I saw the original King Kong the other day. The 1930's black and white version, complete with a menagerie of dinosaurs and a giant ape that in reality was only twelve inches high.
And while it's a great film, in these post-Jurassic Park days it's pretty hard to imagine the effect the film had on Depression audiences when it was released. People were utterly convinced and suitably terrified and the movie had an Adults Only rating slapped on it.
Kong was such a success that a host of cheap cash-ins were raced out including the inevitable Son of Kong and an oddity called Mighty Joe Young. Which brings us in a very roundabout way (or perhaps not, as it later happens) to Mighty Joe Moon, the very fabulous second album by Grant Lee Buffalo.
In my smart-arse trivia-based fashion, I ask GLB frontman Grant Lee Phillips whether the film and the album are connected.
"Oh yeah, I know the one you mean," he says affably.
"Mighty Joe Young was a sort of rip-off and ummm, yeah, I'm sure that's probably where the title came from," he adds helpfully, before going on to explain that it actaully has sod all to do with it.
"There was a fella named Joe Moon who was this wild renegade truck driver who was hanging around the studio when we were recording in San Fransisco Back in 1992, and he used to hang around and tell us stories. He would collect all of Paul's bass strings and all my guitar strings and then tell us what songs those strings were written on. He was very detail-oriented. A real character. So we sorta called him Mighty Joe Moon, 'cause his name was Joe Moon. He was a sorta product of the sixties when folks had such great names like Moon and Sun and Sunflower. And that's definitely where the name came from. The character is larger than that though. The character is mostly an embodiment of so much else and mostly a figment of my imagination."
Imagination is important to Grant Lee Phillips. Fuzzy, the band's 1993 debut album, was strewn with mythical references, both classical and pop, from demi-Gods to comic super-heroes. The opening track of Mighty Joe Moon, Lonestar {Song}, is a dreamy evocation of a state of mind rather than the state of the synonym of the title.
"For me Texas exists in in this sort of mythological way, and what I was writing about was largely Texas the myth, the Texas I've come to know through movies and recent events in history," explains Grant.
I started writing that song focussing on the JFK assassination and all of the weird conspiracies that surround that assassination. All of it begins to sound very myth like. I started it from that point, and then maybe two or three weeks later this thing happened in Waco that I'm sure you're familiar with (the David Koresh-Branch Davidian-FBI holocaust) so the song sort of took a different direction at that point. I sorta wanted to talk about two stories within one song but all of it is a sort of a myth, or a collage of myths."
"It wasn't long after the Waco incident that I heard it emerged on television, that there was a sort of a telivision drama that came out, and soon the OJ Simpson story will be told - in many ways it's being told right now, but a dramatisation will feature. I'm just perplexed by that. It's so important in America, Ameria is such a dreamland."
"I do find myself looking for reality na dlooking for those things that we call 'true' but...ummmm...I don't know, these are things that we have to find ourselves, you know? I'm reading a lot about photography at the moment and it's leading me to believe that reality is a malleable thing."
If America is such a dreamland, then Hollywood is the dream factory, and manipulator, fusing imagined reality with factual artifice to create attractive little placebos that are easily and voraciously consumed.
And album titles and cute linking devices aside, it's here that cinematic illusion suddenly rears its dubious head again. Grant has always been a bit of movie buff, and even went to film school for a short while, and is well aware of the duplicity of the visual medium and the ease with which it can be manipulated.
"Oh, it's certainly the case, the the frightening thing. We put so much stock in what we see. I guess because we depend so much more on our eyes than rather, say, our sense of smell that it's sometimes hard to smell a rat if your eyes tell you something different and the thing is, what comes across on television is another person's interpretation. The interpretation of a camera or the manipulation of an editor. It's so obvious, it's something that we live with all the time. William Randolph Hearst (all time bastard American multi-national media magnate), he knew it, and the tabloids know it and the government knows and the world is starting to realise it."
Which leaves Grant and his band...where?
"Umm...it leaves me fumbling through all this trying to get at th truth and realising that it's ort of like this snake with no head or tail. Umm, I don't know, it's a hard thing. But that's what I find myself doing, trying to unearth things. Digging for some kind of meaning. I don't know that I've found meaning yet, but I enjoy the archaeology."
And Mighty Joe Moon is but one tool in the archaeological cabinet - a map, possibly, according to Grant.
"Oh, it's kind of a voyage, it's a search..." he ponders on the album, "that's the way I relate to it I think."
"It's some kind of deep search and we thumbed a ride in Texas and then we stopped for gas in Jerusalem and it took us through some other dark places and we wound up here. It's a journey," he concludes, laughing.
Get on board!