Album Art: How it Happens

Since it’s just about time to get album artwork started for our upcoming record, I’m thinking about the process. The last two albums have featured original artwork by Justin Masi (as I hope the next one will). It is super-detailed and all relates to the songs and I think it really adds an entire visual dimension to the music. People often ask how does he come up with it. Ultimately the drawings are his creation, but I usually give him a kick start by sending him a rough mix of the record along with lyrics and a written description of what I am envisioning. He then takes that and consults his muse and in a few weeks I get an elaborately decorated, hand-wrapped package in the mail containing his original pen and ink interpretations of the descriptions I sent. These then get scanned and adapted to a CD design and digitally colored by Melissa Masser . What follows is my written description of my vision for the inner-art of our first studio record, What’s Your Sign? and the Jutsin Masi drawings that showed up in the mail:

The scene is a bar that looks like the Burns House. The name of the bar is “Kettle of Fish” and there should be some sort of sign indicating this prominently. Preferably it is neon and in the shape of a kettle overflowing with fish. Beneath the sign a real rooster stands crowing. Everything is dark and dreary. Everyone is either miserable, bored or vainly trying to look neither. There is a clock on the wall with the hands reading 5:55. Somewhere in the bar there prominently hangs one of the old “Don’t Tread on Me” flags with a snake on it. Over in front of the juke box there is the set-up for a band to play but no musicians yet. A drum set, three guitars (gold Strat, blue Strat, Grayish Tele), a bass, and three vocal mics, and small PA. Somewhere on the far side of the bar stand two Civil War Cannons–one noticeably bigger than the other. They are aimed at the band. Somewhere nearby them stands Napoleon Bonaparte wearing a chapeau hat which he is straightening. He has his right hand shoved beneath his coat at about the breast-pocket. A parrot sits on his shoulder.

The bartender is a skinny, short cowboy with a wild look in his eye. He is just barely twenty one and has a six-shooter on each hip. This is Billy the Kid. He should have the vibe of a rock star while still being a cowboy. He is the coolest guy in the bar–you can tell he knows he is better than all of the shit around him. He is busy pouring out a shot of whiskey to an obviously drunk-looking Indian in full headdress, also wearing a six-shooter on each hip, who is sitting at the very end of the bar closest to the band. This is Tonto. Somewhere on the wall hangs an autographed picture of the Lone Ranger which the Indian is probably looking at.

There is a TV set with a woman’s face on it that looks like Angelina Jolie except, like Medusa, she has snakes coming out of her head in place of hair. There is a man at the bar looking at the TV and falling off of his stool. If you do see his face it looks shocked. He is a little scrawny guy with curly hair who looks like Bob Dylan, though you don’t necessarily see his face. Also looking at the TV are marble statues of Warren G. Harding, Franklin Pierce, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Walt Whitman, and Julius Caesar. They are lined up against the opposite wall of the bar and all are seated similar to Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Though they are stone they have living eyes and all are focused on the television set.

There are numerous snakes on the floor of the bar. Also worms. Two farm-boy looking characters are out on the floor moving towards the back parking lot exit but looking at the floor intent on what they are doing. The one closest to the exit has bare feet which are stained purple. He is looking for grapes to step on and crush. Maybe he has tread on a snake accidentally and is getting bitten and hurting for it. The one behind him has a bag of seeds which he is spreading on the floor. The grim reaper is standing near the parking lot exit door, leaning against the wall, watching their progress. Somewhere at the bar or at a table sits a well-dressed, balding, middle-aged yuppie looking guy who is nervously watching all three. In his hand or pocket or somewhere near him is a ticket which reads, “Admit One.”

At the very center of the bar is a man wearing a red and black checkered flannel shirt with dark, short hair (lumber-jackish with broad shoulders) whose face is not visible. He has a copy of Jack Kerouac’s Subterraneans in one hand and a beer in the other. There is an empty shot glass in front of him. He is slouched forward and beaten looking. Heavy chains wrap around his legs holding him to the bar stool. There is a bald eagle sitting on the bar next to him chewing on a piece of liver. The mirror behind the bar reflects him and shows Jack Kerouac’s face. On his left sits a crazy looking old woman with curlers in her hair, wearing a night-gown and slippers sipping on a gin and tonic. She seems to be about to harass Kerouac.

