Guys with Tyson’s Dad (2001)
this time tyson brought his dad over to join in the fun. we smoked some brown stuff through a coke can in the park, but i didn’t get one decent hit because it was dark and every time i was about to inhale tyson would shout something about thinking he saw a cop car drive by, and someone else would promptly grab the coke can to hide it. so everyone was really high except for me, and tyson was doing that thing again where he was encouraging me to sing when i didn’t necessarily have any ideas for lyrics, which made for a slightly awkward atmosphere, at least for me. i was demoted to bass, while gord and tyson’s dad played acoustic guitars, and tyson alternated between percussion, harmonica, kazoo, party whistles, mouth percussion and additional acoustic guitar.
female impotence? and only sometimes stand out in the midst of some stuff that isn’t all that inspired. the former is a bluesy spoken word piece that features a shout-out to a scary walkerville girl, while the latter is bolstered by some nice beat boxing from tyson and a jerky vocal performance from me that earned another david bowie comparison from the big t. it’s probably the best song on the cd, even if starts to get a little psychotic at around the halfway mark. it didn’t go anywhere is a decent instrumental that does what its namesake suggests, though it isn’t unpleasant to listen to. at least my weird distorted whisper in the middle of the song is pretty interesting.
elsewhere, i wasn’t able to inject much of interest into the aimless strumming that surrounded me, though everyone else seemed to be having a good time. it was probably because i was once again the only guy who wasn’t stoned. for a few of the songs i couldn’t seem to find a vocal effect that i liked, and on shitsticks you can hear me rifling through a host of different settings on the digitech guitar box, trying in vain to find something suitable.
the night also provided me with further confirmation that few people knew what to make of me when tyson told me, “before we got together, i told my dad, ‘john’s the weirdest guy you’ll ever meet.’ and then you were normal!” he said this as if i had foiled his plans or something. like joel before him, tyson’s dad would never play with us again.
at the time, i was fond of making crude drawings on the cd jackets to capture something of the experience, and the one on my copy of the back of this cd has to be one of my best: all of us naked, looking like a big oddball family. i think i actually did a pretty decent job of capturing tyson’s dad’s essence, though tyson himself was always kind of tricky to draw because of a combination of the spikes he called his hair and my general lack of drawing ability.
TRACKS:
it didn’t go anywhere
female impotence?
shitsticks
sweaty home atlanta
only sometimes
the duck show
LISTEN:
