Star Blog

Immensely, suddenly, tired. Had a clue to this yesterday when I feel into a swoon on the train into London. But that felt like a good tired; a well-earned tired. Then last night, at home, slept on one side without moving the entire night for the first time in... years. Literally. But again, it felt good. If a little... weird.

Then today... a not-good tired, been creeping up all day. Replete with weird aches, odd pains, and malfunctioning brain. Not alarming but somewhat out of the blue. A need-a-rest tired. Except there's no time for rest. There was a cure for such situations in the old days. Not anymore though. Or if there is I haven't been introduced to it, besides actual, you know, uh, resting.

And now a tired-sounding blog to go with it. Not good either...

Spent the night at the cottage. Good move. Was up drinking tea and thinking great thoughts by 6.00am. Well, thinking anyway, which is great enough at that time of the day. By 7.00am I was at the laptop. Early morning or late night are good times to write, the brain simply can't manage more than one thing at a time by then so no distractions, or need for background music or much pacing around, just head down, tip-tapping until the old bod tells you what to do next, like eat or shit or stare at the inside of your skull.

Today it meant stopping in time to drive home, jump on the running machine, then get the train to London to record the Classic Rock radio show. Something seems to be working though as it was all one-take stuff, or virtually all, and I was back at the cottage again by 4.30pm working on the book. Got a shock when I read over some of what I'd been doing a few days ago. I remember it as disjointed, more notes than anything else, some fuller bits here and there but mainly I remember leaving a mess, like when the builders have gone for the weekend. Instead I found pages of... um... how to put it... quite good stuff. No other way to describe it, just there it is and there I was thinking: when the fuck did I do that? Obviously some sort of trance state.

Let's hope I have another one tomorrow...

I've gone all 'in rock'. So has everyone else, I swear. The last thing I remember squinting at on the goggle-box last night was Brian Johnson of AC/DC on a repeat of Top Gear, thinking how young he looked for his age (63 later this year) and how fast he drove - second fastest star in an overpriced car, ever. Then first thing this morning I found myself lost on YouTube watching Metallica through the ages and finding myself unable to drag my ears away from their original low-end demos, dirty white boys. Now, as I type, I've got the Joe Perry Project blasting away - an MP3 that Sian Llewellyn, my old mucker from Classic Rock sent me.

It gets like this sometimes. I remember who I really am, put down the jazz and classical for a moment and revert to type, like a werewolf confronted by a full moon, or a vampire unexpectedly exposed to fresh blood. The old fangs pop out, the bushy tail appears. I don't go looking for it anymore, it finds me. I should be getting another reminder tomorrow, too, when the first hot-off-the-press copy of Appetite For Destruction arrives in the post. All my yesterdays, all wrapped up like an ounce of charlie, as we of a certain unrespectable age used to call it, back when such things were considered chic.

Doing phone interviews for the book has made me almost nostalgiac for those days. Nadia from Style magazine in Australia emailed me to say she has been 'boasting' to her friends about our interview. Naughty girl, raised on the sand and glue of Guns N' Roses albums and too many old copies of Kerrang, by the sounds of it. Strange to think I'm now considered the mad old uncle of such things. And there I was thinking I'd done my deal with the devil and would never grow old. Or was it 'up'... ?

Mentally, I'm living on about six or seven different planets right now. Nothing new there, some might say, but I'm really feeling it. Take yesterday, Sunday morning 10.a.m., I'm on the phone to a radio station in America who are taping a 60-minute interview with me about the Zep book, which has just come out there. This is good because it's not just a rock show but a serious book programme. V.enjoyable if somewhat of a stretch to get the old noggeroon moving in the right direction at that time on a Sunday morning. Followed immediately by... me interviewing someone in the UK over the phone for my next book, on Metallica. Again, well worth it, but still... it's not even midday and I'm getting deep into the rise and fall of thrash (from a Brit-versus-US perspective, not forgetting the recent revival, if it really exists, and the full circle nature of the band's recent 'back-to-the-80s' album etc etc etc).

