So I had to get a root canal the other night and afterwards, I wanted 20 minutes to chill out and shake off the stress before going back home. Some folks might hit a bar, but for me, a record store is my Cheers. So I rooted around a shop near the dentist and they were playing this dissonant avant-garde Metal Jazz with vocals—it was sort of prog rock for people with short attention spans. And it was good—reminded me of some other bands.
In the meantime, I found this German EP of early Duran Duran remixes that in fact weren’t remixes at all; they were extended versions played live in the studio—Simon comes in on the verse in “Planet Earth” off by an entire line at one point, but I digress.
So I brought it to the counter and as I paid, I asked the counter guy through my half-numb mouth, “What are we listening to?” Though young, the guy had already mastered the traditional record store clerk arrogant sneer, so he stroked his lengthy beard, and sized me up. Because I was a middle-aged guy buying a Duran Duran record. I guess he took “What are we listening to” to mean “What is this shit.” He loftily said, “Yeah, you wouldn’t have heard of them,” adding slowly like I was three years old, “It’s called The Mars Volta.” To which I responded, “Oh, Omar Rodríguez-López’s band after At The Drive-In” And he was dumbfounded—the old guy could throw down!—so I went on. “It’s pretty good; better than Sparta [the other band that came from ATDI]. It reminded me of Trioscapes, but of course they’re just instrumental, no vocals, so I knew it couldn’t be them.” “Trioscapes?” he said. “Yeah, the spin-off of Between The Buried and Me.” After that, his mouth was agog, just hanging open in the wind, so I picked up my bag and said, “Hey, thanks for the Duran Duran record” and split.