Buzzy Linhart’s 1972 Buzzy (The Black Album) cover, with a shadowed portrait against a black background

Buzzy Linhart’s The Black Album: Mystery, Skunk & Meatballs

October 21, 2026

— Lou Waxman

Recently, Lou read Pamela Paul’s 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. Nothing earth-shattering. It is a book that did not have to be a book and would have done just fine as a blog. Like Lou Waxman’s shit here. 100 Things probably was a blog somewhere. The book seems very bloggy. Blogesque. And Lou doesn’t feel like looking it up. One of the things lost to the Internet is curiosity. And boredom. And magazines. And phone calls. Lou still has curiosity and magazines, and he makes tons of phone calls. Apparently, in the Internet Age, phone calls are extremely rude. Nobody wants to talk on the phone. After a few beers, Lou wants to do nothing but. Where is Andy Warhol when you need him? Dude loved the phone. Also, Lou was not one to be bored before, during or after the Internet. Lou can entertain himself, thank you very much.

Ms. Paul also lists vinyl records. Everything that is a negative regarding records Lou absolutely loves. That you listen to an entire side. That you must get up and flip it over. That you can’t skip or shuffle. That they take up space. That means they are tangible, solid, and grounding. Lou loves all this stuff. Another thing lost to the Internet is mystery. With the Internet you can look up anything and get an answer as soon as you need it. There is no place anymore for the know-it-all. That guy (mostly guys, sadly) who has trivia and factoids on the brain and at the ready. We don’t need these guys anymore because we have a woman replacement: Alexa. And people say the women’s movement is under assault. Lou gives you Alexa. Hey Lou, that is not a progressive take. Alexa, is Alexa proof of the empowerment of women? Tell Lou what Alexa says. Lou does not use Alexa because he is a chauvinist pig.

Matt at The Vogue handed Lou a copy of Buzzy and said it wasn’t bad. This LP had mystery. The cover was shadowy, dark, and hard to figure out. Who is this dude? Is he white or black? Is he even Buzzy? Who is Buzzy? Is that a dude or a band? What is going on? Lou had never heard of Buzzy (The Album) or Buzzy (The band or dude or avatar). So, Lou did what you do. One googles it. Turns out Buzzy was William Charles Linhart who bounced around the Village during the folk boom in the early 1960s and became a rock musician in the late 1960s/1970s. He released two albums called Buzzy. The one Lou has is from 1972 on Kama Sutra Records and is called Buzzy (The Black Album) due to the aforementioned murky cover photo. Based on quick research it appears that Linhart performed on “Drifting” by Jimi Hendrix from the posthumous Cry of Love LP as well as doing a bunch of other session work, so Lou thought Linhart was something of a Hendrix rip-off. Maybe? To be honest, Lou did not know much about anything.

Wrong. The Black Album has elements of hard rock and funk to it for sure, but it is kind of all over the place. The long and short of Buzzy for Lou are “Boogaloother or Captain Hornbone’s Last Desparate Truck” at just over a minute long (great title, almost as long to say as the song itself) and “Sing Joy – Tutti Frutti” at around eight and a half minutes long. If you are going to like Buzzy, you are going to like these two songs. Lou happened to like them quite a bit, so he bought the LP.

There is also a cover of Elton John’s “Take Me to the Pilot”, which had Lou looking through his Elton John albums. Turns out Lou does not have Elton’s second self-titled album. This will be remedied for sure. The original by Elton is far superior, and Lou definitely likes himself some early Elton John. In the Beatles vs. Stones conversation about piano men, Lou is on Team Elton, but only the albums from the early to the mid-1970s. The apex is Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and at the top of the mountain is “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding”. Nothing unique about that take. To be sure, Billy Joel never approached anything like this. And he tried.

When you get down to it, the reason Lou bought Buzzy was because Jeff “Skunk” Baxter was pictured on the back. Lou has a soft spot for the Skunkster, and it has next to nothing to do with his guitar playing. Lou likes that Baxter went from the apex of rock to returning to life as a civilian. Baxter was the epitome of the guitar mercenary. If you paid Skunk he would show up and lay down some licks. Have guitar will travel. A hired hand. That is why he is the perfect guy to appear on Steely Dan albums. Steely Dan is a band of hired hands. That is also why it was fitting that Skunk went to work as a defense consultant advising the government about missile defense systems. Skunk is the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of rock. Neoliberalism at its best. Skunk has no soul or morality. Like Steely Dan. Just pay the man. And the band.

Lou likes creative icons who maintain their nine-to-five. Three that come to mind are T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. A banker, an insurance executive, and a family doctor. All three could easily have gone into academia and become professors at any university they wanted. This is what almost every poet in the post-WWII era does. And Lou hates it. Get a real job.

Charles Bukowski is the poster child for this. Buk ground it out at the post office for over a decade before John Martin of Black Sparrow offered him a stipend to write for a living. Taking Martin’s cash, Buk wrote Post Office in a month. Buk’s letters written while he was juggling the post office gig and life as a poet are some of the best letters in the history of literature. They are an inspiration for Lou to write whenever life allows. Buk never went the ivory tower route. Frank O’Hara is another one. Never quit his job as a museum curator at the MOMA. Lou gets the sense that O’Hara never took poetry too seriously. He has an insouciance about him; O’Hara never breaks a sweat. Anyway, Skunk got a real job. A real sus one, but a real job, nonetheless. Good for you, Skunk.

Lou also likes the name Skunk Baxter and his facial hair. He just may have the most iconic moustache in rock. Maybe David Crosby or Zappa have Skunk beat. Freddie Mercury for sure. Tough call. Lou was misnamed at birth. He should have been Baxter Waxman. That has a ring to it. It is cool. It reminds Lou of the coolest name of all time: Blaise Ciabatone. Blaise was a rival swimmer back when Lou swam competitively. Blaise was a good swimmer. Lou was ok. Blaise moved through water like a duck’s ass. Lou quit swimming because of the practices. Remember your Allen Iverson. “Practice!? We’re talking about practice??!!” Lou did not like to practice, which is just about all that competitive swimming is. The meets were long and drawn out too. Not much fun.

The best time Lou ever had on the swim team was when the team all gathered at the swim coach’s front lawn and marched through the neighborhood to the swimming pool chanting “It just doesn’t matter!!” before a match with a rival pool that was just a front for an elite swimming club.

Lou cannot tell you how much the movie Meatballs influenced his young life. Lou went to summer camp, begged to go to summer camp, after seeing Meatballs. Lou needed a Bill Murray figure in his life. Meatballs was fake news. Lou hated summer camp. Nothing like Meatballs. He spent most of his time in his bunk reading Zane Grey novels because that was all the camp had in its “library”. Lou also enjoyed waking up at the ass-crack of dawn and participating in the Polar Bear Club. In short, Lou enjoyed being miserable. Lou also fell off a horse. To this day, Lou is terrified of horses. Consult your Freud if you want. Lou just knows they are powerful animals that have no concept of their own strength. Brutes!! Lou learned his lesson from Meatballs and was not fooled by Stripes. No Army for Lou.

How did we get here? Geez. This took some twists and turns. That is why you buy LPs. For the memories. Another thing that is lost to the Internet, according to Pamela Paul. She should know since she wrote the book on it. Or so you would think. AI would write the book now. Books that should just be blogs, Lou predicts, will be lost to AI. Lou is sure that Pamela Paul is working on 100 Things We’ve Lost to AI as we speak. With her ghost in the machine writer.