The rest of the day was of course devoted to entirely different pursuits and involved children and dogs (much more complicated). Today though, we're back to... let's see, starting the day with trying to sort out the security software on the household computers which needs upgrading (if only they made it as easy and user-friendly as the to-pay parts of the transaction). Then running like a bastard on the machine while hearing from wife about the letter she's just received from the hospital - finally - confirming a date for the 'procedure' she needs to have (back related, nosy), before running even harder back to the cottage to resume work on you know what. Having to stop now, though, because someone is phoning soon from New Zealand to talk about my actual next book, the one due out next month called Appetite For Destruction, a collection of 'classic' me-stuff from the golden age of air travel and limos. I will be taking this call back home while babysitting (it's wife's yoga night) and trying to cook that steak that's been waiting for me in the fridge. Then as soon as that's all done running back to the cottage again to... erm... you know... hello? Mars calling?

Always time for music, though. Been making the most of Spotify while I'm at the cottage, so when I'm not immersing myself anew in the vicissitudes of Metallica through the ages, I'm allowing what's left of my bad brains to be boggled by stuff I would not be listening to no-way otherwise. Today that has included more Lou Reed, who I'm going through a bit of phase with it seems currently. Coney Island Baby (the extra-lengthy tracks you really don't need to hear digitised extra version, natch). Wow, so nostalgiac. I first bought it as a 17-year-old lying on my bed at my folks' house, smoking ciggies and dreaming of the life of luxuriant hedonism I knew would one day be mine if I could just find the right locked door to totter through. Now it just takes me back to a simpler, sadder but inescapably younger time. The critics hated the album, of course, and over 30 years later it is obvious just how wrong they were, though equally clear just why they wrote the things they did. Dudes like me and Lou, we're just so misunderstood...

Knowing what kind of long day I was in for at the cottage I arranged for wife and boy to pick me up this morning so we could take a walk with the dogs while the girls were at Saturday morning stage school. One of the things I really love about living in the countryside is the walks. Of course, you have to have at least one dog to do them on a daily basis, what other reason would any sane person have for tramping through mud, snow, rain, wind, and all the other unforeseen pains in the frozen arse that come your way at all sorts of strange early and late hours - except the pressing need to walk the dogs? Or, in our case, dogs plural. Dun arf do ya good though when the rest of yoru day is spent squatting in front of the mirror of an only occasionally hot laptop.

Other than some eating and a bit of telly watching while I'm doing it, the rest of today and tonight has been spent with my good friends James and Lars and Kirk and... actually, none of the others today, just the main players. Some of this has been fairly mechanical sort of stuff, chronology, getting your facts right. But a heartening amount has also been more than that, evocation, surmise, insight, gamble, careful stitchwork... in other words, the real business of writing. The thing we writers love and hate the most. Love it when it's done, fear it when it's (supposed to be) happening.

All this against a background of Radio 3, whch is especially good on a Saturday afternoon - Lucy Duran's World Music show at 3pm, followed by Jazz Library at 4pm, Jazz Record Requests at 5pm, then the pelasure of the BBC iPlayer on the net for the rest of the night, replaying Late Junction and hearing for the first and nearly always last time many - many - extraordinary tracks whsoe names I will never recall again but whose surface of the moon atmospheres and earthy undulations help me on my way as I sit here like a fiend tip-tapping away.

Meanwhile, in distant accompaniment, the endless sound of car engines revving, car doors slamming, car things doing car things that has gone on all afternoon and now well into evening as Nigel and friends do whatever it is men do when they have a Saturday to waste on tootling around with their cars. I'm a sissy like that. I prefer the quiet, red wine, too much food and the sound not of cars of but of, say, JS Bach and his violin Sonata No.2 in a-minor. Or possibly Metallica's Orion. Cliff Burton, a serious student of both old-fashioned manly pursuits AND JS Bach, would have been happy either way, I'm sure.

An extraordinary thing. I was driving back to the cottage tonight listening to Radio 4's usual evening arts programme, forget the title, only listened to it a few million times, and... There was this wonderful piece I came in on: Mark Lawson interviewing this artist. I wasn't sure what kind of artist - paint, installation, who knows these days? - but immediately I could not stop listening to what he had to say. It was so sweet, so interesting, so involving without the slightest scrap of the usual artspeak bullshit. I totally - instantly, dizzyingly - got what he was talking about yet what he was talking about was so wonderfully understated, yet so deep, so clearly full of blood and pain and lost laughter and exquisite thought, you wanted to spend more time in that world because that's where sorrow and regret and courage and age and "dark glamour" - his words - all met in a hugely attractive confluence, or somesuch. Anyway, the bastard got me, made me realise how far behind my own radio interviews are in terms of actually saying something without either having to brag about it or be dull, maybe not to you but to yourself.

