A few years ago when my friend Kirsten died I took solace in googling her name over and over trying to find people sharing memories of her, and it is in that vein that I thought I would share a few memories of Tim Haslett, who I wasn’t super close with, but who I remember fondly. If anything, I am typing this out for people looking for scraps of his life, however small, floating around on the internet.
I first met Tim at WZBC in the early 90’s. He was highly regarded, almost to the point of guru status, for his musical tastes. He was really into hip-hop and funk, stuff I didn’t know much about, but the way he talked about the stuff gave you the impression that he knew just about everything there was to know about. Best of all, his enthusiasm wasn’t bounded by any sense of serious decorum. Tim had more than his share of hilarious lines to describe things. For a while, everything was “fifty pound” this, and “fifty pound” that.
“This track rocks harder than a fifty pound diamond.”
“…thumps like a fifty pound jack rabbit.”
He had a unique style and cadence to his dry humor. For example, he would present a funny idea in what seemed to be the opening clause of a sentence, and then having done so, would switch gears to a new sentence entirely without finishing the first one. There was a very stop and go measured quality to this, a feigned losing track of his original thought, and then onto something even funnier in an entirely new sentence. Gagne and I spent hours entertaining ourselves with far off approximations of this mannerism.
I am very well aware that this doesn’t translate well, but I’ll throw in the cursory “you had to be there.” I know I wish I could be there again myself.
Well said. Tim rocked metaphors like a fifty thousand pound sack of solidified volcanic magma.
…and about what you said, I often wondered, was it a “feigned losing track” or was it just how his mind worked.