On Kerouac’s right is the same beautiful Angelina Jolie look-alike who is on the television screen, except the snakes have been replaced by normal hair, though if you look closely you might see a snake head or tail or two coming out from beneath her perfect, wavy, dark locks. She is obviously coming on to the Kerouac character, with an obviously devious look about her. Both the old woman in curlers and the Angelina Jolie look alike are offering Kerouac a light.

There is an older man beside the Angelina Jolie look-alike who is dressed in the habit of a preacher only instead of a black jacket and pants his are bright orange. He is balding and looks like he is giving a sermon (mainly to Kerouac) while high on coke. In one hand is a full shot glass in the other a rattle snake. The Bible is sitting on the bar. The Angelina Jolie look-alike seems to be half-listening to him while hitting on Kerouac, but it is obvious she has heard it all before. Several people throughout the bar are obviously crying. Kerouac would obviously prefer to read his book.

Behind the bar is a small stage in the shape of a pentagram with five candles lit, one sitting at each of the five points. There is a pole in the middle and a beautiful though tragic looking red-head who is absurdly skinny with obviously fake D-Cups is on it. She is bored and dancing half-heartedly on the pole. She is wearing a red bra and thong. A few dollars are held beneath the top string of the thong and noticeably, there is a ticket protruding from one of her bra cups which reads, “Admit One.” Somewhere behind the bar a lion lurks, only his head and maybe his tail are visible over the bar, but he is obviously eyeing up the go-go dancer, licking his lips like he sees dinner.

At the end of the bar farthest from the band (near the back parking lot exit) is a wizardly looking old man, dressed up to perform his side-show act as a psychic. Sitting next to him is a fat, bearded lady, who is also dressed for her sideshow act. They have the appearance of an old married couple who may well be in the middle of a routine quarrel. They both are drinking some sort of hard liquor and are killing time before they perform.

The bathroom door is open and there is a Medieval knight kneeling in an open stall snorting lines of coke off of the toilet seat. Next to him the stall is closed but beneath the divider you can see there is a person in it wearing a pair of black boots and black jeans.

There is a toddler standing on one of the tables with a loaf of bread in his hands which he is breaking.

Sitting at the bar there are two young, Civil War soldiers. One should be dressed in Union blue, the other Confederate gray. They should both have muskets leaning against the bar next to them, barrels up, with bouquets of flowers stuck in the ends. They might even have cute young girls with them showing them great affection. They might be the only happy looking people at the bar.

There is a turbaned, bearded, Osama Bin-Laden looking Arab and an Hasidic Jew sitting next to each other uneasily rubbing shoulders.

Judas Iscariot is somewhere in the bar with a bag of silver coins in one had and holding the hand of an innocent looking girl with the other. He might is leaning in to kiss her.

Somewhere on the floor (preferably in the exit hallway to the back parking lot) there are a bunch of bones laying scattered. Basically, there are several skeletons which are disconnected and scattered about.

Near the Main St. Entrance is a small, stone-walled well which rises up out of the floor about two feet. A boy is sitting on it with a fishing pole. The line is dropped down into the well and nothing is biting. A can labeled “Worms” sits open on the well-wall next to him and there are a lot of worms on the floor. A rusty, old-fashioned can opener is sitting next to the can. A man’s hand is reaching up out of the well, grasping blindly towards the entrance door. There is a rainbow sign on the door like the kind used to indicate a gay bar.

Twelve innocent looking 16 year-old girls wearing all white nun uniforms are spread throughout the bar. They all have bellies showing that they are pregnant. A few of them are gathered around the bathroom checking up on the knight who is snorting coke.

The devil is sitting at the bar wearing a big white cowboy hat and boots, like a modern, country music, fake cowboy.

Justin Masi’s Original Cover Art for our album What’s Your Sign?

Original inner album art for What’s Your Sign? by Justin Masi

The artist himself: Justin Masi sitting in on drums with us at a gig a couple of years back.

Memories of a Friend

The following are a few memories from my friend Steve who I used to race bikes with. We talked for the first time in years this week. He’d been reading my blog and he related these stories that he felt were in the same spirit as the stuff I was digging into. The well has sort of run dry for ideas to write about here these days—probably from being so busy—so these are my treatments of what I recall of our conversation.