As I pulled into my parking spot at the cottage, the interview was drawing to a close. I sat in the car as the rain tumbled down listening, just didn't want it to end. Then - gasp - Lawson mentioned the artist's name - Dexter Dalwood - and gave a plug to his latest show - Tate St. Ives, I think he said. And I didn't know whether to... don't know the word, Dexter would though.

Many life and death times ago, Dexter and I were friends. About 30 of them in Earth time, several hundred in real time. He had been a teenage musician, a bass player, in The Cortinas, and I had been a teenage punk writer on Sounds. And we had both been so spectacularly unsuccessful, yet briefly name-worthy, that we very, very quickly found ourselves earning £40 a week cash at Step Forward Records, a grim shithole just off the Portobello Road. There were few laughs to be found in that self-regarding palace of NME-approved puke but Dexter knew where they all were hiding. Along with a great many other things I would not embarrass either of us by getting into here.

Skip some years and several episodic adventures, togethr and apart, later, and we are both a couple of years older and well moved on, or sideways, more like. And... well, there is so much more I couldn't possibly tell it, or even a little bit of it here. And yet we only knew each other for a few things. Except to say I remember the weekend he became interested in painting again, and being puzzled and impressed and yet somewhat forlorn because it was a language far beyond my ken. I had no idea of course it would result in Dexter finding himself at last. Had no idea really that he was looking...

To hear him 30 years on, so... famous and successful is not what I'm talking about. So... wonderfully beautiful, so interesting and light of touch, so funny in a serenely almost... [insert wondrous word] way... shit, let's leave it there. I'm just glad one of us made it over the finish line. Nice one, Dex. Kisses.

Up at 4.00a.m. thinking about Metallica. Going to bed now at just after 10.30p.m. - thinking about Metallica. In between... quite a good daythinking about Metallica actually. Too long to talk about right now though. Except to quickly mention Nadia, the charming Australian journalist who interviewed me over the phone tonight about the new book of my journalism that's coming out next month, Appetite For Destruction. I really like Australians. You can hear the sun in their voices. The warmth in their words. What a treat. I see myself one day sitting on a beach out there somewhere, complaining about the humidity, an old straw hat keeping my bald head from exploding, surrounded by attractive young journalists humouring me by pretending to hang on my every other word. God, I feel old. God, I am old. God, I must go to bed now.

Escaped the vanilla prison long enough this morning to catch a surprisingly on-time (given the new snowfall) train to London to record this week's Classic Rock show. Which reminds me - it's moved from Sunday afternoons to Wednesday evenings and a new Peel-like time slot. Which means the show is on tonight at 10pm - till 1.00a.m. via the jolly old www.rockradio.co.uk network. Plus various FM bands up north and in Scotland.

That all seems a long time ago though now, writing as I am from somewhere in 1981, just as Lars Ulrich takes a plane from LA to the West Midlands to catch the mighty Diamond Head in all their early NWOBHM finery, god bless 'em. Actually, the Head may have been percieved as leading lights of that scene, but to me they always sounded more like a next-generation Zeppelin than possible rivals to Iron Maiden or Saxon. Whatever, from there it was only a few short steps, lots of garage rehearsals and a fair bit of rich young Ulrich-style blagging to Mettallica. Yes two 'T's, originally. By mistake. Ah, young and hungry days, full of spunk and acne and cheap beer-filled dreams...

Meanwhile, been listening to Lou Reed's Sally Can't Dance album after stumbling across a wonderful / sickening clip on YouTube of him from that (literally) golden-haired era playing in Paris. I say 'playing'... There was little really playful about Lou or any of his rotten-to-the-core 'new' songs in those days. Weird then how all the years that have slunk by since mean that suddenly this awful schtick tickles me so. There's a message there. If anyone has the bottle can they send it to me please so I can put it back in where it belongs. Ithangyew...

One of those days I had all the time when doing the Zep book but promised myself faithfully hope to die I most certainly would not have with the Metallica book. That is, setting off to write a chapter and finding yourself six or seven eye-straining hours later having wandered down a side road of last-minute checking that turns into research that, yes, has taught you something you really ought to know if you want your book to be The One, but which leave you at the end feeling like you haven't done anything - nothing you can count in terms of numbers of pages anyway. It's self-illusory of course, work has most definitely been done, if only it were walls you were painting, you would see. Except it's not and you can't, not right now with your face pressed too close to the radioactive screen.

