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Jumpin' Jack Flush

from Hopscotch To Heaven by Young Southpaw

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lyrics

So ya know when Jaco Pastorius, ya know greatest bass player who ever lived, he was asked once in an interview – ‘where is the future of the electric bass going?’ and he stood up and said ‘well right now it’s going to use the bathroom’...

I mean that’s pretty funny...but it’s also so dangerous ya know!...he’s saying that he’s the future of the electric bass..but what if he went and just flushed that all down the toilet?!...and then there were no more bass players ever, ya know like The Doors...I don’t wanna go down another Doors rabbit hole, but did he close that bathroom door?...it’s a relevant question I guess...or did he leave it wide open so the whole world could see him flushing the entire future of low frequencies down the toilet, man?...

...of course this would be a disaster...I mean first off those low frequenices would cause some serious damage to the whole septic system of the city...

and then people wouldn’t know what to do, I mean in time they’d start hearing the rumors again of the old bass players and they’d havta like...dive down into the toilet..ya know like Slothrop goin’ afta the harmonica in Gravity’s Rainbow...though the harmonica is not a bass instrument, too small ya know...though in uh Against The Day he has them playin’ bass harmonicas...though ya know bass harmonicas wouldn’t fit down a toilet, though again I guess a bass guitar wouldn’t either... though, even as Jaco said, we’re here talking about the whole idea of bass frequencies...which like I’ve already started are probably even more dangerous to just send down the toilet like that...that’s a disaster no one wants to be a part of...

...do more damage than Boston Baked Beans...which as you’ll recall Boston is precisely where Slothrop actually goes down the toilet, Roseland Ballroom...roses, huh...Outkast you know....and Roseland was where Malcolm X was the shoeshine boy...

Slothrop’s harmonica goes down the toilet and he goes down after it, well there’s that scene from Trainspotting ya know...echoes that when he loses his opium suppository if ya need a visual, man...ugh...woah...imagine havin’ to do that to save the bass...how low can you go, as Public Enemy asked....well, I think we’ve found our answer

then you had Public Enema as Iron Maiden said on the No Prayer For The Dying album...ya got Eddie comin’ up outta the grave on the cover...but who’s to say he didn’t first traverse the whole septic system while he was down there...lookin’ for his own harmonica...or ya know just curious as to what gets lost down there...but No Prayer For The Dying...I mean Steve Harris, Maiden’s main songwriter is a bass player himself and I doubt he’d want to lose all those low end frequencies...

but Eddie man, he had all those adventures...and what if like nothing is ever lost, like the present just lives on top of the past, like somewhere way underneath ancient Egyptian civilization is still going on...like time is like a cake and these are all layers...ya know like the Powerslave record...well I guess cake is more equated with the French Revolution, I mean there’s an idea for a Maiden album...maybe they were even thinkin’ of it when they recorded Murders In The Rue Morgue, usin’ Rue as the French word for street and all that...

but then Maiden prolly sensed this cause the next record was called Somewhere In Time...but what I’m sayin’ is perhaps Eddie was down in the underworld exploring all these crazy times and he somehow winds up in the Boston toilet system in the 30s and meets the fictional character of Tyrone Slothrop..but in real life!...the two of them then teaming up to try and convince Maiden to record a cover of It Takes Two with special guest vocalist ol’ Tommy P himself!...but then again which It Takes Two song?!..Rob Base or Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston...well I guess by the nature of the numba two they should do both! perfect for a 7” single too! one on each side...this idea’s got legs! let’s do it, Maiden!

but ya know, goin’ back to this idea of civilizations literally being on top of one another...well I guess there’s gotta be a better way to travel down to them than by the toilet but that’s what we got for now...well I mean if that’s the case, maybe we can get down to lost kingdom of Atlantis! I mean that would be rad...I loved that Intellivision game as a kid...imagine if they had record labels back then, I mean you can’t say they didn’t...well you can say it but....but I mean Atlantis Records...prolly a precursor to Atlantic Records...just change the S to a C, you know like with the Russian spelling of USSR being CCCP...did I get all the C’s in there...maybe, I don’t know...ya know because of the Cyrillic alphabet...I’m not saying the Atlanteans were Communists...let’s not head down that route...but ya know who was on Atlan-tic Records...well only Led Zeppelin...and with this whole travelin’ to the past via toilet tubes...well that could be where Jimmy Page got his idea for the water slides!...I mean they had that whole Travellin’ Riverside Blues song too!

