by KUBOA
BG: Yeah, yeah, that’s Lor’s mom, Sadie. She’s remarkable, really, a sort of Zen master just in her daily life. I mean, plant a seed, watch it grow, you know, that whole Lennon/Ono message. I love that. And it’s a rhythm guitar song, mostly, right? I wrote it with this rhythm guitar sound in mind, simple, a song any bar singer can play.
CM: The title song.
BG: That’s a California song, the first one I wrote out here. You know, it rains a lot here—well, yeah it does. And at first, I thought, it’s such a distraction, you know, you want to just sit and watch it. In Memphis, when it rained it was either these pissy little showers that barely dampened the dust or drain-clogging downpours. Out here the rain takes on other qualities. Biblical, almost. It rains Dostoyevsky novels.
CM: Which is a line from the song.
BG: “It rains Dostoyevsky novels” (sings)
“It rains streets of crocodiles/It rains the end of innocence/it rains murder trials.”
CM: The first line is “The rain, the park and other things…” Isn’t that a Cowsills song?
BG: (laughs) Yeah. I was looking for a way in, I was looking for something Californiaesque to start with. (laughs) I thought the Cowsills—well, I didn’t think Cowsills because I couldn’t actually remember who sang the damn song, but I thought that song was quintessentially California. It was just a key to the door.
CM: Anything else you want to say about that song?
BG: Uh, just that the line “It’s raining in my heart” is, of course, an homage to Buddy. And the line “It’s raining Grabenhorst” is about an old school friend.
CM: We’ve already discussed her, I believe.
BG: Did we? Good. It’s got that “Green River” riff to it, a chugging thing, even though it’s acoustic, it sounds like a freight train, don’t you think?
CM: Ok, uh, “If You Push Your Belly Button your Legs Fall Off.” Many critics said this was like a children’s song. Like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Consciously so?
BG: A children’s song? Shit. No. It’s about being in bed with a new woman. It’s about that moment of intimacy after you’ve spent each other, that time when you’re running your fingers over each other’s bodies, asking about little nooks and crannies, scars and tattoos. I said this to a woman—the “white swan woman” in the song—after our first intercourse. I said to her, “If you push your belly button…” and she laughed long and hard. It became code between us, code for post-coital pleasures. By the way, the song makes reference to an actual quote. When they asked Casanova what made him such a great lover, he said, “The tenderness afterwards.” So, the line “the tenderness afterwards” comes from the Seducer, gambler, necromancer and spy, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova.
CM: Ok, um, “Hell in Denmark.”
BG: Well, you know, Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood?” Yeah, man, that’s about some affair he had, right? But, he couldn’t talk about it because of Cynthia. So, he writes this piece of surrealistic poetry and he sings it, man, in this voice as old as the shepherds. Well, “Hell in Denmark” started that way. It’s code, man. But, you know, I don’t hide anything from my Love. I don’t know, I started out writing this song because I had fucked this chick, see, when I was on tour, when Lor was back here. And she sort of followed me around for a couple of gigs, and it was like a lost week, there, I was all screwed up. I wasn’t thinking about Lorelei or what this would mean to her, if anything. I just wanted to keep balling this chick, right? She was blond and willowy and looked like a pixie and I just couldn’t get enough of her. Some of my roadies, and Pete, man, God bless him, he was like ‘Buddy, drop this chick, she’s trouble, man.’ He was thinking of Lor. So, anyway, this beautiful woman followed me from city to city—she was a gypsy—and she dressed like a gypsy—I can’t tell you her name cuz you’d know it, man. Her heart is a legend. But, I didn’t know who she was until I was inside her and she was moving like God’s immaculate machine. Damn, she could ball. And, I was, I thought, in love, for only the really second time in my life. I wasn’t thinking, like, I gotta leave Lor, it’s gonna be painful, I want to be with this woman, this white light. I wasn’t thinking, period. Anyway, Lor knows all this—it’s cool, it’s cool. Lorelei, you gotta understand, is amazing, she’s like so together, and she understands human nature and sees it for the shoddy stuff that it is, and she accepts everything, man, like all human interaction is innocent, you dig? I mean, it hurt her, yeah, she’s human. But, she knew I wouldn’t do anything like this lightly. She knew it must have been some kind of deep cut for me to persist in it for, what, a couple weeks, a little longer. It took a while to get this angel out of my blood—it was like going for detox, you know? Shit. (laughs)
What were we talking about? Oh—the song, yeah, anyway, that’s what the song is about, that lost time, that time I went away and came back. I still like the lyrics:
I still
imagine a face white like
faith’s hue
and a dimple carved
there and a disdain for any
attention. How attractive
these qualities are.