Also, that great fish-eyed demon they call 'money' has started craning over my shoulder as I try and write, cackling not so softly in my ear. The Wall purse looks sadder and thinner than a church mouse's chuff on a cold day in Cheese Town now the tax man and his evil VAT twin have done their every-January thing again and I am starting to get The Fear. That we won't be able to pay the mortgage next month if I don't creep like a vampire quietly out the door at some lonely point soon and go hunting for some magazine work or whatever comes my red sticky-fingered way. At this point in the saga of the Zep book I simply held my muddy paws out to the bank and they merely shrugged and handed over the readies. But that was then, before the great crash. Now... I don't know. A lottery ticket perhaps? Oh gawd...

Been polishing my halo, the one around my gut. It began at 5.30 this morning when I wandered down the stairs like a zombie to make tea and get ready for my 6.00a.m. phone interview with WGN Radio in Chicago. Early for me, late for Nick the DJ, somehow we managed to make an hour's worth of radio together based on my Zep book. There were even a couple of phone-in callers. I kept expecting some Zep nut to come on with the fire-and-brimstone and denounce me for blowing the whistle on Knebworth or whatever but it never happened. There's a podcast of it if you're interested. I'd give ya the link but you'll need to Google the WGN site yourself as for some reason this blog-writing box won't let me cut and past today. Another of Jimmy's curses probably.

After that I took the dogs out for a dawn-rising walk over yonder snowy hills. Jesus, was that a mistake. After the big white snow, the dark black rain, and mud and slush all being blown by a gale force wind straight into my sorry kisser. Dogs loved it of course and it felt strange and actually quite good if just a little spooky to be staggering around as the black sky turned grey and stayed that way.

Continued the virtuous theme when I got home by looking after two-out-of-three sprogs while wife took eldest to her clarinet lesson. Then, if this isn't making you too sick yet, I jumped on the running machine and put in my best time since Before Headgate two months ago when the year went out for me, literally, with an almighty bloody wallop. Weighed myself afterwards while the steam was still rising from my head and... not a single pound lighter than this time last week. Fuck it. I feel better, that's the main thing.

The rest of the day I have spent at the cottage banging away like an old shed door, bish bash boshing cos the polish can come later, Mabel, I need to chop me some firewood I mean I just gotta. Now it's gone seven in the evening and my baloon is well and truly popped. Was gonna crash here tonight, burn some midnight oil, but I really have had it at this point. Gonna crawl home instead and put myself in the loving care of wifey, see if she can tear herself away from Casualty on TV long enough to do something right for me. Or maybe I'll just go to bed. Not to sleep - obviously, like I'm young enough to still manage that - but to lie there feeling this was one day at least I didn't just blithely shoot in the head. Not without blindfolding it first anyway.

A proper book day, spent at the cottage where I slept last night. Meaning: early start, late finish, brains boiling over by the end but the soul welling up again at the prospect of getting something really solid done. Particularly with what I was doing today. The aim of course is to make every bit of every book as well written and 'vivid' as possible, but inevitably there are parts of the story which require an even more evocative approach. These are the money-shots in any book, the bits where the author shows - or tries to - that not only do they have a good grasp on the yarn at hand but that they know how to tell it fit to rattle the bedsprings.

That's not to say I'm ready to make any claims, just that I buikt myself a new base camp on the climb today and the view, while it lasts (until tomorrow when it the hard part starts again), will certainly do for now. If I wasn't trying to get the old bod back into something approximating what passes at my survivalist age for 'shape', I'd have a glass of something red to celebrate. As it is, I'll settle for apple juice and a flop out in front of the TV, followed by an equally virtuous early night tossing and turning and pretending to find sleep. Not looking forward to that part. Even less though than usual as I've got to be ready by 6.00a.m. to do a phone interview with a Chicago radio station about the Zep book, which of course means I will only fall well and truly zed-worthy at about 5.30a.m. just before the alarm goes off. What treats I do enjoy sometimes...

Having both forced myself to mount the running machine again today - can barely walk now but feeling good, know worrimean? - and managed to get my frozen arse back to the cottage for some serious Metalliwork, I was feeling pretty, pretty, pretty good. Then I caught the TV news and found myself staring at the pictures from Haiti. "There is no god," said wife. "How can anyone say there is?"

