Garrett's AZ blog

Insightful thoughts and the occasional rant. Or occasional thoughts and insightful rants.

September 12, 2005

Who Will Collect Madonna in 2020?

We-ll Doggie! An eccentric after my own heart. Joe Bussard; living and collecting rare 78 American roots music and playing it on radio stations in my old hometown in Carolina. Doing if for 35 years and I never heard of him!
This rabid brotherhood is almost invariably made up of eccentrics who came of age in the '50s and '60s, rejecting everything around them. More than just hippie-haters, though, these men loathe the very idea of popular music, right back to the time of fox trots and Al Jolson, the Jazz Age clichés often mistaken for the soundtrack for their beloved era. They've got their own names for such million sellers as Vernon Dalhart: Vermin Dogshit and Vernon Stalefart. These are the enemies, the pop crooners on the crapola 78s that they've had to muck through to find the gems that never made it in mainstream America. Their Jazz Age is strictly the music of poor whites and blacks: wild-ass jazz and string-band hillbilly, surreal yodels and king-snake moans, lightning-bolt blues and whorehouse romps and orgasmic gospel.
It's all anti-pop, anti-sentimental: the raw sounds of the city gutter and the roadside ditch.

Maybe I'm just a few generations behind them, but for the past 7-8 years people say I'm "stuck" in the past, musically. I'm sorry, but the past is where it all started. I've done classic rock, rockabliy, punk, alternative, grunge, reggae, island music, some native american music, classical. Well now I'm interested in just two things, really only one thing: where it all started, and modern artists that are unique and innovative. Pop country or rock or both can be for the masses. Check out his website .