walter goad's 8-track collection
Though I haven't seen my cousin Walter Goad in perhaps thirty years, I remember him looking somewhat like the puppet to the right. He was a few years older than me and a bit of a teasing, pinching, Eddie Haskell asshole jerky guy.
As a pubeless Goadling, I spent a few summers with Walter and his family in Vermont, up where black people don't exist and gentle squirrels nibble on pine cones as a morning mist rolls over the green hills across the river in New Hampshire.
One evening when Walter was out stealing hubcaps or leading a circle jerk, I rummaged with fascination through his collection of 8-track tapes, a clumsy musical format possibly unfamiliar to our legions of younger readers. I remember him owning John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic and lots of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, most notably the rampaging mechanical armadillo phallus on the cover of Tarkus.
What clobbered my jowls—and what, sadly, still resonates with me on several emotionally arrested aesthetic levels—was Alice Cooper's Killer, with the scary demonic snake on the cover and the uber-tasteless song "Dead Babies." I'd play and replay the song obsessively, lapping up the idea that someone would joyously trill about how "dead babies can't take things off the shelf."
I later heard that the song was a protest against non-childproof medication bottles, but I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. I'd prefer to savor the incongruity, that small patch of artistic cancer nestled in rustic Vermont.