How they still reverberate
across the gulf of time.
It really is a gulf,
deep like an ode, and
dark as if dipped in death-shadow.
CM: Damn. It’s a beautiful melody, too.
BG: Yeah it is. And that’s sitar on it—though we miked it so it sounds sort of like a harp.
CM: Ok. “Building Cla-Le-Clare?”
BG: You know, Larry co-wrote that.
CM: Larry?
BG: Raspberry. As in the Highsteppers. We wrote that when I was back in Memphis because my mother was in the hospital. Larry came and sat with me in her room—he’s a bloke, man, a true spirit. He would come and sit with me, and, while we were watching over her—it was horrible, stomach cancer, and her heart was weak, I thought, shit, we’re losing her—anyway, Larry was there. And we wrote that song next to my mother’s hospital bed. Strange. It has nothing to do with the surroundings. It’s about, you know, having a dream, and building something, only to have it come to naught. It’s like “Castles in the Sand.” It’s sort of a cop off that idea. I don’t know—Larry, he’s got this mind, it’s really a musician’s mind, you know, songwriting for him is a calling—I don’t think I have his dedication to it. Why I was so happy to work with him. And we’ve made plans to work together again. He’s coming out here—when was it again, Lor?
LE: June, I think. His wife called just a couple days ago.
BG: Larry’s into something or other. But, he promised he’d be here. I’m ready to see what we can do together again.
CM: “Necronomicon Blues?”
BG: Whimsy. Just fooling around.
CM: Don’t know anything about the Black Arts, about..
BG: Naw. Cept what’s written there, most of which I made up. Satan is a cruel master. (laughs) Shit, I’m not Alice Cooper, you know. I’m not a reincarnated witch. (laughs) Really.
CM: The music sounds a little calypso.
BG: It does, doesn’t it?
CM: “When the Henbane Blooms”?
BG: Drug song, right? You can dig that. Even you, Creole, Family Man. You can dig where that’s coming from? Naw, shit, I’m goofing on you. It’s not a drug song. It’s about Lor’s brother-in-law, who is a werewolf. No shit. He’s really a werewolf.
CM: Um…
BG: Hey, here’s something I can tell you now, something that’ll blow your mind, ok?
CM: Sure.
BG: I mean, it sounds perverse, but, well, everyone who wrote me off as this junkie-folkie like JT, here’s another clue for you all. I did a song called, “Don’t Ever Antagonize the Horn,” based on a Coltrane melody. A real, guitar heavy piece with some of Zappa’s band. I released it under the name “Jimi Mumu.”
CM: I know the song, great song.
That’s you.
BG: Well, shit, I can say it now. Let ‘em sue. Yeah, it’s just a single right. At first we were gonna do it on Frank’s Straight label but he was going through some business hassles at the time. So it came out on Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus, this really underground Frisco label, started, I think, by Dino Valenti. Maybe not. Anyway, we did this heavy piece as a kind of lark—I was pissed, I admit by all the dismissals I was getting in the rock press, all the accusations of sell-out. So I did this little 45, this really wild piece of music—that’s a Stratocaster I’m playing but filtered through this mini-moog that Underwood brought with him. And damned if it wasn’t a hit. We didn’t even have a back for it, you know, a flipside. So I quickly wrote “Stately Plump Buck Mulligan” as a 12-bar blues, and we sort of adlibbed it in the studio. One take. Anyway, you heard it here first. That’s me, man, Jimi Mumu. I love that little 45. If you can find one, Dad, it’s worth some money, I hear. After Laughing Buddha folded, you know. Hey, I got some here—Lor, get a copy of “Don’t Ever Antagonize the Horn” for Creole. A little something for your reading public, man, for the fans. I can still cook, Daddy, believe it. Check out that bridge—that “rave up.” I was really playing that instrumental part like it’s a jazz chart, see, stretching it out—that’s psychedelia, I guess. Shit, that was fun.
CM: Huh. I thought that was, like, a one-hit wonder thing.