Quite so. But that's a discussion for another time. Right now... 50,000 dead, hundreds of thousands injured, homeless, trapped, fucked forever... no god, no words, either. Music might say something about it but that won't help right now. Prayers, money, send what you can, I guess. And hug your babies, whatever species. And be glad it's only snow outside your door and not... that. There may or may not be a god but there is certainly devil's work afoot.

Finally got back on the running machine today - eight weeks almost to the day since I last managed it. Well, it's been some eight weeks. Obviously, I couldn't manage the scintillating marathon-level pace of before but, fuck, I did manage about 30 minutes of puffing and blowing while trying not to fall off. Good for me, I say. Besides, what with fresh snowfall (dread words) there's still no way back to the cottage and if my arse spends any longer glued to the chair in front of the laptop it's going to fall off. Or something.

I'm so stuck into the book right now I woke up at three this morning with a great new heading for chapter one, plus a few sentences for another part of it my brain has obviously been thinking about while what's left of the rest of me lies there in the freezing dark pretending to sleep. This used to happen all the time with the Zep book too. I end up lying there emailing myself on the Berry so that I won't forget the ideas in the morning. Right now, I have about 11 emails with Important Book messages waiting for me to paste the contents of somewhere into the draft copies of the chapters.

I say 'chapters' that makes it sound like things are moving right along. They are not. But at least I know where I'm going. Most of the time. I think. Ask me again tomorrow...

Still trying to get back to the cottage but oh lord you obviously have another purpose for me cos it takes so damn long...

Yesterday began with me braving the snowdrifts to get eldest daughter to the foot doctor to sort out the new rash of varookas she's got sprouting on both feet. Wife couldn't do it cos she was out on her own arctic expedition trying to get the other two to school, which because of road works and diversions now means traversing one of the slipperiest, windy white roads for 50 miles.

In my day the schools wouldn't allow any child with a varooka anywhere near other humanoid sprogs. These days they viurtally encourage them to fester and spread, throwing them willy-nilly into swimming pools, whatever the state of play, making them run around PE class in barefeet. Anyway, fortunately Doctor Paul is the foot master and he tended to daughter's needs without any tears. (He also pruned my own claws while I was at it, always a sweet moment in my ever shortenening days...)

After that I had to ride like the wind Bullseye to get back in time to catch a train to London where they have never even heard of this thing the rest of us call snow. Like going to another planet! Really, if it wasn't for the fact that Paddington station was the emptiest I've ever seen it - and I've never seen it remotely empty before in my life - you'd have no clue that the rest of the country is up to its privates in cold white stuff.

Walked like a normal to the studio where because I couldn't get there last week we recorded two Classic Rock radio shows back to back. That is, 40 links back-to-back, plus a full-of-fun promo. What's left of my brains were literally dribbling out of my ears by the end. (They certainly weren't anywhere near my mouth by then, that's for sure.)

Today was... another day. The best part was walking the dogs with wife this morning over yonder white hills. Almost up to our knees in snow, I felt like taking a picture on my phone and emailing it to all the disbelievers in London, then decided I couldn't be bothered. We've been told there's more heavy snowfall due tonight so we stopped at Tescos on the way home to top up on supplies. The rest of the day found me sitting here, the first few hours trying to get everything straight for my imminent departure back to the cottage (code for paying bills, and sending begging emails for money), where I fully expected to be snowed-in for days. Well, good, cos then I can really concentrate on the book.

It was about 2pm before I realised I wasn't going anywhere. Still unready to leave - too much going on, too much still to sort before I could clear the launchpad ready for blast off - I decided my best shot was to hang on till the morning and try and throw some left hooks into the book from... right here.

Still trying now, except the kids are having their bath, the dogs of doom are barking not so low, and my antennae tell me there just might be a consoling glass of something red and naughty awaiting me nextdoor. If I'm lucky. And despite the big white awaiting me outside and all this black inside, I do feel that at the moment...

A so-called day off. In which I interviewed somebody for the Metallica book. And wrote this week's CR show, which we are supposed to be recording tomorrow back to back with last week's show which we still haven't done yet because no one can get to the studio because of the snow. Whatever else went on today is now lost to me. The snow has started falling inside my head. All is ice and arse pain. Or nearly all. The kids came through, but even there my bedtime story consisted of the strange ghostly tale of Frosty the Snowman and the night he appeared in the children's bedroom - carrying a bowl of ice-cream. I hope it didn't give them nightmares. I like to keep those for myself...

