A Leak In The Safe

Ever since I had a minor (but painful) health problem a while back I’ve tried to be more aware of what I eat. My pet bugaboo has been high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener they pump into almost every processed food on the face of the earth. Avoiding it is what led me to Arbor Farms Market, our locally owned and operated health food supermarket – at the Kroger you have to search for something that doesn’t have HFCS, but at the Farms it’s hard to find anything that does. I’ve come to love the Farms and my weekly visit there. The store is pleasant and uncrowded, the employees uniformly nice and uncorporate, and even the music is fantastic, modern classics like Dylan and Van Morrison. The whole establishment seems to me to be a very workable compromise between idealism and commerce, gracefully poised beside the unhealthy consumer madness of a chain grocery store and the uncomfortable, smugly ostentatious virtue of food co-ops and other greener than thou food providers. Sure, I still go to Kroger once a week for more modern and more ambiguous kicks – like the self serve checkout, which is somehow less dehumanizing than facing the Kroger cashiers.

So there I was at the Farms on my day off, in the first aisle, when one of the employees, a guy who’d rung me up a few times, sidled over and said Is that a Brian Jones t-shirt? And indeed it was – I tend to wear it on my days off to avoid endlessly explaining to my less than hip customers who Brian Jones was. Yeah, you don’t see these every day I said. I got it off e-bay. I even admitted to having a couple of others. I think he said cool or something like that and I mentioned the Brian Jones movie Stoned (which I own but have yet to watch) which he knew about.

I’d noticed this guy before, a rocker in a sort of intellectual way, skinny with glasses and shoulder length hair, and noted his very fitting name Caleb. I think the first time he really stood out to me it was because he was wearing nail polish. But I admit I hadn’t really focused on him because of the distraction of his fellow cashier, quietly beautiful and genuinely sweet, the graceful mistress of the zen arts of packing a grocery bag (think it’s easy? Try it – I’m hopeless) and having meaningful thirty second conversations with people while giving them their change (she’s also a lot better at this than I am). If I ever make a list of the most enchanting women of my city she will be very near the top. But I digress…

I went home, feeling part of a secret, hip society recognized by t-shirt, not thinking much about it until I opened the paper later that week to see a picture of a rock band with my fellow Brian Jones fan in the middle. Look I shouted frantically to my wife It’s that guy from the supermarket!

She recognized him too, and indeed there he was Caleb last name Dillon, the leading light of a group called Starling Electric which was opening for a hyped local band at the very same local rock bar where Nirvana had played a legendary early gig. Caleb was all decked out in a Woodstock rock star sort of way and looked quite a bit more hip than when wearing an apron. I decided to see if I could hear some Starling Electric music.

I started at their my space page: http://www.myspace.com/starlingelectric

Now usually when I hear a band that has someone I know in it like, say, Mark Maynard’s Monkey Power Trio, they’re not quite as bad as I feared, but not anything I’d ever want to listen to again – Starling Electric on the other hand blew me away and I’ve been listening to them ever since. The first thing that hit me was simply their sound. It’s very nuanced and complex, bringing to mind a host of sixties bands like Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, psychedelic era Beach Boys, The Byrds, or even Skip Spence’s immortal Oar, while retaining its own integrity. These influences are the same as those of the "Paisley Underground" bands of the eighties that I liked, such as Rain Parade, Plasticland and Dream Syndicate, and Starling Electric synthesizes the sound as well as any of them. Whoa!

I was able to download their album Clouded Staircase from I-tunes, and started to hear some of the great songs under the sound. I suppose the obvious one is Camp-fire, which in a better world would already be a top ten hit, but in my initial listenings I’ve also been impressed by A Snowflake and the killer riff of British Boots. Who’d have thought all this would come of a chance encounter in the bread aisle?

Of course I’ve heard fantastic local bands – specifically the awesome Ronald Koal and the Trillionaires in Columbus or our own ultra-talented George Bedard – that never went anywhere in the larger scheme, but, to paraphrase Janis Joplin, if you can make good music one time for one person, well, that’s all that really matters.

On Monday, wearing Brian Jones t-shirt number two, I kept my eyes open for Caleb at the Farms to tell him how much I dug his groove in a (hopefully) unembarrassing way, but even though I spotted him when I came in, he was gone by the time my cart and I made the circuit – oh, well, maybe next week in Brian Jones shirt #3 – in the meantime I’m still rocking out to Starling Electric.

YR PAL,

UBU