CHILDREN BY THE MILLIONS SING FOR ALEX CHILTON

anyone who's hung out with me has probably heard this story before. twice.

so , we were on a tour a couple years back with a band called saturday looks good to me, both bands on the way to south by southwest in austin. we were in phoenix, waiting around to play at a kind of art gallery/venue space, just sitting in the van drinking beers, wishing we had some weed. lo and behold, like some fucking weed angel sent from heaven, this kid walks up to the van and asks us casually if we want to smoke a joint. being in the states with drug paranoia on full blast, we dragged the kid into the van, closed all the doors and windows (in the dry arizona desert heat), scoured the street for signs of cops and lit up. after a bit of small talk, it came out that the kid was originally from memphis so we quizzed him with the usual elvis/graceland rap ("you ever get stoned and hang out at graceland, man?" shit like that. "you think elvis smoked weed, man?" and so on...), lot of good music from there, bla bla bla. i mentioned big star and the kid, cool as a fucking cucumber, says "i smoked weed with alex chilton once." of course i immediately shit my pants. the kid then tells us the following tale:
some buddies and him were out at some show when they noticed alex chilton standing in the shadows watching the bands. after a while they finally scraped up the balls to go over and talk to him (i'm not sure what the fuck one would say to alex chilton if one were to see him at a show, "so, big star... pretty good band." i would maybe die.). anyway, i guess they didn't nerd out too hard on him, because he ended up asking them if they wanted to go smoke weed with him at his place (i would TOTALLY DIE!). they go back to his place where he has large amounts of various strains of weed stored in big film canisters on the mantle from which he proceeds to roll joint after joint, passing each joint around once before putting it out in a huge overflowing ashtray underneath the coffee table and lighting another. of course things got weird. he looks at them and asks the big question: "you guys wanna see something cool?". now, obviously the first thing any of them are thinking is "ok, here comes the porno" or "out come the handguns" or "nazi paraphernalia time". he reaches under the couch and pulls out a large box full of carefully labeled videotapes. not a good sign. well, it turns out that they were tapes of EUROPEAN FOOTAGE OF THE O.J. SIMPSON TRIAL ("you know, so you get the full, unbiased story")! bet you didn't see that one coming. neither did they. how fucking weird is that? i'm not sure if they watched any of that shit with him or if they just awkwardly tried to get the fuck out or what. truth is, my mind was so blown i don't remember the rest of the story.

anyway, after completely blowing our minds clean out the backs of our skulls, this kid (like he's fucking clint eastwood or something) calmly says peace and hops out of the van and into the show, never to be seen again. maybe that kid really was an angel.

wild.