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A Larry Wallis State of Mind
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| ...I had been going through some old boxes of notes, clippings, etc
(I'm still surrounded by unpacked boxes) and I found a poem I'd written,
obviously in some advanced state of swackery. It concerned your good self.
Obviously, I was a big Larry fan since long before I met you - and of course,
I've remained a big Larry fan ever since. And naturally, I would not publish
the contents of this email anywhere [but Funtopia
has! RD]- I just thought Nigel would be amused. To cut a long story
short, I had once heard some musician describing you as "the most perfectly
stoned human being" he had ever met. This observation impressed me enough
to remember it. And it coincided with a view I took when I was working (for
the first half of 1978) at Stiff: I once phoned you to check something -
maybe about the Realists or Wreckless - and, after a pregnant pause, you
said "Sorry, man I can't handle talking" and put the phone down. That tickled
me for years. I had never heard a response like that and I'm pretty sure
I never will again.
Later, after I'd left the record biz to become a full-time scratcher again, I began to use the expression "I am larried" - when I was a bit boinked - and it worked its way into local jargon. There was a lot of weed being consumed in Marston (where I lived for 30 odd years) at the time. A bloke called Chopper Beecham was growing it in his mum's greenhouse, a good quality leaf. It was spoken of with reverence and awe as Marston Green during Sunday lunchtimes in the Social Club, which was often blue and hazy with its texture and perfume. The smoke clouded the picture of the queen, which hung above the fireplace, looking out upon the patrons with an expression of serene bewilderment. I once went down there on one of my lodger's bikes, and it took me about an hour to get home on it. The air was a bit like Woodstock when Country Joe came on. The expression caught on and spread amongst some of the younger guys. You would hear them in the pub saying "I got well larried the other night" without any understanding of the word's derivation. Years later, I was still using it. I would tell my girlfriend that I was going to get larried and if anybody phoned, I wasn't in. It was the period that I was writing the record review part of a column called the Vulture, in the Times each Saturday. I did it every week, for five years, writing over 250 columns in all. Three short paragraphs, about 220 words, on a classic or particularly interesting (in my opinion) album. I got all sorts of stuff in there, from Eddie Cochran to Captain Beefheart, bootlegs to the Brinslies. It took them five years to rumble me! My modus operandi was to adjourn to the Bell (local pub) at 6pm and consume two pints of ale. I would then return home, get larried, and sit on the floor, listening through headphones to the album I had selected that week, and make copious notes on an A4 pad. I would keep playing it, and writing about it, all evening, until Steph dragged me off to bed. In the morning, I would go over the notes, extracting and re-shaping the few good ideas. At least 98% of it would inevitably be bullshit of course, peppered with triple exclamation marks of profundity and (what I thought were) salient words written in large capitals, but there was always enough good stuff to beat a column together and post it off. At some point, somewhere in the midst of all this, I wrote a short poem in recognition of your influence. It was called A Larry Wallis State of Mind, and went like this: Life can be considered A spot of relaxation Sketching out scenarios Pete Frame |