shocking revelation!

Travel with me back to those halcyon days of the early '80s, when Lower East Side hipsters that cut their hair with scissors while chatting on big old clunky era-appropriate telephones were actually able to land tracks in the charts! To a time before people recognized that "performance art" meant people who couldn't dance dancing, people who couldn't play an instrument playing an instrument, people who couldn't act acting, people who couldn't paint painting, and people who were quite skilled at removing their clothing removing their clothing. Anyway: during such a rare cultural moment, it actually might have made sense for a major label to release a record more or less by a jazz artist with a track that was a knowing parody of Philip Glass-style minimalism. And hire beloved British eccentric - woodgrained vocalist Robert Wyatt - to sing on a few tracks. But: cover your bets by actually releasing the album as billed to a member of Pink Floyd. Good plan...except the member of Pink Floyd in question is the drummer, Nick Mason.

All of the above makes this track absurd to identify. See, technically the album is billed to Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports - but really, it's Carla Bley's band (and compositions) with Mason sitting in on drums. And Wyatt's a name artist in his own right, of course - being one of those people who are quite famous among people who've heard of him. So I tend to prefer the rather unwieldy "Robert Wyatt and Carla Bley with Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports" - just because it's a lot less misleading than "Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports" (the music sounds not a bit like anything Pink Floyd ever did).

Anyway: the track in question, "I'm a Mineralist," not only features a dead-on Glass parody in its middle section (play this for your Glass-fan friends and claim it's a newly discovered work circa Einstein on the Beach - they'll believe you) but, for groan-inducing humor fans, a lyric that's entirely a series of terrifyingly awful puns. (Don't forget that musicians sometimes refer to a trombone as a "bone"...)

Speaking of Laurie Anderson (yes, I was, many words ago), for some reason all the way later in 1998, a band with the brilliantly charming name of Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives recorded this track called "My Dinner with Laurie" (which seems to have nothing to do with the similarly titled film from the same era). It does a pretty good job of nailing Anderson's phrasing and a few of her typical lyrical and musical devices (such as the instrumental middle section, with its jumpy additive rhythms), although its chorus makes no particular effort to be Andersonesque. But really, it's here because otherwise, the title of the first track would take up so much more space than the title of the second track.

Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports (with Carla Bley and Robert Wyatt) "I'm a Mineralist"
Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives "My Dinner with Laurie"