SATCHMO

#34 - (a preface)


I have fond memories of the summer of 92'. 21 years after the release of the previously reviewed Marvin Gaye album What's Going On I spent the majority of my time tooling around the city of Rochester NY in a beat up black 87' AMC Renault 4 door coupe with my non-racist skinhead friend Pete and a mutual but mysterious acquaintance of ours, a young scrawny deaf kid that we knew simply as "Deaf Jessie". He may have stood only 5'6", but with his candy apple red liberty spikes he more than compensated for the height advantage that Pete and I had on him. With me piloting the whole operation and Pete in the passenger seat most of the time we would roll past a local 24 hr. diner looking for him, and at any hour of any day Jessie would almost always be standing outside waiting pensively for us.

He would climb into the backseat while guardedly clutching a crumpled paper sack that seemed to be on his person at all times. we would drive off and Jesse would then proceed to pull out a pack of double wide EZ-Wider rolling papers from his pocket and piggyback them together upon which time he would then delve into the paper bag to remove the most gorgeous fluffy freshly picked buds of what was then a very new and intense strain of marijuana called Northern Lights. After rolling a joint roughly the size and shape of a shotgun shell Jessie would pound on the back of the passenger seat handing the joint to Pete who would light it and start the counter clock-wise ritual which would ultimately lead to us reaching an unparalleled plateau of lifted consciousness. This process would repeat itself 3-4 times until it became sufficiently obvious that we needed to find a place to dock our spaceship, upon which we would drop Jessie off at the exact spot where we had picked him up and pete and I would find a place to allow our sizzling brain cells to cool off.

On a particularly overcast and sweltering July afternoon Pete and I were riding around with Jesse in the Renault performing our regular ritual. It was so hot that day and while the car had excellent A/C we were forced to keep the windows rolled down due to the terrible smell emanating from the back seat.

A few days prior to this Pete and I had stolen a tank of nitrous oxide from his uncle's dental office and we successfully made off with it straight to a huge music festival about 50 miles away where we sold balloons of nitrous out of the backseat of my car for $5 a pop. We made a significant amount of money, but did end up getting high off our own supply as they say; too high to realize that we had left the release valve of the tank partially open while we were passed out. The result of this faux pas was that my back seat smelled like what I imagine the lobby of hell must smell like. Although we did our best to remove the smell from the upholstery. it became a waning but permanent fixture of my automobile and a large part of the reason why I eventually sold it.

So there we were Pete, Deaf Jessie, and I hot as hell, baked, sweaty and slightly perturbed driving around the scorched city trying our best to take our minds off of our own discomfort. While at a red light Jessie began punching my back seat repeatedly and grunting. This was standard communication between us and Jessie. Neither Pete nor I understood sign language and Jessie's feeble attempts at communicating verbally were hard enough for us to understand sober let alone as high as we were. So pete and I took it upon ourselves to decipher Jessie's request. Jessie was repeatedly punching the palm of his hand and pointing to the dashboard al the while making a anguished wincing face. for a moment Pete and I were quite confused and had to move it along to the next red light before we could continue trying to solve this perplexing mystery. Jessie's signals continued much the same at the next intersection except he then reached into his brown paper bag and pulled out a CD that would forever change the way that I thought about music. It was also at that moment that I understood exactly what Jessie was trying to communicate, so I reached for the parametric EQ beneath my car stereo's CD player, dialed up a region between 150 and 300 HZ, put the CD in and ensured that the two 10" subwoofers in the trunk would pound hard enough to defribulate a whale's heart.