BG: Yeah, yeah. That’s the story. I remember Rolling Stone sent someone out here to get the story behind the song, but, by that time Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Records has closed up its offices. No one home. They had one other chart hit. What was it called? Uh. “Fainting Spell, A Bagatelle.” That was it. By The Holly and IV. I can’t tell you who that really is.
CM: Ok, um, the next song on Rain and Other Distractions, the penultimate song, before the finisher, “Goodbye to the Shell,” is this odd little folk song, “Right on Poplar Avenue.”
BG: Yeah, that’s Lor’s song, actually. Well, I mean, she didn’t write it, except in the sense that she’s inside my head like no one else. That song stems from a conversation we were having about the past, about the future. You know, it’s so damn hard to live in the moment, isn’t it? I mean, it’s that Zen thing, you know? You wanna stay present, but the past keeps intruding. “Right on Poplar Avenue,” pun intended, is about this girlfriend I use to have—well, she wasn’t really a girlfriend, I guess—she was one of those people you come up against in your life where you’re just beating your head against a wall. For whatever reason you just aren’t connecting. This woman, beautiful woman, was a flirt, no kidding, I mean, she made eyes at me across this restaurant, this vegetarian restaurant, and I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. I was a little dense—this was, oh, I don’t know, before Lorelei, before we really hit big. And, then afterwards, one of those driving home epiphanies, I figured out who she was, and that she was looking at me because she recognized me and expected me to recognize her. So, I was a bit embarrassed and when I got home, I called her. I said, hey, it’s Buddy. I know, she said. I said, well, shit, you know, in the restaurant, I’m sorry, I didn’t remember who you were, and I thought, damn, this is embarrassing, but, I thought you were staring at me, you know, to get my attention, to get my heterosexual attention. And, well, then I remembered, of course, that I knew you through the Tickles. And she said, I wasn’t just looking at you because I expected you to remember me. You know, you’re not bad to look at. I could have looked all night, she said.
Well, shit, I thought, ok, yeah. I can dig this chick, because I mean, she had this body, well, the kind you dream about. And she was this novelist’s daughter and so she was cool and kind of bohemian and had this apartment in Midtown, upper floor, with a nice view of Poplar. So, I just showed up there one evening. And, you won’t believe this, but she was just out of the shower and was wearing nothing but a bathrobe. And her skin was glistening with dampness. I thought I had stumbled into heaven, man. I thought, nothing is gonna be easier than falling into bed with this beautiful woman. So, after some awkward small talk—and keep in mind, she didn’t go get dressed—I made a move. I think I just sort of leaned in to kiss her. And she let me kiss her, but, man, nothing back. I mean, fuck, she didn’t even open her mouth. Don’t you hate that shit? So, I’m standing there, I might as well have had my dick out, and she looked at me like I was a piece of modern art that she couldn’t figure out. And, finally, after I had already turned back into an awkward 12 year old, she said, sorry, I can’t be doing that. That was it. That was her explanation. I never saw that chick again, I can tell you. I mean, I got out of there fast and tried to restabilize my pride, and I just thought, well, fuck it, I don’t know what that was all about, I don’t pretend to understand what that was all about. So, anyway, that inspired this song—actually, Lor and I talking about that incident inspired that song. The line “she was going through her midtown period/there was blood in the air” is mostly Lor’s.
CM: That’s quite a story. Ok, that leaves “Goodbye to the Shell,” maybe one of your most controversial songs, one that some folks back in Memphis didn’t take too kindly to, one that is perhaps misunderstood. Can you clear it up any?
BG: I’m not even sure what the fuck you’re talking about? It’s about leaving Memphis, yeah, so what? What’s not to like? Who didn’t like it?
CM: Um, well, let’s see, in Sum Times, the review said, “’Goodbye to the Shell’ is the kind of self-satisfied soft-rock that John Denver would be proud of. If Gardner hates his past so much why can’t he leave it behind? Why does he write, ‘Adult us, be real, don't frighten or gull us, Honest Merchant, Home, Bluff City.’? Buddy Gardner, Memphis don’t need you around no more.”
BG: (laughs) What horseshit. Who wrote that? That same dame that wrote that other fucking review, right? What’s she got up her ass? “Goodbye to the Shell” is a love song, ok? It’s about my hometown, the only hometown I’ll ever have. The only one I could leave. I love and hate Memphis, man. You understand. I love and hate a lot of things—they’re twin emotions. Especially, when you’re dealing with the past. Fuck her. She doesn’t understand anything. Whoever gave her the job of writing reviews should be shot. Next question.
