Trying to sneak in a few more birthday notices before the year’s up, 2016 marks the 40th birthday of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It’s also the 30th birthday of John Cale’s third album which borrowed its title from Robbins’ novel. Cale’s Cowgirls is a live record/time capsule that captures the New York punk scene one decade later…

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the third live album by Welsh musician John Cale. It was originally released on LP in 1986 and then later reissued on cassette in 1987 with a different cover and drastically altered track listing. In 1991 it was reissued on CD with a third cover design, but with contents identical to the cassette edition. It was recorded in CBGB club in New York between 1978 and 1979 with three former members of Patti Smith Group, bassist Ivan Kral, keyboardist Bruce Brody and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. The LP version contains different track listing than CD.

Here’s a sampler of the album followed by a monster Cale playlist on YouTube…

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They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps, and according to author Tom Robbins’ Wiki page, he’s kept his company very well, indeed…

Robbins was a friend of Terence McKenna,[20] whose influence appears evident in a couple of his books. A main character (Larry Diamond) in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas advocates a theory similar to those of McKenna, involving the history and cultural influences of psychedelic plants. Robbins also spent time with Timothy Leary and the author has said that one of the protagonists in Jitterbug Perfume (Wiggs Dannyboy) exhibited certain characteristics of Leary’s personality; Robbins has admitted to using LSD with Leary.[21]

He is friends with Gus Van Sant, and performed the voice-over narration in Van Sant’s film adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. He has been friends with directors Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph, as well, and has had small speaking parts in five feature films.

Celebrating the recent publication of Tom Robbins new memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, here is a great little video of the counterculture hero’s classic short story “The Purpose of the Moon.”

Buy Robbins’ Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
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