1. That time laying in bed, trying to sleep was full of fascination and terror when I was young. I had patterned white and blue wall paper in my room. I remember seeing the image of a donkey and one of a rabbit and one of a dead woman in the patterns. Two particular hallucinations/sensations followed me up through my teen years. The first was a strange tactile feeling that I was tumbling through or in some sort of tumbler with some sort of sandy-feeling substance. There was a sound attached to it too, but the sound was internal in origin so it was felt more than heard.
The other was a white light that would come from the periphery of my eyes-closed “field of vision” and encompass my entire “field of vision.” This generally came in times of great turmoil or sadness, particularly after crying. It was always somehow comforting. It still occurs to this day, though is no longer really associated with turmoil.

2. When I was eight or nine my parents began taking me on family bike rides. When I was ten we started to go see some races. I became hooked and decided that that was what I was going to do. I announced this at the dinner table one night and my dad said, “You can’t be a bike racer, you’re too lazy, they train every day. That’s hard work.” That summer I began riding every day. Every night before I went to bed, I prayed, “Dear Jesus, Please help me. Thank you for everything you’ve done. I pray for my family and friends and everyone in my life and pray that I’ll get a good night’s sleep and wake up early enough tomorrow morning and train hard so that I can become a bike racer. (Here I would insert whatever particular concerns I might have on a given day). I thank you for everything you’ve done for me and in Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.”

When school was out that summer I would go to my grandmother’s every day and I started training. First it was only two miles or so, but I went as hard as I could and didn’t miss a day. The rides got longer and I got stronger. By the time I was twelve I talked my parents into letting me actually start racing. I never lost a race in my age group that first year. At some point after I had already won several races I was out riding (I still remember the exact stretch of road where it occurred) it occurred to me that I was a bike racer—and a good one! I don’t think I’d ever felt more excitement in my life. I also realized I’d have to change my prayers. As the years went on that same piece of road became a trigger for self-reflection: when I looked back as a junior national champion, national team member, or a veteran of Belgian kermesse racing like I had always dreamed of being, it was always a reminder—every moment lived enthusiastically is a prayer—and that there always comes a time when a prayer needs to be changed.

3. When I was twenty-two I was graduated from college and was living back at home for awhile while I drifted. My grandmother had moved in there too, for different reasons but was doing her own sort of drifting, I guess. One night she had congestive heart failure and was taken to the hospital. She stayed there a week and my father was sick with the flu and my mother had cancer, so I was the only one to be able to visit her. I visited her daily.
One night it seemed like all was up for her. Her heart was unstable and she was passing in and out of dementia. She thought I was her 22 year-dead husband. To blur matters more we shared a name so I was never sure who she was talking to—didn’t matter really, I suppose. She kept flashing back to strange times and places in her life. She repeatedly thought she was in the house next to the one in which she grew up. She thought I was her husband and we had been visiting her friend who lived there for dinner and something had gone wrong. She was worried about my father and his leg and kept asking if it would be alright. The thing that was coming up the most though was an ice cream party for her class. They were supposed to have an ice cream party and she was supposed to by them ice cream but new that she couldn’t. She kept saying, “Those poor kids, they won’t get their ice cream now.” She was in tears over the ice cream. Eventually I assured her that I would get the ice cream for her and she needn’t worry. Then she calmed down and was almost happy. She pulled through and lived for another two years. That night made me wonder, though—what the hell was that ice cream party? What will that be for me?

Autobiographical Memory Project II

6. In preschool when we had free playtime inside the entire group of boys would rush to the toy shelf for the most desirable toys. Getting the right toy could make you the alpha male of the day. The two “power toys” were the big wooden dump truck and the “big cow.” The truck was big enough that you could put your knees in the back and ride it around. It could haul any other toy in the room. The “big cow” was the largest, most muscular horned bull out of a set of plastic cattle. When we “played cows” we all clustered around on our hands and knees on the carpeted floor. Your chosen plastic cow then became a battering ram to use against all the other cows while making “Mooooooooo!” noises or snorting. It was a very complex game. The amazing thing was to observe the power of the “big cow.” He could clear out the “corral” every time, even when in one of the weakest hands. But if he was claimed by too inferior a grip he would sometimes break loose and find a more suitable clutch. No one ever let the “big cow” win. We all fought hoof and sometimes udder for dominance but nine times out of ten the “big cow” prevailed. We had a seldom-voiced notion of magic associated with the “big cow.” We all realized it’s power and knew it was something supersensible yet real just the same.

