And I'm scared that I ain't ever gonna 'mount to much
Except the feeling I get from your touch
But I want to write
I'm sick of how I just talk about it
I want to write
And it's silly how I never work on it
I want to write
I can't turn it off and on like a light
I want to write
So I won't be by your house tonight
"Rosanna Arquette" by Bob McCluskey

Most of us have never heard of Bob McCluskey, but in the Knoxville, Tennessee music community, Mr. McCluskey is a highly respected and revered musical name. A founding member of Taoist Cowboys (see the review of "Punt" at www.rockzilla.net/smith13.html ), McCluskey wrote off-beat, out-of-left-field rocking little pop songs that had brilliant insights and a childish sweetness, a sense of innocence and decency and community.

McCluskey continued to write and perform after the Taoist Cowboys rode off into the sunset. Lynn Point Records has recently issued two McCluskey records, a reissue of the legendary 1994 cult icon McCluskey solo record "Emergency Lunch Box" and a new recording of McCluskey doing songs from his band after Taoist Cowboys, The Estradas' "Last Summer's Folding Chair." Neither record is headed for the Top 10 with a bullet (if you're looking for those, you're dialed in to the wrong website anyway, right?), but those who do purchase them will in all likelihood hold them with the kind of fondness we attach to a beautiful piece of driftwood, a shark's tooth, or a sand dollar discovered on a beach during summer vacation.

McCluskey's songs are the opposite of hook-laden, calculated, formulaic hit songs. Listeners who prefer Top 40 radio will scorn McCluskey's work and vision, but others will identify and savor the depth, compassion, humility and humanity in McCluskey's songs glaringly missing from the Top 40 formula. An entirely do-it-yourself solo album played, sung and recorded by McCluskey, "Emergency Lunch Box" was included in Knoxville MetroPulse's recent feature on the Top 100 Knoxville recordings of all time. Knoxville sound guru and knob twister Kevin Crothers mastered the original tapes and has transferred the original to digital format for Lynn Point.

The album is a compendium of originality and mirth, a sparse, dark-visioned, poetic record, the type of record that college students and the intellectually curious would cherish like a product of the 60's would cherish a Dylan bootleg. If McCluskey had painted this record, he would somehow have incorporated the starkest Realism, overlaid Dali-esque surrealist elements, then given the whole canvas a generous dose of Dada absurdity.

"Lunch Box" is worth the price just for the originality of the song titles, titles the likes of Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart would be proud of: 'Nobody Cares for the Drunks,' You're Not God,' 'Rosanna Arquette,' 'Nice Night to Do Laundry,' 'Clothesline,' 'Stupid Things,' and a delicate instrumental called 'Semi-finalist in the Natural Lite "Back to Natural" Ad Campaign Background Music Contest.' McCluskey more than measures up to the titles with his lyrics. They are full of boozy social comment, relationship dilemmas, and darkest-of-night soul-searching. It isn't pretty or slick or polished and it isn't intended to be.

Nobody cares for the drunks in this town
Everyone here is afraid to play the fool
Everyone's in check and everything's cool
I give that bartender all of my dough
But I couldn't tip him a hundred to say hello
Nobody cares for the drunks in this town
Whatever happened to a sense of humor
In a stupid world what's wrong with being in a stupor?

McCluskey never travels in a straight line, and that is the source of his charm. Who else writes a love song like 'Starfish'? Who but the angst-ridden, eccentric poet makes the connection between the starfish's ability to reproduce its own parts when injured and a broken love?

When there's so many fish in the sea
Who wants an amputee?
But I'll hobble along this shore
'Til some girl has the heart to give me hers
Starfish, starfish
You grew a new heart
Just like it was a spare part
Starfish, starfish

'It's a Nice Night to Do Laundry' isn't so much a song as it is a look inside a poet's soul. The song deals with an absolutely pathetic situation and McCluskey delivers it in the quiet and achingly desperate voice of a potential suicide.

It's a nice night to do laundry
Reminds me of how she took care of me
Didn't fold my clothes
But she sewed up my holes
Now here's the boxers that I got from her
That one Christmas when it snowed
Now I'm all alone and I fold them in front of complete strangers
It's a nice night to do laundry

An even more penetrating and tragic line from the song illustrates a sense of social inferiority that McCluskey finds among the lonely and rejected.

Once thought life had no boundaries
Now it's boundaries are all that surround me
It's a nice night to do laundry
All my old friends have grown beyond me
They all have washers of their own in their homes

Fair warning: don't come to "Emergency Lunch Box" looking for happy music to use as background Muzak at your next dinner party. "Lunch Box" is the anti-Muzak, the antidote for the same old formulas, the same old hooks, the same old thought processes. It is a work of utter and absolute creativity, of a sharp mind looking for a hole in the boundaries, for new notes and minor keys.

Deep inside my Emergency lunch box
It's a place that only I had been
But you left fingerprints, what can I say
Let's go for a picnic on a sunny, sunny day
But you're not a god, you're a woman
I still love my mother more than you
I compare you to sunsets not sunsets to you
You're not a god, you're a woman
'Cause if you were this would have never began
And now I can get so close to you
And if I just see you my prayers come true
No, you're not a god, but I'm a man

* If you absolutely promise not to leave any fingerprints inside, you can purchase Bob McCluskey's "Emergency Lunch Box" at http://www.lynnpoint.com/bobmccluskey.html

Contact William Michael Smith at: wms-at-rockzilla.net

 
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