“What’re you up to?” asks my dispatcher.
“Just living it up out here in Beaverton.”
“You want to pick someone up at the Shell station?” The honest answer is no. Cabbies are skeptical of convenience-store orders for a variety of reasons, and given that it’s 2:30 in the morning on a Saturday, the person at the Shell is probably in for a long wait. If the dispatcher’s bugging me about it, they probably already have been waiting a while, or are stuck in some kind of dire straits.
Whatever. My main concern is scoring some brownie points.
I tell her I’ll take the call, and she replies that she’ll send it over on my screen. The first words that pop up are “GOING TO SALEM,” and my smile could illuminate PGE Park.
I race to the gas station and am greeted by a pissed-off young man. Turns out the woman he met on the dating chat line greeted him at the hotel with a pimp and a request for money. It’s difficult for me to keep from laughing as I tell him that’s the deal with those things, and he’s stupefied by the revelation that strangers on the telephone aren’t really dying to bed him for free.
He wants to smoke, and he spends the whole trip hollering inanities into his cell phone. I’m fine with all of it—as much as the $10 dumbasses drive me crazy, I could cart around the hundred-dollar ones all night.
A couple of months ago, in a long and interesting reply to comments by Jeff and myself, among others, you mentioned liking weird music. I like weird music too, (Sun Ra, Todd Dockstader, Ornette, Ligeti, to name a few) and I'm wondering what you listen to. You did mention that you avoided talking about your musical tastes in the column, but your comment made me curious. As I am a strong believer in "weird" and since that can be a very relative term, I'm really wondering what music you like. Thanks for anything you might let us know about your faves.
Anyway, I listen to music that sounds good, and plenty of it's not weird. I'm an especially big fan of the harder and freer jazz from the 50s & 60s (Mingus, Coltrane, Dolphy, Blakey, Adderley, and Coleman being particular favorites), avant-garde underground hip-hop from the turn of the century (early anticon, Def Jux, Anti-Pop Consortium, etc.), European psychedelia of the 70s and contemporary Japanese stuff (Can, International Harvester, Acid Mothers Temple, Afrirampo), and artful use of drone (Flying Sauce Attack, Damion Romero, Mountains, and everything in between, those're just 3 names). And I'll always have a very soft spot for the wide array of things called "noise" (Smegma, Yellow Swans, Argumentix, et al.)
But mostly I listen to local music. As much as I've become put-off by scenes, there's some amazing non-indie rock being made in Portland these days, mostly by really good people. Current favorites are The Evolutionary Jass Band, Fly!Fly!Fly!Fly!Fly!, Eet, Oscillating Innards/Caen, Gulls, Paul Dickow's various projects, Soriah, Soup Purse, the Reproachables, Pulse Emitter, Merce Cunningham Duo, Daniel Menche, Bikes, Moodring, Waves of Nightingales, Atole, Au, Grouper, Inca Ore, The Venerable Showers of Beauty, Persiflage, Truck Truck Ocelot, Celesteville, I could go on and on for ages and still forget people. I actually have very little idea what's been going on nationally for the past few years, to my discredit I've mostly been getting my new music from friends and don't go record shopping much anymore.
One of the great things about my job is that I get to listen to music constantly, and it is a huge part of the cab driving experience and the conversations I have with fares. I've avoided writing about it because people get so possessive and defensive about music, and if they thought that when I mentioned Subtle I was trying to sound like a music snob... well, that's about the most pop shit you'll ever catch me listening to, and I don't want to alienate readers any more than I already have. Besides, it's a column about cab driving, not about music. Though the names of acts have been mentioned occasionally when integral to the story (those occaions thankfully being the relatively well known Mr. Lif, Subtle, and Howlin' Wolf).
I also have to say that my favorite radio station these days is 93.1, where some of the most exciting music I've heard in a long time is being played. And I say that with complete honesty and a lack of irony - people need to get over their bias against the Spanish and recognize that this is vital music. Pay especially close to the mastering and the synth patch horns, there's some very cool stuff going on. It's not all that dissimilar from what dub was doing in and for England in the 70s & 80s.