The Lost Recordings Recorded

There has been an enormous amount of interest lately about the reappearance on the pop culture radar of the once-famous Country and Western star, Colonel Foz.  Colonel Foz, as you know, was world famous back in the 60’s and 70’s when he was touring with such international acts as George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Lynrd Skynrd, Gramm Parsons and Emmy Lou Harris, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, Frank Zappa, and Wayne Newton. 

He was also romantically attached to each of these great performers as well as Gretta Garbo, Mary Todd Lincoln (during her “crazy” years), Richard Nixon and Bond Villain Nick Nack.  Colonel Foz has lived long and seen it all, but unfortunately for audiences of the digital age, has yet to complete an album.

Like many great artists The Colonel can be a bit self-sabotaging, and the reason, as you well could guess, lies in The Bottle.  He has done some of his best work in there, but for obvious reasons, what is made in The Bottle, stays in The Bottle.  He occasionally disappears into a fog of sobriety, severely hampering his creative output.

Still, we here in Chicago are incredibly lucky because Our Hero, Sean Flannery recently discovered Colonel Foz while trying to retrieve keys from a urinal at The Beat Kitchen, rinsed him off, and brought him back into the limelight as the musical feature performer at The Blackout Diaries.  That, as you know, is the monthly pageant of dissipation occurring at the Beat Kitchen that was recently named by The Red Eye newspaper as, “The greatest thing ever, including monotheism!”

Read it for yourself.  Here it is:

After you read it, get your tickets to The Blackout Diaries, and then show up at the Beat Kitchen this Saturday night, September 29, at 9:00 for fun and booze.  It costs 10 bucks.  Don’t be cheap - go!

And when you see Colonel Foz, buy him a drink and seduce him.  It’s your best chance of becoming a Bond Villain!

Time Pie

The thing about time is that it is a freaky weird kind of thing.  I mean, is it a real thing or not?  Historians remind us that normal people only had clocks as part of their lives when they started getting paid by the hour.  Before that, a calendar did very nicely for dividing up time into understandable bites.  People didn’t have appointments before the Industrial Revolution.  If you wanted your friend to come over for sex, you just said “why don’t you come over sometime?”  Then your friend would come over and the two of you would have sexual intercourse together.

Now, of course, we divide up time every which way.  How many clicks did I get on this post in the first twenty minutes?  Why didn’t my friend like my Facebook post until it had been up for 9 minutes already?  Why do I only get four minutes at Cole’s Open Mic?  Did they really give me the light at three minutes or was it two minutes and fifty seconds?  Why can’t I get my ten seconds back?  Why won’t anybody fellate me?

Only one of these questions has an easy answer.

It’s about time.

One time it was 1990, and Your old Pal Foz had a hangover.  I was living in Lawrence, Kansas at the time because of the higher education and the reasonably high quality ditch weed.   Also, Lawrence had a bit of “scene” when it came to music, with great local bands like The Homestead Grays, Kill Whitey, and Bobby and the Chuxx.  Good bands always hit Lawrence on national tours.  Pearl Jam played at the graduation party that year. 

So I had this hangover and I was doing what I did back then in the mornings, which was run on the levee next to the Kansas River, over on the north side of the river by Johnny’s.  I had a hangover because I was out late getting drunk the night before watching a great band from Minneapolis called Trip Shakespeare.  They were playing at the Bottleneck.  That was the bar where sometimes Billy Goat would play.  They were the band where the lead singer would defecate on stage.  Remember?

So I was running along the levee there, and I see a group of five people walking up the levee from Johnny’s parking lot, and it didn’t take but a second to recognize that they were Trip Shakespeare.  I had just seen them the night before, and even had this hangover to prove it.  I ran up to them – which they did not find scary because I was dressed for running – and said something like “Hello.  You are Trip Shakespeare."  They recognized their name and answered to it.  I said something like “Hey.  I like Lake.  It is the only song I know of about infidelity as seen from the point of view of a fish.”  They said something like “yes, it is.” 

They had a camera guy with them who was shooting footage for a promotional video.  The camera was very big because it was 1990, and the camera operator was a professional camera guy who they had to pay to take the pictures – again, because this was 1990. 

Anyway, he shot a bunch of footage of the band hanging out on the levee and rolling down the hill and so forth.

The other day an old friend pointed me to where the You Tubes had a video of Trip Shakespeare, and there it was – all the footage I watched them take.  I am not in the video when you watch it.  I am standing right by the camera watching what we are looking at live but 22 years ago – and hung over. 

We had a good time chatting, took our goodbyes, and then I ran away.

Did you notice the part where Elaine the Drummer says in a wispy and spiritual hippy-dippy way that her role in the band is to divide time and stuff.  Crazy, spacey thoughts.  That’s kind of the way Patrick Stonehouse, the drummer for FtH does it. Patrick divides up time in to any old origami swan, and leaves you laughing or crying at the way he whacks on the drums.  That’s what drummers are for.  That’s why we have them.  We don’t always have sexual intercourse with them.  They don’t fellate us (they don’t have to), but they do take some time, divide it up into bite sized pieces, and use it to make us move our asses around.  That’s a good thing about drummers.  There are other good things but I can’t think of them now.

If you want to hear a man make a time-pie that will move your butt around be at Cole’s tonight at 9:00 to hear FtH lead off an amazing night of comedy at Cole’s Comedy Open Mic.

Good comics understand time too.  Someday we’ll talk about that.

September 11, 2001

A Year of Bitterness!

You know how much Your Old Pal Foz likes to write about all of our friends who tell jokes at Cole’s.  That I typically write about the lady comics, and more frequently write about lady comics who are Ladies’ Lady comics "reveals much," as they say at the psychiatric conference.  Obviously, I have a sick fascination with women who tell hilarious jokes. 

But I also have a sick fascination with certain chaps who tell jokes, and one of those is a tiny and bitter little gnome (sorry, but that’s the most flattering phrase I could think of) named Peter-john Byrnes.  Pete recently invited me to play on his fabulously depressing podcast, This Week in Despair. It was fun.  I am told that since listening to the conversation we had with James Fritz that day the Mayans have cheered up a good deal.  We might make it to 2013 after all!

Anyway, today is a day of some importance to the world of People Who Prefer Laughing to Rectal Prolapse.  For the past fifty-one weeks Pete has been writing and performing a totally new four-minute set for Cole’s each week.  He has never repeated a joke.  That’s pretty impressive.  If you don’t think that’s pretty impressive, try a little rectal prolapse. 

Here is where you can see much of Pete's great work.

So, if you like funny women or bitter gnomes join us tonight at 9:00 for FtH followed by Cole’s Inter-Gender Comedy Open Mic at Cole’s. 

Congratulations, Pete!  The best part is that almost all of these one-off jokes were funny.  Can you start repeating some now?

I didn’t want to find a picture to illustrate Rectal Prolapse, so here is an Angler Fish, which, I understand, is a pretty good illustration of the concept of rectal prolapse.  It's also not a bad approximation of the feel of a typical Pete Byrnes set at Cole's.

PS:  If you ever forget the term rectal prolapse and need to write it in a blog or something, try Googling the phrase “anus turned inside out.”  It works OK.