Howland, Don - Endgame - New LP

When I was a kid, the old brick garage next door had two garage doors in front.  One opened regularly when the neighbor and his good-looking wife squeezed their slant-six into one of the slots of their old garage.  But I noticed that section was separate from the other half, sectioned off with a brick wall that nearly reached the ceiling.  And while the used section had a side door, the hidden half had nothing else that lead to it, except the door that I couldn't pry open with all my might.  I wondered what was in there, maybe old bottles and sunken treasures from pirate ships, Al Capone hats on the skulls of old gangsters, empty eye sockets waiting for someone to pry open that door and let in the light of day.  I was curious as a stray cat to find out what lie in that unknown cold darkness, and when the neighborhoods left town for Florida trip one blustery November and left me in charge to feed their Siamese cats, I stacked up the metal grating milk crates and shimmied between the top of the brick wall divider and the rafters and dropped down into the darkness and spiderwebs.  I turned on my Quaker Cereal headlamp, and through the fog of my breath, I found decades of magazines piled in the corner, crumbling as I lifted them, and in the middle of the garage was parked an old roadster jalopy.  I jumped into the rumble seat and listened to the springs squeak, blew the tin whistle in my pocket, leaned over and clicked on the nonexistent radio on the dashboard and rocked out to the AM radio transistor sounds in my head, drummed my hands on the rear panel and imagined I was Steve McQueen as Boon Hogganbeck bumping down the dirt roads and tooling from the shanty shacks and juke joints town to town.  That was a good discovery, kind of like listening to this Don Howland album.  This sounds like it was recorded in that garage, and garage-rocking songs about the stuff I dreamed about on that day, that haunting hope that keeps us going even though we know this road we travel will lead to broken bones and busted hearts, and in the end the road ends at that graveyard up on the hill. If you don't want to think about that, this probably ain't the album for you.  -- winch (green noise records)