Another musical setting for WSB's magnificent spoken voice. As with Dead City Radio, Hal Willner is involved in the production, though the backing here — by The Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy, featuring Michael Franti previously of The Beatnigs — is a more funky affair.
Material used WSB's monologues mostly as decoration for their music, but when the tables are turned and the voice is up front, everything depends on how good the spoken texts are. There are a one or two here that aren't top notch, like the title track, for instance. There's a reading of The Talking Asshole that doesn't sound as good as Frank Zappa's to me, but possibly that's because I got to know Frank's version so well first.
The stand-out for me is the 16-minute short story, The Junky's Christmas. I had a C90 cassette of Time Out of Mind that I kept in my car, and I recorded The Junky's Christmas onto the end of the tape to make up close to the full 90 minutes. I must have heard that story 20 times. I went through a phase of finding it boring because I knew each turn of the narrative by heart, but then it came good again. Years later, I gave Lucy the car, and the stock of cassettes with it. She loved the story. But she was disappointed when she bought a CD copy of Time Out of Mind and found that The Junky's Christmas wasn't on it!
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