I mean Atlantis was supposedly this very advanced ancient civilization, I mean I wonder if what did them in was finding out that David Lee Roth would leave Van Halen?...or maybe it just coincided ya know, everything started to crumble at the exact same time they received this information from the future...maybe from Eddie bouncing around time like that, Iron Maiden’s Eddie not EVH!.. it all just seems acausal...I wonder if Maiden and Van Halen ever played at a festival together...though you’d think if the Atlanteans were as far along as some people claim, if they’d invented time-travel they would’ve made that happen..for sure...

then you got that otha underwata kingdom, ya know Lemuria...which I find a strange name cause lemurs...don’t swim...or actually I think some of them might but they are not aquatic creatures ya know..by nature...so maybe they meant lemmings ya know?...throwing themselves off the cliff inta the ocean...Zeppelin all cranked up...

Lemmings ya know...maybe!..maybe they meant Lemmy! ya know from Motorhead...everything louder than everything else, ya know that Motorhead saying...though apparently that saying comes from that live Deep Purple album ‘Made In Japan’ bringin’ it back to Iron Maiden again, woah!..but ya know the spellings of Made In being different between the bands, that woulda been crazy if Deep Purple named it Made In M-A-I-D-E-N ya know..kinda cool though acknowledging Maiden’s magnificence like that..but I mean the word ‘everything’ implies the bass too, ya know in ‘everything louder than everything else’ then you got Nicki Minaj with that Superbass tune, imagine the band that Nicki Minaj and Lemmy coulda had...that woulda been amazing!..I mean they could still do it ya know...just get in contact via séance or something...and record it...I mean they prolly couldn’t, well no, they could tour..just gotta keep that medium link open, again like in Gravity’s Rainbow!...though if the concert promoters in ancient Atlantis got wind of this, you know they’d be whisking them off too...we gotta be careful, ya know, so these acts can tour in the present time as well so we can get to see ‘em...

so I guess it seems like Lemuria had a lotta bass...was this like the division between the two kingdoms, between Lemuria and Atlantis...Atlantis was all like, well no cause the bass got flushed there to begin with..and they didn’t want it?..I guess cause they had heard about David Lee Roth leavin’ Van Halen and they didn’t know if Michael Anthony and Eddie would continue with the high backing vocals so they wanted to preserve all those high frequencies – I mean they needn’t have worried – but they didn’t know of course, that event was so disruptive..they were too heavily invested in George Orwell – to them Orwell spelt with a nautical A in there between the O and the R...so did they just shuffle the bass off to Lemuria where it – but all water is connected, you can’t have bass in one and not in another section, maybe that is what drove the two kingdoms to despair and why they don’t exist anymore...and why Lemmy had to appear on..on terrestrial land, you know?...it’s a shame he and Nicki Minaj didn’t start their band together when they could have both enjoyed it in corporeal form...and then her Starships, you always hear about those connections too with these lost kingdoms...I mean did Thomas Jefferson.. take...a...starship..down..the..toilet...to Atlantis...I mean why would he do that?.......well I mean yeah I guess it’s kinda obvious if ya think about, you’d want to be in some sort of ship, some kind of protection if you’re going down toilet pipes...huh... but Jefferson Airplane were from the Bay Area, the Lemuria side of the world!..so if Jefferson was going to Atlantis...was he a spy?......though I mean maybe it wasn’t even political, we can’t jump to those conclusions..ya know how soccer teams watch tapes of their opponents...

