"What Did You Bring Me?"

Once in a while, the Ear would play something unimaginable, unthinkable, apocryphal. Was that James Brown, covering "Purple Haze?" The Parliaments, sitting in with the Sun Ra Arkestra? Might have been, must have been, the sound like no other. Yet any attempts to trace these sounds have failed. They don't exist, did only long enough for Sal to play them, once, on air. I called him once, and I asked him:

"Did you play...?"

He just mumbled, and laughed.

Apocrypha One

Apocrypha Two

Apocrypha Three

Apocrypha Four

Ted Taylor-Ramblin' Rose

Or, You Could Just Set The Ball On A Tee For Them, Odalis

One thing about Sal, he'll admit it when he's beat.

Derrick Harriot-The Loser

The Heartbreakers-Born To Lose

Yo La Tengo-Meet The Mets

Don't You Know You're In My Neighborhood?

Sal called last night. I knew it was him, sloppy breathing into the receiver, with the television turned up way loud behind him.

"Hello? Hello?"

It was a baseball game he was watching, though it was almost two o'clock in the morning my time. Five, in Washington. I recognized Charlie Slowes, the Nationals' announcer in the background.

"Jesus Sal, you really shouldn't call at this hour. And you shouldn't be watching the Nats replay. Watching that team's bad for the soul."

"Easy for you to say. We took two of three last weekend, need I--"

"A once in a lifetime occurrence, Sally. It'll never happen again."

"Whaddya think of this Milledge kid?" he asked me after a minute. He didn't want to fight, thank God. I'd have been up all night.

"Lastings Milledge?"

"No, Derrick Milledge. High school player in Bend, Oregon. I think we'll get him in the second round, if the Tigers don't take him first. He's the savior of our franchise."

"My God, you're not calling to talk about a savior for the Nationals? The only savior you can hope for there is all that anger that's gonna send Frank Robinson to the cardiac ward eventually. Then you can--"

"Plus-slider, 98 mile an hour heater, hammer curve. We're not talking about Boof Bonser here, the guy's got--

I knew where this was going. Last time I talked to Sal he got all heated about arcane statistics like BABIP and park-adjusted EQA. I asked him about a proposed Izturis-for-Ryan Church trade and he damn near flew through the roof. "Don't talk to me about that banjo slappy!" he shouted. "Church is a three-true-outcomes hitter."

"Good for you, Sally. Good for you and all your rotarian buddies," I said now. "All I know is, the game gets played on the field. The game gets won on the field. And next time you bring that east coast business into my house, you might just be sorry you did."

Archie Sez

David Sez

Rance Sez

Just A Friendly Game

Glavine and Maddux-Chicks Dig The Long Ball (YouTube Link)

Nothin' But The Prog In Me

Three minutes. Plenty of time to flee a hotel room, flush a stash, tuck the magazine back under the mattress...to smoke a cigarette, mix a martini, tell any joke that isn’t The Aristocrats, read poems by Basho or William Carlos Williams (or Basho AND William Carlos Williams.) Time enough to listen to some of the greatest pop songs in human history—“I’m Eighteen,” “I’ve Been Tired,” “It Takes Two”—all clocking in at three minutes exactly, all leaving you as flushed and elated, as wrung and regretful, as the fucking they point towards. Songs like these were made for the radio and its format of the “classic pop single," over-and-out once they'd banged their choruses into your head. But such was never Sal’s game, nuh-uh. One tuned in to the Ear to get stretched, played-with, teased at great length. By songs that threatened never to end, or in some cases—hear that taffy-chord at the beginning of “Ecstasy Symphony”—never to begin. “Is this thing still on?” “Are we there yet?” Never, never, says the Ear. We’re just getting underway.

