...Well, the Doors came here shortly after Morrison'd been arrested in Florida for exposing himself -pulling out his weezer on stage. So I guess that on this particular night he was maybe a little more fucked up than usual. They were really good I guess, couldnt really tell, I was kind of overwhelmed just seeing them - What I mainly remember is that about two thirds of the way through the concert, they began, "When The Music's Over" - The band kicked into it and were playing the intro riff - the bass kept going, "do, do-do, do, dooo" but the Lizard King just stood there, mouth on the mic, leaning on the stand looking at the crowd but not saying a word - You cold see the other band members getting pissed, like the drummer would accent the riff's turn-around with a heavy, "bam bam bam bam!!" on the snare - but the lizard might as well've been deaf. This went on fo r a good three or sour minutes - members of the audience started yelling shit like, "wha'd ya forget the words??" It was almost like some had come just to hate, it was like we all knew we were watching a cat at the end of his tether - acid shaman in his Gene Vincent black leathers just trancing his way through this eternal in-resolved riff - audience on their last nerve just about reaching boiling point and then "Buwah- ha- ha - ha!!!" he let out with this deep, Vincent Price horror movie evil laugh and a big bunch of us rejoiced, cheered, others fell back confused, still others grew more angry!! And then he began - Talking - saying all this shit from old blues songs, "I had a friend. At least I THOUGHT he was my friend!..." and like, "Play with me baby, make it hard, drive the dog into the yard!!!" There were people getting upset people who had only heard the hit, "Light My Fire" on the radio - they were dressed in evening gowns and suits, They got up in a huff - standing up, shaking their fists at the stage and walking out! Good riddence. Everything else beyond that point was kind of anti-climatic, I guess the concert ended, I guess we all got home - next thing you knew you knew we started seeing pictures of him where he'd really started gaining weight , looking like some cat in an old man's bar...and then, not long after that, we heard that he was dead - died of a heart attack in the shower - the water was too hot or something - attacked his heart. Must'o been the still sea conspiring - b

Lookin Back - "Me and Red Mouth"

Well, I still got no money but am trying to ride lose in the saddle - So I had this cat named "Red Mouth" come in right after the radio show...let me start that over - I met this guy on myspace - not even sure how we became friends but he contacted me saying he was coming up here and could I maybe hook him up for a gig - well, i couldnt but told him I could get him on the radio and then we'd see what we could do - so I scheduled some studio time right after my show on Friday and he drove up from Springfield MO where he had played the night before - that's about a three hour drive and he literally just gets out of the car and walks in sets up his shit and performs in front of four of us who he dont know from Adam and he fucking just ruled!!! I mean he brings in this wooden platform that he sits a stool on and pounds his foot and the platform's about four inches high and so it amplifies it so all of a sudden this six foot three kid with long stringy red hair, his eyes get real big, lines form on his face and he's all like...crazy and this voice comes out of him that's like some seventy year old man who's possessed by the fucking devil or somethin'. It's like the devil's defiantly in the room - like he's eaten up Harry Smith's dead body and is spewin every mutilated confederate soldier, wound or insult the south's ever taken - every dead mule!! And the studio's already backed up cause it's Twangfest weekend and they've got bands stacked up like planes over Laguardia and somebody with a stop watch is policing Red Mouths one hour jealously... and BOOM! everybody just stops what they're doing at that moment and silently stares into the studio!

So anyway, there's this guy from fucking Alabama and i want to buy him a meal or something but I got no money and neither did he so I come up with this idea and we go down to U. City and play on the sidewalk in front of vintage Vinyl, out on the sidewalk, the two of us and there's all these college kids and tourists and young black kids and the whole Twangfest crowd (it was alt country weekend and all these liberal young professionals were going to that and that was weird cause I know a bunch of them and they were sneaking by kind of like I was embarrassing for them...) and, anyway we wound up making like $48 bucks which we kinda split - gave him the extra eight bucks and we took twenty a piece and then we went and bought a roasted chicken at the grocery store and tore that apart with a little container of potato salad and then went down to a bar downtown, the tap room, and watched Magic City, Peck of Dirt and some out of town band called Slick who were nothing if not the living embodiment of Black Oak Arkansas, complete with a heavier version of Jim Dandy himself and it was kind of a warped southside anti-twangfest celebration with all my southside rocker pals.