CM: Sorry, Buddy.
BG: Fuck it. Move on.
CM: Uh, that brings us to your most recent release, the almost entirely acoustic, “I Was a Child When Smaller.”
BG: Right.
CM: First song, the painful, “Allison All Gone.”
BG: Right. Nothing to say there. Next.
CM: Uh…
BG: What? It’s all in the song, man. Broken heart. Big fucking deal. Everyone’s had ‘em.
LE: “O Allison, between your legs was a kitchen of delight” is still a lovely line.
BG: Yeah, yeah. Ok, Creole.
CM: Next cut is “Burn my Bridges.”
BG: Same thing, right? One has to grow up, you know? One has to destroy one’s parents. Metaphorically. I can write about that—that’s viable stuff, right?
CM: One critic wrote, “Gardner seems content to wallow in his own past as if anyone else cared about it.”
BG: Yeah, it’s a personal song. It’s personal. I write personal songs now. Dismiss me but leave me alone.
CM: And the next cut is “Forget my Roots.’
BG: It’s the same thing, ok? Same fucking thing. You think I don’t know that. It’s a companion piece. It’s meant to be ironic—you think I’m stupid and don’t see that they’re the same song. See, “Forget my Roots” is an inversion of “Burn my Bridges.” You gotta compare the lyrics. I’m not gonna connect the dots for you, man, I’m the artist. You gotta meet me halfway. Ok? You dig?
CM: Yet, the next song is definitely a more mellow, more, can we say California song?
BG: “At City Lights I was Saved.’ Yeah. An homage to Ferlinghetti, his whole ethos,
his whole mystique. He’s the patron saint of boho out here, you know? I wrote that song after an afternoon I spent with him and Michael McClure and Dylan at McClure’s place. We all had come from the bookstore—I was looking for, what was it, Lor?
LE: Rexroth’s Chinese translations, I think.
BG: Exactly. Yeah, so I had that in my hand. And there was Dylan with a copy of Teeth Mother Naked at Last. And we hugged and, man, it was like, I was set loose. I was exonerated for all past sins. Dylan knew the writers, you know, he and Ginsberg and the rest of them. He was meeting Ferlinghetti there at City Lights and Larry brought Michael and we all just kind of hit it off—you gotta know these guys, I mean, this is what’s real, you know, this, what you can hold in your hand, that’s the kind of guys these guys are. You take a book, you can hold it in your hand, and it’s like, it’s already communicating with you, before you even open it. And these guys, these poets, man, they are just so honorable. And City Lights is a halidom, right? You’ve been there? Ok, it’s ground zero, as far as I’m concerned. I’m just a student of that place, of Larry, right? I’m still learning. Anyway, we all went to McClure’s for coffee and sat around the whole fucking afternoon talking about anything and everything. Dylan, you know, he was in, what they were calling a down phase—like they fucking know—and we talked about that, and about how I was being called a sell-out. And, I remember, Ferlinghetti said this wonderful thing, he said, “You know what Durrell says, Buddy? ‘In the end everything will be true of everybody.’ And, man, I thought, yeah, that’s salvation, that’s true. I tried to capture that in the song. I probably missed the mark—you had to be there (laughs)—but I tried, you know? I wanted to say something about being an artist, a struggling artist, how it’s hard to even say what you mean, half the time. I don’t know. Some of that is in that song. The line about the maple tree is McClure’s.
I don’t really like the arrangement we came up with for this song. I don’t think the backup guys were up to it. I should have played everything—I almost went back in and re-cut it, but, hell, it’s ok the way it is. But, it could have been better. Thicker.
CM: “It’s Not True Unless it Makes You Laugh.”
