So I’m riding shotgun in my pal Keith’s 1964 grey Rambler American outside Littlestown Pennsylvania with my pot-smoking buddies when Lenny leans over the front seat with an 8-track in hand and says, “Put this shit on. It will blow your minds!”
So we eject F. Zappa’s Hot Rats and pop his 8-track into the player and what comes out of the tri-axe speakers in faux wooden cases does indeed blow our minds because it’s some kinda vapidly upbeat bugle blurt of the sort that would make the IDEAL theme song for a wacky TV sitcom about a grouchy Nazi doctor living under an assumed name in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.
“What is this flatulence?” I shout. “It sounds like somebody’s farting a clown!”
“It’s messing with my high!” bellows Keith.
“This is the music that was playing in the bunker when Hitler shot himself!” cries Dan from the back seat.
“Kill it! Kill it!” I scream, the way you would if you happened upon a hissing 8-foot Komodo dragon hunkered atop your stash.
“Aww, come on guys,” says Lenny. “It’s jazz! Don’t you guys like JAZZ?”
And so it was that I first laid rueful ears upon Chuck Mangione’s easy-listening landmark, 1977’s Feels So Good.
“You call this jazz?” I shout. “Charlie Parker is jazz! This is chipmunk porn soundtrack music!” I make a move eject the monstrosity, but Lenny literally throws himself into the front seat to grab me by the wrist.
“Listen to that flugelhorn!” he cries. “Chuck’s a flugelhorn savant!”
“Fuck the flugelhorn!” we all shout in unison.
Now what you have to know about Lenny is that Lenny plays in the high school jazz band, and what’s more Lenny plays flugelhorn in the high school jazz band, and if there’s anything that will ruin you forever as a judge of jazz or anything else it’s playing flugelhorn in a high school jazz band. When Lenny hears Chuck what Lenny hears is a better version of himself, whereas what everybody else hears when they hear Chuck is a lot of almost impossibly flaccid flugelshlock.
“Just give it a couple of minutes,” says Lenny.
“Minutes!” screams Keith. “Nobody could handle minutes of this dreck! Ear torture!”
“Does anybody have any serious downs?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t want to be subjected to this shit on strong acid,” says Dan.
“What’s this song called, anyway?” ask I.
“Feels So Good,” says Lenny.
“It does not feel so good,” says I. “It feels like somebody’s boring through my nerves with a live wire.”
“No, that’s the title of the song,” says Lenny. “Feels So Good.”
“Irony,” says Dan.
“It’s all so nice,” I say. “Everybody’s playing so nice. Nobody wants to offend anybody. Everybody’s like, ‘I hope that last nice note didn’t offend you.’ And everybody else is like, ‘No, your last note couldn’t have offended anyone. It was perfectly nice.’”
“It’s so smooth I could puke,” says Dan, more or less inventing the phrase “smooth jazz” in one nauseated swoop.
“Mike’s right,” says Keith grimly. “I really think we need some heavier drugs.”
So we drive out to our pal Billy’s pig farm to get our hands on some Placidyl (shit’ll knock you on your ass). We pull up to his brother Kevin’s doublewide, honk the horn, and sure enough out flies Billy, bottle of Jack Daniels in hand. He crams himself into the back seat (he’s a big galoot) and the first thing he says upon hearing Chuck is “Turn this pussy shit off. It’s stinking up the goddamn car. Don’t you have any Blue Oyster Cult?”
And Lenny immediately goes into his spiel: “It’s JAZZ don’t you know yadda yadda melodic minor scale blah blah blah you gotta have good TASTE to appreciate it etc.” to which Billy replies “Good taste? Sure! If you like the taste of BALLS! If I were to throw this 8-track into my farm pond every damn fish would immediately pop to the surface stone dead!”
“Let’s try it!” shouts Keith.
“No way!” shouts Lenny. “I paid $5.49 for that 8-track and it was worth every penny!”
But by this time we’re out of the car with Lenny behind us screaming bloody murder and Billy thundering ahead, bottle of Jack in one hand and 8-track in the other.
“Look at him,” says Billy in disgust, glancing at the picture slapped on the 8-track. “What the hell is he laughing about? And what’s with the fucking hat? And what the fuck is he hugging?”
“It’s a flugelhorn,” says Lenny, hurrying to catch up. “It’s a very EXPRESSIVE instrument. Chuck squeezes EMOTIONS out of it.”
“I know a couple of bikers who would like to squeeze the emotion out of Chuck,” says Billy. “I haven’t heard anything that awful since our prize stoat hurled himself at an electric fence.”
And when he gets to the farm pond he sorta lobs it into the middle and as we all watch a whole shitload of fish come bobbing to the surface, dead as doornails.
“Better than dynamite,” says Dan.
“Thank God it’s gone,” says Keith.
“How do we know it won’t crawl back to shore and kill us in our sleep?” asks Dan.
“And here I thought Spyro Gyra was bad,” I say.
“He’s a goddamn flugelhorn wizard and a misunderstood genius,” says Lenny, dejected.
“Let’s go do some SERIOUS drugs,” says Billy, “and wash that shit out of our ears.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