Then Saturday we slept half the day then ate Mexican down on Cherokee street where I introduced him to this wonderful trash pile of a "drugstore" we got called Globe Drug where you can but all kinds of railroad salvage bargains for hardly anything and Red Mouth buys himself a case of energy drinks for six bucks - he says they taste like ass but he's got to stay up twelve hours to get back to the gulf! - So we ate Mexican down there, (the street's kind of a little barrio of it's own so there's plenty o'great places down there to tie the feedbag on!) and that rocked and then we went to this party that my band, Alley Ghost was playing that night for this friends 47th birthday. This house is owned by this great couple named Ross and Kim who are both unbelievable cooks/punks/hippies/really cool folks with a huge garden about seven dogs and cats and this wonderfully bizarre house that they moved into and forged out of the ghetto wilderness - they lived their for at least two years with no electric power or heat. anyway, given the playing that me and Red Mouth had just done the night before we worked out a deal for me and to back him up - so he did a gig after all! It was fucking great! We played in a bedroom on the third floor - filled with about thirty people in the room and bout twenty more in the room just below us downstairs - Red Mouth became the old crazy fucker again just a slappin his tambourine and stompin' his foot for like two songs and then we got up behind him and jammed on another two songs which together went about ten minutes and all we were doing was jammin around a G chord on iether one - it was like some crazy ass white boy hill country trancin shit like ol' RL Burnsides used t'do - Damn man, my band's the fucking best too - I mean they hadnt ever even seen this cat before let alone heard his music and we were just wreckin the room - Red Mouth kept turnin his head to look at me with this big shit eatin grin on his face, "GET RIGHT CHURRRRCCCHH!!" he was a shoutin! Then he moved over and we kicked into our own set - Christ, the room went wild! I kept on lookin' out into the crowd and could see kids mouths movin like they knew my words by heart - they were singin along, pumpin' their fists are just dancin!! Hee hee! by the time we got done it was like 3AM, Red Mouth grabbed him a last beer and I went around with my hat beggin Red Mouth some gas money for his trip back to the Gulf - S'mazing how big drunken hearts can be - he made enough for gas and for us to eat one more meal! it was five AM by the time we got back to my crib and we just crashed - he slept in my front room on a water stained futon that took up the whole floor - we slept till noon the next day and went out to my fave natural foods restaurant (Shangrala!) to do our usual Sunday brunch - (the owner has named our little group as the "hipster Algonquin round table") Well, we ate our fill and then he hit the road back south about three in the afternoon - I'm gonna play his session on this weeks radio show - little bits of it anyway! Fuck. what a weekend. Wish they were all this good!

Broken and Wonderful (Trailer)

Interview with KWMU

Last week's interview with Bob Reuter by Mike Schrand on Cityscape - KWMU 90.7.

One of St. Louis' finest storytellers, Mr. Bob Reuter, was featured in this week's Last Collector Standing

By Jon Scorfina for the St. Louis River Front Times July 9

Spending a day with Bob Reuter is an emotional experience. Synonymous with his KDHX show Bob’s Scratchy Records, every Friday from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., Reuter does not just have a passion for collecting vinyl, but sees the pops and scratches between the grooves as being part of the meaning of life. His gut-wrenching worldview exudes from his voice and has recently won him Best Male Vocalist in the RFT music showcase with his band Alley Ghost. Even more so, it has ultimately manifested itself in the upcoming documentary film about his life “Broken and Wonderful,” playing at the St. Louis Filmmakers showcase. Between homes, Reuter stores his records in the back of Tom Huck’s art studio, where we met on a hot afternoon and discussed 45s, Bob Dylan and the Columbia Record Club.

LCS – When did you first start listening to music, and what was the first record you remember buying?

Reuter – I started consciously listening to music when I was six or seven years old. My older sister had a collection of forty-fives. She’s eight years older than me. When she got out of high school, she figured she was too old for rock n’ roll, so she gave all her records to me. I was just thrilled.

Those were the first records that I got, and for a long time, I just played them. The most thrilling record there was “Good Golly Miss Molly” by Little Richard. At one point I left it sitting on a metal space heater and it warped. It was horrible. I felt like a relative had died.

I didn’t buy a new copy of that for like 15 years. I just felt like, “well, that’s gone.” Like I couldn’t get another copy of “Good Golly Miss Molly.”

I’m kind of embarrassed by the actual ones I first bought. I wish it could be something really cool. It was just a weird concept. There was a record store right by my school, and I had never bought a record. The concept of being able to go into a store and actually buy a record was real foreign to me. I didn’t know how to do that (laughs). I wasn’t sure how much they cost. I think it was like 99 cents for a 45… I’m really dodging it here, but the first 45 record I actually bought was “Let’s Limbo Some More” by Chubby Checker. It wasn’t even “Let’s Limbo” it was “Let’s Limbo Some More,” a bad follow up. I don’t have a copy of that now. It was kind of like (laughs) some guy losing his virginity to an ugly girl that he doesn’t really like because he has to get his feet wet, or something wet.

