The Drink Tank 063 (2006).pdf

The Drink Tank

issue 63

just another multiple of nine

Why Does This Man Have a Bucket

on his Head?

If you ask me who the greatest guitarist of all-time

is, I’ll give you a straight answer: some dead guy. If you

ask me who the shreddingest guitarist of all-time is, adn

I’ll have no problem giving you a name: Buckethead!

You see, there are several different type of guitar-

ists: the ones who suck (like Eric Clapton) and the ones

who can play faster and meaner than anyone human has

any right to (like Dick Dale) and there are those who can

make you weep (like the great Mexican guitarististas) but

no one does the speciic art of shredding so well as Mr.

Head.

Ah, yeah, I should mention that Buckethead is a

weird dude. A really weird dude. He is always on stage

behind a white mask, very similar to the one that The

Carver wore on Nip/Tuck. He also tends to wear a Ken-

tucky Friend Chicken bucket on his head. That’s right,

KFC. He’s weird, and usually with a gimmick like that

you don’t get quality play, but not so with Buckethead. He is really an amazing guitarist

and seldom have you heard someone who uses so many of the possibility of a guit-box to so

many different levels.

Buckethead irst came to my attention with a band called The Deli Creeps. They

played the old Cactus Club (the club I’m making the movie about) and were incredible. He

then got an added boost from being the guitarist asked to join Bill Laswell’s group Praxis,

which included keyboard/clavinet virtuoso Bernie Worrell, genius drummer Brain, and the

funniest bassist of all time, Bootsy Collins. Praxis was a band of incredible talent making

amazingly funky music together. Buckethead and Brain were the drive of the band, and

Bernie and Bootsy were the funk. It was a great band at irst, with the genius Bill Laswell

doing the producing, I really got into them, but sadly that line-up only lasted one album

and they really became more of a SoundScape band after that.

Buckethead still plays, often solo or with various bands. He was chosen as the re-

placement for Slash of Guns & Roses when they came back in the late 1990s. He’s a much

better guitarist than Slash and has much cooler headgear.

The Drink Tank Issue 63: Just Another Multiple of Nine, was written, produced and direct-

ed by Christopher J. Garcia and posted to eFanzines.com by Bill Burns: King of All Fan-

nish Media. If you’ve got a comment or just want to see how many emails you can send me

before I go nuts, you can send them to garcia@computerhistory.org or, if you’re Old Skool,

drop a letter to 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View CA 94043. Or, if you’re so inclined,

drop by and buy me lunch. I won’t complain!

A Simple Adventure Story

One of, if not THE, greatest movie ever

made is Sam Peckinpah’s brilliant The Wild

Bunch. There’s no question that it’s the great-

est Western ever made and that there are per-

formances that would blow anything else out

of the water. The combination of violence and

beauty and grit and intensity is everything

that Quint Tarantino would be credited for

introducing to ilm just a few decades later.

As is almost always true, great ictional

material leads to great documentary material,

and that is the case with A Simple Adven-

ture Story, a short documentary about The

Wild Bunch. Director Nick Redman brought a

group of long-time Peckinpah and Wild Bunch

devotees to the area of Mexico where Sam

made his classic. They show old clips from the

ilm as well as clips of the original footage they

took when they were scouting locations. They

talked with locals who were extras in the ilm,

including one who had a couple of lines. There

are strong connections to the ilm still evident

in the city, and throughout that Northern area

of Mexico.

Perhaps the most impressive thing

about A Simple Adventure Story is the con-

nection of the folks that get interviewed, the

movie and Sam Peckinpah himself. A couple of

them worked with him, and almost all of them

knew him to some degree. The ilm obviously

changed these guys, they’re all most ilmmak-

ers, but it speaks to the power of personality

that can sometimes bleed through, even if the

real star isn’t on the screen.

