Toledo Tales

A Toledo Tales Guest Editorial
By Derek Pulser, Local Jazz Bassist

Pulser: A Musician with Integrity, Dignity, and Bloodlust

Let me hit the ground running here: I play jazz bass and am going to say a few things about music. So if you listen to Brad Paisley, or Jay-Z, or Panic! At the Disco, or even if know two guitar chords (both of which are probably variants of G major), you need to go buy an issue of Teen People, roll it up tightly, and stick it down your motherfucking throat.

For too long I have played Mingus and Coltrane covers to drunk college kids and Ottawa Hills yuppies who have asked me—after the most blistering, soulful sets of my life—“to play something they can sing to…you know, something from the radio.” And because of this, I pray the same prayer every day of my life: oh, that someone would kill the band Bon Jovi in front of their children.

Why Bon Jovi? I know they’ve already enjoyed their lame, late-eighties peak of third tier hair rock and are now just coasting through Botox Wonderland. But what drives me up a wall is that these ass-lickers continue to make cheesy, disposable pop-rock that cute, 30-something single mothers buy impulsively when they’re shopping for kid shoes at Target. I have a Masters in Music Theory and Composition, do five gigs a week, and can’t even get a date, but these guys write lines like “I just wanna live while I’m alive” and every woman between 28 and 45 drops their fucking panties. Bad poetry and power chord clichés: such things, my friends, are why people fly planes into our buildings.

I propose that some brave soul round these faggots up, bind their hands and feet with duct tape, and make them listen to their entire catalog of crap while their kids squeal with terror a few feet away. And then after everyone’s shit themselves, and begged for their pathetic corporate lives, and pledged fervently to make real music with a real message, they get blown to bits by a bazooka.

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. The day popular music got reduced to the lowest common denominator of bouffant-haired Jersey pride, millions of purists like myself had a dream of restoration. Now if only someone was willing to do life in prison without parole for this dream, I’d be one happy bassist.

Labels: bass players, bassist, Bon Jovi