Lighten Up, Francis

Bracos Band—Fly Away (1977 / Hard French Boogie Rock)

Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re trying to find the rhythm when we’d rather be road trippin’.

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1) One thousand degrees Farenheit.

That’s how hot my heart burns with love. Love of the world and all the amazing things within it, so hot my hands can’t contain it and everything drips through my fingers like molten glass and I’m so horrified by not being able to cup it all, that my overwhelming love hardens and shatters into a thousand shards of light.

In all my entire life on this spinning carousel of teeming abundance, I’ll never understand how to express that outside of my own head. It’s too giant and I don’t understand how to use it.

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2) One thousand degrees Farenheit.

That’s how hot the Texas sun burns. It burns slowly, like the molten lava of hot glass dripping off the end of a carelessly-spun punty¹, onto the foundry floor, gently igniting, then threatening to consume us all. It’s hot and wet, and reminds me of a dirty joke about Galveston that I overheard once as a kid. Houston heat drains you, like the modern western world drains you and no amount of words—of which I have plenty of—can fully cup all of that in my hands, either.

3) One thousand degrees Farenheit.

This is the temperature of my burning desire to get the fuck out, to hit the fuckin’ road— to who knows where, for who knows how long. Some days, I just want to drive and drive and drive. Drive out of this chaos world, drive through it. If you don’t stop, maybe it can never catch you. I run from the world, and have been running for a long time and maybe it’s the heat or maybe it’s the overwhelming love—but maybe it’s just the heavy burden of being human, a condition we only find relief from when our creator no longer wants to experience life’s wonders and mysteries through our being and we are at last gifted our great and final reward.

Anyway, this is a French rock n roll song. It smells like motor oil, not Gitanes, and is as far removed from Paris as I can imagine—because I’ve never been to Paris.

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And I missed it by a day, but here is the 14th volume of the Paycheck playlist. This edition’s ten songs cover a wide range—as I hope you’d expect by now—including funkified country, Algerian Rai, Jamaican dub, psychedelic highlife from Ghana, Lebanese and French disco, whatever genre Stereolab is; and it ends with an early High Vis song that reminds me of a moment in time from a few years back that I’ll never forget: driving back through downtown Vancouver, headed home from the beach. Also contains Doug Hream Blunt’s Gentle Persuasion—which I’ve written about before, and am including because if the line Like ice, your butt is like dice now, damn isn’t the perfect summer lyric, then summer should be cancelled forever.

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

1. A punty is the solid rod used in glassblowing to help shape the molten glass, in coordination with the blowpipe.