Beach Boys-Good Vibrations (Sessions)

Bruce Springsteen-NYC Serenade (Live at The Main Point 1975)

Can-Bel Air

Spiritualized-Feel So Sad (EP version)

Kraftwerk-Kling Klang

Spacemen 3-Ecstasy Symphony/Transparent Radiation (EP version)

Richard & Linda Thompson-Calvary Cross (Live)

Soul Asylum-James at 16 Medley

Sonic Youth-The Diamond Sea (with alternate ending)

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson-The Bottle/Guan Guanco

Eddie Hazel-From The Bottom Of My Soul

Everything that Moves, Including The Hand Up Your Pants

The Ear used to have this riff I half-understood. Move, he'd say. I'd get out of my chair, thinking he wanted it. No, Move. Be Mobile. Keep Moving. Keep jingling around, something might be gaining on you. Get A Move On. That part was easy enough. Then he'd start in about Everything That Moves. Not Anything, he'd always remind me. Anything is just sloppy. Everything is a strict policy. It's got to be Everything or Nothing At All. He'd read me this poem by John Ashbery, The Songs We Know Best, and emphasize the line "It's the worm inside the jumping bean that makes it race". (He also showed a fondness for the next couplet: "Too often when you thought you'd be showered with confetti/what they flung at you was a plate of hot spaghetti".) To this point I was still with him, sort of. Then he'd start in about the puppets. It's Not Who You Move, But Who Moves You. He'd wiggle his fingers at me lasciviously. That's when I tended to change the subject.

The T.S.U. Toronadoes - My Thing Is A Moving Thing

The Verlaines - You Cheat Yourself of Everything That Moves

Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet - Everything Moves By The Grace of God

Meat Puppets - On The Move

Kermit and Fozzie - Movin' Right Along

All the Jim-Jims in This Town

It transcends everything that separates us—class, race, geography, eating habits, facial hair. You can see it in the eyes of men who’ve been touched by its power. They preach and preach, but their mutterings of apocalyptic reckoning carry little weight, cannot be fathomed by outsiders, and you go on with your life. You may mock them for their single-mindedness, but then you might wonder: could that have been me? Could it still one day be me?

The following men turned their backs on their former lives—as a Philadelphia construction worker, as a Staten Island iron vacationer, as a Washington, D.C. policeman—so that you might hear their gospel. In 1972, despite his best efforts, the Salivating Ear finally had his own epiphany, and for many months he dedicated the 10 o’clock hour every Thursday night to spreading the news. Listen for these men, but mostly for yourself. Then look into your soul, and ask: does a Ray or Jim lurk in my life?

Jim Croce - Operator

Ghostface Killah - Never Be the Same Again

Terry Huff & Special Delivery - That's When Love Hurts

D(r)owned

I was grouting tile in a strange house in San Francisco when The Ear played “Downed” for me. I was twenty-three, had recently split up with my girlfriend, and was embedded in a depression so thick and wide I couldn’t see either end of it, every day a grueling stretch of isolation and paranoia. I knelt in a bathtub in the Upper Haight, and somewhere—the apartment downstairs, a car that had parked itself outside the plowed lot that had once been (and would again be) Kezar Stadium—a radio played those flanged chords I might’ve heard before in junior high, though I didn’t remember them. It stopped me dead. I went over to the window and stuck my head out. The clocks had just changed, it was the first day of Spring, and a girl I’d seen at a bus stop at 2 AM the night before but been too shy to talk to now walked opposite, up the bright side of the street beside the crater of the stadium. These things—girl, spring, sunlight, song—intersected for me, flung me outta my head. Sixteen years later, that song is still what it was in that moment: a pinnacle of civilization insofar as—like all such pinnacles—it instills me with religious ecstasy.

Some time after that, after this girl—or maybe it was a different girl, it’s hard to keep track of the phantasms of my twenties—had re-bruised my heart I lay in bed and listened to New River Head in its entirety. This was a record that carried recumbency in its wake, melding prog Anglo majesty to couch-rock despair, and “Drowned” was a big favorite on The Ear’s infrequent KALX appearances. Its tremelo’d guitar loop and sluggish keys were weirdly consoling to me, a bait-and-switch of mood not unlike Cheap Trick’s crisp, kinetic ode to the 714. I think The Ear understood this. I think he understood me too.

Cheap Trick-Downed

The Bevis Frond-Drowned