Discarded I's: June 2025

Monday, June 30, 2025

They Deserved Better: Twilley, Sayer & Squier

CREASE MAGAZINE // October 1993
Buzz Drainpipe, Contributor // Page 42, beneath the fold

Buzz Drainpipe deconstructs three fallen idols of radio royalty in a world too dumb to listen.

In 1993, we're told the revolution will be televised—flannelized, commodified, buzz clipped and fed back to us as "authentic." But before this Gen-X grievance pageant came to town, three men already knew how it felt to be kings of the moment and ghosts of the charts.

Dwight Twilley. Leo Sayer. Billy Squier.
Three names, three eras, three stylistic solar flares eclipsed by the moon of misunderstanding.
They didn’t fizzle out—they were snuffed.

TWILLEY: Rock n Roll’s Phantom Limbo Kid

He sang like an Oklahoma Presley caught in an analog web of jangle and echo. Looking for the Magic wasn’t just a track—it was a thesis on pop’s cruel denial of permanence. Twilley played like the radio was still holy and your bedroom still mattered.

The Dwight Twilley Band should have been mythic. But record label implosions, market fatigue, and Twilley's own too-late-for-the-70s/too-early-for-the-90s timing condemned him to cultdom.

"Dwight wasn’t ahead of his time. He was exactly on time. The rest of us were late."
—Phil Seymour (interview, 1987)

LEO SAYER: The Falsetto Pierrot Who Fell from Disco Heaven

Yeah, he danced. Yeah, he looked like Harpo Marx after a Vegas bender. But damn if he didn’t bleed on every ballad. When I Need You is weaponized soft rock. It sneaks up, and suddenly you're crying in a laundromat.

Leo was more than the hair. He was a crooner in an age of cocaine and Casio. He made vulnerability sound like a riot. But the industry only tolerates sentimentality when it’s ironic, and Leo never played that game.

By '93, he was playing clubs in Australia. Which says more about the world than it does about him.

BILLY SQUIER: Died by Video

It’s been nine years since Rock Me Tonite detonated across MTV like a feathered bomb. That pink-shirted interpretive dance was a sin only because the world was not ready for joy. Squier was a riff beast—a leather-and-denim poet of teenage apocalypse. But America saw that video and collectively decided: “nah.”

What a loss.

Go back and listen to In the Dark, The Stroke, My Kinda Lover. They're tight. Sexy. Swaggering. Honest. You can dance, punch a wall, or write bad poetry to them. What else do you want from rock?

“I got body shamed by a nation. And I still look better than your dad.”
—Billy, 1991 interview, uncensored

Postscript for the Forgotten

In a just universe, these three would be on postage stamps. Instead, they’re crate-digging holy grails and punchlines to people who never listened closely. They deserved the arena, not the clearance bin.

But that’s the thing about great pop.
It doesn’t die. It just waits.

It hums under the static. It echoes off thrift store speakers.
It’s still looking for the magic.

Next Month in CREASE:
"Raspberries vs. The Records: Deathmatch in the Power Pop Purgatory"
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"Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam were prophets—argue with your landlord, not us."

—Buzz Drainpipe, tapping typewriter ribbon with a broken Bic, 1993
Filed from the backroom of Joe's Used Cassettes, Eastie

❝Cataloging the Abyss: On Aurelien Duvant’s The Corridor Without Doors❞

by Dominique Ferrier, for Le Cahier Noir, Spring 1998

When the suitcase was unzipped in Strasbourg in 1993, the literary world barely noticed. Another set of mold-soft pages, another forgotten manuscript from a minor Parisian essayist—no one expected to find inside the most structurally unsound and emotionally precise novel the twentieth century never quite published.

The Corridor Without Doors, long believed to be apocryphal, was known only through whispers, references in correspondence, and the wine-stained recollections of jazz flautist Vic Blackwing. For decades, Duvant’s reputation hinged on his minor essays—philosophical miniatures exploring solitude, ritual, and memory in the Parisian margins. That he might have written a 7,000-page novel—and one so sprawling, so recursive, so exhaustingly sincere—seemed absurd.

But the Corridor exists. And it is relentless.

Architecture as Absence

To read The Corridor Without Doors is to submit oneself to a literary architecture that denies orientation. The book has chapters, but no narrative arc. It has a protagonist—the Custodian—but he shifts tenses, changes names, and is often described in the third person as if someone were watching him. The plot, such as it is, concerns the Custodian’s assignment to catalog a corridor that may or may not exist. Bureaucracy, surveillance, and doubt compound in pages of reflection and footnoted hallucination.

“There is no door because I was never meant to leave,” the Custodian writes in the fifth chapter. “The light flickers in Morse, but I have forgotten the language.”