Maybe I’ll start lying and say it was something else.

What would be your ideal record to say was your first?

“Good Golly Miss Molly.”

When I first started buying records in earnest was when the whole British invasion hit, and [I bought] the Beatles and any [other] rock ‘n’ roll band from England. Then I had a backlash from that where I bought all American artists. That was real important. Who was as cool as these British groups? Well, Bobby Fuller was. At that time the Beach Boys were. The Sir Douglas Quintet was. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. The Young Rascals.

Also, my brother-in-law was in college, so it was compulsory to have a few folk albums. I stole a few of his albums. Those were the first albums I ever had. He didn’t even notice they were gone. That’s the part that really gets me. It was Pete Seegar doing “We Shall Overcome.” It was a concert he did live at Carnegie Hall. It was the closest to rock n’roll that he ever did because they were rebellious songs, like “I Ain’t A Scared of Your Jail Because I Want My Freedom.” Also, he had a Leadbelly album on Capitol. It was a much better recording than all the recordings I had heard prior to that. It can of blew my mind and still has an effect on me. People back in the day use to tell me I sounded like Leadbelly when I sang. That was the first none rock ‘n’ roll thing that sounded like rock ‘n’ roll to me.

Back when I didn’t quite know how to buy records on my own, I lived in north city and I wasn’t big on riding the bus across the city. I was 11, and there was this big record store in midtown. That was when record stores were more like department stores. I think it was called Musicland. My mom was a clerk in the library, and I used to sit there and wait for her to get off work. I would read Down Beat magazine, and I had read all these articles about Bob Dylan. So I got on the bus and made this journey by myself to this record store. This record store clerk at the time -- and you should have seen the clerks -- it was this really nerdy guy with a short sleeve white shirt and tie and horn-rimmed glasses. That sounds like it’s cool now, but it very definitely wasn’t cool then.

I said, “Do you have anything by Bob Dylan?”

He looked at me real puzzled and went, “oh, you must mean Bobby Dye-land”

“Well, whatever.”

He pulled out this forty-five of “Like a Rolling Stone.” It was like at the beginning of The Simpsons (Sings the opening theme) like God’s in the room or something. I picked up that record, and I heard the music and looked at the picture of Bob Dylan. I remember him sitting at the piano with that crazy-ass hair, the Ray-Ban sunglasses and the harmonica around his neck. For the time, I’d never seen anybody look like that. I’d never seen a white guy look like that. It almost didn’t register on me until I played it ten times. It wasn’t catchy like the way pop songs are catchy. It was something completely different. I just listened to that record non-stop. I’m not talking about the album; I’m talking about the forty-five.

I got hooked up in the Columbia Record Club. It was like for a dollar you got six records. They would send you a record every month, and if you didn’t pick one they would send you a record at random. One month I didn’t pick one, and they sent me a copy of an album. It was The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, where he’s walking down the street with his girlfriend. I was like, “Whoa, he doesn’t look quite as wild as on the 45. What’s up with this?”

I put it on and dropped the needle and listened to it. “Holy Fuck, Dylan’s gone acoustic!” It just blew my mind. He didn’t sound like rock ‘n’roll, he sounded like a folk musician. What’s up with this? So I did the inverse of what everybody else did.

Do you prefer 45s or albums?

45s. I think because to me they sound punchier, like it’s recorded better. I’m not very technical. It just sounds like they have more punch to it. To me the recordings on albums seem a lot thinner, because they have to take up more space. Forty-fives are heavier vinyl. You can have a forty-five from the ‘40s or ‘50s and it will look all scratchy, and you put it on and it sounds really good. It doesn’t sound like there’s a million scratches on it. You take something that was pressed in the ‘80s and it looks like it’s in mint condition, and it just sounds like crap. You can hear scratches all over it. It’s in the quality of how they printed them. They weren’t doing it to last. Those earlier 45s can look like someone strapped them onto their feet and went skating down the sidewalk and they still sound cool. Especially for rock, you’re not going to hear the scratches anyway. They just kind of give it more texture.

Why did you name your radio show Bob’s Scratchy Records?

