Spaghetti Head
Funky Axe
Private Stock
1975

Is this the way everyone’s life is?
	Neither a success nor disaster; something that just rolls along.
	Today I worked seven hours in the garden turning beds; the soil is clay heavy
and tired; I’m digging in manure and compost and sand.  While I work I think of
friends in the city who have never owned a spade.  I watch the dark earth heave up
and collect on my boots.  Then I think about the new collection of short stories by
Diane Williams that I’m reading.  Then I think about an upcoming trip to France and
Germany that I don’t want to take.  Then I think about my father who’s old now and
mostly silent.
        All this stuff moving around inside my head.
	Come evening I sit down and listen to a Sun Ra record.  Then, because it’s
Sunday and I’m my father’s son, I play a few tracks from a gospel album by Ralph
Stanley.  Finally, thinking of my friends at Caught by the River, I randomly pull out
a single from the shelves.
	I put it on and I’m in the Bronx, it’s 1980, and I’m thinking: what the hell is
this record?
	I remember pestering the DJ until he told me: Funky Axe by Spaghetti Head.
	I thought he was joking; who calls their band Spaghetti Head?
	It took me a few years to find a copy.  I was in Amsterdam looking through
boxes of junk and I pulled it out and thought: damn, he wasn’t joking.  It is called
Spaghetti Head.
	It’s still, after all these years, a killer groove.
	And now I’m thinking: none of this makes any sense.  No plan, no order.  No
connective tissue.  The arbitrary bricks that make up the building of me.
	Is this the way everyone’s life is? 

*

Jeb’s new record, Country Hustle, is out now. Buy a copy here.

Here’s his website and Twitter account.

Jeb’s Jukebox archive/Brand spanking new Spotify playlist