CHAPTER 91

 

 

#10: VINCENT GARGIULO with TOASTERS ‘N’ MOOSE

“Taste The Biscuit”

from the album Tiny Wannabe Comets

Released: October 2015

 

 

You reach that stage in life. I certainly have done. The time when you realise, with melancholy, that you were never going to live in Buckingham Palace or Tower Bridge, would never grow up to be a famous scientist, would never appear on Top Of The Pops – in retrospect, just as well – and would, in the final analysis, never end up a renowned and famous music writer, to which latter profession you reluctantly dragged yourself after you’d lost everything. You look in the bathroom mirror and there’s a strangely curdled old man you don’t recognise glaring back at you. You understand, as you approach your sixties, that this is all there shall ever be for you. You don’t, indeed were never allowed to, get above or beyond your situation as it is now.

 

But it isn’t about a lack of talent or ability; it’s all there, you know it is, even now. It’s just a case of getting it all in the right harmonic order. Like Drake you almost never opened yourself up – I say “almost” because at one crucial stage in my life I decided to do that, which is what in the end has made my life still worth living. Sometimes, just the one time’s enough.

 

Yet here you are, in these pages, skiing around emotions, doing your best to avoid grasping the absurd joy that music frequently, heck always brings to you. Because the world has on many occasions treated you like a timid bin ready to be set on fire, it instead comes back to the pain, the hospital nightmares of five years ago of which you, the reader of this book, have learned only a fraction.

 

Hospital nightmares could constitute a minimalist electropop duo setting up in a thrift shop, as people shop around them, and performing a song which you think could never quite exist in reality, all about tasting the biscuit and upsetting rhyme and scansion by inserting “wedges” when you would normally expect the singer to sing “fries.” Maybe this is a preview of hell; I got enough of those in 2018.

 

You don’t laugh at the two performers. Well, you can if you want, but somehow you feel sorry for them and at the same time rather admire them. They are called Toasters ‘n’ Moose, and their well-meaning but useless manager has fixed up a brief tour of southern California. They released an album in 1979, which presumably disappeared abruptly, and reunite only very occasionally when their day jobs allow (at many points in the sixty-one minute mock-documentary film Chickens In The Shadows – for that is what I am talking about here – you give an immense, internal sigh of relief that these two people have day jobs; at one point, with Moose sitting on a park bench, head in his hands, a passing woman offers him half her sandwich. He angrily tosses it back at her, yelling “I’M NOT HOMELESS!” But if they relied on their music alone, they might be. There is a very sinister implication when their manager mentions that many of the songs they’ve played today are available on this album (he offers an LP to an interested but bemused spectator, who asks if he has a copy on CD – of course, no such artifact exists).

 

The tour turns out to last barely three days, and to add to the duo’s woes, their manager has agreed to babysit his nine-year-old niece at the same time, so she comes along with them, much to Toasters’ angry chagrin (a key part of her act is that she hates children). Usually her uncle gives her some money to go away for a couple of hours and not bother her. Their first scheduled appearance is at a record shop which on close inspection has shut (the baffled manager stammers: “b-b-but I talked to them only two months ago!”). They are then allowed to play one song – “Taste The Biscuit” – in the middle of a thrift shop, whose manager cannot wait to politely get rid of them.

 

Other “performances” follow, and these turn out to be open-mic nights at various clubs and restaurants in states of comparative disuse – one such establishment shares its facilities with a launderette. That having been said, the duo don’t go down too badly with the sparse audiences there, and you can actually glimpse – despite the nerdy, middle-aged Moose fumbling around with his Casio keyboard, switching on the orange light and timidly experimenting with chord sequences and drum programs – an element of real talent. Toasters’ voice doesn’t quite harmonise with Moose’s surprisingly complex chord changes, but although musically they are not quite in sync, they absolutely are as a pair of human beings.

 

We catch two glimpses of solo performances. In her motel room, Toasters unexpectedly brings out an acoustic guitar and sings a very profound song. She has something, yet her stubborn fucked-upness – she is a real bastard towards the niece on a few occasions - prevents anybody else from seeing or feeling it.

 

The other glimpse I’ll come to in a moment. Things seem to descend lower and lower. They get a gig which appears to be in a bus terminal, right next to an ATM dispenser, playing to an audience of no more than the occasional, moderately-intrigued passer-by. There’s a big outdoor antiques fair somewhere in or near Sacramento, which turns out to be a shithole market situated beneath an underpass. They perform on the sidewalk – another, more bitter version of “Taste The Biscuit” stripped of any enthusiasm or point, since they are literally singing to no one. You generally marvel at Toasters’ regenerating self-motivation – she really gets into this stuff. But after this final biscuit, it’s clear that she’s had enough. She says that she has to run off and get something and of course, as Moose already knows – because he’s been through this before? – she isn’t coming back.

 

In that sequence you can comprehensively feel Toasters’ utter sense of defeat. She’s tried her best for thirty years – on and off (the only time you see them in retrospect is in a messy 1994 “15^th Anniversary Tour” clip, and maybe Sub Pop or Kill Rock Stars might just have been interested in them back then, but their manager over-optimistically sends the clip to the producers of America’s Got Talent) – and this is all she has to show for it; busking on a semi-derelict sidewalk for nobody and nothing. Fuck this, she might be thinking to herself, I’ve got a proper job (as an acting teacher, and a clip early on in the film of her at work shows how surprisingly, if goofily, good she is at doing it).

 

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it’s that feeling; the exhausted knowledge – which you also get at the end of songs like “Rock ‘N’ Roll I Gave You All The Best Years Of My Life” – that nobody gives a flying fleck about your art. Just shut up and contribute in your own quiet way to society like everyone else. You’re not going to get the present they all said you’d get when you were ten. It’s like…well, look, I’ve been blogging about music for upwards of twenty years and it has all got me nowhere. As with Drake, it’s easy for me to feel that I am sending this writing out into a total vacuum. Nobody is going to take any notice of it and at best will pretend not to notice it.

 

So why do it? Why write anything, including this book which, at the time of writing, doesn’t even have a name and is extremely unlikely ever to be published? Because you can’t not write it. If you don’t tell the story, even if only to yourself, how will anybody else know that the story ever took place, that you ever existed?

 

That second glimpse I promised you four paragraphs ago; Moose, left alone on the sidewalk, performs – plays and sings – a song which is initially melancholy but gradually grows angrier as it goes along. With an encroaching shiver, you realise that this mostly taciturn guy really has something about him which may be normally suppressed by what, or whom? Someone with an appalling Scouse accent passes by, sees what’s going on and offers him a gig playing minimalist keyboard bass in a “punk” band which mainly consists of another keyboardist performing the works of Chopin.

 

In the film’s final section the two reluctantly reunite – they are evidently both too tired not to reunite – and we see them as we saw them at the beginning, performing their “theme song” “Rock Your Body Home,” possibly to the inhabitants of a care home or halfway house. Yes, The Office, the beige carpet dust of systematic defeatism, the ceaseless grasping for a thing that is slightly beyond the protagonist’s grasp, or it is within their grasp and they lack the essential personality component that would enable them to grasp it. But they had a story and needed to tell it, if only to provide proof that they were here. It is the same with this book.