7. When I was a kid Halley’s Comet came. A big deal, it happens only once every seventy-six years. I going through a big science/astronomy phase and was really excited. My mother took me to see it at the observatory down the road from our house. There was a long line and it was cold and at some point, there standing on line with my mother I realized that in seventy-six years, when Halley’s Comet came back again, I might be able to see it again,but I also realized that in seventy-six years my mother would certainly be dead. I had never realized such a thing before. I cried myself to sleep every night for almost a week after, but refused to say why. Finally one night, my mother came into my bedroom and sat down on my bed and said, “Who knows, I might be there with you to see the comet again,” and rubbed my head till I fell asleep. That convinced me then that there was something out there too big to understand, yet real. Whether it was God or ESP, or a mother’s love I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was real. I believed.

The next time I went to the observatory was with my wife years later. There was a comet that I can’t recall the name of and we waited on line to go up in the telescope to see it. My mother was in the hospital then with lymphoma—she died before she ever got home. I think things are usually quite circular if and when you pay attention.

8. My grandmother who had been an elementary school teacher took care of me during the day. She would read to me every afternoon. We’d go to the library and get books or read the ones she had. The milk man brought milk and orange juice on Mondays and I particularly liked to read Curious George books with the orange juice. Somehow they went well together.

8. The first time I read on my own must have been when I was three or so—it was very young. It was just a book with pictures and the word of what was pictured, but I learned to go through and read the whole book myself—more an act of memorization really, but man, did I feel grown-up! In some ways I haven’t changed since that day. It couldn’t have been much after that that I really learned to read—it was well before kindergarten. My grandmother had gotten me a whole National Geographic children’s series on science and nature and we were reading my favorite part of my favorite one, which was a paragraph beneath a picture of a raccoon. She had been reading to me and she asked me if I wanted to read that page this time and I read the whole thing. She said something, like, “Good, now you know how to read. You can read anything you want now if you put your mind to it.” That was a pretty wild proclamation—even wilder because I realized it was true.

9. During the years I apprenticed and then worked as a metal smith I learned more than I have in any two year period of my life. The most important things were: 1.) it hurts when you hammer your finger; 2.) when you hammer your finger it is not an “accident”—it is your own fault; 3.) fingers only heal themselves, nothing else can heal a finger; 4.) when your finger heals itself, you are healing yourself because your finger is part of you; 5.) the hammer is better at hammering than you are, so get it started and then let it do its thing; 6.) practiced detachment from the mechanics of things prevents detachment from the art of things and fingers; 7.) art and detachment are both healing.

Autobiographical Memories

I was asked by a college student to help with her “Autobiographical Memories” assignment for her Psych class. I’m supposed to record fifteen memories–here are the first five:

1. I’m lying on my back in my parents’ bed getting my diaper changed by my maternal grandmother. My grandfather is in the kitchen, my father is working nights and my mother has gone to the city with her friend. The light is brown and somehow I know all of this.
2. I’m out picking tomatoes with my mother. I must be about four. It is before pre-school so maybe even three. She has to go into the house for a minute and she leaves me outside telling me to pick any of the tomatoes I want, just not the green one. As soon as she goes in I pick the green one. When she comes out I say, “I picked it anyway.”
3. I’ve heard that “fuck” is a bad word but don’t know what it means. I want to try the word out on my mother so I start saying words that rhyme with fuck in a stream-of-consciousness ramble: “Buck, luck, truck, duck, muck, suck, cluck, stuck, fuck . . .” and then a pause because I’d run out of rhymes. She was not impressed and I learned it really was a bad word, at least to say to your mom.
4. The first question I ever got wrong was in Kindergarten class. Mrs. Listener holds up a red stuffed-fabric, piece of fruit with green leaves on top and asks, “What is this?”
I raise my hand and answer, “An apple.”
She says, “No.” I am stunned. She must be wrong.
A girl in the class raises her hand, is called on and says, “A tomato.”
Mrs. Listener says, “Correct, it’s a tomato.”
How could she tell the difference? It was a poor replication and could easily have been an apple. If a representation is ambiguous can a judgment be incorrect? I sensed injustice in the world.
5. I was playing trucks with Tommy Johnson. He was six years older, lived up the street from me and was mistreated by his adoptive parents so he spent a lot of time with me and mine. He told me once that he was found in a dumpster in a garbage bag as an infant—that’s why he didn’t live with his real parents.
This time we weren’t talking, we were hauling dirt with our trucks. My truck’s wheel bent crooked and I said, “Jesus !” in disgust.
Tommy told me that I should never take the lord’s name in vain or else I’d go to hell.
“So?” I replied.
“You burn forever there.”
“Yeah, but you don’t feel it, do you?”
“That’s the problem, you do feel it—forever!”
I imagined what that would be like and how that could be possible. I realized that it was torture beyond what I could comprehend.
I decided then and there that 1.) I didn’t believe it; and 2.) If God would really do that to someone he wasn’t all he was cracked up to be.

