Not All Who Wander Are Lost

The Sonic Q-tip That Is Tributary

Drove down to New Jersey Saturday night to visit my brother, an MFA student and teacher of painting at Rutgers. After finally seeing his studio – I’d describe his current work, but then I’d have to shoot you – we stayed out far too late barhopping with his art school cronies, holding down the pool table to the cheesy techno remixes of eighties songs on the badly beaten radio in the corner of Doll’s Place while a Green Party rally band played awful tooloud metal under our feet up against the bar and the electronic trivia games.

Nominally, of course, we were there for the wedding of a second cousin. My parents joined us, though my sister was too emeshed in vet school applications to attend; the four of us knew few folks there, and pretty much stuck together, off to the side, during what must have passed for New Jersey party music – mostly throbbing-beat medleys of half-familiar disco songs -- finally sneaking out early while everyone was distracted by garter-throwing.

On the way home, passing over the Tappan Zee what had been a fairly decent Calypso radio show began to fade. The ride home is a blur, mostly – a solo five hours peering into the dark and rain – but I seem to have a faint memory of a long stint of top forty, marginally better than giving up on the radio altogether, somewhere between White Plains and Hartford.

It was a weekend of pretty awful music, actually. By the end, my aural palette needed a good scrubbing. Thank goodness for the radio show and, an added bonus, a sweet live version of Divided Sky, one of my favorite old Phish tunes, from the station’s overnight computer-generated radio feed the way back home again. Tonight’s playlist follows, with cover songs starred.

Tributary 10/27/03

Bob Dorough – Too Much Coffee Man
Phish – Golgi Apparatus
Oysterhead – Oz Is Ever Floating
Barenaked Ladies – Be My Yoko Ono
Dar Williams – Are You Out There
*Alana Davis – 32 Flavors
Domestic Problems – I’m A Line
String Cheese Incident – Latinissmo
*They Might Be Giants – Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
Sheryl Crow – Strong Enough
Charlie Parker – Ko Ko
*Negativland – Over The Hiccups
Negativland – Sycamore
*Bobby McFerrin and Yo Yo Ma – Flight Of The Bumblebee
*Jazz Is Dead – Scarlet Begonia
Keller Williams – Anyhow Anyway
Mickey Hart – Down The Road
*Indigo Girls – Uncle John’s Band
Susan Werner – Time Between Trains
*John Cale -- Hallelujah
Marc Cohn – Mama’s In The Moon
Alison Krauss – Forget About It
Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem – Finland
Shawn Colvin – Shotgun Down The Avalanche
Nickel Creek – Smoothie Song
*Dixie Chicks – Let Him Fly