would have done anything they asked to be part of that process. I’d dreamed about being in a proper recording studio for years, and I though it may be years before I’d be trusted to work in one as an engineer, forget producer. I thought there was this long, slow learning curve, like becoming a priest or something. Seriously.

“It was the attitude that killed me. The jaded taking for granted thing. I won’t tell you who they were, they were well-known and a couple of them are still in the business. I might find myself working with them again someday, though believe me I’ll try not to. It took me years to get over—myself, partly. To get over myself. Now, of course, I understand why an artist would be casual about just about so much of what he does, there’s just so many pieces, so many things beyond their control, whatever. But then? I mean, Jesus! How dare they?”

That’s our little holiday meditation for all you Rock Gods readers. Respect others. And rock out responsibly.

Out and about: The Ask Tells kiss and make up for the holidays, sharing a bill with Treaty Spoilsports at Government Center Garage Thursday… Student Squeeze says they had nothing to do with that “riot” at Dollaire’s last week, and to show what a tame, safe, fun-loving, frolicsome act they act, they’re playing out three times this week: acoustic Wednesday at the Bullfinch, Thursday on the showcase bill at Hamilton’s and Friday at the campus student center. Dollaire’s will have them back, they say, once all three bands on last week’s ill-fated “College Nite” bill have apologized and agreed to do a bit of public service clean-up duty at the club. Student Squeeze both they and The Gilmour Memorial are up for doing the penance, which makes Camilla’s Car the only hold-out—and the likeliest instigator of the onslaught, during which (ho-hum) a chair apparently got thrown… Not many local shows to look forward to this week, eh? Well, what’re you complaining to us about? Go book yourself somewhere already!..

I was shocked and delighted to get a Kindle last year for Christmas. The first book I downloaded onto it was Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. I guess there were other ironic purchases I could make, but that was the first one that occurred to me.

Steal This Book (to explain it for those born after computers were) is a hacking guide for a culture where the most complicated device most people could hack was a pay telephone. In the book, Hoffman, one of the best-known political activists of the 20^th century, teaches you how to scam free food, self-publish and otherwise stick it to the establishment.

Nearly all the sneaky tips in the book are 40 years out of date, and many resulted in change-ups and clampdowns before the book even hit a second printing. Still, Steal This Book ain’t just a icon of a certain era of free expression. Turns out it still directly inspires an occasional revolutionary runaround.

In mid-March, I received this email from Kindle Store proprietor Amazon.com:

Hello,

We are writing to inform you that we need to refund your purchase of the book ‘Steal This Book (Vantage Point Classics)’. This book was added to our catalog by a third-party who we now believe did not have the rights to make the book available for sale.

We will be removing the book from our servers, making it unavailable for re-downloading from your archived items. Any copies you already have on your Kindle devices will not be removed, but you may choose to remove any such copies yourself.

The total refund amount of $1.99 will be credited to your account in 3-5 business days.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Any information and assistance you might need on your Kindle can be found here: www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department

Amazon.com

“I usually only have anonymous sex with people that I don’t know.”

That astute observation from a local scenester has been mocked as if it came from some great aphorism-garbling ballplayer of yore. But in rockspeak it nearly makes sense. This musician has the luxury of fleeing town and touring on a regular basis. That’s where true anonymity lies.

Don’t dirty the nest by sleeping with co-workers, any office grunt will tell you. Good advice, hard for some to keep. To a working musician, your immediate job-related social circle can number in the thousands. Yet some impressively tread that line between being unwilling to settle down and being TOO available.

So this muso walks into a bar, hundreds of miles from here, and apparently meets a soulmate. Here, it’s all crawl-off-to-sleep-in-the-bath, while there, amazingly, there’s an apartment and shared expenses and housekeeping.

Why not just leave town, and move in full-time? “What, and leave the scene?!” Seriously, that’s the reaction we got when we told this wandering minstrel that we’d learned of this stable out-of-town romance.

To the lucky elsewhere spouse: We can vouch for the fact that you never need be jealous of another human being encroaching on your loved one: adultery’s absolutely not in the repertoire. A local riff, however, or that wondrous feeling that comes over you when you’re on the back deck of the Finch discussing college loans or other local industry while sipping a freshly brewed house ale—well, that’s your competition.

