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In This Issue

• Graffiti: High Art with Penii
• War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Columbia is Friend
• COPS: Keeping You Safe, At Any Cost
• Pigs, Drugs, and Electric Shocks
• Letters to the Feditors
• Operation: Fed Freedom!
• Mike Ilardi: From Carman Mutant to Fed Helm
• Farewell, Mr. Lippert
• The Pope Vs. Katie, Round II
• Pranking Feditor Fades into Archival File Cabinet
• Oodles of Doodles
• The Last Days of Mary-Kate and Ashley
• Gangrenous Jaguar
• The True Story of How the Big Bad Bunny Stole the Easter Animal Election From the Cute Piggy
• What All the Cool Immortals Are Reading
• John Jay Flees, Kids Rejoice
• Arts & Entertainment : Del McCoury Band
• THEY Watch
• Meet the Staff of 20.8
• Get to Know Us!

Matt Holden

My infatuation with bluegrass music began some time ago, long before it was cool (and I assure you that it is, in fact, preeminently cool). You might picture me as a toothless simpleton, content to spend my life wandering from town to town in search of a patch for my mud-stained overalls. I hate to burst your bubble, my presumptuous reader, but you'd be wrong. Well, except for the toothless part. Your nomadic portrait leaves out my penchant for hit-and-run bestiality, but that's neither here nor there.

Following in this grand tradition begun by Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys, I picked up a banjo over eBay and a set of finger picks from the Appalachian Bluegrass Shoppe in Catonsville, Maryland. Over the past few months, I honed my skills, working my way up to some basic "rolls" and simple melodies. Combined, they form the basis of bluegrass banjo, as well as Captain Planet, although this latter product also requires earth, water, wind, fire, and heart.

Unfortunately, not long ago, I collided with a brick wall. Yes, in the literal sense of having been the victim of some bovine sexual clumsiness, but also in my progress on the banjo. Having mastered the basics, I couldn't manage to rise to the next level of play. This would include techniques like the "slide" and the "hammer-on" (These are technical terms that you corn-fed louts needn't concern yourselves with. I aim to impress, not inform). There is a limited amount one can glean from tutorial websites, and New York offers a selection of banjo instructors shallower than the deep end of Michael Jackson's swimming pool. Faced with the prospect of endlessly repeating the Scruggs roll (again, you are all slack-jawed buffoons), I knew that I needed a breakthrough, the kind of transformative experience whose description ends with, "And that's when I knew..."

A solution presented itself almost immediately. The Del McCoury Band would perform at an Annapolis, Maryland club on a weekend for which I'd be nearby. Excellent. Delano McCoury is the band's namesake, lead singer, and a pillar of a man. He looks about sixty-five years old, with a leathery face and the "high and lonesome" voice that even you people know is essential to the bluegrass sound. Del's hair is a vibrant silver and has the distinction of being the world's only pompadour carved from a single chunk of granite.

The rest of the band: Jason Carter on fiddle, Mike Bub playing the bass fiddle, and two of Del's sons, Ronnie McCoury on mandolin and his brother Rob working magic out of the banjo. With that, my friends and compatriots, we've arrived at the crux of this ode to bluegrass. Rob McCoury's banjo proficiency is inhuman.

I remember the band stepping onto the tiny stage and launching into "Travelin' Teardrop Blues," a furiously paced, banjo driven number about (what else?) life on the road. From that point forward, I saw little but the hands molesting Rob McCoury's banjo. The left was promenading along the banjo's neck and the right one was pickin' the strings like it was digging money out of them. It was the revelation of a parallel universe, a fundamental revision to the nature and number of sounds that I'd known to exist.

Watching Rob McCoury play the banjo was like watching another man have sex with my wife - and her loving every minute of it. Her rapid, staccato stream of passionate tones made it clear that McCoury was touching spots I hadn't thought existed in ways I hadn't thought possible. Obviously, he is a master, the Sherlock to my Watson, the Penny to my Inspector Gadget, the Captain Planet to my young Brazilian boy-with-a-monkey (the kid with the heart power, sheesh).

I still play the banjo as frequently as I ever did, and it's nice knowing that there's a world of untapped sound in there somewhere. Until I find it, though, I'll have to cope with the following knowledge: those of us on the receiving end of such virtuosity are so lacking in relative talent, and so deficient in any comparable skill, that we can only hope to gather enough of Rob McCoury's table scraps to cobble together a meal. Literally. But hey, if the banjo doesn't work out, there's always the mandolin.

[Editor's note: the author has assumed that the mandolin is commonly known to be extremely difficult to play. Therefore, he thinks the article's final sentence is uproariously funny. In writing this note himself, he is also being very patronizing. The third-person references to himself don't help to temper his tone of inborn superiority. Somehow, his admission that he is patronizing the reader with this note has made him into even more of a condescending asshole. He does not see a way out of the vicious cycle of this endnote.

And that's when he knew...]