BG: Right. That’s actually a really old song—that almost made it onto Turntable. I wrote that in Memphis, in Lorelei’s bedroom, right after we had made love. There was candlelight dancing on the walls, and outside one of those Memphis thunderstorms that seem like the end of the world, beautiful like the end of the world should be, and Lorelei was lying there naked, a vision out of Titian, and I just started singing those lyrics. Those were given to me, you know? Like they always existed but I was the one that plucked them from the ether. It’s weird, that’s the most Memphis song on the LP, though it really is about, what’s inside us, you know? What keeps us going, keeps us growing. And, it’s not true unless it makes you laugh. That’s what I want to say to my critics, you know, lighten up, irony isn’t dead yet. Well, I don’t really want to say it to them, I mean, they’ve got their lives, their maggoty little lives, and they’ve got these things they want to say and I say, god bless them. But, in the end, fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. But, back to the song, here are the elements present in between the lines: candlelight, a picture of Tristan Tzara that was on Lor’s wall, post-orgasmic lassitude, the sound a needle makes stuck in the endgrooves of an LP, and, finally and most importunately, the sight of my woman’s incredible ass, naked beside me. That’s that song. I wanted a starker arrangement but Pete talked me into the chick singers and the spoon harp. It’s ok, at least it was subtle. Quiet chick singers, ha. Naw, they were great, really. Jimmy Keltner brought me them.
CM: “Song for L. Enos.”
BG: Kind of self-explanatory, right? I mean, here she is. My be-all and end-all. I realize outsiders can’t understand—they see, what, witchcraft or some kind of nefarious necromancy at work. Shit, man, it’s love. You know, LOVE? I wrote that song because Lorelei changed my life. It’s like “Julia”, you know, the Lennon song? Julia as all-women. That’s Lor. She’s the feminine principle, the earth-mother, female rain, Moon Goddess. It’s in the song. Between the lines, it’s all there. And dig that 12-string playing, man. That’s near perfect.
CM: Only near?
BG: Yeah, it’s all any of us get. Near perfect. That day I was riding God’s tail. I was playing like Robert Johnson ensorcelled. You dig that? I made up that little middle bit, and, then, as discussed—I think we talked about this—a little piece of Jimi’s “Third Stone from the Sun,” thrown in at the beginning, as a tribute, because he had just died and I was in mourning when I wrote that.
CM: “Squonk?”
BG: Yeah, dig. You know what a squonk is, right? It’s like, what’s that song Cocker did so well, “I’m Gonna Drown in my Own Tears,” right? Squonks cry themselves to death, dissolve in their own tears. That’s what I mean by the ironic twists to I Was A Child. This charge of self-pity, yeah, man, I’m on it, I dig. It’s right there on the album, if you really listened to it, if you listened with more than your ears, man. The repetition of “I’m crying”—almost three minutes of it, I know—it goes back to “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry Over You” and Lennon’s “I Want You.” You know, you strip it down, you get right to the core phrase, the essential thing you wanna say—that’s what I’m getting at. I’m crying, yeah. My woman done gone. You get it? By the way, that’s Sebastian on the autoharp.
CM: “Kill the Wabbit.”
BG: (laughs)
CM: One critic suggested that this was infantile and on a par with McCartney’s love song to his dog.
BG: Infantile? Ok. Shit, it’s only a minute twenty four seconds. I was just goofing around. And, hey, I like McCartney’s love song to his dog. You mean Martha, right? You ever loved a dog, man?
CM: “Flower King” we did.
BG: Right.
CM: “Beverly’s Box?”
BG: Sex song.
CM: Really? Because it never mentions sex.
BG: Like the best sex songs.
CM: About…
BG: You do pry, don’t you, Creole? Beverly. Ok?
CM: Another…
BG: She was this beautiful woman, large breasts, great body, lived in Jackson, Mississippi, with whom I had a torrid, sporadic affair. Sitting on me, oh my goodness, she… Beverly, Beverly. Beverly from Jackson, like the song says. Is this gentlemanly? No, no, edit this out…
CM: Funny line about her being hotter than a pepper sprout. Now, I guess, I see the smoldering sexuality of the song.
BG: Thanks. A lot of folks didn’t get that line. Short memories.
CM: Lost love—would you say that’s one of your themes, especially as it is related to physical love?
BG: Shit. Sure. Yeah, lost pussy. I’m the poet of lost pussy.
CM: (laughs)
BG: (laughs) Shit. I got you to laugh, Creole. Now, we can start. Now it begins.
CM: One more, the seven plus minute, “Weanling of the Great Waters.”
BG: It’s about the river, obviously.
CM: The river, back home…
BG: Ok, yes. Caught. Another Memphis song. Yeah, it’s about growing up next to that river, Big Muddy in my veins, also about being born just a few miles from Niagara Falls, and, briefly it makes mention of the Pacific. I’ve always been near water. What does this mean? Nothing. But it made for interesting song material. I like some of the lyrics, which are a little plain, despite the ornate title of the song.
