Caught in the Carousel

Letter from the Editor - November 2007

By Alex Green

In this business there are always those moments where you allow yourself to lapse into the kind of dreamy fantasias that are normally imagined by kids at bus stops who wonder what would happen if Bruce Lee fought an alien, or if they could outrun a T-Rex if it somehow got loose in the schoolyard and starting crushing buildings with single steps. When I was a kid, my friends and I did thousands of these hypotheticals and they always started with a broad, troubling question (“What would you do if your boat was on fire in the middle of the ocean and it was surrounded by Great White Sharks?”) and ended with a bizarre, almost hallucinogenic answer (“I’d use my jet pack to rocket myself the fuck out of there and I’d land in Hawaii at a Van Halen concert”).

The one I remember the most came when I was in 8th grade. I was sitting in woodshop class, wondering if my parents were really going to be thrilled by a pig paper towel holder, when Robbie Kangloss, who had seen the nuclear scare drama The Day After the night before, asked me what I would do if a nuclear bomb was dropped and I had an hour to live. I looked at the pig and considered the possibility—an hour seemed like a measure of time that would be too easy to see slipping away. It was a tough call. What would I do? Before I could answer, Kangloss said to me, “I would go to the bank and steal a million dollars and then I would find a hot girlfriend and get the fuck out of there.”

Maybe Kangloss’s willingness to ignore time, space, bank accessibility, the use of currency in a nuclear war and the amenability of a stranger of the opposite sex willing to relocate in the face of an apocalypse, made his solution almost seem possible. It made sense. It was a good plan. I’d do the same thing, I decided: the bank, the money, the girl, the getting the fuck out of there.

All of this has nothing to do with what I’m about to tell you about the new issue of Caught In The Carousel—well, almost nothing. When my friends and I talk now, we imagine what it would have been like to have seen The Beatles, or to have interviewed Cobain—you get the idea. My list goes on: Dinner with Hendrix, seeing the Smiths in ’84, a short, but hot and tumultuous romance with Patsy Kensit….And I always wanted to interview the June Brides. I’ve listened to The June Brides since I was 15 and I always thought it would be cool to sit down with singer Phil Wilson and just talk shop.

For once the fantasia became a reality. Almost twenty years since they broke up, I got a chance to interview Wilson, who is about to re-launch his solo career. Affable, kind, engaging and intelligent, it is truly one of my favorite moments in music journalism. I hope you dig the interview and follow Phil’s marvelous new work and newly launched solo career.

So that’s our cover story.

Elsewhere:

**David Porter got the lads from Mofungo to give us this month’s annotated Consummate Top Ten list.

**We’ve got new reviews of albums by Gram Parsons, Mr. D., New Model Army, Steve Goldberg, and more.

**Don Ciccone went out in the field for us and came back with a live review of Big Star at the Fillmore.

Tons of surprises to come in 2008, but before we start talking about the new year, we feel compelled to announce that our final cover star for 2007 will be Max Eider, who gives CITC an exclusive interview about his new album Back In The Bedroom.

Questions, comments, movie suggestions: alex670@earthlink.net

Love and Rockets,
Alex Green
Editor, Caught In The Carousel
Alex670@earthlink.net