That was purely a defensive move. If I was listening to radio prior to that, and I’d hear some one play a record that was scratched, it was real obvious that it didn’t sound like everything else. Usually it was some hippie crap that you needed the quiet to hear what it was, but like I said, in rock ‘n’ roll the scratches don’t matter. I knew that I was going to get some assholes who would go, “That sounds all scratchy.” I figured I’d just jump pass that by calling the show Bob’s Scratchy Records. It’s like a bald guy making fun of the fact that he is bald before anyone else could do it for him. Okay, well just get this out of the way right now.

Sometimes if it’s like a really cool song, and there’s a lot of scratches, I’ll go, “I want you to just pretend there is a giant pan of bacon frying in the background while this is going on.” I hope that covers it.

Do you think the pops and scratches that you hear on records gives anything to the music as well?

Oh god, yeah. I have a couple of records, one is Still A Fool by Muddy Waters, and the other is Bo Diddly doing “Back in my love life.” Both of those versions I have are really scratchy. Nothing major, just a bed of scratches. Then I’ve gotten a clean copy of those songs and they don’t sound nearly as cool. They sound a little too antiseptic. When you here the scratches, it’s almost like your smelling the cigarette smoke, and it’s burning your eyes. You can smell the alcohol in the air, and it’s hot and you’re getting sweaty. Whereas when it’s all clean sometimes it sounds like your sitting in a laboratory. It’s the difference between Sonny Boy Williamson playing for a bunch of collage kids in England rather than playing in a juke joint in Chicago.

Can music sound as good on a digital format?

To me it can’t sound as good, and it’s maybe just me, but I know there are some other people like me. Like on NPR, they have those shows where you have a guy who sounds like an English teacher. He’s going, “Now we’re going to bring you down to the delta and listen to the recordings of Blind Jimmy Shoeshine.” They play it and there’s not a scratch on it. It just sounds so scholastic that all the emotion is totally removed from it.

For rock ‘n’ roll and dirty music… what do you want an antiseptic version of dirty music for? That just seems like it defeats the purpose to me.

A lot of these classic rock n’ roll albums are being remastered -- for instance all The Beatles albums, the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street -- do you have any incentive to go out and re-buy those deluxe editions?

No. That to me is just a trick on white folks. People get hypnotized by that shit. You know the latest ad campaign tells them they got to have this, and they’re so bored and empty in their lives that it’s like, “oh this is exciting because they tell me it’s exciting.” That’s fine. I’m glad they found something, but I just think it’s sad. To borrow a line from Marshall Crenshaw, “I never bother with the usual things.” I want to find something that’s got more mystery to it.

For the kind of music I listen to, I just want it rough and raw. One thing that really draws me to music is sometimes, if I’m feeling really bad, and my heart’s feeling broken, I wanna go to the Record Exchange and go up into that big giant 45 room. Just hunt through that shit. Look for certain labels. I have an idea of what kind of label is going to have something I’m interested in. If I find one of them, I look to see who is the artist, who is the writer. If there is any kind of information, like if it’s recorded in Louisiana. To me there is something healing about finding some cool record recorded down in Louisiana by somebody nobody’s ever heard of, and this guy’s pouring his heart out. He’s like this mysterious shaman from the past and he’s carrying this message, and somebody else has felt like this before, and I feel more connected with the earth somehow. That’s what I feed on.

Most of the time the records that are holy grails to me are ones that are just filled with mystery. “Wow, who in the hell was this? What made them do this? Did they really think that this was going to sell, or did they just in their heart of hearts know that they just had to get this pressed up and put it out there?” All they really knew was that this was something that they had to spew out, and it’s going to be there for fucking ever. I come along 50 or 60 years later, and I found it. I hope that somehow they know that I found their record, and I’m playing it on the radio.

You started that story explaining that there is a passion of the hunt. Do you think current generations of music fans, though they might have the instant gratification of getting it online, might be missing out on the hunt?

That’s like a real double-edged sword, isn’t it? You have access to almost anything you can imagine at your fingertips nowadays. It does seem like it loses some of its value. I didn’t start getting into computers until probably around 2000, but all the sudden it dawned on me that there are 17 year old kids who know about records that came out in 1967. If you were a record freak in 1967, you had to be extremely hip to know about something. These kid today, they know about stuff that’s totally obscure, that you not only would have to have been extremely hip, but you would have had to have friends in every city to find out about that.

You used to go into a record store for a new record. They would cost like eight dollars for an album. You would go in and you would look at the covers. You would stare at that cover and spend practically the whole afternoon looking at record covers. You couldn’t play them at that time. You just had to make a good guess. “Does this cover look like it’s going to be worth my money? Eight dollars!” Sometimes it paid off. Sometimes you were just a chump. There was some mystery to it even then. I don’t see how it can have the same value, because you can just go to a computer and get a taste of it. You can get it for free, whether you want it or not. I don’t see how it can have the same kind of value.