M Goes Shopping

One of the better things about M is

that she knows how to shop. Despite be-

ing rich beyond my second wildest dreams,

the girl manages to get stuff cheap and

look good doing it. She once got a corset,

the one she’s wearing in the photo above,

for less than ifty bucks. When I asked how

she pulled it off, she said ‘I’ve got boobs.

That should answer your question.”

M wrote an email the other day about

some shopping she did in Helsinki. She

said that the town itself was pretty expen-

sive, along the lines of Berlin. She said

that you can get the best tech gadgets for

a song, which I like to hear since my Birth-

day is coming up.

She said she had gone out for clothes

and had come back about 1,500 bucks

lighter. That’s ine, with her money, she

can spend like that once in a while. But

when I asked what she got, she blew me

away.

The irst thing I found was a leather

jacket, just like Trish Stratus wears. That

would have cost 800, but I talked him down

to 500 and I also picked up a bunch of short

skirts and some stuff that reminded me of

my old house parties for another 300, which

should have cost me 700. I got a few other

bits of leather and a few shoes, all of it for

1500 when it should have been around

4000. The guy must have liked me to shave

so much off his mark-up.

Man, I wish I had the boobs to bring

the cost of a new sweater vest down.

Wired Before We Were Wired

Frank Wu may or may not be

an Angel. There’s no proof that I could

give, but there’s certainly a possibil-

ity that he is one of those who has

touched Ghod and returned to give us

Peace, Love and Understanding.

You see Frank gave me, as a

Christmas gift, a stack of 1925 edi-

tions of Science and Invention. They

were wonderful, colourful and just

plain rad, but why would Frank have

a bunch of issues of S&I?

Well, Hugo Gernsback edited

Science and Invention in those days,

along with running WRNY radio sta-

tion and doing experiments and

editing science iction. He was an

all-around guy. He also liked to use

several artists, including Frank R.

Paul. Frank Wu maintains the Frank

R. Paul site, so he bought the S&Is to

look for Paul’s work. When none were

found, he gave them to me.

And what a gift thet are.

There are several that just

scream me, like the one here with the

900,000 dollar ship getting blown up

(I believe it was for a ilm about the

Spanish-American War) and there are

several that feature my favourite form of transport: The Dirigible. There’s an article about

the future airplane which will be Steam-Powered. The drawing of it that just makes me

smile (it’s the one below), especially since it would never have been able to ly.

Science and Invention is often thought of as a hobbyist magazine, and it was certain-

ly meant for those who loved early electronics and radio and the like, but really, it was the

1920s version of Wired. There were Science Fiction stories as well as non-technical articles.

There were explanations of new

inventions and descriptions of

things that were ‘ahead’ (most

of which never made it). There

were articles on how to turn

your radio into a short-wave

receiver and how television (the

mechanical variety) might end

up working. They even outline

what seems to be the airline

hub concept, only using Dirigi-

bles and the North Pole!

Needless to say, Frank

Wu is a good, nay, GREAT man.

The MAN!

When the history of the video game indus-

try is written, likely by Arnie Katz, it will feature a

guy whose name might not be too widely known

but whose start-up spirit change the business

forever. His name is Nolan Bushnell, and he’s a

genius.

Nolan was an electrical engineering major

at Utah and he got his hands on the DEC main-

frames there. One of the most typical pursuits

that computer users in those days would under-

take is a game called SpaceWar, designed by Slug

Russell and friends at MIT. Nolan got to playing it

and it sunk in that folks outside of the computer

labs might want to play SpaceWar. Nolan went to

work for Nutting Associates and released Comput-

erSpace, the irst commercial arcade game. Sadly,

it lopped, but Bushnell got the idea to make a

home video version of Ping-Pong (from visiting the

Magnavox Odyssey booth at a Burlingame Elec-

tronics show where Ralph Baer’s original version

was being shown) and he had his friend Al Al-

corn build him one. That was the start of the irst

Video Game Juggarnaut: Atari.

