Las Vegas a cultural wasteland, America a cultural wasteland. I was desperate to access secret history, the avant garde. I read James Joyce and Ezra Pound. I read On the Road and Naked Lunch. I tried to hide these from my Mom, and when she found them out she was very worried for me.

I sensed that there was something there beneath the surface of my life and education, like an underground lake. I tried to find some entre into this obscure cultural reservoir through movies, and I scoured Blockbuster videos for “foreign” movies or art movies. Music videos had given me a taste and I knew there had to be more. The pickings were so slim, I did find a very poor VHS copy of the silent movie “Metropolis.” This was all before the latest wave of film restoration and preservation started. This was still in a time when “silent movies” were never shown, and were only acknowledged to be made fun of. Whenever you saw a clip of a silent movie on tv it was always sped up to make the clip look ridiculous.

It was in this mentality that I would go to the big record stores and pick up bargain discount versions of figures like Bob Dylan and John Coltrane. I knew their names. I didn’t know any of their music, but I picked them up in the hope that they could open doors and help me find ElDorado.

Snake charmer Cassette, maybe a bargain bin https://www.discogs.com/master/393323-John-Coltrane-The-Best-Of-John-Coltrane

Drive around listening to it.