$26 Adventure Time.

Tonight on Disasterpiece Theater, we bring you a delightful dialogue from B and C.

Bottle: alright C-spot, run and fetch me another $20 adventure time. Don't put too much thought into it though, i just want new old interesting things to listen to.

...several short eternities of muzak later...

C: ok boss, i went a little over this time and had to pay sales tax, but i had a few bucks to chip in.

B: how kind of you, let's see what we hear with the smell of our thoughts.

Gather 'round kiddos, it's $26 Adventure Time with Bottle. This time it looks like we're judging the books by their covers. Phoebe Snow looks like she has something important to say, let's let the good times roll.

If this album is any indication, then we're going all over the place. There's a clear blues/jazz foundation, but she veers off into every direction at any moment. One moment it's jazz, then country, then Doobie Brothers or Neil Young type soft rock, southern twang to soul style glottal stopping to almost yodeling. She's a phenomenal guitarist to boot. Part of that eclecticism is that she recorded the songs anywhere with anyone who was around, and she and Dino Airali spent ages rearranging and editing and adding stuff like string arrangements and chorus. And there's jazz sax solos everywhere. Christgau calls it a cult album, and i'd say sure, this is a nice little secret to have amongst friends. You wouldn't want to pull it out for just anyone to hear, but your fellow afficianados will surely give an approving nod when they learn you scooped it up for $2. Alright, where to next on this mystical adventure?

Oh, of course, i should have known, it's Mystical Adventures by Jean-Luc Ponty. I didn't really say much about Enigmatic Ocean during last weekend's youtube binge, but Ponty deserves some serious credit. One, he really did elevate the status of violin in the jazz world, and two he made jazz-rock just about as popular as possible. To my mind, jazz and prog are kind of two opposite directions that smash together in the middle, Ponty being a jazz musician writing big epic rock show pieces. Zappa and Elton John both loved working with him, and Zappa was the guy who convinced him to emigrate to California. I actually haven't heard this one, so i'm really hoping it's as spooky and intriguing as the cover art leads us to believe.

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you the following confusing statement. Couldn't you technically argue that Phoebe Snow is jazz fusion, albeit on the soft side of the spectrum (folk styles as opposed to rock and funk)? Sorry for the interruption, on with the adventure.

Oooooooooh. Yeah, that's a little mysterious and dangerous. What an awesome album. And yes, it's that Randy Jackson just killing it on bass. You thought he was just some schmuck Simon Cowell dredged up from the ocean, but the dude is Wooten/Pastorius level phenomenal. 

Next is The post-Graham Nash Hollies, i guess. For a moment there i thought we were going to keep the jazz going. You really didn't put much thought into it, did you c-cucumber? I mean, it does have Sandra's theme song on it, she is a cool black woman in a long dress. I like it a lot, i just wasn't expecting the complete 180 from jazz to swamp-pop. Yeah, the Hollies are the British approximation of swamp-pop: that murky, twangy guitar reverb, ever so slightly more yelling than singing, blues filler licks, it sounds like they're wearing hip-waders. It just does. I mean, i'm positive you picked it because the artwork has trippy upside down portions to it, but all three albums so far have a kind of general murkiness about them. On the surface they are one thing, but behind the scenes there's a whole lot of everything going on. I'm a little bummed that the gatefold is ripped off and lost to the universe, but you only paid $2 for it, so whatever. Where we going next?

Canada? Red Rider's third album named after Pablo Neruda for no apparent reason? Not the album with Lunatic Fringe on it? Red Rider is technically a 1-hit wonder, right? Oh well, bombs away. After all, i love Prism, and The Guess Who, and Lighthouse, and Steppenwolf...i apparently love Canadian Rock, so why not?

Yeah, that's a hell of an intro. Even more mysterious than Ponty's. This is so 80s you can taste the neon, but i can't lie, i freakin' love it. It is metaphorically about Neruda, though if it were a movie it would probably star Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. It's not a "yay, Communism!" album, it's just one man standing up to the corruption of power, whatever form that power happens to take. If you demanded i compare them to some other band, it would have to be Golden Earring; it's the same kind of spooky hard rock nefarious nighttime espionage aura, but with the added value of grammatical comprehensibility. I gotta find more Red Rider albums, this is fantastic.

