“Craig Number Seven” played guitar for Big Fish. He looked like a redheaded golf ball in blue jeans cut-offs wielding a hollow-body Gibson 335 knock-off. A guitar effects wizard who toted his pedals in a periwinkle Samsonite overnight case (before powered pedalboards, you made do with luggage). I must have praised the suitcase at some point, because he turned up stage- side one night with a duplicate. And so it accompanied me throughout the nineties – even on our Oasis dates where it received looks askance.
When I happened upon it in the garage a few months back, I was amused to remember how I’d covered it with band stickers and a “NO NEWT IS GOOD NEWT” slogan from 1992. That Cotton Mather sticker being the lone survivor represented (unless you count Newt) lent the suitcase a somewhat pitiful ennui. All those dreams and band meetings. Those sad post-gig schleps.
“Who was Eleanor Plunge?” Whit asked me one night after I’d re-enlisted the old Samsonite warhorse. There had recently and mysteriously appeared, Shroud of Turin-style, the faintest hint of a sun-bleached band logo spread diagonally beneath NEWT. Eleanor Plunge. I surely could not remember, but we had a few glasses and guesses and some foggy memory of the name. There was this one gal who lived here in the early nineties and she seemed to have a new band every fives minutes. We were acquaintances and should have been friends really, but we had one of those relationships fraught with perpetual awkwardness. We always started sentences at the same time, and seemed to make one another uncomfortable. Maybe it wasn’t her band – but this is her song nonetheless.
38. Diversity explores ways one navigates differences in relationships that might seem irreconcilable. In my experience amongst I Ching readings examining potentially negative circumstances, it’s one of the more benign. Eleanor Plunge performed by Robert Harrison, Whit Williams and Darin Murphy. Recorded and mastered by Lars Goransson