The snow and ice has both messed up my week and brought a strange new clarity to the passing days and nights. I can't go anywhere, not even the cottage, so I just sit here and work on the Tallica book. I did try going to a meeting in Twickenham yesterday - something that has been arranged and rearranged so much it's been going on for months - and it took me half an hour to dig the car out of the snow and get it off the drive. Then, after stuffing it with coats, blankets, sandwiches, water, flasks of coffee and etc, I got about 25 miles down the motorway when the windscreen got so clogged with the salt they've been trying to clear the road with I couldn't see to drive. The water-jets on the hood had iced-over so I didn't have anything to clear it. In the end I simply had to turn round and come home, stopping every few miles to stick one blue hand out and try and rub a viser in the screen. Nice.

Mostly, though, I have been sitting here going through the mountains of research I've compiled, not just the endless interviews I've done and am still struggling to get transcribed, but the zillions of cuttings, fan books, DVDs, CDs, bootlegs, vinyl and internet junk I've accumulated along the way. This is a hugely important part of the process, without it I don't actually know what sort of book I'm supposed to be writing. It goes back to what I've said before about spending more time thinking than actual writing. It really lies at the very heart of the thing. Without it, there is no book. Which makes it by far the most interesting and enjoyable part of the process.

However, it's also the most time-consuming and tiring. You end each long day (and night) round-shouldered and slumped over, the book all the better for it, the no longer young and impervious body and already creaking to catch up brain far less so. I've really got to get back on the runner next week. Not that I'm completely over the various bugs, bad heads and whatnots that have kept me from it, I'm just far less unwell than I have been for weeks. I need that runner to give me the energy I need to really start converting all this research and thinking into hard black words on even harder white screen pages. And I need it now. Or will do... tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I've got another phone interview to do for the book tonight, and another one tomorrow night. (And another the night after that actually. Jesus...)

Well, I'd love to tell you how it all went down but hey life is just too damn short. Some high/low lights: waking up on Boxing Day with bruises down both arms (ask my wife); staring goggle-eyed at our new widescreen TV, tickled pink at how green the greens were and all that; having my hair stand on end even though I have no hair left as both daughters screamed when they opened their Xmas prezzies; walking with my boy along the icy bank by the old railroad tracks, lov ing every hard soft minute; walking out on a supposed lunch with people too bent inside to actually offer us lunch (our fault obviously); trying and failing, trying and failing and trying and failing again just this week to get to the cottage long enough to get any damn work done so having to do it all at home to a backdrop of the usual screams and cries and laughter and door slamming dog pissing wife mentalling out hysteria thank you lord; discovering that the entire town reads this stupid blog and that there is no peace from that anywhere anytime ever; watching old vids of the kids when they really were teeny-weeny then making more as they played in the snow yesterday and today; calling the plumber, welcoming back the boiler man, doing radio interviews with America, Ireland, Scotland and, um, Manchester, all in the past 48 hours and not all for the Zep book but like what do I think about songs that go backwards or what do I think about Christopher Lee making a symphonic heavey metal album (really); scratching my arse and blowing holes in the ozone as emails arrive, like the one from my once best friend in the world not seen for 14 years, or the one from the Channel Four producer who has just read Paranoid after having it gather dust on his shelf for 11 years and telling me it's better than Cider With Roadies (no shit...), or the one from the Hollywood mogul's office enquiring about something that sounded exciting for almost two seconds until I realised what he was actually talking about, or the one from the lady Carlotta talking about life in all the dark places it really goes on but none of us ever fully acknolwdged, or the endless crap from the VAT the tax the bank the credit card the gas electricity holy shit where does it end nowhere never ever fucker...

Meanwhile, and don't ask how it happened, but somehow after another long day on Planet Metallica I find myself sitting here playing - wait for it - RECORDS. Started with an old Metallica EP I dug out for research purposes but which jumped all the way through (1987 was clearly a very drunk year at the Wall Chaperal) then switched to Let It Bleed by the Stones which god bless it didn't jump once (they knew how to make those fuckers once up a fuck ago), and onto playing right now Gram Parsons and Grievous Angel which also, miraculously, isn't jumping at all, despite the grizzly and grunts of the zillion scratches, all uncheaply earned you better believe it cowboy.

All I need is some good red vino to go with it. Pardon me while I skate through the indoor snow to get me it yum yum...

x

cough cough cough somebody please kill me cough cough cough cough...