See the cool thing is, the kind of shit that really means something to me, you still can’t get on the computer. Generally, if you don’t find it online, it means that no one ever really noticed it. When I have a record like that that I think is really cool and I realize that nobody really noticed this record, I really feel like I got something.

If you could give a young music lover who’s never bought a record a few words of wisdom to get them to go out and buy a record, what would you tell them?

You know (long pause)… part of it that gives it it’s value is…. It’s amazing the number of 45s you find that have a little piece of tape on them with a girls name on it, or written across the record -- very rarely a guy’s name. You know, these girls had sleepover parties and they all brought there 45s so their’s wouldn’t get mixed up with everybody else’s. Just the story of you’ve got the same object in your hand that someone who lived back then, and maybe this was something that was really important to them. You really have a little piece of somebody’s life, or history of this country, or the real culture. Not only is it this object that was owned by somebody that [it] was so important to, but it’s something that was recorded by somebody that what they were saying was real important too, or who they wanted to be was real important too. Sometimes having that in your hand and putting on the turntable and dropping the needle and listening to it can actually make your life better. It’s like finding some sacred object that has some of the secrets of life there. You get to share and be part of that, and maybe when you’re gone, that will be left for somebody else to find.

Good Bye Baby, Baby Good By

That non-specific sadness is back - an acknowledgement that life is just gonna be whatever it's gonna be - a reminder that it's always and forever out of your control. I guess I could look on it all like some big adventure but sometimes I just get so tired -

When the woman you thought was gonna be there forever just up and goes away - as mysteriously as she first appeared - You just lie there at night wondering just what parts were real. How did this happen? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly. I can remember looking at her one night in awe of how much I loved her, or at least of how much I felt when I looked at her face. Chemestry, or biology or whatever's amazing really. I dont know. Astounding how the wounds take place, how they repeat all through your life like some bad b-movie noir script...

Now I play my gigs and I feel this connection with my boys. Some nights we're able to make magic - no seriously, this band I got could weave gold out of dog shit - some primitive alchemy that soothes the raw wounds at one's core. By the end of the night my guitar's in my trunk and I'm back in the the night, out on the road - the buring heat - my brain reals at what I just took part in. And I want to let some one know and I want to go back to that lost and gone sweet love I thought was gonna save me - But I walk now, only with strangers - I talk now only with strangers - I move with angels that got no place.

Last night at Tom Hucks place something bordering on astounding went down. I started out swinging wildly at the ones I love the most - I did it in public - brothers fight - brothers jab and claw each other like young animals (I swear I used to be young!) So I hid out - back in the wharehouse space with all my worldly possesions and I screamed inside -and I wept out loud, then I went back out, put my dark glasses on and fronted my band in that glorious room - industrial wasteland - sweat soaked and smokey, contruction lamp bulb burning my eyes - all darkness beyond that one burning spot cept for momentary flashes of a camera light and,

"OH my god there's a room full of people out!" and the next second they're gone and back into black

And we wailed - And we wailed - And we wailed - And we wailed!!! And all that pain we all hide inside shot out my mouth and Matty's guitar and his wails and every player spewed their passage, spoke their truth - battered their axe and some how we all came out more whole.

Something had taken place beyond the realm of what we come to expect in situations like this - somthing like the shit mystics seek - and I truly almost felt sorry for everyone there, not one of the five of us - We alley ghosts - You dont get to be this for free - there's a cost involved that not everyone's gonna be able to pay - Sometimes you gotta give away everything and everyone you ever held dear, or be willing to...and then we move on into the night again, all solitary an'shit - But we get to take part in magic. And on some nights it feels SO worth the price you pay.

the Sun's Going Down On Grand And Gravois

The sun's going down on Grand and Gravois as a skittish Mexican hairless makes it's way east 'cross four lanes of traffic. This town's beginning to look a lot like some
foreign country - Africa, Bosnia, goat herding survivors of floods, cat
with a turban walking an alpaca through the Tiny Bubbles Laundramat,
lookin like the proverbial Black Hole of Calcutta...

Sittin' at the drive up window awkwardly shoving your money up over
the top of your car door cause the electronic push button windows dont
work no more as you run out what's left of your last quarter tank of gas - six minutes left on the "pay as you go" piece of shit Chinese phone in your pocket. Gun shots off in the distance and the sweat burning your eyes. I been spending like a broken yo yo all week long, I need a
place to rest.