The Growlers - Greatest sHits

Band: The Growlers
Album: Greatest Hits

The Growlers’ Greatest Hits emerge like a placid pale moon rising in a bruised black and blue night sky that crushes the tropical guava and peach horizon behind green tea seas frothing to cream over brown sugar sands. Dead on arrival. Overdose. But thrilling while it lasted.

It’s a 25 song album with 78 minutes of sound sensations. Intoxication for the ear canals. “Listen to it while smokin’ some weed,” said the band member that sold it to me at one of their shows. It’s sort of 60’s acid psychedelics meets recorded pot jam session that are good enough to be smoked mellow to afterwards, too. Songs to watch the exhale of cotton mouth candy fluff stretch and dissolve into nothingness before the eyes. Let black pupils swell and float in red veined rivers. The feeling of the beach is only present to enhance the image of relaxation and setting tensions free. No worries, for now. I have no green to bowl for this night, but instead, cut off the rolled end tip of a cigar to moist in my mouth and puff through the album. It will last. It will relax and do the job just fine. So, now begins the journey through this pestilent pot pie…

“Golden Vine” sets the tone of the weird madness that’s about to incur, like stepping through the red curtains of Madam Moselle’s gypsy settlings. An orator with seeming origins from an archival broadcast commercial cues in with the wonderful effects of fine wine. Stay easy and ease into the sensation. A safe tasty introduction step into the slippery slope of drug life. A dry rusted carnival merry-go-round organ of instability and fright creeps into the end of the tune. But the ride has only begun.

Into the wandering dancing rhythm of “Barnacle Beat” comes a scene of grey market dealings turning black. A bazaar of misfortune that is for sale, for a price. Come one, come all. The loudspeaker sells it like a stage show. Watch for the man that will “smoke with his feet.” Getting it anyway he can. Then letting “Big Wednesday” ride him into an instrumental high.

The ascent sinks deep below, into the hidden caverns for “Old 8 Legs.” Grab hold, take a thick breath, let good ol’ poppy take care of ya’ through the “Red Tide” night of hallucinations swelled with inanimate objects breathing to life. Is it real what the eyes do see? In the night it just might be. The myth comes alive in the ripple of the tides. Illusions? More than a few have seen it to be true. A lax tune that slowly rises into a wave curl that then settles into the trickling tickle pip of “The Cobblestone Creep.”

But what a sunset blossom bursts in “Sunset Girl.” A luau goddess, grass skirt hips swaying like a hypnotic bronze pendulum, a petite ukulele held close playing, so adorable and yet sensual. But on closer inspection she’s a girl that only raises the shades at night to see the moon spotlight her room she never leaves, rolling a Zig-Zag filled with her only happiness. She seems to be a part of “Freedom Children” that are free only when they are lit in their demise, shackled by shriveled brains and drug veins. A chain gang clanking sound with repeating verses of doomed hope. Clank. Dying spirit.

Then a coal miner’s pick ax working the hallows of a cave in sync with a jazz piano and mellow guitar play into “Slack Back Boot Man.” Seeking something stronger, more potent, digging further into darkness. Straight to the core. Life is too fast. Make it slow, laid back. Love for women has turned to drugs. The ladies are too much reality, too much high pitched drama. A life necessity, but quickly forgotten when lost in one’s own soothing chemical void. Fondness for drugs is the only true romance, now. Forgetting life. With melted brain one becomes a gurgling and blabbering “Mad Dad the Crusty Crab.” With shakes and rattles and squawking like a duck in an attempt to communicate. Sizzling brain cells spill with gurgling drool. Wha-? What’s there not to understand? Quack-quack.

While “Soul of Coral” creeps up like a defenseless voodoo female seduction layered half-naked in beads lurking in shadowy fog floating along a cobble stone alley as ghostly plumes with black hole eyes hover and circle around. It’s a pleasing mystical image, but the outcome can’t possibly be good. Like the natural beauty of coral or a slender moist jellyfish, so delicate, and yet so harmful to clench.

Turn flash switch the scene again to trotting along a dusty trail, escaping on your old faithful to the “Conquered Sun.” As it gets closer to the end of the trail, the trod becomes a gallop, hope is near. Home is there. Turn to the light. Reach. The overdose will not take me this time. My own strength and strong will see me through. Awake! Alive.

But still under lock in a soldier’s march, uniform, rigid, by “Her Command.” Orders burst like a trumpet as the craving soon returns. I have to conform, I’m addicted. But the injection keeps me feeling free, though she owns me, controls me. I clench you tight, but it is still I that slips. Unable to raise my head to you. I will never leave her until my final fade away. Dependency is what keeps me returning. Need to steal to pawn for cash to buy her every ounce. Nothing left of me when there’s nothing left of her. Each time.

