Before staggering out the door with
Dino and Sammy and the other
minor constellations, a crystal tumbler
filled to the brim with iced tea,
he’d jam his shiny-shoed feet under the
nearest couch, tilt them up, and
give the kicks a cheap shine.

I think about those couches sometimes.
Like the way I think about
the girls in A Hard Day’s Night,
reduced to tears by the sight of Paul’s bob,
how many of them are dead now, how many
lit by the cold fireworks of memory,
dull & worn, like those
couches Frank Sinatra shined his shoes on.

And how many, if you tumped them over
would give the most delicate surprise,
a streak of faded black polish
hinting at
past glories.

That’s just depressing, is all.

Scratchboard, total ripoff of the awesome Flying Chair.

WILD EMOTIONS on the Facebook
BARE WIRES on the Myspace
OLE TAVERN is where it’s at, yeah, it’s a Monday, sorry.

Mom squinted and palmed me
a fortune in quarters and singles,
tip money and pocket change, and
I ate so much pizza at the buffet they
had to pull the bus over, my
cheeks sunburn hot, Ms. Crabtree
held my pony tail as I
puked up six dollars of pepperoni.

Srsly: Light + Glass Studio, on lovely Commerce Street, in Jackson, Miss. Singles are $50, doubles $75, triptychs $100. There’s about thirty pieces to choose from. There will be some Sandusky Reviews. There will also be candy!

AWWW COME ON DUUUUUDE

This song will undoubtedly get played at some point. Is it “Left of the Dial”? Man, who cares, this is just what good stuff sounds like.

Paul Collins has long been a sailor on that secret river. His first ship was the Nerves, a Los Angeles based trio active in the 70’s that banged out fast and furious bubblegum rock. They get labeled “punk” sometimes but they were only punk the way the Standells singing “Dirty Water” were punk, or ? and the Mysterians doing “96 Tears” were punk—only because it was played a little too fast and a little too jaggedly by kids a little too out of breath.

It was Deborah Harry and Blondie who gave the Nerves their biggest break, doing a note-by-note cover of the Nerves’ single “Hanging on the Telephone” as the opening track on their legendary 1978 album Parallel Lines. In either version, the singer’s lament is timeless: “It’s good to hear your voice, you know it’s been so long/If I don’t get your call then everything goes wrong,” just over two minutes of pure cotton candy laced with teenaged regret and fantasy. And by the time Blondie made it a hit, the Nerves had been broken up for over two years.

Paul Collins never sat still, and after the Nerves imploded—as all bands eventually do—he and co-Nerve Peter Case built the Breakaways, another band who they smashed on the rocks right after recording exactly one mesmerizing, bittersweet pop song: “Walking Out on Love.” A thematic sequel to “Hanging on the Telephone,” where its predecessor captures that spark of high school lust and desire, “Walking Out on Love” picks up six months later, when you come home and all your records are in a Crown Royal box in the hallway, favorite jeans stuffed in a duffel bag, and you didn’t even know anything was wrong. It’s got the only two words any sad song ever really needs: “oh, why?” The best part is that you would never know it was sad just from hearing it, since it bounces along with a Beatles transmission, guitars shimmering like a Delta wedding.

The Breakaways foundered even faster than the Nerves, with Peter Case going on to form the Plimsouls (you can see them jamming away on “A Million Miles Away” in the background of the Nic Cage 80’s classic “Valley Girl”), with Paul setting up The Beat. The Beat opened for New Wave and mod stalwarts like the Police and the Jam but never quite broke out like they could have, never broke out no matter how catchy the songs got. But by the eighties and nineties a cult of rock and roll fans devoted to unknown but wonderful music was steadily growing, and a series of reissues by Rhino Records clued a whole new generation into the music of the Nerves and the Beat.

So Paul Collins set out to sail the river again—this time aided by members of his legion of admirers, and headlining as the Paul Collins Beat. The history of rock and roll has always flowed through Mississippi and the power pop tributary is no exception. For a tour of the Southern states, Collins enlisted Jacksonians Paul Tucker and Larry Morrissey to serve as his backing band. Both men play in Thee Hypnotic Chickens, who have often darkened the doors of Sam’s Lounge, and Tucker also serves in the Used Goods. Backed up by these Mississippi stalwarts, just the past week the Paul Collins Beat recorded a few new tracks up in Oxford at Fat Possum Records.

If you could measure success by adoration and emulation, Paul Collins would be living in a castle down the moor from Jimmy Page. But love don’t pay, so you can see him for yourself banging out the number one chart toppers from some other, different world, splashing around in that secret river, this Friday at Ole Tavern on George Street. A gaggle of Mississippi garage royalty opens up—thee Hypnotic Chickens, Los Buddies (who sprinkled “Walking Out on Love” in a recent live set celebrating the release of their seven inch), and the Used Goods.

Paul Collins on Myspace