I inadvertently made a great punk rock road tape of my own banjo playing. I was never in a band, except for a rehearsal band called Smart Cats, because there was a now defunct cat food called Smart Cat, and the 2 woman in our band were Veterinary Medicine students. Even with a band that never played a gig, there was Fleetwood Mac-like social drama. We mainly played Beatles tunes, and the other guy in the band recorded us once or twice. I thought it sounded real corny. So one time at home I set up a low-fi recording set-up but with a nice mic though, and just played as weird as I could. I also put a whammy bar on the banjo bridge, and did all sorts of tuning peg and other strange string manipulations (like scraping the strings with coins). It was really awesome, like a strange cross between Robert Johnson, and Frank Zappa playing the bicycle (video from 1963). So I would just keep this ~30 minute tape in my car, and occasionally would play it for hitchhikers and they would be blown away. "Who the Hell Is That?!" I would usually play it after playing some conventional band like U2 or Van Morrison, which had gotten a real meh response. "Umm, well, that's me". They would be all, "Are You Kidding?, That is Insane!" And it was.
The Requisite Fish Story When my friend Tom and I went backpacking on Isle Royale we didn't bring a lot of food and even planned to catch fish for a few meals. We brought a lot of lures but didn't have leaders and we hooked a lot of northern pike but they broke free because of their sharp teeth. So we were fishing one of the inland lakes on the island, and I cast my lure and it wasn't a very good cast, it went more up in the air than out on the lake, and it made a really big splash, and I already had hooked a pike but when I got it near shore it broke free. My friend Tom had come over to help me land the fish since he had already lost a couple near shore. So I said "Wow, that was a big one, like 3 feet long". Tom said, "No, more like 26 inches, maybe, at most." So we argued about that briefly, and I was muttering "at least 3 feet", after I had tied on a new lure and made another cast, which was also a poor cast that went more up that out, an...
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