B: Alright, c-monkey. How did you do it?

C: do what, boss? You told me not to put too much thought into it, so i picked interesting covers from the under $10 albums.

B: yeah, but you picked an east coast singer-songwriter, a European violinist who emigrated to the West Coast to play with Zappa, an English band playing American rock styles, and a Canadian band singing about a Chilean poet. Sunrise, sunset, upstairs, downstairs, women and men, black and white, everything all the time, none of it sucked. Do you know how frustrating it is when everything's awesome? I'm a smack talker! You have to give me one-sided garbage, so i can bludgeon it with a baseball bat.

C: are you mad that you're happy?

B: OF COURSE I AM!

C: i got one more album, if you think that might help...

B: so help me, if it's an ironic 80s genre avoiding album in the form of a corporate motivational seminar, i will enjoy it so much my intestines explode and i will haunt you in your nightmares for eternity!

C: Oh. Um. Nevermind. I misplaced it, i guess.

B: you didn't?! You did! You found The Completion Backwards Principle by The Tubes. You bastard. Fine. Ruin my perfectly miserable day. What are you waiting for? Roll it.

The Tubes were just a silly rock band from Phoenix/California who kept hiring roadies from other bands and out of nowhere hooked up with Journey's manager and sold out enough shows to open for Led Zeppelin (manager's choice), and were almost too much for anyone to handle, what with the throwing cocaine and pills (flour and candy) at the audience. They were somehow a legitimate representation and complete mockery of the 80s at the same time. Their mascot is a schedule 40 pvc tee, 3/4" if i were to guess based on my knowledge of photographic scale and perspective.

They were art school kids who played in biker bars, and even more unlikely, Pointer Sisters shows. 5 albums later, they made this. After living through a bunch of unnecessarily pointless corporate shenanigans (including having to work really hard to get fired from A&M during an actual recession so they could sign a new deal with Capitol), this album is a satire of Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign. If you mistakenly think Trump is a good liar, you should go back and look at the nonsensical infographics Reagan broadcast on National Television. People still believe that garbage after decades of watching it get "taken away from them" like it existed in the first place. Why is my retirement fund in the same bank account as the CEO's severance package? Oh. That's why.

But Bottle, you say, you're just a useless commie Indonesian woman, and you're opinion is a thing i don't like. 

That's a fair rebuttal, but let's agree to pretend that i'm a 40 year old white guy with a bushy red beard who has 3/4 of a brain and constantly asks people "why do you keep demanding that i lie to you? Do you really like being constantly surprised how reality works?" 

You see, C-scape, i'm an absolute asshole. The happier you make me the meaner i am about all of it. Someone probably took this personal, and damnit that's not fair. I run and run and run and they just keep chasing me. Dividing money doesn't make more money, and "investing" is just double speak for loan sharking. If we put it in terms of Republican and Democrat, the Republicans are selling fizzy lifting juice, and the Democrats are saying if you're gonna fuck us all over like that, then at the very least pay the $40 for our office visit so the doctor can tell us to stay home and not lift such heavy things for a while. I mean, just think about it for a minute. Your employer can fire you for any reason they want without telling you, but they don't just to prevent you from collecting unemployment. Said a different way, it's cheaper to keep paying your salary than to be a complete asshole. If you would just stop lying and be an asshole, i'd get a raise and have time and energy to find a better job.

Again, someone's going to take that personally. I assure you it's not personal, it's systematic incompetence. 

I'm equally amazed that people don't understand the congeniality clause that rules the Senate. At least 80% of the nonsense you hear on TV is mandatory doublespeak because there are hefty punishments for calling each other "fucktards." Just stop lying. Be wrong, say "i'm sorry," and do your job, which is telling the asbestos salesman that he can't market it as a "weight loss supplement."

I haven't ranted like that in a while. It feels good. Real good. Thanks, The Tubes. And thank you for reading. I put an entire Saturday afternoon's worth of sheer joy into it.