Cardboard Claude by Jonathan Beckenstein
Real time solo guitar improvisation, one mic to one mono track.

I used to be a garbage man. Sometimes I’d ride the back of the truck, as you often see. Other times I’d work at The Dump. Recycling had just begun back then, and the only material we’d recycle was cardboard. Collection took place on the flat roof of an old brick building that had a ramp leading up to it. Slick with maggots and the juices of everything foul under the shimmering sun, this is where the trucks would dump the day’s load. My job was to climb the towering piles of garbage and remove all cardboard, before the piles would be pushed, by a bulldozer, to the far end of the roof and into iron ports in the floor that opened to a two story drop into the incinerator’s inferno. I never knew when that bulldozer was coming. There was a blast of its horn, and then only seconds to jump off of the pile before it was slammed toward the Hell Hole. Claude was the bulldozer driver – cigar stub, bloodshot eyes, drunk. Always drunk. We called him “Cardboard Claude”. This improvisation is for him, even though it doesn’t sound like him. But I do flatter myself to say I thought I heard just the whiff of Debussy in it somewhere, just a ghost in one of the lines. Hey, they’re both Claudes.

Telecaster, Twin Reverb, and pedal board.