Free King Dork Approximately by Frank Portman

been doing of referring to records by their catalog numbers rather than the titles, and maybe I should explain. Except that there isn’t an explanation. It serves no useful purpose. Hence, obviously, it’s a thing worth doing. Sam Hellerman started it one day, saying “You know, Henderson, I think I actually might like EKS 74071 better than EKS 74051.” I was mystified but went along with it, nodding silently in that way I do, till I figured out from the other stuff he was saying that he was talking about the Stooges. I caught on that EKS stood for Elektra Records, and that he was saying he liked
Funhouse
better than the self-titled debut album. (To which I say: no duh.) So I joined in. It’s like a fun, really dumb secret code. We started out with the obvious ones pretty much everyone knows, like BS 2607 or 2409-218. But some of them are really hard, and you wind uphaving to do a lot of research after some conversations just to find out what the hell you’ve been talking about. I even take notes sometimes.
    Sam Hellerman is way better at this game than I am, of course. The guy seems to know every catalog number of every record by heart. Maybe he prepares a list the night before just to impress me. Either way, it does. Impress me, I mean. Sam Hellerman is like that. He just randomly starts doing something stupid and before too long it becomes a well-established custom and you soon forget that people ever did anything different.
    One of the records we found at Toby’s that day was APLPA-016, the Australia-only issue of AC/DC’s second album,
T.N.T.
, which is perhaps the finest hard rock record ever released. This was the first pressing, with the kangaroos on the labels. I’d never actually seen one. It was five dollars rather than fifty cents, because it was an “import,” but it was certainly well worth five dollars of Christmas money. We walked out of there with twenty LPs between us, and we barely spent thirty bucks.
    So APLPA-016 got me thinking, and later on the bus I asked Sam Hellerman if he’d ever noticed that Shinefield’s drumming when we covered “Live Wire” was much less retarded than it was when we played our own songs. And of course, he had noticed.
    We spent the rest of the bus ride engaged in exaggerated, sarcastic mimicry of Shinefield’s awful drumming, using our hands as sticks on the seats in front of us and augmenting that by making various drum noises with our mouths. When we were asked to leave the bus and had to get out and walk the rest of the way, we had to use our arms to carry the recordsinstead of using them to mimic Shinefield’s eccentric sense of timing and rhythm, but the conversation continued.
    Sam Hellerman noted that we had tried to explain the concept of “space,” and beats, and regular tempo, and rests, and eighth notes to Shinefield till we were blue in the face, but it never did any good. Shinefield always agreed enthusiastically that good drumming had to be minimal enough so you could detect, say, where beat one was going to fall, and—though this might be pushing it—where beat one stood in relation to all the other beats. And he would say things like “Totally, dude” and flash us a grin that overflowed with eager camaraderie, if “camaraderie” is the one where you’re all on the same team saying “Okay, boys, let’s get ’em.” But then the song would begin and he would be even worse than before.
    “The only way to improve his drumming on our songs would be to kick him out of the band,” said Sam Hellerman, and he added that in his opinion, Shinefield played “Live Wire” better because it was only a cover and he didn’t care enough about it to mess it up by trying to make it all special.
    “Wouldn’t it be great,” I said, “if we could somehow get him to play ‘Live Wire’ while we played our songs?”
    Sam Hellerman stopped in his tracks.
    “Say that again, Henderson,” he said. Like a scene in a movie where someone says something