I had an idea to ask my wild & weirder friends to tell me about their favorite books.

Lucky for you I know one of the weirdest & funniest front men in Toronto.

One quiet weekend night, I heard this loud ass band coming down my street. I peeked out the window & went “WTF”. White Cowbell had rented a flatbed truck & were crusing downtown Toronto playing along with their lady dancers, uh huh they have dancing ladies. Something that wild obviously caught my attention & I’ve been a fan ever since.

Welcome Clem of White Cowbell Oklahoma & be afraid, because I am. Did I mention one of the guys in the band plays a flaming cowbell?

WLP: Tell me the last book you’ve read, and no playboy doesn’t count.

C: I tend to read a lot of books at the same time. Kinda in a Dr. Who time-traveling William S. Burroughs cut-up, mash-up technique. You get a lot more in your brain that way. Like an all-dressed pizza. Speaking of William S. Burroughs, I was reading Cities of Red Night. Wow, the gay boys sure do have lots of fun with the sex and drugs. Maybe I’ll come back in the next life as a gay boy. Then again, I was reading Songs of the Doomed by Hunter S. Thompson and it seems debauchery is attainable to all if you apply yourself properly. Then I was reading The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. Definitely a manual on how not to have a good time.

WLP: Favourite book you’ve ever read…again no porn doesn’t count.

C: Well, the dusty 1971 editions of Penthouse at the cottage when I was 14 were pretty rad. But despite the nerdiness, I can’t knock Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings off its pedestal. Pretty much all Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs slays me. Maybe In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje for some Canadiana/Torontonia. Sometimes I like staring at blank empty pages, though. It’s soothing.

WLP: If you could write a book about your life, what would you name it?

C: A Manual to Excellence or 10 Steps To Rule Like Fuck or Having a Good Time, All the Time…On Someone Else’s Dime. The follow-up would be Cornish Cooking and Shrubbery Maintenance. There’s also a literary project in the works called Don’t Be A Retard!

WLP: What would said book focus on mainly?

C: It’s mostly all self-evident — tips on how to avoid the pit-falls of shitsville. It’s so easy to be a schmuck these days. We all have to be vigilant. You do, of course, have to be willing to cross certain thresholds of dubious legality/morality. The cooking/gardening handbook is a little different, though. Everybody should try a Cornish pasty sometime.  

WLP: Do you think writing books and writing music have similarities?

C: Well one medium you see and the other you hear. But they all end up in the same brainbox for processing. Creative shit is all the same. White Cowbell Oklahoma are actually working on a new album that you eat — afterwards you float off into a semi-permanent hallucinogenic state while simultaneously going off in your pants. It’s very high tech stuff.

WLP: What book would make a good song?

C: Ed Rosenthal’s Marijuana Growing Tips. It’d be educational. For the kids. Or Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. It’s too hard to read with your eyes.

WLP: Tell my poor readers about a typical WCO show.

C: A White Cowbell Oklahoma show will leave you enslaved to the cult that is us. Even the most dubious will afterward surrender their will to us forever. We are a rock n roll army. A pummeling, lurid, power-tool enhanced riff armada and testosterone onslaught.

Check out White Cowbell Oklahoma on their website & bug Clem on Twitter