CM: And, that’s just you and your guitar.
BG: Right. Actually, recorded here at home, right over there, in the corner by the bookcases. I set up a mike in the corner, turned my back to the room, and used the wall of books as organic echo, a trick, I’m sure you know, that Robert Johnson employed to get his idiosyncratic vocal style.
CM: No, I didn�
�t know that.
BG: Oh, yeah. That’s the story, anyway, He turned away from the engineer in the studio there and faced the corner, like Little Jack Horner—as a matter of fact, I almost called this “Little Jack Horner,” but it didn’t make much sense. Anyway, everyone thought the poor guy was just shy, or hiding his idiosyncratic playing style—which may be partly true—but the real reason, so I’ve read, is that he could get an interesting “bounce” from the corner, sort of double-tracking his voice before that was ever heard of. So, I laid it down first just on this cassette player—really—and then dumped it to a 16-track, played through a little reverb amp I had at the house. Stayed up all night doing that fucker. It was a full moon, I remember. It was beautiful. And at dawn, I brought it to Lorelei and said, baby, this is as good as Buddy gets. Is this interesting?
CM: Sure. What’s that percussive sound—it’s very interesting.
BG: (laughs) That’s my guitar hitting my shirt buttons.
CM: Oh. How--
BG: The genesis of a song, I don’t know. I’d rather you just listen to the song. But this is your interview.
CM: It’s yours, also. Don’t you feel that?
BG: I don’t know. Perhaps. Do I have a need to get my thoughts out, to let the public in on my life, my style, my method, my oeuvre? Nah. It’s all bullshit, isn’t it? I mean, ten minutes after I say something I don’t mean it anymore. It’s ephemeral, this trying to grasp what sparks art, like trying to catch soap bubbles. Just listen to the music, man. That’s what I want to say. Can we erase everything else and just have me say, just listen to the music? (laughs) I didn’t think so. Jesus, how we’ve gone on here. Who’s gonna read this?
CM: Can you foresee a time when you won’t write songs anymore? When you’ll retire?
BG: (long silence) No. I’ll always write songs. I’ve got a lot to say. I’m just tapping into it, you know. Everything that has come before is only prelude. I believe that. I believe I’m on the cusp of a breakthrough, creatively. I think my best stuff is ahead of me. As far as retiring, I don’t know what you mean by that. I can see me just staying home, writing, being with Lor, house-husband, you know, and just writing, and saying let someone else record the stuff. But, I’ll always write.
CM: Anything besides songs?
BG: I, uh, I really don’t want to talk about it too much.
CM: Something in the works.
LE: He’s writing a novel.
CM: Really?
BG: Well, hell, yeah, I am. But, you know, I don’t want that out there yet. Look what it did to Dylan. He didn’t want to finish Tarantula, but, there was so much pressure on him and then someone circulated bootleg versions and the whole thing became uncontrollable. I can’t have that. I’d rather keep my plans private for now, dig? Can you keep that under your hat, Creole man?
CM: Got a title?
BG: Right now I’m callin’ it Great Expectations.
CM: Uh—
BG: Move on, man.
CM: At this point in your life, Buddy, are you a religious man? Some of your work hints at it—but it’s subtext, it’s buried.
BG: Lately, for whatever reasons, I have been thinking more about the spiritual side of the human animal than ever I have in my previous twenty-some year tenure on Spaceship Earth. It probably has to do with getting older, finding my stability in Lor. Time at least to take a peak into the spiritual caldron. There are miracles, it might cause one to whisper, alone in the dark.
I’m not comfortable, really, man, talking about my numinous side, as interesting as I think that is. I want to ask a lot of questions, without presuming there are always answers. Like, where do lares and penates, where does religion, fit in with this cynical lifestyle we’ve adopted, or that we’ve carefully constructed? As The Lovin’ Spoonful asked, “Do you believe in magic?”
I mean, I don’t know what has caused me to cogitate about the underlying premise of life, you know?. I mean, fuck, are we really that far removed from our supranatural sides that any discussion or mention of it is inordinate, is worth commentary? Or are we only embarrassed by discussions of spirituality? If so, why? This interests me, I guess.
