this warning: “I don’t lie, but I exaggerate for a living.”
Many of the dead ends that he pursues were victims of censorship. “Cape Cod Girls,” Baby Gramps says, almost surely included bawdy verses that were never written down by the shy Victorian thinkers. “Did you know they used to put bloomers on piano legs?” he says.
“I listen to everything. My dad had that guitar that’s on that album cover,” he says of the rusty National Steel he’s holding on Same Ol’ Timeously. “That’s my shoehorn into the past. Back when everyone was buying 45s, I was buying 78s for a nickel. They’re all worth thousands of dollars now. That’s my retirement.”
He also collects old recording cylinders, the kind of thing Thomas Edison used. But Baby Gramps’ interests extend beyond music. “I live in a hand-made mansion, three stories, a museum of wondrous curiosity