i swear to god it was one of the funniest if not most awkward things i’ve ever had the good fortune of experiencing. it was a public poetry reading event at ‘magic beans’ coffee shop in boone back in the late 90s, attended by what we like to call ‘trustafarians’; rich, upper class appalachian state university students who wanted to be hippies and drove range rovers with bumper stickers that read ‘visualize whirled peas’ (i.e., ‘world peace’). these kids spent in one trip to the mall to buy tye-dyed clothes and beads and lava lamps and shit, what would take a real hippy like a month to make in wages. some of the chicks even stopped shaving their legs… well because that was part of the script. i’m a natural chick. here, want some granola? i made it myself. peace, brother. we should have sex, actually.
so anyway they always had a drum circle up on the roof after the poetry readings. so i’m up there with somebody else’s bongos chopping up latin jazz fusion beats in circles around em… and i’m getting a lot of evil stares. you’re such a show-off, man. no, it’s just that the greatful dead puts me to sleep. okay i’ll slow down.
at the end of this ‘jam’ we’re all sitting around drinking coffee and smoking bowls. i happened to have my portable radio with me… and the CD in it at the time couldn’t have been more perfect. it was ‘we’re only in it for the money’. i had a plan. watch this. i set the radio on the railing and play this song. now what followed was worthy of video by hidden camera it was so glorious. you’ve never seen a more perfect deterioration of good mood descend upon a people before in your life. i promise you. it was the kind of thing where everyone wanted it to stop, but they couldn’t move… couldn’t say anything. all they could do was sit there transfixed and frozen as frank delivered their fate… and i sat back admiring what i had created. things were never the same between me and the appalachian state trustafarians again.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LaZmyqCKUs[/youtube]