When I told my shrink I didn’t use to be a spiritual person, his answer was, “You were not aware of being a spiritual person.” I didn’t like his correction and insisted that, no, I embraced atheism briefly, then settled into a kind of solid-artifact agnosticism, i.e., I didn’t believe in anything I couldn’t put in my mouth and suck on. This is a line of thinking invented by my friend, Eddie, who named his belief system, Oralism. It made perfect sense to me at the time. Eddie has since become the father of two beautiful little girls and I don’t know where that leaves him, belief-wise. We haven’t talked about it. Which is maybe part of what I’m digging at here. My therapist reiterated, “Denying you are a spiritual being is like denying you have a left arm.” I’ve come around more to his way of thinking, though I hate to lose any argument. Man, I’m a believer, just like Mickey Dolenz. (laughs)
So, I believe now that we are spiritual beings. I believe in a First Cause. I believe in an afterlife, a kindliness underlying the universe, an Attendance behind the growth of an acorn into an oak. A Man behind the Curtain. I deplore the Religious Right (which, as the bumper sticker says is neither) and I’m uncomfortable with the entry of religion into politics. I even dislike the “In God We Trust” on our currency. But I am, for want of a better word, religious. That’s me.
Is this the norm and people find it better to simply not talk about it? I’ll tell you where my cogitation has led me. I’ll keep you in suspense no longer about my conclusion. It is this: we are not cynical. We do not deny our left arms, our spiritual sides. I mean, the universe is vast and mysterious and difficult and harmful and loving and full of the kind of wonder that makes simple men sit on their porches at night and look at the stars. I believe this: there is more star-gazer to most of us than cynic.
But I’m still left with an uneasy feeling about spirituality, religion, personal theism, ibada, vespers—call it what you will—entering our workaday lives. I’m not sure I want it there, in the marketplace, in the bars, in the music. Perhaps, dad, it should all remain private.
And maybe all this religiosity can be refuted by Hemingway’s wonderful closing line to The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” But here, in middle age, with my old friends settling down, with children growing up around me like burning bushes, I say to Papa: Yes, it is. It is pretty to think there are things we don’t understand.
CM: We’re nearing the end here. Anything else to add?
BG: I’ll drop a bombshell on you, Creole. Only you will know this until you print it, dig?
CM: Alright.
BG: You know, I got a lot of big plans. I’ve got the LP of covers coming out. I got the novel, though that’s hush-hush. I’m working on some new material for a song-cycle LP, to be called The Agoraphobe’s Pandiculations. I might be scoring a movie for Robert Altman. I might even play a small part in it—he’s cool, Altman. He likes my new stuff, you know, he’s championing my newer stuff. But, friend, I have bigger news than all of this—all my considerable stratagems pale in comparison—I give you the most hopeful news on the planet.
CM: Buddy, I--
BG: Lor is pregnant. That’s right, man. We’re gonna be parents. And, you know, I’m ready for it. This is gonna be one far-out kid. And I think, I really believe, I’m gonna be one helluva father. It’s my focus now. There is hopefulness in parenting, dig?, like nothing else—it’s like saying, yes, I believe in the future. Man, I’m so in love with this kid already, though right now, he’s a brine shrimp, right? He’s a curled up question mark, a little bit of flesh and sortilege. And, the music, well, it will only enrich it. You’ll see. Everyone’ll comprehend. “In the end everything will be true of everybody.” Wait, till you see what I do next.
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Since this interview Turntable Poison has been reissued on cd (Sundazed, 2000) with all songs in their original order plus these bonus cuts:
“Thunder Over Scenic Hills’
“Blues for Sandra Leathers”
“Hayley Mill’s Underpants” (live)
“Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” (live)
“Blues for Wendy Ward” (alternate version)
“Hiroshima, Mon Amour”
“It’s Not True Unless it Makes You Laugh”
and a strange, concrete sound collage, called “Resolution #666”, which consists of tape loops, radio noise, car horns, snips of classical music, a piece of “Sugar, Sugar,” and, apparently, Crafty intoning, over and over, in a funereal tone, the phrase, “Fleming Fine Furniture.”
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Post script: All efforts to contact, or even find, Buddy and Lorelei’s child, purportedly a daughter, proved fruitless. As a mystery, it becomes another part of the myth of Buddy Gardner’s life, and death.
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COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has authored four novels: Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010), and Following Richard Brautigan (2010); two full-length poetry collections: Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2011); and three books of short stories: Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009), Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories (2011), and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (2011). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been selected for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written “Rock and Roll Heaven.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.