audiotrack Gargoyle Wings

reviewed by Carey Dean Potash

Published in Issue No. 16 ~ September, 1998

Gargoyle Wings is sensational. Gargoyle Wings redefines music. The future of music depends on albums like Gargoyle Wings.

This is how I would describe Gargoyle Wings if I had stabbed a crack needle into my frontal lobe.

My first guess was that this was a 16-year-old kid who just finished listening to an audio cassette of “Learn the Guitar in One Week,” and figured it was time to break out the shiny new 4-track his parents bought him for Christmas and cut a CD to be distributed throughout his high school with the aspirations of becoming a macabre, oddly attractive cult figure.

Then I thought no, it was a 47-year-old jaded ex-librarian on disability who thought it would be a “hoot” to dig out the old ukulele he hadn’t played in 20 years and voice his frustrations to a new generation using a language they can understand. He went to the big city to a real studio while his knitting wife pulled away from her pot holders to applaud hysterically after each song.

Then I thought, “come on, be serious.” So I listened intensely to Gargoyle Wings for two solid minutes, realizing that it wasn’t a wannabe goth teen nor a middle-aged ex-librarian turning on his wife with his “wild side.” It was Rowlf, the piano-playing canine muppet from the Muppet Show. Once I discovered this, everything fell perfectly into place. It had to be Rowlf. This was his comeback record. Incognito as Bob Xark.


  • It sounded a lot like him.
  • He has music in his blood.
  • Who other than a minor muppet whose career ended prematurely when his creator died would be bitter enough to write songs like “Denying People Medicine” and “Oozing Rot?”

Then I thought, what the hell am I doing? With the two minutes I spent listening to Gargoyle Wings, I could have been outside, scraping the bird crap off my car windshield.

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Carey Dean Potash graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in English. He works as an editor for an online news provider. He's only begun 'writing' short stories, his fiction appearing in a zine called Sink Full of Dishes and in the May issue of Pif. In his words, "I don't plan on riding horseback through the Rainforests with martini in hand at some $10,000 summer writing workshop. I've also never been a roadie for Kiss. And aside from winning 'Best Hair' in the eighth grade, I haven't won any contests." A major influence of his was Dave Louapre, who wrote a short-lived comic strip called Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.