Joe (Moanin’ In The Moonlight) Fernbacher, Creem, 2/85
In Venice Beach, moke monsters pull up in gleaming ’57 Chevys coiled and armed with all the requisite Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong noises. They giggle and swarm into Junior High School parkin’ lots, front seat knowledge their only courage, dead words of soft reassurance their sticky candy...Down Hollywood Blvd., in front of the Screen Actors Guild office, the Santa Ana’s sweet fiery heat blesses the street and gusts up the flimsy red dress of a hooker with long, light brown legs...Over on Melrose, young boys with stun-cute smiles wander the night leaping lazily in front of fast-moving Mercedeses for the mere sport of it. Slamdancing their way through his city of illusions, they rough up passersby with fast, cruel words, broken bottles and rusted jewelry...And in Buffalo, N.Y., Joe Fernbacher side-glanced all of these soft explosions of travelogue nervousness and nostalgia with a bleak white silence and while Los Lobos’ new LP How Will The Wolf Survive? played on and on and on. Seldom did music invoke such crystal clear images in his deeper blue ripples. He let his mind wander some more as the band launched into “Evangeline.”
...He saw the stream rising above the barrio--oh, how it beckoned. He knew what kind of fix was in order--a night fuckin’ with the head of the Holy Ghost at the Ooo-Wee La La Lounge. To him the Ooo-Wee was a cafeteria of sin’s darker rhymes--and that’s exactly what he needed. Eyes sparkling, he stumbled through a blurred landscape of dueling lowriders, hideously burned out Naughels stands and horribly pulped palm trees until he slid, invisibly, through the doors of the Ooo-Wee and plunked his plentitudinous frame into a corner booth. He ordered up nine double Jose Golds and an accompanying small fleet of Coors and settled down. From the jukebox came a strange, carnival-like song that ice-picked its way through his bulk right down to his toe, which commenced to tapping.
The next thing he knew, he was back in Buffalo, New York, his dream fading. Looking around, he noticed his entire living room was spraypainted with strange, carnival-like paragraphs. “Just HOW in the hell can I send the entire living room through the mail?” he wondered.
On the couch he had written, “Amidst the oily mists of metal, the spine-twirling scratchings of tarmac funk, and the ever-washy new psychedelia comes a simple, yet brilliant, pachuco pulsar of music, a sound punctuated with wheezing accordions, angle-moan pedal steels, streets-on-fire-tonight guitars and Bajo Sextos and Quintos--a sound perpetrated by a band called Los Lobos. It is a good sound, a refreshingly good sound.”
On the TV screen he’d heiroglyphed: “‘Don’t Worry Baby’ encapsulates and then outstrips any and all George Thorogood LPs as well as a few of the finer moments of the Allmans’ Eat A Peach, white-boys-can-play-the-blues-opus-in-Harley-minor. Pure excitement from beginning to end.”
On a frosted window pane, in deep, squiggly black, he’d scrawled: “‘Corrida #1’ is a neat pachuco polka and is as self-definitional as this record gets, while ‘I Got Loaded’ is a quirky, pagan ode to drunkenness with (and this is paraphrased) a story line that reads like a Donald Newlove novel or vintage Bukowski--‘I got loaded last night on gin/I feel alright today/I got loaded the night before on whiskey/I feel alright today/I’m gonna get loaded tonight on wine/I feel...’”
On an ashtray, in bright orange, he’d continued: “‘Lil King Of Everything’ is the greatest title for a song I’ve seen in years AND it’s an instrumental. On the oh-good-it’s-a-definite-metaphor-for-cultural-assimilation side is ‘How Will The Wolf Survive?’ which could’ve been about Peter Wolf but isn’t...”
On the coffee table, in bold letters he’d concluded, “I have heard this record--and it has heard me. Buy it or I’ll just keep fantasizing until you capitulate...Arghhh!!!”
Get your own Free Home Page