Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew Hamlin Joint

Elegantly Hermetic Cages Dept.: Crucial for me to see Chumbawumba live on Letterman if for no other reason that they existed to me as a series of fragments and omissions. I can remember for example my friend Rob raving about Chumbawumba circa 1992, when we spent a great deal of time together in the studio of KAOS-FM looking out at the lamppost light and the occasional person for it to bounce off of, like a salmon run in the off-season, an odd fish swimming through thrashing its head at the most malingering of hangovers. I can remember Rob opening his mouth under our own much harsher florescent lights to explain about Chumbawumba's discography and its attendant wonderfulness. I can remember him in fact proceedings, but the details are down the drain, leaving me with this image of Rob's bearded head bobbing as a hand gesticulates towards a compact disc, then nothing more, the last few frames of some indented outtake left unspliced back into the whole. Life leaves many such moments, naturally, but how bracingly odd to find this band with the laughable name back in my life so many years later and removed from Rob that the earlier memories wavered ephemeral as the track of a solitary salmon.

"Tubthumping" announced itself in an IHOP while my mind was on the pumpkin pancakes, but in the words of good friend (about himself) I'm incapable of following anything one hundred percent if there's music on in the background, and soon I was wrinkling puzzledly from a frosty angelic voice singing "Danny Boy, Danny Boy," alternating with some waddy Kleenex sounds I couldn't quite make out, and when divorced from the clatter of plates and hum of pie-slice rotator proved to be some shiny processed shouting I still couldn't make out and didn't want to. Weeks later, the song still ubiquitous on Star 101.5, the station I wake up with and towel my hair to, I'm still thinking the men shout "I get NO DOUBT!/But I get up again/And you're never gonna keep me down," and I still get a mind's eye vision of four Devo-ish fellows opening four copies of Tragic Kingdom that detonate in four faces knocking them to the ground (a bit like David Byrne in "Once in a Lifetime") only to bound upright, grinning, in four simultaneous kip-ups. Then the angels sing "pissing the night away"--a friend swears that part isn't transmitted from my increasingly suspicious mind--then a litany of alcoholic beverages--"an ode to football hooliganism!" laughed another friend--followed by a trumpet line from Handel's, "Water Music" and then by Jewel, or Matchbox 20, or Alanis, or sometimes a disbelieving DJ.

I reached all the way back to "All You Need is Love" for a song whisking strident melody, plaintive harmony, brass, and plagiarism--an unusual recipe under any sun--into a soufflé I can only describe as oddly warming.

It's winter, so I'm entirely justified in feeling cold, but sometimes, even with wet hair, I'm more chilled by the weary misanthropy in Matchbox 20's "Push," the nihilism in Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" that I fail to find when I'm told of it, the way your desire to pick a scab might be tempered by your realization that you have no handkerchief to staunch the running blood. "Tubthumper" let me know that delirious mystery never died and sinks its lemony fangs into the dominant paradigm from time to time. I know little of Chumbawumba's anarchist activist leanings and like my hesitation at discovering what's really knocking those gentlemen ass-over-tits sixteen times a minute, I'm not sure I want to know, except that it increases the improbability, and hence my suspicion that something the size and power of that Improbability Drive on Douglas Adams' Heart of Gold lies buried somewhere in Atlanta, or the Atlantic, or between Clark and Hilldale, or in Al Capone's vaults. And sometimes--especially in winter, especially in these quicksand days before the Yule log is upon us--I need that to get to the next click of the clock radio.

So how did this eight-or-so person band perform such an impossible song live. As if it were the most natural song in the world, and as such entitled to a rough vocals, nanosecond hesitations on cues, and skewed levels. The men didn't look too Devo, except in the sense that everyone's black jumpsuits and cropped heads recalled Devo's uniforms, although I saw the movie Bent as a closer analogue. In the middle they chanted "FREE!!! MUMIA!!! ABU-JAMAL!!!", surely the purest protest ever released on Letterman's airtime since that night he kicked Harvey Pekar off for eruditely ragging on General Electric. No, I can't find those words in the recorded version. I'll try again after tomorrow morning's shower.

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