Buckethead & Ol' Dirty Bastard

I was listening to Enter The Wu-Tang this morning and when "Shame On A Nigga" came on it made me think of only one person:

Buckethead.

Contrary to assumptions put forth the mountains of fan mail I try so desperately to read all of but sometimes can't because I have to concentrate on the ones from the really needy kids, (How needy? Tsunami-needy.) I haven't always been a semi-professional blogger and tennis champion. My most recent former employer was a online retailer for band merchandise (read: swag). What's that you ask? Were there perks? Oh yeah, there were perks - Cheap Trick wristbands, collectible Dave Matthews Band race cars, Carlos Santana votive candles - you name it.

But the best perk of all, the one that always got me really perky and helped me to feel like I was making a difference by providing an extremely small number of clinically-hardcore fans with a way to get what they really wanted - I helped run the Buckethead Store. For all of you non-Bucketheadheads out there, he's a guitar-shredder who wears a KFC bucket on his head and a mask over his face, and was most notably the guitar player on the failed G'n'R comeback tour. An excerpt from his bio speaks more about the man:

"One night, after he got to be this tall, somebody threw a bucket of fried chicken into the coop. Try as he might, Buckethead couldn't put the chicken back together again. So he put the bucket on his head, picked up his guitar and ran to the cemetery.

Buckethead was real sad but it seemed like he played guitar better than ever. All the grey people and angels in the cemetery listened to the music and it was so beautiful they just stood still and speechless. He figured the spirits of all the fried chickens he ever knew were channeling into him through the bucket, and he played until he collapsed.

Well it prob'ly won't surprise you to hear that eventually the sun came up and the rooster crowed. And some folks say Buckethead had chicken grease and barbecue sauce smeared around the mouth hole on his mask. Whatever happened that night, the bucket stayed on his head, and in the morning it was filled full of chicken bones."

Honestly, I can't stand BH's music, with the exception of.........wait........no, it's all terrible. The dub project is bad, the numerous shred projects are bad. The Viggo Mortensen stream of consciousness record is "is-that-blathering-idiot-the-famous-actor?" funny-bad, but only for about 47 seconds and then it journeys deep in to the realms of terrifying-bad. But I have always believed that music is the last true safe haven for the criminally insane, and Buckethead, and apparent safety of those around him, made me feel that was true. Meaning I was right.

I'll leave you with my favorite Buckethead moment: The day Ol' Dirty Bastard died, the front page of Bucket's website was all black and read, "Buckethead was very sadden by the death of ODB and did a tribute to ODB".

Here is that tribute.