Swedish Magazines - Laughing Problem LP

You have burned every bridge there was to burn and consumed yourself into a psychosis in the city. In true Guy Clark fashion you packed up all your dishes and told your landlord to fuck off and pointed your car east on the freeway out of Los Angeles. This time you are praying to God that something will kill you or catch you before you get there. Your prayers are not answered. They will not be.

The sun is setting behind you on I-10 when you clock the checkpoint twenty miles outside of Las Cruces. You blow the rest of your tank and burn the roach down to nothing and eat the last tab before you reach it, only to have the fat pig wave you through without lifting his eyes from his phone. It is dark now and you are still driving. Sweating. You missed your exit. You have missed every exit in your life.

Your eyes begin to cross and a demon in the shape of Little Richard comes crawling through the windshield glass and he tells you that you need to be placed into the dipper and pulled back down into the world so that men may see your good works and glorify God Jehovah. Your eyes go back to the road and there is a Pink Fairy standing dead center in it. You swerve and careen your car into a ditch by the roadside and sit there in the dark a moment. You are still alive. You are angry about it.

Then you hear the music. Down at the end of a dirt road, at the end of the world, a bar. Barely more than a stack of cinder blocks with its neon struggling against the dark. You follow it like something that has no choice but to follow and you walk inside.

Lou Reed and John Cale and Sterling Morrison are on the stage in the corner. But it is Charles Gocher behind the drum set. Moe is slumped at the bar in conversation with the Bishop brothers. You belly up and a young John Fahey takes your order while the old John Fahey pours well whisky into a top shelf bottle and does not look up.

A longhaired blonde man in a cowboy hat and round sunglasses comes through the door and asks if anyone is going to San Antone. You finish your beer and tell him you are but that you need help getting your car out of a ditch first.

You pull into Silver Machine Studios together as the sun breaks over West Ave. The next three days are gone from you entirely. Lost in whatever that was. The only evidence that any of it happened at all is Laughing Problem, the debut EP from Swedish Magazines.