Accidental Nostalgia Thursdays 4PM PDT/7PM EDT

This week's Accidental Nostalgia Radio Show will be a rebroadcast. Norm & Jane will revisit the subject of exploitation films. You'll hear lots of groovy cult film tracks taken straight from vinyl. We'll also be remembering Sky Saxon's passing, and honoring his memory by spinning a few Classic Garage Psych tunes from The Seeds, Ya Ho Wa & more! Norm & Jane will be back next week with an all new Accidental Nostalgia Show.

Tune in Thurs 4pm PT / 7pm ET on Radio Dentata. See our show page and click on the reminder link to be emailed before the show starts.

Audio For News Reports For Week Of June 28st 2009

This week we remember Sky Saxon, fans pick Paul McCartney Favorites, and Men At Work go to court.

Use as you like, but keep all audio intact: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I am not a writer by trade. I can't call myself a blogger either, without the word catching in my throat somewhere between my vocal cords and my lips. I am a vinyl records dealer. Most of what I do online is comprised of seven parts marketing, two parts vain narcissism, and one parts opportunistic voyeurism. I'm interested in the Face Book & Twitter happenings of people I know in 3D, barely know, or knew a quarter of a century ago. I'm not a celebrity. I hate that word. Neither are most of my FB and Twitter friends. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of famous, and or infamous persons that I have met, and still have fingers left over. I would like to be able to say that I don't give a shit about having met these celebrities either, and that they are just like you and me. But they are not like you and me, and these encounters left their mark. Maybe, when God gave out Fairy Dust, they got in line twice. I don't know. My point here is that, I am a cynical human being. I can be brutally judgmental, and I dislike more people that I like. Bukowski got it right when he said. "I don't hate people, I just feel better when they're not around". For whatever reason, deserving or not, celebrities are special in our eyes. They, and their goings on, orbit the periphery of all our lives. And whether we like it or not, their deaths stir our emotions and trigger memories, that usually have little to do with the celebrity personally. The deaths of Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett, and Sky Saxon have done just that for me. Triggered an ocean of memories and emotions. They've been sloshing around my head all week, and they're overflowing all over the place.

For those freaks that can't get enough of celebrities, even in death, here's a goulish site. Not that I spent time there or anything.

Remembering Sky Saxon

For almost twenty-five years I am running into people who know Sky Saxon, or have their Sky Saxon story.

My last time was just about a month ago. Another record dealer who I have lunch with about once week had a Little Richie Marsh 45 that he listed on eBay. Sky Saxon contacted him and offered his phone number. He really just wanted to say how cool it was that someone had found one of his old 45's. He also kindly sent a signed CD to my friend.

That is the typical Sky Saxon story. Friendly, unassuming and always looking for a conversation. I met him twice at shows in the 80's.

Unassuming is the word that always comes to mind when I think of Sky Saxon. Years ago I was friends with a girl who hung out frequently at Sky Saxon's apartment. This was during a period in the eighties when garage music was going through its first revival in Los Angeles. Saxon was a part of it. And a part of the next revival. Of couse he never left the sixties, and if you didn't know the particulars, the reports of him working jobs at stationary stores and Baskin Robbins would make him sound like a burn-out, a pathetic case.

But Sky Saxon was not a Syd Barrett or Roky Erickson. He was always genuinely authentically always doing his own thing, as they used to say so so long ago. And he was most comfortable in his own skin.

Maybe it was his association with the Source Family, to which he kept connections all his life, that kept him grounded, humble even. Yeah, the Source was one of the many seventies cults in Los Angeles. But here again to call the Source a cult is to trade on stereotype. I'm no fan of any religion, and suspicous as all out doors about it too. So when I say the Source people didn't have the ick factor, it should come with some currency. Hell, I get more icked out by the Saddleback Church types that live all around me.

If I were to believe in such spiritual things, which I don't, I would say that something rare happened on June 25th. That humanity lost such a powerful soul that morning that a correction had to be made in order keep balance. That the death of a man who had obscurely acheived a rare height of authenticity and freedom had to be counter-balanced with the taking of a man who had sadly fallen to a rare depth of spuriousness and confinement. I'm not looking for the Google points so I choose to leave out the name of this second man.

Remember, I don't actually believe any of this anymore than I believe that something I read in a great novel is true, other than that sometimes great literature is more true than reality.