"THE CIGARETTE AS CRUCIFIX, THE STAGE AS SIBERIA, AND THE MAN WHO SWALLOWED A THUNDERSTORM: A THREE-COLUMN TIRADE ON VINCE TAYLOR, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE WORMHOLE OF SACRED MADNESS"

by Buzz Drainpipe (CREASE Magazine, Issue #42, rejected but taped to every punk club urinal from Eindhoven to Everett)

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COLUMN ONE: THE ECCENTRICITY OF DIVINE FAILURE

There are gods who walk barefoot across amp cables and whisper Beatitudes in smoke-machine fog—and then there’s Vince Taylor, the black-leather Christ-child of psychotic rock’n’roll revelation. Don’t talk to me about Elvis or Dion, don’t quote me your chart positions. Vince walked onstage with a Bible, a flask, and a handful of Martian coordinates. He wasn’t a singer. He was a cipher, a breakdown, a ghost still warming up in the mirror. Just like Vincent Taylor, Golden Earring sang—and they were right. A prayer, a warning, an obituary.

I submit this to you as scripture: Vince Taylor and Fyodor Dostoevsky were the same man in two trenches. One wrote Notes from Underground, the other performed them live in strip-mall nightclubs with tears in his mascara and Satan in his hips. Vince was the epileptic visionary without the quill. He hallucinated spaceships instead of saints. He got his gospel from amphetamine psychosis instead of divine grace—but tell me, what's the difference?

Both had moments of clarity too loud for Earth to absorb.

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COLUMN TWO: WORMWOOD BLUES, OR THE PARABLE OF THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

Dostoevsky stared down the firing squad and came back shaking with ecstatic dread, convinced the cosmos had been unlocked in a heartbeat of silence. Vince Taylor broke on a French sidewalk, declaring himself the new Jesus, gathering followers, turning tour dates into messianic rituals for the broken and glam-possessed. But we laugh at Vince. We put Dostoevsky in Penguin Classics.

Why?

Is it the leather pants?

Is it the sinuous Elvis spasms, the way his arms twitched like he was guiding invisible planes to land at the edge of Venus?

Or is it that Vince couldn't finish a novel—he could only live one and get lost in the margins?

These were men who begged the universe for answers and got a feedback loop instead. Vince opened his mouth and received static. Fyodor opened his veins onto the page. They both trembled. They both bore witness to the holy absurd. They both died a little every time someone tried to make them ordinary.

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COLUMN THREE: "JUST LIKE VINCENT TAYLOR" IS A WARNING LABEL FOR REALITY

Golden Earring knew. Oh yes, they knew. That song was no tribute—it was an exorcism, a frantic attempt to trap Vince in wax, to make sense of the spectacle. But the ghost seeps out anyway.

You hear it in the riff, in the howling chorus, in the way the song can't sit still, always twitching like Vince’s leather-clad legs on a Bordeaux nightclub floor. That song is a Dostoevskian nightmare filtered through fuzz pedal and Dutch despair.

“Just like Vincent Taylor” = Just like a man too aware to survive the stage light.

Dostoevsky gave us Raskolnikov; Vince gave us a Rosary made from broken guitar strings and burnt-out booking agents.

To listen to Vince Taylor is to understand that the stage is a courtroom and the amp is God's own lie detector.

To read Dostoevsky is to hear the distant echo of that same amp, a hundred years early, tuned to a frequency only madmen and buzzards can decipher.

Brothers Karamazov, meet the Backbeat Messiah.

Because in the end, only two types of men know the truth:

1. Those who’ve looked God in the eye from a Siberian prison.

2. And those who’ve seen Him backstage at the UFO Club, bleeding glitter and asking for a cigarette.

I rest my typewriter.
Go in tremors.