Joe was really my father. My actual dad had become so fucked up by Air Force speed and drowning his hatred for the officers with beer. My mom was too busy working full time and managing the CREEP campaign (Committee to ReElect the President) sharing an office with Ted Bundy. Joe took care of and took me to the Lynwood library on the back of his white ten speed, where we’d read anthologies of Buck Rogers and Carl Barks’ Duck comics. We listened to all kinds of music as we started our comics company, but it was mostly this band, and especially this album, with its friendly mod sexiness, and power pop, inside jokes, novelty songs, half-parodies. I’d bring every issue of Tiger Beat and other mags they were in, and in the park I’d scissor out cool photos and images and make fumetti out of them. (Of course I watched the series every Saturday, eating something like Quisp.) Then he would ride us back to the trailer, where he became a Sandwich Guru by making me ridiculously experimental sandwiches, just to see how I’d react. All the while making me laugh. My brother and I shared albums like these from the late 60s to the mid-70s, where he mostly slid into Jethro Tull and Ten Years After. Which is how I was able to inherit music like the Tubes and Be Bop Deluxe. But then Joe was chased out of the trailer by my mother, when she caught him with a lid on the back of the toilet in the bathroom. No more listening together.
The Monkees – ‘Headquarters’ by Chris Estey
