Famous


"Gonna be big as a barn and everyone will sing along..."

Went to see Robyn Hitchcock with my daughter last night. Wore the same Syd Barrett T-shirt I have worn to every single Robyn Hitchcock show I have ever seen. It has a big tear up the side where it burned when I heat set the ink in my basement about a million years ago.

I was sitting with my daughter and a man behind me asked if I got my Tshirt from "that Anderson Council" thing. He said he had something to do with one of the newsletters a couple years back. Went on to say, "yeah, something about Inky Fingers in Berkeley. Those guys." He mentioned he wore the very same t-shirt a few days before, but tonight had chosen to wear his Pink Floyd tshirt. I told him I thought I had heard of Inky Fingers and the Anderson Council.

A little time passed and the man behind me asked again if I knew where my t-shirt came from. He wanted to talk about shows he had seen. He wanted to talk bootlegs. He was boring the HELL out of me and distracting me while I was trying to enjoy dinner with my kid before seeing my hero. I was sitting there thinking how odd it is to sit next to someone who knew my "work" ten years ago. He remembered it. It had somehow touched his stupid life. He wore my tshirt a few days ago and had an immediate working knowledge of a newsletter that I published (ONCE!) and a memory of a business that had been my whole life for a while.

There was this one guy back in the day who contributed quite a lot to the Anderson Council newsletter. He also annoyed the HELL out of me back then. His name was Ory. He had every tape and every published shred about Pink Floyd from the Syd era. I was actually impressed by his collection but hated talking to him.

Finally, while the guy behind me was boring me to death with some story about some Syd cover or another, I asked who he knew over at Inky Fingers and the Anderson Council. He said there was a guy...uh...Michael he thinks. I said, "yeah, there was a Michael there." He went on..."yeah, and a guy named Rick ran it all."

In the end I asked, "so, what is your name?" In fact, I was pretty sure I knew who it was though he looked nothing like he used to. He was reading a lawschool text and drinking a shot of something. Not the annoying ruffled kid that I grew so sick of.

"I'm Ory" he said, and I didn't really expect anything else. Then he asked me who I was. I paused and made it maximally dramatic and said, "and I'm Rick."

You would have thought I was some kind of fucking hero to this guy. No joke. This guy has had NO life since I last saw him...except he has two kids and has started law school. I mean, yeah, his whole life is as different as mine but he's still as boring as ever stuck in some world of Syd bootlegs and stories about shows he saw back when. He's a serious loser.

Did I mention I was wearing a t-shirt I wore to every single Robyn Hitchcock show I have seen? Wanna hear about the time I saw him with the Egyptians and they went straight from "Railway Shoes" into "Uncorrected Personality Traits"...?

Losers all of us...though, I'd like to think some of us are more famous losers than others.

Posted: Tue - November 18, 2003 at 07:40 AM      

©