Staff Picks

The Memoirs of Buckethead

by Patrick Cassels on February 25, 2008

Few musicians personify the insanity of rock n’ roll better than Guns N’ Roses’ masked guitarist, known simply as “Buckethead.” Yet the following excerpts from the reclusive musician’s memoirs paint a portrait of an artist very different from the man known best for wearing a KFC container on his head.

Ah, dear Journal! It is to you I run once again as my musical purgatory continues. What torment I am in! Each night, forced to perform like some minstrel before a stadium of utter morons. I am Prometheus, and the audience the dreaded vulture waiting to tear out my liver as I arrive in Nassau, in Scranton, in Sacramento, to lend my talents to the pandering songs of some bandana-wearing American hayseed.

If only they knew, dear Journal! If only they knew what mad, glorious genius brewed beneath this upturned bucket of KFC. For what once contained a dozen pieces of Colonel Sander’s extra crispy now contains glorious symphonies, Baroque concertos, Italian operas of such beauty that Zeus himself would shed a tear. And all of them, unheard! Unappreciated! Pushed aside so the brainless philistines of rural New Jersey can hear their precious “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

It is times like this that I long for my younger years. Ah! Summers in Dover. Autumns at Oxford. Strumming my mahogany lute beneath the university’s golden spires, each pluck of its horsehair strings more beautiful than the last. Until that fateful day I auditioned before Axl and his grotesque carnival of musical freaks. ‘Twas a lark! A jest! An act of undergraduate tomfoolery to break the monotony of school! Had I only known it would condemn me to a lifetime with a barbarian like Axl Rose, I would have fled as far from him and that top-hatted Slash as humanly possible.

Oh Axl! Bane of my existence! Salieri to my Mozart! Brutus to my Caesar! Et tu, Axl? For an Axl Rose by any other name would smell as strongly of nicotine and Jack Daniels whisky as does this so called “musician” who causes me such pain.

I must go now, dear Journal. Slash beckons me to hold his exotic pet snake while he fornicates with local harlots in a motel laundry room. I can only hope the serpent swallows me whole, granting me deliverance from the unknown terrors of this life.