With all the time to trip. Going places. The backdrop falls us in a foreign land of artistic oddities and ambient quirks and looms when “We Think France Sounds Like This.” Goofballs and assorted chemicals packaged as pills carry on luggage like this. Romp and room on the road, lullabied to sleep by a violin weep. Like floating down a river street, or is that a Venice canal? It’s all the same anyway, all beautiful, wondrous, strange. Next is an interlude in the swamp with “Swamp Stomp,” reminding me of a Reading Rainbow episode with LaVar “Trek” Burton reading a story book of an animal swamp band playing the swamp, “Mamma Don’t Allow” based on the song of same name. Those kid days of summer inside watching all those learned shows to learn all that stuff I no longer remember, except for that swamp band playing the swamp, “chicka-bomp-bomp.” Give me my rabbit weed! Down to the last destination that is no other than the escape refuge and discarded refuse known as “Tijuana.” An echo of “waste and dreams” tumbleweed down these devil bitten streets. Prostitution for survival? Uncertain if one sees it or not, the little children make me cry. I blank my mind to the situation, like turning off the television.

I instead ponder about “Lenny Sinpablo Juliano 36th,” which is a Robert Johnson tin can recording sounding tune, rickety nostalgic. A song of hope and rehab, perhaps? Broken bottles bringing broken promises. There’s even a feel of Dylan in this one. A rehearsal horse around. God gives you life for free, but it’s up to you to make it worth something. Think about that while the waves lap in “My Forehead’s Dripping Ocean” for thirty-eight seconds.

Cease thinking. Now rise up in chanting praise to moonshine and homegrown pleasure products with an “Oh, Sweet Spirit.” Raise a jug to the bootleggers for an ode to captured white lightning in a jar. Nows git sum mo’ potaters ‘n’ gits backs ta workings. Moonshine my mind and let the glycerin explode through my limbs, for I am nothing but a wasted “Average Man.” Problems of being normal, one of the regulars, another jingle that sounds like the others, but with a slight extra average busybody bit to it. A rushed song, like pop life, downtown society, and the average person, always hurrying to something, always late, especially late to the realization that they are just like the others. Drink your Starbucks and turn your eyes bliss. Now get back to work and make somebody else rich.

The opposite of society is to be a wanderer, free from attachments, no roots taking hold, “No Trees Grow in the Desert” is the philosophy. Become the desert or the ocean shore: open, vast, and unending. Given to all, but owned by nobody. Jack Kerouac. Neither here nor there, but everywhere. America and abroad his home. You’re only free when you are a part of everything, held down by nothing. Acoustic.

One thing you might want to hold onto though is precious life. “Killed My Woman” is a story of relationships yelling to pieces and death from unnatural causes. A country folk jingle of a tune, twang with a Levi’s denim slapping tempo. Killed her before she killed me, and that’s the way the song goes. Another relationship flipped fatal. Those possessive psychos. No real way to escape them, if you daringly decide to break-up. Looking down the end of her 12-guage barrel of love. Forever hers, she takes your life. Unless she misses and then you claim self-defense when she is found sprawled.

Regardless, Momma always wants what’s best for her children, though not always knowing best as in “Jonesy’s Bowl.” A quick anecdote sung over shaking beans, soft claps, and strumming strings. Mama doesn’t know that what she thinks is happiness, is really just a bitch with an empty bowl. She has the wrong understanding impression of butterflies. The husband being the main cause of that. Now she wishes the same upon her child, not knowing what she is truly asking. Is that food for thought? Twisted.

Cut off. You’re in the anus. “Johnson’s Gone.” Eighteen minutes of entrails into paranoia insanity. Mind gaps fill with unwanted imaginations, magnified. Byproduct of the drug. The fear. What’s over my shoulder? Somebody is watching, I feel it, I swear. Who is it? Who’s there? Did they see me do what I just did? They couldn’t have. I was very precise in hiding every fact. Satellite vision through my window. They know, but they wait, wait, holding steady, until I crack and confess. Madness confusion fills my mind like an expanding balloon, stretching, stretching, until, until, no, no, I won’t! It pulses through my limbs, fingertips trembling. Sweat. I wipe wet on wet. Alien in my own body. Get it out of my veins. Control? What control? Shut up! Mind won’t shut up! I want out! Now! Out! Out!

Wham! Spit! Plunk. I break free into precious blue skies as I float safely on a puffy, fluffy, white cloud all mine. Open air deep breathe dreamland. A peaceful chime gently twirling with rainbow dazzle is my caress. The journey is at an end when I make it to this vision of “Magic Castle.” The star light in the darkness is reached when the eye lids slide shut. All is well. Sleep. Tomorrow the sun will rise beautiful. And I’ve made sure my blinds are shut tight. Album ends.

That night I had a running nightmare that may have likely been brought upon by the chill night’s concoction of a cigar and this pulp rock of The Growlers.

To Be Continued…