Clunkline

Each September I drive up to stay with my aunt and uncle and help them harvest the fruit from their orchard in West Virginia, and this year was no exception. I have special blood-relative permission to eat one apple for every basket I pick. Uncle Herb loves his crop, but they do it as much because they love it as that they want the money. Uncle Herb always says if he just wanted the money, he’d go back to making applets for iPhones. But, he never liked working for Macintosh, although I could never tell exactly what was eating him, and so an orchard it was.

I found an old record in the middle of the apple I was eating. You know, one of those tiny LPs that they make especially for autumnal fruit. I don’t recall the name, but it was by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

I’d never heard this particular album, although my grandmother on the Smith side of my family might’ve mentioned it once or twice. She used to listen to a lot of Mr. Cave, and loved to collect his rarities. She was the one who got me into him, actually… she said his music was juicy, delicious, all red and gold imagery with saucy lyrics and pie-in-the-sky ideas. He was probably her favorite artist, although her favorite song was still Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros’ “Johnny Appleseed.”

I put the record on my miniature phonograph. Agh! What IS this garbage? All noisy and screaming hoarsely, and playing every note on their instruments at once as fast as they can… I usually like Nick Cave, but I’ve never heard him sound like this before.

Curious, I looked it up on Wikipedia. …Turns out they classified it as applecore.