KINK

Generally I don't listen to the radio while I drive because if a good song comes on it makes me drive faster, and let's just say that's been a problem for me in the past. But the yummy biker was behind the wheel the other day, and so the oldies station was playing and we were singing along and beating on the armrests, punching the dashboard, yelling 'fuck, yeah!' and generally acting like a dignified middle aged couple.

Now it's a good thing there was a nice lineup on or I'd have started whining...the man, god love him, does tend to stick with the classics, while I'm up for just about anything musically as long as it doesn't involve yodelling or fake southern accents or taking a popular tagline and whamming it against a fence until it bleeds and then setting it on fire and peeing on it; or as it's more commonly known, Country Pop.

Well, as fate would have it, later on that evening we were at our favorite eatery, sitting in the bar having dinner and they started in with the inbred Waylon jr. shit. I made my displeasure known verbally, eliciting a noise from the yummy biker. Kind of a 'huh' noise.

But damn. This is a place that usually plays ranchera. I like ranchera. It's kind of like oompah band in spanish, with someone intermittantly cutting loose an 'aaaaaAAA-HAIIiiiii...' or 'ooooooOO-PAA!' which is rad because it sets off everyone in the kitchen to doing it too.

This lead to a conversation about our favorite radio stations when we were kids, back when you had to rub two dinosaurs together to generate fire. His was Armed Forces Radio. Well, he had no choice; he spent a large portion of his childhood in arctic military installations and that's all ya got. Mine was a Portland, Oregon fm station called...
KINK.
No fucking lie. Is that not cool?
That motherfucker changed my life.

Those guy were nuts. They were all refugees from college radio trying to outdo one another proving that they weren't really selling out, so to say the resulting lineup was eclectic is an understatement. You'd get tibetan nose chant* followed by an entire side of Disraeli Gears, some Tom Lehrer, a couple boring comments from Alan Watts, some ZZTop, a little Monty Python, Mountain, Nixon speech remixes....oh damn, I miss them. And the later in the day it got, the stranger the lineup became. Around 9:30 p.m. the jazz dogs would take over. They had a running feud, modern vs oldschool, so you heard a lot of Blind Faith-that seemed to be the audio demilitarized zone-while they mustered their forces against each other.

Oho, but at 12:00 midnight my boy came on. I wish I remembered this guys' name. I called him the 'Lude Dude. His on-air personna was so profoundly laid back and so unself-conscious that you felt like he was in the room with you dropping ashes on the carpet.

Apparently all semblance of management supervision dissappeared around 10 pm at KINK. By midnight, fuggeddaboudit. 'Lude Dude would audibly toke on air. One night he gave a brief tutorial on how to heef coke off a turntable with an empty bic pen by stopping down the rotation with his thumb, during which the technicians were falling on the floor laughing in the background. You'd hear them taking bong hits and hacking. One night he spilled it on the desk and ruined his mix tape, so he did a call-in show and took requests; had to be titles dealing with altered states and illegal substances. First time I heard Billie Holliday was that night, singing 'You Make Me High' (which isn't about drugs; its about sex, but oh well.)

I discovered this guy by sheer accident, only because I had trouble sleeping when I was younger. To me, it was like discovering a hole in a tree that magically refilled with gold coins.

'Lude Dude was no brainless wastoid. He was brilliant and interesting. Most importantly, this guy knew his music and loved it. He'd stick to the playlist for a couple of songs, start expounding on the influences and start picking from the racks to illustrate his points. It was an honest to god free associative education in music, tits out, not sealed for your protection. He gave me my favorite music in a way I could OWN IT. ZZTop and Neil Young. Janis. Brother Jimi. Led Zeppelin. He did a whole show on the music that the Rolling Stones had re-released and made famous long before 'This Ain't No Tribute' was a gleam in some producers' eye.

Can you believe I had never heard Blues before I found this show? Oh, every now and then you'd catch a couple of sanitized bars in the soundtrack of a movie, or some sad wad like Dinah Shore would warble a selection froom Porgy and Bess in her soulless waspy voice while she shook her biznez, though only managing to look as though like she was struggling unsuccessfully against four point restraint. But 'Lude Dude played Muddy Waters for me. He played Howlin Wolf for me. I could not believe what I was hearing.

The effect hearing this music had on me was like having a question answered that I had no idea I was even asking. Read the first few paragraphs of Dante's 'Nuova Vita' because he expresses the type of transformative experience I'm talking about better than I can. All I know is that I was lying on my bed at 2:00 am, 1973, and that man played John Lee Hooker for me and it blew through me like I did not even exist. Something inside me opened up like an undersea flower and my life was different from one moment to the next. It was better.


*in case you were wondering, there really is such a thing. It's unearthly cool, too.