Word: banjo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pogues are doing well enough, and remain enterprising enough, to explore some unlikely avenues of musical inspiration. "There are eight really strong personalities in the band," MacGowan comments. "Everybody writes." Jem Finer, who plays banjo, sax and hurdy-gurdy and who pulled the Pogues together in the early days, has written, with the aid of a "very old Italian phrase book," an aria. "We've rehearsed it," he reveals, "but it wasn't recorded for the album. Various factions thought it was pushing things a bit far. But opera is one of our secret desires." Unlike British soldiers...
...folks, it's mournful country music that makes your blue eyes water. Call it the Sick-Dog Blues. Abbey, who must have written this on a banjo, not a typewriter, is feeling sorry for his hero and probably for himself too. What saves the book is that he is skilled enough to pull sympathetic readers into his own mood of regret, not just for long-gone youth and foolishness, but for small-town, big-sky Western life as it was before shopping malls and industrial parks ate the best...
Every character, great or small (and truth to tell, they're all small), has the juice of comic originality in him. In jail with Hi, one convict strums Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the old banjo. The bounty hunter -- he's real, not just a Hi dream -- is a demon road warrior, a warthog from hell who grenades rabbits and torches roadside flowers, can catch flies between his filthy fingers, and has a secret tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his left pectoral. Gale and Evelle (lots of gender-bent names in this picture) lecture Ed on the importance...
Down by the river, groups of banjo and guitar players amused sunbaskers, bicyclists, roller-skaters, strollers...
...gorillas, he did not dream of becoming a cartoonist. Instead, as a communications major at Washington State University in Pullman, he hoped someday to save the world from mundane advertising. As it turned out, the world was not ready for salvation when he graduated, so he played the banjo in a duo and worked at a music store. The latter job so depressed Larson that in 1976 he temporarily quit to try his hand at drawing. In two days he sketched a few cartoons and sold them (six for $90) to a local magazine. Two years later the Seattle Times...