Whatever Happened to the Bambi Slam? And Other Assorted Mixed-Up Thoughts

"You know that you won't find whatever it is you're looking for in that stuff." I looked up to see if it was I being spoken to. It was. "That music," said the smiling, clean-shaven face across from me. "I see you listening to it all the time - listening and writing stuff on that computer of yours. Why? Are you seeking something in it?" Seeking? That word could only mean one thing and it tipped me off to the well-scrubbed fellow's angle; I immediately knew where he was going with this pre-evangelical inquiry.

"Seeking?" I asked back, noticing the Bible he was reading.
"Yeah," he said with a grin. "Usually those sorts of things - music, books, television, movies, drugs," the last word dropped from his mouth as if it were a piece of rancid meat he'd just bitten into. DR-ughs. "Usually those are the vices of lost souls," he explained. "They're the golden calves of our modern society, false God's. And, the thing is, that people - in defiance of God's very first Commandment - tend to worship them because they are seeking something they do not have, or that they have yet to find."

I nodded, trying to be pleasant while ignoring his overture.
"The answer is," he said, sliding his bible across the table toward me, "right under your nose now." He smiled and then chuckled a bit. "Under your nose, not in your ears," he added, apparently hoping that I'd remove my headset to listen to his spreading of "the word".

I shot him a blank expression.

"Go ahead," he said with a smirk and a nod toward the open bible in front of me, "Make my day." He laughed in self-amusement. I turned off my music and removed my headset.
"Look pal," I started. "I have nothing, not a thing, against religion. In fact, I have my own set of very sincere beliefs in some kind of higher power." I figured that using "some kind" and "higher power" might offend his God-ly sensibilities, but really didn't care. "But the last thing I need is you telling me that my spirituality - whether I seek it in that bible of yours, tea leaves, a box of Cracker Jacks, or the music I listen to - is anything less than yours."

I began to slip my earphones back into place when the guy smiled at me and said, "Whatever happened to the Bambi Slam?"

The dude had clubbed me, and good. I was floored. The Bambi Slam! Jesus, I hadn't heard that name mentioned in years, and even back then no one ever talked much about that record. It was truly one of the lost pleasures of my past. But he couldn't have meant the Bambi Slam, could he? I removed my headset once again.

"What did you say?"

"The Bambi Slam…have you ever heard of them? They were Canadian or something, or I should say he was - wasn't that a one man deal or something?"

"Yeah," I said, flabbergasted. "Some guy called…"

"Roy!" he interrupted. "I really dug that record. So you've heard of it, eh?"

"Oh yeah, 'The Awful Flute Song', Roy…and all of that. I used to listen to it a lot" I must have looked pale. I felt pale, like I was in shock.

"You okay?"

"Yeah…yes…I mean…Yeah, I am fine."

"Just shocked that a 'bible thumper' like myself knows who the Bambi Slam was aren't ya?"

"I have to admit, yes, I am…very"

"I was like you once," his tone now turning preachy.
"I don't need a lecture right now," I replied, reaching for my earphones.

"You probably think you don't, but that music, that lifestyle, well it leads to Nowhere City my friend. You're a lost sheep."
I glared at the dude.

"And your lifestyle?" I asked. "It's superior to mine I suppose?"
"Superior?" he chortled. "Well, judge not lest ye be judged I suppose, but I am comfortable in knowing my salvation is guaranteed."

"Well, that may be the case for you, and I would never try and take that away from you. Live and let live I say, and respect that ideal at all turns - but I don't need any guarantees my friend, my salvation comes every day, every time I turn this damn disc player on."

"Well, you may think that…"

I cut him off. "No, I don't think that, I feel it. You see, you may get your answers in that book right there, and that is fine, fantastic actually. I do not begrudge you your religious beliefs, they are as urgently important to your spirituality as this music is to mine. I find more consolation, more answers, more comfort, more life, in these sounds than I imagine I ever could anywhere else. It called on me from a very young age, and it really hasn't ever let me down. Now, that isn't to say that I hold the music up as a deity - my God - or anything like that, but rather I recognize it as humanity serving humanity through the grace of whatever higher power or order may exist."

I felt like I was preaching now myself, a feeling that I am never, and have never been, comfortable with. But this guy was questioning something that I believed in dearly, and he'd made the mistake of doing so while I was listening to the most spiritually satisfying record I'd heard in a long, long time, David Baerwald's Here Comes the New Folk Underground.
"The one Higher Power is not an order or something else in the vague ideals that you seem to describe, that sort of cop out is typical of the lost, but rather…"

"I don't need you to tell me anything," I said quietly, cutting him short again. "I am very glad that you are comfortable with your own station in life, I just wish you could see to it that you might be glad just the same for others."

Glad just the same for others - a lesson we may never learn on this planet I suppose. In Angola, Algeria, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, factions in Central and South America's, Senegal, Rawanda, hell, much or most of Africa in fact, the Philippines, Korea, in so many places that the so-called New World Order has taken its 'one-world-market' and stripped indigenous peoples of their culture, their politics, their humanity, and handed them guns but not food, and taught them greed but not how to read. Doom. Everywhere that religious fervor is the only thing that the people have left for themselves anymore, where faith is the only identity that remains in a world that has stripped them of the simple dignities - culture, clothing, bread, and shelter - that used to serve as a bridge between their differences. They are now left with nothing but the tiresome fight over whose God is more right through might. And as I try my damnedest to keep a distance from mingling the politics of our times with the music about which I am supposed to write I cannot help but wonder, with this evangelist sitting across from me, peacefully, for now, how it has all come to this. Worse yet, I get the feeling I know all to well.

I slid the bible back to him, a thanks-but-no-thanks gesture, and tell him that I appreciate his caring, but I apparently have a separate set of values and there's no use debating them. I can see that he wants, or perhaps needs, to say more to me, but I simply smile and put my headset back on and press 'play'. "One, two, three, four…" I hear David Baerwald count off the opening cut from his new record, "Why". The song is a gentle, flowing number that was written as Baerwald's personal attempt at catharsis, an effort to reconcile the tragic and difficult death of a close friend's seven-year old son. It is as deeply spiritual as anything written in any book, bible, in any film, or on any recent record (I later ask Baerwald if the song worked as the catharsis it sought? It did, he says, and isn't it funny how we can always just move on in life? Amen brother, amen). "Why" is utterly cathartic, even for those unfamiliar with its history. It's freeing. It is both hallelujah and amen. It's as nourishing to my spirit as any homily I've ever sat through, or as any passage from any book of worship. And as my friend gathers up his bible and saunters away toward his own version of salvation, I stumble onto my own deep within this song. I, in fact, find it all over this glorious, wonderful record. And I know that this is all I ever really need. I am saved once again.

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