Nolan was at Atari for only a few years. He

bought out his partner and then he sold to Warn-

er Communications. He made a mint on that sale and he was still with the company until

1978, just after the Atari 2600 changed home video gaming forever.

When Nolan gets free time, he starts companies. He had started a division of Atari

called the Pizza Time Theatres. He bought the rights from Warner and then launched them

with their mascot Chuck E. Cheese. This became a big hit, but it didn’t last forever, as the

crash in video games in the mid-1980s led to him leave Atari as it entered bankruptcy.

Didn’t really matter, Nolan had other ideas.

Nolan had started a second video game company called Sente in the early 1980s.

This was a very advanced series of games which featured great graphics. With Chuck E.

Cheese’s in bankrupcy, there really wasn’t a major outlet to give Sente games the nation-

wide exposure. Sente didn’t do very well except for the hockey game called Hat Trick, but

their games are popular today with collectors who do the Arcade Show circuit.

About the same time, he started a robotics company called Androbot. It was a home

robot company that was way ahead of its time. This went down fast and ended up produc-

ing robots for only two years. He also founded a company that made a bear that would go

on to inluence Teddy Ruxpin and Furbies.

The Garcia family has long ties to Nolan starting with my Grandma. She used to work

at the Hyatt House in San Jose as a Coffee Shoppe waitress with her Identical Twin. Nolan

used to stop in every few days and she was his favourite waitress. My dad was the irst se-

curity guard hired at Atari and often had good convo with Nolan. My Mom, Aunt and Uncle

all worked for Atari in the 1972 through 1979 timeframe.

I met Nolan when I was a kid, but it wasn’t until I was working at the Museum that

I really got to talk to him. He and I played a version of SpaceWar and I beat him fair and

square. A genuinely nice guy, Nolan’s been here a few times and always enjoys himself.

What’s with the Retro?

You may be asking why I just did an issue that was more like the early ones than

anything I’ve done in six months or so. Did I forget how much they sucked? No, not at all.

I just wanted to do a simple issue like this again before I forgot how. One of the reasons

is because I’m about to dive into The Drink Tank issue 64 with all sorts of vigour, prepar-

ing my First AnnIsh for late next week or early the following. It’ll be an interesting issue,

that’s for sure, with just about everybody who's ever written for me taking a stab at an

article for me. I’m having a lot of fun laying it out and illing in with my own and those

from The Cahootery.

So, what’s after that? Will The Drink Tank be forever changed? Nope, not in the

slightest. I’ll probably take a week off (which means you’ll get, at most, one issue of the

Drink Tank that week) and then it’s back to the weekly. I’ll be taking a break during

Cinequest (with a wrap-up issue after it’s all over) and I’ll probably be doing a lot of writ-

ing for Science Fiction / San Francisco on the various cons that seem to start up in the

middle of February.

Other than that, it’s all normal about the Garcia Compound. I’m starting to look for

a place to move in the coming months (probably into Downtown San Jose or maybe Cu-

pertino) and then it’s all about getting myself ready for my serious con season (starting

with BayCon and running until SiliCon in October)

I’m ready, even if I’m not that steady!

M Lloyd Presents

A Chris Garcia Story

from Years Gone By

I’ve been waiting to have a reason to

run this, and here it is with Chris tell-

ing me he has a section that needs ill-

ing. I found this in one of the old cigar

boxes I keep full of letters and poems

and such. Read and rejoice in 18 year

old Chris Garcia’s prose!

She sat with her back to me, not

smiling, but not frowning either. She was

up to something, though I’m not sure

what. The string in her hands seemed

connected to some far-away object, not

a kite, it was far too steady, but perhaps

to a building. I learned far too late what

the other end had been anchored to, and

when I saw it arrive, I knew my choices

had all been poor.

There was an eyelet on the moon

that she had tied her string to. She reeled

it in, pulling it ever-closer, increasing the

tides and signing our Death Certiicates.

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