Austin Fanzine Project

Man...or...Astro...man!"), you could always check out the huge painted wall-hanging/backdrop thing or several black and white TVs playing choice snippets of old sci-fi b-movies. I also had a pretty good laugh when they started throwing out Little Debbie snacks and assorted candies and chocolate into the audience and some guy behind me shouted, "Fuck the chocolate, WE WANT TANG!!!"

Whew, we went back to the hotel and crashed so hard that we forgot to wake up in the morning to go to Al Green's Full Tabernacle Church. Oh, the things I missed. Guess I'll have to go back.

Sunday, 25 June 1995

We walked down to this shitty pancake house which I always want to call "Biscuit House," although I don't think that's its name. (Susan, Scott and I went there when we passed through Memphis on the way back from Chicago once. I couldn't remember its name then, and I still can't.) After breakfast, we saw the boys off and went to Sun Studios.

We were apprehensive, as we had just recently seen Mystery Train and were pretty convinced the tour was gonna suck shit. Boy, were we surprised. The tour guide was very informative and talked about all kinds of neat stuff. He also played parts of songs recorded there. I swear I got goosebumps when he played the first part of "I Walk The Line' and announced that we were standing in the very room that Johnny Cash recorded it in! Then he told us this story about this recording session where Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and somebody else were all recording together, but they kept cracking up because Carl Perkins was in the adjoining office mooning them through the window.

That night we hooked up with a friend of a friend, the wacky Andy Biscuit of the Resort Theory Recording Conglomerate. Andy drove us out past this industrial wasteland, like a decrepit, vacant warehouse district. Through that, to this bizarre neighborhood that had these creepy houses. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong with them. Was it the paint, the architecture (I use that term very loosely here), the arrangement of them? Or was it that we didn't really know Andy too well (or the friend who referred us to him, for that matter), and there was the possibility lurking in the back of my mind that someone would be hauling my corpse out of one of these condemned factories the next day? Obviously, we lived. And I can say that Andy is a fine human, although he still owes us a visit.

Monday, 26 June 1995 (Susan's 19th birthday)

We went to breakfast with Eric Oblivian and most, if not all, or the Royal Pendletons at this cool anachronistic home cookin' place right next to some old railroad tracks. The Royal Pendletons had to sit at a separate table cause the tables weren't big enough for all of us, but they kept coming over to our table in shifts. They'd sit there for a while and talk and be funny, then they'd leave and another one would come over. After breakfast, Eric took us to the Wooden Indian Giftship across the street from Graceland so we could get stuff to bring back for all our friends who wanted Elvis shit. I was really low on cash at that point, so I only bought one souvenir, a gold bottle of "Love Me Tender Conditioning Rinse." I am not kidding. On the way back to our hotel, Eric told us a hilarious story about taking Guitar Wolf on a Graceland tour the previous year.

When we got back, we packed up the car and split town. We had decided to go to New Orleans for the night, then cruise home the next day. But we didn't make it that far. For reasons still unknown, the transmission decided to go out just north of Granada, Mississippi, between Memphis and Jackson. After a bunch of grief, the details of which I will spare you, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would be spending the next three or four days in the Holiday Inn in fucking Grenada, Mississippi!

I think the penance for any roadtrip, fiasco, party, good time or disaster that leaves you with a good story to tell is that you have to tell the story thousands of times even if you're already sick of it or you just wanted to forget about it in the first place. That's why most of this story is about the fun we had in Memphis and not about the fun we didn't have in Grenada. But I'll tell ya what, everytime I see "Blind Willie's Johnson]] and they do "Mississippi Dirt," I think about all the mosquito bites I go in that fucking swamp of a state and when they got to that line at the end of the song, I'm ready to scream along, "Yeah, New York City's bad, but Mississippi's WORSE!" -Jennifer Geek

Cartoon caption: "The rebel yell that was heard throughout the world"