Tito Larriva and the Cruzados, chilluns. Just played the top one twice through good headphones at maximum volume and got honest-to-God goosebumps both times. (The second one is Tito and Tarantuala in HD from 2008!) One huge tip o’ the hat to Santino J. Rivera (check out his Tumbler, too) for sending me to this YouTube page where I got the skinny on the Plugz (which I’d at least heard of, once upon a time) and a link to the first video. From said page, for those of you in a hurry:
The Plugz were the great Mexican-American punk band from early 80’s Los Angeles, led by Tito Larriva. They backed Bob Dylan at one point, and achieved cult fame on the “REPO MAN” soundtrack with their spanish cover, “Hombre Secreto” (“Secret Agent Man”). Less known is this closing track to the film which is a loving tribute to Morricone’s western scores.
Tito went on to front The Cruzados and act in the Talking Heads’ film “True Stories”. He’s appeared with his band Tito+Tarantula in Robert Rodriguez’s movies, including appropriately enough “ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO”.
Possibly the best cropping I have ever done (Dubuque, Iowa)
A funny thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. When I finished my grueling 10-day exile in Maine, having decided what to keep out of all my dead aunt’s possessions I had suddenly inherited, I ended up with four large boxes and one suitcase full of photos, family letters, Finnish fish knives, my father’s “baby dress” (so help me), a 150-year-old hatchet, crocheted potholders, and three boxes of .22 long rifle ammo, along with other family detritus.
What was legal to mail I took into Augusta to ship back to Taos. It was something of a milestone, because I realized I was finally done with sifting through old lady crap in search of love and treasure. (Last year there had been my mother’s TWO mobile homes in godforsaken Arizona.) As I drove the rental car much too fast along the twisting turns of Cross Hill Road anxious to be shed of all of this, I pondered how the lot of them were gone: my mother, my father, his siblings (their mothers and fathers, etc. etc.)… and a singular Appalachian-style ditty fell into my head, lifting my spirits in a wild new way:
Ohhhh
the Farrs are dead
the Farrs are dead
stuff’s all gone
and the will’s been read
cheap as hell
I hope they’re well
devil’s gonna wish they were saved instead
The ripples are still spreading out in all directions. I look and see and nothing hurts. What was always there is still alive and throbbing. More than half a century is safe to eat!
The last time I stood here, here were pelicans gliding in the breeze
I could almost live in Balltown. Well, for a couple of weeks, anyway. This is the view from the scenic overlook just past Breitbach’s restaurant, and the photo doesn’t do justice to the sense of being up in the air you get along this ridge a short way from the Mississippi. (That’s the river in the background.) The stretch between here and Sherrill is gorgeous now with flowering trees and such. It’s probably the closest one comes to mountains here in Iowa and feels more like a genteel West Virginia where everyone has jobs and razors.
Breitbach’s is a hoot and a half. There’s a beer garden out back, but inside you’ll find the finest examples of deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwiches in the world. Fried anything, actually. They used to have fried ice cream, but I didn’t see that on the menu this time, possibly because the place burned down twice since I was last there. I can imagine the insurance adjuster saying, “Okay, one more time, but dammit, cut back on the grease traps!” and something had to go. Personally, I may never recover. (We even had onion rings as an appetizer, so you see where this thing went.) They had a buffet tonight, all you can eat for $16.95. I saw one fellow eat three servings of fried something, and I swear his wife had a couple pounds of potato salad piled up on her plate. Dear God in heaven.
It’s so damned verdant in Iowa right now, it’s like being on another planet after Taos. Something gave me an awful headache this afternoon, and I figured that was it, so I told my wife I was allergic to grass. (Hell, just look at it!) She wasn’t buying that, though, and in any case I have to play it cool because in over 30 years of coming to Iowa, I have often been a bad, bad boy: the omnipresent propriety that hugs the very earth like a stifling fog used to give me the willies—to put a cute face on Mr. Ugly—but I’m all better now and love it for the edge it sets up in me once I’m gone.
The fine young men and women stand up tall and straight. Lawns look like bright green felt. The concrete driveways have no grease spots. All the cars are shiny. Judging from the roadsides, the last person to toss a bag of fast food garbage out the window ended up as hog feed years ago. (That would surely be the dark side of this arrangement—although I jest, what did they do with all the beatniks, hmm?) I do appreciate this, absolutely. It’s everything my scared-ass parents wanted us to be but could never conjure up because of how they hurt inside their souls. So I salute you, Iowa, and the deep fat fryers on the ridge in Balltown.
While I’m busting bear balls down in Taos trying to stay alive, I’ll remember what it’s like up here where things make mostly sense, and when I fall into the gorge, I’ll thank my lucky stars I have a grave to fit my rotten, twisted corpse that held a heart deserving of the love that pours out from my Iowa sweetie like an everlasting spring.
This is the little house in Wall Lake, Iowa where my wife the classical pianist lived until she was three years old. We visited it on the way to Dubuque. Next door on the right is the house where an older woman lived whom she used to visit as a child. According to her, she’d just knock and walk right in. The woman owned a baby grand piano, which fascinated the little girl. One day she walked in, went over to the piano, and started playing the same note over and over. The woman was lying in bed and asked her please to stop because she wasn’t feeling well. The child was disappointed because she’d been imitating the ringing of a church bell and felt so proud: bong, bong, bong, etc. This was also the first time she’d ever touched a piano…
We stood on the sidewalk together looking at the house. As she told me the story, she shook and cried.
A good place for someone I know, I thought, as we went driving through. Lots of cheap housing, plenty of meth and cantaloupes, and when you get old, you can motor back and forth across the street in your electric wheelchair until you’re run down by a teenaged idiot in a big 4WD talking on a cell phone. (Not to detract one iota from the dignity and spirit of this fine gentleman, who’s lucky as goddamn hell not to be locked away in an old folk’s jail.) I get all goose-bumpy and snurfy just thinking about it. The stupid country music videos in the steakhouse in Nebraska that night, not so much.
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