The novel unfolds like a psychological fugue—Kafka filtered through reel-to-reel delay, with echoes of Beckett and Foucault but filtered through Duvant’s personal ghost dialect. The prose is recursive and devotional: phrases reappear in altered forms, sentences loop like mantras, and entire sections are redacted, as if the book itself censors the reader’s understanding in real time.

Memory, Ritual, Collapse

At the core of Duvant’s work is ritual as resistance. Where Camus gave us the absurd man who defies meaning, Duvant gives us the minor civil servant who finds meaning in every absurd gesture. The Custodian sharpens his pencils, reorganizes unsorted files, and writes in ledgers no one will read—all with the intensity of prayer.

And yet the novel constantly undermines these acts. Time loops. Files rewrite themselves. The corridor is never described the same way twice. Reality becomes administrative hallucination.

“I was told to describe what cannot be seen. Each time I look, it alters to remain undocumented. The corridor is not hostile. It is simply uninterested in being known.”

Reading Duvant’s novel is itself a ritual—a slow procession through memory’s fog, lit only by the small candles of recurring imagery: a window that won’t open, a typewriter with the wrong alphabet, a form that asks, “What have you forgotten to forget?”

Legacy: A Mirror with No Glass

The book’s influence since its rediscovery has been quiet but profound. Poets cite it as an exorcism text. Filmmakers describe it as a storyboard of non-images. A cult of archivists and writers—calling themselves The Custodians—claim to be building a physical version of the Corridor in an abandoned office park outside Leipzig.

Critics remain divided.

Some call it unreadable, narcissistic, paranoid to the point of incoherence.

Others, like myself, return to it like a fever dream—a book that refuses you, until you are finally broken enough to understand it.

Duvant did not write a novel to be consumed. He wrote a containment device. A whisper loop for the unreconciled self. A cathedral for the archivists of sorrow.

Final Thought

The Corridor Without Doors is not a novel. It is a mirror that forgets your face every time you look into it.

It is not a question of whether you’ll finish it. It is whether it will finish cataloging you.

Metal Messiahs#5: Savage-Loose n' Lethal

METAL MESSIAHS #5: SAVAGE – LOOSE 'N LETHAL
Buzz Drainpipe, The Discarded I
“This wasn’t just NWOBHM—it was a warning shot to the thrash gods.”

By 1983, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was splintering—some bands going slick, others going speed, and a few, like Savage, dropping napalm on both directions and choosing pure combustion. Their debut album Loose 'n Lethal didn’t ask for your attention—it punched through your denim jacket and took it.

While Metallica were still studying Diamond Head riffs in Ron McGovney’s garage, Savage unleashed something rawer, meaner, and more prophetic. Loose 'n Lethal is the Rosetta Stone between NWOBHM and thrash metal. It’s the kind of record that feels like it was recorded in a furnace by chain-smoking mechanics with nothing to lose and too much speed in their blood.

⚙️ The Sound: Chrome-Plated Fury

Opener “Let It Loose” lives up to its name—an absolute explosion of riffage and punk aggression that reportedly left teenage James Hetfield shaking with delight and terror. It’s got the DNA of Lemmy, the bark of Di’Anno, and the unstoppable momentum of a flaming 18-wheeler in a thunderstorm.

But it ain’t just speed. Songs like “Dirty Money,” “Ain’t No Fit Place,” and “Cry Wolf” show Savage could groove like doom druids and gallop like warhorses, often within the same track.

The guitar tone? Razor-edged.
The drums? Like trashcan lids in a street fight.
The vocals? A mad preacher shouting from the top of a burnt-out Vauxhall.

🗡️ The Vibe:

Forget fantasy epics or hellfire pageantry—Savage were working-class warlords. Their music smelled like axle grease, leather, and cheap lager. The cover art is a busted fist through barbed metal. No dragons. No demons. Just you vs. the world with a busted amp and a bone to pick.

And somehow that made them more metal than any of their flashier peers.

🔥 Why It’s Metal Messiah #5:

Because Loose 'n Lethal is where NWOBHM swerved hard into proto-thrash, and the rest of the world had to catch up.

Because it’s an underground classic that feels like it should have sold a million but instead became sacred scripture for the truly initiated.

Because when Buzz Drainpipe spun this on his battered Walkman during a midnight walk through the Manchester rain, he grinned, soaked to the bone, and whispered:
“Now this is what it’s all about.”

—

Next on METAL MESSIAHS #6:
Buzz unearths a post-Vietnam acid-fried metal gospel from the American South. One part biker fuzz, one part Sabbath séance. You won’t believe this record even exists.