Happy homemaking.

Tonight at the Finch, a bill better suited for Hamilton’s—popular rock from the Netflices, with high school emo epistolators Lost an Envelope and metal mockers Problem Playing opening. At Hamilton’s, a bill even better suited for Hamilton’s—reggae retreads Yellowthroat, mainstream “crazies” The Nuthatch and—what this?—downcast solo provocateur Grouse, spreading his wings into a new venue. Shout out “Don’t Play That Song” and see if he smiles.

The local daily gave Blake Edwards’ death short shrift. But so, I imagine, did all publications everywhere. This was one of the most prolific and well-rounded comic artists of the 20th century, and it would take several books to do him justice. What I liked about him was that he seldom played safe. His failures were as  staggering as his successes. There wasn’t much middle ground. There were the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films and then there were the Ted Wass and Roberto Benigni ones. There was Dudley Moore and Bo Derek running on the beach in 1o, then there was Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger inexplicably sliding down a vertical mattress in Blind Date. The composers he got to do soundtracks for him, mainly Mancini, were impeccable, but between he and his wife Julie Andrews between them rendered the one-two punch of Darling Lili and Star! which nearly killed off the American film musical for good in 1969-70. His S.O.B. is considered a cult classic which Wikipedia deems “autobiographical”—until you read the far superior Terry Southern novel Blue Movie from which it was clearly ripped off. I interviewed Southern shortly before his death and he told me that both Edwards and Andrews had been attached to a movie adaptation of Blue Movie that never got green-lit. Southern was appalled at S.O.B. and still held a huge grudge.

In any case, funny guy, and more of a risk-taker than anyone gave him credit for being.

I’ve recently become enamored of Edward’s early-career work on the radio detective series Richard Diamond, Private Eye, which you can find on several on the Golden Age radio websites. The show’s edgy but not as manic as his later TV series Peter Gunn, funny but not as campy as his Honey West

A rainy day, and the only show we’d been planning to attend got cancelled. (Fie, Deer Guild!) So we’re stuck home listening over and over to the greatest record ever made, “Yip” by the New Nation, recorded in 1968 just a few blocks down the street from our humble apartment.

“Yip” is one of the reasons we stuck around this town in the first place. We found it in a used record bin a thousand miles from here, seemingly a thousand years ago. The first time we spun it, it took our mind apart piece by piece. The singer’s cool, contrite, controlled, completely composed. Yet he has no language—he just says “Yip.” Behind him—we always assume this is the drummer, but it could be anybody, just a guy passing through the room—there’s a raucous unhinged yell from time to time. Could be excitement, but then why wouldn’t the singer be excited too? He’s not. Could be that the yowler just dropped some hot coffee on himself. Several times, whenever the next “verse” (lyrical cue: “Yip!”) commences.

The rest of the band take the middle road, but in the language of the young. They are organized, yet they are progressive. They want action, yet they want to keep the party going, now burn out quickly. They are steady, yet they rock. These aren’t ancient swing-jazz rhythms converted to the latest rock fad—it’s the base discourse, the core language for these kids. It’s a conversation that allows for the suave “Yip” on one end and the wild beast attacking on the other.

“Yip” is the sound of the ‘60s, and that indeed is what a vinyl anthology I later found it on was titled. None of the other songs on the LP sounded like the ‘60s at all. They sounded like the ‘50s retreaded or the ‘70s anticipated, but not in between. “Yip” was the juncture, that antic intersection.

Very little has been written down about The New Nation, and much of what has been turns out to be lies. The legends are fascinating—the jealous brawls, the pranks pulled by competing bands, the shows New Nation allegedly staged in clubs they’d been banned from.

Someday that book will be written. Perhaps we’ll write it ourselves. But that’s not the point this rainy day. The point is “Yip,” the perfect mid-‘60s studio garage chaos-amid-the-establishment anthem.

Fuck this whole essay, then. Words fail. Just think “Yip.”

Yip!