Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker - Dirt Bike Vacation
Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker - Dirt Bike Vacation
Preorder due for release 25th October
“Friends, they are my ticket out of this place I am in… feels like nothing more than a dirt bike vacation stop between Phoenix and San Diego.” Dirt Bike Vacation - for Worried Songs Records - explores the sonic world of the late amateur guitar player, Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker, through a captivating set of instrumental songs made in the mid-1980s. Recorded on a single-track, Marantz field recorder, the project is a transportive document of Walker’s days spent as a meatpacking employee in Yuma, Arizona and the dailiness of that existence: driving to work, sitting in his backyard, walking around drunkenly, unwinding on the couch with a friend. These sketches, showing an experimental tendency, are surprisingly ahead of their time; some exhibit ad hoc tape delay (“Granite Bluffs,” “Goodbye YMCA”), while others make use of primitive overdubbing (“Continuation to Moon Doctor”). Not dissimilar to works such as Bruce Langhorne’s The Hired Hand soundtrack, Walker’s guitar playing is melodic, texturally rich and beautifully sober.