This friend of Jack's who's a drummer, who's a really, really great drummer, who will haul out an SUVful of bongos for a $50 gig at the Brewhouse, is also the drummer for Los Lobos. Los Lobos! This, to me, is, like, a really big deal. It's hard to remember when everybody dug Los Lobos con as much mucho gusto* as all those L.A. punk bands they hung out with, like X and Black Flag and those nuts in Fishbone. Back before R.E.M. was weird. I daren't go on for fear I wouldst make a further asse of myselfe, since the early 80s are like so twenty years ago.
Anyway, I bought the latest Los Lobos album. It's good. It's even great in spots. But mostly I was psyched for Cougar. Besides being the guy we almost named Jackson after (and we would have, if Jackson had been born in a Mercury Cougar, but as we all know he was born on the toilet and -- you know, what? I think there are better ways to commemorate that particular location in our house than name our son after it) -- besides that, Cougar is just totally fuckin' awesome and deserves to succeed. And so now he gets to play with Tom Waits. I said to Jack, "That is so cool for Cougar that he got to be in the studio with Tom Waits!" and Jack was all, "Tom Waits just sent them a tape of himself making that weird noise. Then they built a song around him in the studio."
Imagine my surprise: Tom Waits phones it in. What a bastard. You've got to hear what they did with the tape**, though, it's hilarious. It's like they were really cheesed that all they got was a dirty cassette of Tom Waits howling for thirty seconds, so they got this woman to come in and harrass him. You can just see her hands fly up in the air as she bitches, "Tom! TOM! Take your headphones off! and, It's not fair, I do EVERYTHING around here!
But I guess the most beautifully insulting thing they did, from a musician's point of view, was put a trombone over the whole thing, which is especially meaningful if you know this joke:
Q: What are the three most useless things in the world?
A: The Pope's balls and a trombone solo.
*Do you speak Spanish? Congratulations! I don't.
*LInk no longer works, sorry.