well I bet..I bet baseball was a completely different game underwater ya know..playin’ with actual bass frequencies..and that’s how..the whole idea of...sonar...well I mean they got it from the whales..obviously..now whales..woo!..they musta been a team ta beat! some serious mofos there...I wish we had access to the records of those games..even just knowin’ the scores of one or two of those games would surely be eye-opening! e-y-e and just the letter I, as in the self ya know both of ‘em...whales usin’ sonar, cause it’s dark down there too...but obviously too that’s what we base – no pun intended – submarines on...did they hafta stop playin’ cause of the submarines interferin’ with the natural course of action...but maybe that’s just the way of things..when you’re playin’ games with..sonic frequencies...man...dolphins too, porpoises...woo! I wonder if the bats ever got in on this!...for some sort of, well not international, though that certainly may apply too, but inter-environmental inter-ecosystem what would it be! two Es right there but not so E-Z!...like DJ EZ-Rock who collaborated with Rob Base on one of the It Takes Two songs...Rob Base, it’s in his name!...but like the Miami Dolphins, were teams species-based? so that one of the teams was the Dolphin Miamis? I mean you can’t say there’s no I in Miami..there’s two for goodness sakes!...and there’s an I AM...ya know like God said to Moses in Exodus...I mean does Miami just use iambic pentameter...or like the Dolphin Miamis instead of well maybe not instead of cause why limit ourselves, but along with cheerleaders they also have bards that communicate solely through iambic pentameter? or is that why they were bringing all these bands down?!....and does that mess up the sonar? like there are rules that no poems can be composed whenever a match is in play?...I don’t know, again I wish we had those records...

but then like..did they have bases as well, like b-a-s-e?..like Rob Base...like in baseball?..I don’t know!...I mean where were they actually playing? cause like when ya say it, ya kinda picture like a baseball diamond ya know...just to latch on to what you know...but it coulda been anything, specially if the bass being referred to is subsonic frequencies, underwater no less...can’t run to those, those are moving!...all this played long ago, in a kingdom far..well not that far away, spatially it’s still here on Earth...I don’t wanna cram Star Wars inta this...unless like that’s the name of the Star-fish team, like the Starfish Wars...ya gotta imagine if animals on terrestrial land had teams like this the Pigs would also have the team name Wars...War Pigs bein’ cranked out everytime the Pigs took the field...good thing the Starfish and the Pigs could never play each other, ya know cause of the land/ocean divide...though maybe in the future...but of course there hadda be underwater stars...ya know, of the game!...though ya couldn’t really have baseball cards underwater..they’d get too soggy ya know...unless they were like holograms, I mean they did have that advanced technology down there


but I mean people do still play electric bass today...so I mean obviously... well I can’t say it didn’t happen cause it might have happened concurrently with!...continuing here on Earth Jaco may have thought he flushed..them..down the toilet...but maybe like somebody, like as he was turning away, while the water was still flushing – imagine if this happened in Flushing, Michigan? that’d be crazy, I don’t think it did..though maybe in future generations the tale will..morph into that...but imagine there’s someone standing outside that very bathroom door, who knows it’s gonna happen, a messenger from Atlantis..or Lemuria...or Lemmy himself!...and as soon as like the coast was clear, as soon as Jaco had exited the latrine doorway whether it was open or not, this man just jumped inta the toilet a la Slothrop and Ewan McGregor a la Rentboy..just jumped right in, jumpin’ jack flash – Jumpin’ Jack Flush!..that’s prolly, that’s, that’s what his name should be...nipping at your nose and all that..cause I mean man, the smell...but this hero saved all the bass frequencies, ya know Joseph Campbell Greek myth, the whole hero descending into the underworld, well what a better representation or heck it actually is an under-world – but like with Hercules with the winds, wait I’m thinkin’ of Odysseus but you know it’s like Odysseus meeting Hercules in those stables, just get a fresh breeze through to get the smell out – but like maybe some of the bass frequencies escaped down into the kingdoms of Atlantis and Lemuria but he pulled most of em back up through the top of the toilet out that bathroom door, snuck em past Jaco continuin’ on with the interview and gave rise to all those bass heavy albums today

credits

from Hopscotch To Heaven, released June 18, 2022
Words by Aug Stone
Music by Kevin Reed

Vocals recorded by Michael Eisenstein, Los Angeles, February 2020
Bass recorded and track mixed by Adam Deane, Nashville, 2021

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Young Southpaw Connecticut

"From the existential thread that ties Jean-Paul Sartre to Jon Bon Jovi, to the skinny on what’s floating in TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’, and the possibility that Al Pacino is coaching boxing kangaroos in space, wise-fool Southpaw's ramblings lead listeners on a surreal journey through doors they didn't even know existed, into a highly original, deeply funny land of pop culture confusion." - popbollocks ... more

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