The Blackouts
A genuine relic - actual dialogue of an incarnation of the first band FZ formed, The Blackouts, for which he was initially the drummer (...). This snippet is early evidence of the composer's career-long, social-anthropological habit of taping spoken anecdotes by friends and acquaintances, a trait well known to all members of his various bands (...). Here, members of The Blackouts (...) briefly discuss recent participation in an NAACP benefit concert starring Earl Bostic and Louis Armstrong at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, sometime in 1958 or '59. (It's stunning, but true--FZ once appeared in the same concert with Satchmo.)
Kenny's Booger Story
Here is Kenny's remembrance of an experiment undertaken by Ronnie and pal Dwight Bement (later tenor sax player for Gary Puckett and the Union Gap), with guitar accompaniment by FZ. The experiment, which involved the pair smearing the bounty of their nasal passages on a single window over a period of seven months (perhaps to determine if dried mucous could block light?), later attained mythical proportion in the line "Ronnie saves his numies on a window in his room/(a marvel to be seen: dysentery green . . . )" from "Let's Make The Water Turn Black." The enterprise arguably merited artistic consideration as well, at least in an abstract sense. The "canvas," after all, ultimately acquired what FZ described as a "frosting," with chance arrangements of darker, solid sinus matter, suggesting whatever one's id might detect. To paraphrase Victor Coussin's famous remark from his 1818 lecture at the Sorbone ("L'art pour l'art"--"Art for art's sake"), one might say of this undertaking, "La snot pour la snot." Kenny finally admits to having possibly contributed to the project in some small way.
Ronnie's Booger Story
Ronnie's less apologetic, more blunt recounting of the same events.* We learn that the work was ignobly destroyed with the aid of a putty knife, under orders from the Williams boys' mother.
*After having no contact with Frank for many years, Ronnie reportedly showed up in the front row of a 1975 MOI concert in Pomona, California, yelling, "Do the song about the boogers," and was subsequently invited on stage as a special guest.
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