Light Matter (CD)

In 1867, or some time thereabouts, a riverboat plunger with cowboy blues in his blood reached the wrong end of the Mojave Desert. They called him ol' Langhorne, and he carried in his vest a crooked feather and a leaf of paper that seared a trench through the edge of his chest. He'd left his lonesome Missouri bungalow to discover the soul of America-a soul he thought he could hear and feel in the wild winds of a Mojave rain shadow. But when he got where he was going, those shadows told a different tale. As he gazed back at the dried streams and dead lilies that swallowed his tracks, he flicked his quill, pricked his tongue, and with blood that burned like a screaming steamboat cylinder, he summed up that old red desert. quot;The poetry,quot; he wrote, quot;is all in the anticipation.quot; Not long ago, another gambler ambled into a wilderness of a different kind, a lonesome vale where pallets pierced the sky and the scramblers pushed their way toward silver tills that chirped and chimed the new American symphony. He'd come from a westerly place with serpents in his shoes and blues that coursed through his own blood like Mississippi mud. Them pushers meant nothing to him-that much he knew-but still he looked around. A funny feeling began to fill the air. The floor creaked. A ball bounced. The sky went drumbeat black. When the dicer broke sleep and braced up, the bullet that had lodged in his head lay in the dirt of St. James Infirmary. The sky outside donned a new, more elastic hue, and all he could feel was the juddering of shades as they fled the door outside his room. The phone screamed and wobbled. He stuck it to his ear, smiling, as the soft sound of a woman's voice whispered from the other end, quot;It's me. I want my lizards back.quot; Alias Means was alive and well. He jumped that last train and set out straight to prove ol' Langhorne wrong. He reckoned he had a lot to say, and he reckoned too that the poetry is not in the anticipation but in the music, and in the droll and winding life that gives rise to things we know but can't explain. So, in a style that can rend and restore the most Desdemonian mind, and with a sound as merciless as it is full of grace, these songs tell of one man's need to laugh at a life that we're forced to live forwards but can only learn backwards. More importantly, they realize a good old-fashioned yearning to spread the blues so that others can laugh-and learn-along with him. Just be sure to listen carefully, because as they say where I come from, quot;Great cry and little wool, as the devil learned when he sheared the hogs.quot; Phinneas Crux, Ph.D., 1968 Bronze Medalist Murfreesboro, TN.