Bob Baker's heroes include the guy who writes a letter to the DMV asking for a 'handicapped' parking permit on grounds that his heart is broken:"Since she left I'm a human frownCan't stand up for falling downI lost a hundred points off my credit score, soHow can you ignoreThis handicap?"Then there's the guy who explains to his psychologist why "low expectations" keep him sane:"When life hands me lemonsIt's lemons they stayWhen I go to trial I don't get off like O.JWhen I come on to a woman she rejects me at first sightI expect nothing and I'm always right"And the guy who dreams that he has insomnia:"There's a black, jagged pit of dreams rubbed rawAnd a man whose body achesSo tormented by some nameless phobiaThat he thinks he's still awake"And the guy who can't figure why he just got dumped."I was there from the start, I healed your broken heartI propped up your confidenceTil one day I spotted this younger guyClimbing over your fenceI politiely asked you for his name and you said:You can call him lover manAnd then you got into his van"And the creep who celebrates getting 'an e-mail from a female,' and tries to lure an under-aged girl on the Internet:"Open it up, wop boom bamPraying so hard that it ain't spam......It ain't spam, it's a girl named GwenAsking me do I wanna I.M.?I got an e-mail from a femaleI got an e-mail from a femaleI got an e-mail from a femaleMaybe she'll be the one."Once in a while, some of these guys develop a conscience or a backbone. Like the one who refuses to take a cheating girlfriend back and wishes that four grotesque scenarios befall her. Or the one who vows to stop settling for being 'almost there.
' Or the country singer who can't wait to tell his mother that his struggling band finally made an audience dance. Or the lovesick guy desperately breathing the name of his lover. Or the one who is still consumed by 9/11:"Half the world is crazy, and the other half is scaredWhen it comes to dying, they're religiously preparedThey cross the street on red lights,they don't look the other waySo confident they're never gonna make it through the day They used to love to greet the dawn, but nowadays they hurlEpithets at sunrise--there's a madness in the world. "Bob's characters grew out of three decades of chronicling human absurdity as a newspaper reporter and editor. He quit the Los Angeles Times, produced a home-made demo, and made two trips to Nashville to re-record the music with session players. That experience was so heart-warming that Bob authored a first-person account of it in the New York Times in 2007. (See "Links" info on left-hand side of this page.
)Bob, a Los Angeles native, is the co-author of 'Burn, Baby! BURN!' (University of Illinois Press, 2003), the autobiography of legendary R&B deejay Magnificent Montague. He also wrote "Newsthinking" (Allyn & Bacon, 2001), a book on mental organization for journalists.
Here's a translation from a Dutch website specializing in alt-country, http:// altcountry.
nl/recensiesmrt08.
html#bbakerThe 58-year old Bob Baker ...