(Bill
Mullan, host of Randophonic, weighs in)
First up,
he's not who he appears to be, being neither Philip nor Random on his birth
certificate. All power to the
early days of punk when reinvention of self (re-labeling anyway) was all the
rage.
I met him
in early 1981 when we were both young guys driving cab on Vancouver's North
Shore. It was the easiest,
slackest, best paying job a young man could get in those days. Just get high, bomb around, meet
everyday weird people by the car full, get your universe expanded.
Then the
economy crashed. I went back to
school. He just kept driving, one
way or another. Story of
both our lives, I guess. Crashing
economies and relevant detours, re-routes. Welcome to
the Apocalypse and all that. Which
is perhaps the best answer to the question.
Who is
Philip Random?
He's the
first person I ever met who really "got" the Apocalypse – the fact
that it wasn't some grim cloud gathering on yonder horizon. No, we were in it, and had been our
whole lives. Blame the
idiots/assholes/geniuses who split the atom back in 1945, New Mexico desert.
Some of them were genuinely freaked at the time that it might set in motion an
atmospheric chain reaction that would engulf the entire planet. Who says they were wrong?
I remember
the day Philip and I first really discussed it, high on acid, ricocheting
around Vancouver's Downtown Eastside on a pub crawl ("because sometimes
men must do these things").
It was a rough neighbourhood then, too, but the day was a stunner. Winter cold and clear, sun blinding off
the harbour water, which is where we ended up, sharing a six-pack, bonding on
our shared young-man realizations and epiphanies. Yup. Here we
were. Right now, right here, whole
damned planet on a fucking razor's edge and we wouldn't have it any other way.
So
yeah. Who's Philip Random? He's my oldest apocalyptic friend. That's who. Yeah, we've had our ups and downs over the years (one near
lawsuit), but in general, we still "get" each other, which in this
increasingly crowded world is a damned rare thing.
As for the
"disappearance". It goes
like this. September, 2001. Dragons attack way out east which gets
everyone looking in exactly the same direction. Consumed by it.
Anyway, by
the time we got our focus back, well, certain things were out of place,
including Philip, who hasn't been seen since. Was he in Manhattan that day of days, possibly at Ground
Zero? Probably not. He didn't much go in for big crowds and
anyway, we're pretty sure he's alive somewhere up the coast, based on various
rumours and at least one outstanding arrest warrant (agriculture related).
Which gets
us to the Countdown. It was his
daughter, Chloe, that alerted us to it, digging through all the stuff he left
at his cabin. Literally tons of
it. Including a whole lotta
notes. That was almost ten years
ago.
The rest of
the story? Well, that's what all
of this is really about, I'm thinking.
The
Randophonic All Vinyl Countdown and Apocalypse
[or]
The 1,111
Greatest Records You Probably Haven't Heard
Because in
the end, it's not the human that matters, the biological stuff, doomed to
decay. No, it's what comes off
him, out of him, into us, through us, out of us, on and on. Like John Lennon said …
(not
included in the countdown by the way)
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