one-eyed peter and jan breydel

can you see what is happening
or do you think it’s some kind of joke
the loser was in power for four whole years
now the winner says, “the world, it’s broke”
and we all believe him so i guess that means it’s true
we’ve been at it ten thousand years, you’d think by now
we’d know what to do

there’s a church in the city of bruges
they say has the blood of christ
and it’s been standing almost a thousand years
’cause the trade routes ran dry
but in the center of the square there’s a statue of two common men
and a whole nation with their blood standing like
a church
to them

so one-eyed peter and jan breydel, come and meet me on the square
’cause the bells are ringing, the tower’s leaning
and revolution/evolution’s in the air

i met a man in a new york bar
and he bought me a beer
he said, i’m an old poet, boy
and there’s just one thing i fear:
they’re gonna try to make you play their game
if you can, just refuse
’cause there ain’t no way to beat ‘em at it
and if you win
you’ve just got more to lose

so one-eyed peter and jan breydel, come and meet me on the square
’cause the bells are ringing
the tower’s leaning
and revolution/evolution’s in the air

now i don’t have any golden spurs to hang on your wall
but it’s been a long day of riding and the miles
i’ve felt them all
but don’t you tell me we’re going under now
not while there are still girls who look like you
and i can drink a beer
and wipe away the years
and talk about
what we’re gonna do

so one-eyed peter and jan breydel
come and meet me on the square
’cause the bells are ringing, the tower’s leaning and
revolution/evolution’s in the air

barack obama and the reiki healing of america, part 2

I remember getting stung by a bee a in late August of 2001.  I was wearing sandals and walking in grass and somehow it got between my sandal and foot and got me on the right heel–one second I was walking on top of the world and the next I was howling in pain and on the ground trying to remove the stinger.  I remember thinking that it had been months, maybe even years at that point since I had felt any real pain.  I also remember thinking that that was somehow unnatural and being sort of thankful that the pain had finally come–better to feel it than know it’s out there and due.

I was staying up all night, every night, reading the Koran and Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma then and had some vague notion that I had to have both finished and have achieved some sort of Bo Tree-enlightenment before I started work in September or else it would be too late.  I read The Bible too–the New Testament–and I was still living at home and my dad would walk by my room on the way to the bathroom and make sounds of disgust when he saw my light was still on at 3 a.m..  One night I was reading the Gospel of Luke and he actually opened my door in a half-asleep stagger and snarled, “What the hell is the matter with you, being awake at 3 a.m.??  What the hell are you doing?? Go to sleep goddamnit!!”  Jesus seemed to get along with his Dad pretty well, but he did have some cross words for Mom every now and then, so I figured he would have been able to relate at least.  I kept reading and turned the other cheek to the glares he shot at me when I got out of bed at 2 p.m. the next day.

I had just gotten a new guitar that month too–my 1969 Mahogany Guild D-25, which I still have.  I bought it off of Brian Molnar for $400.  I think it hurt him terribly to let it go, but I needed it and he didn’t and that’s the way things should work, I think.  I was playing it in these funky open tunings with dropped down strings that just rang through the mahogany with the sound of the smell of autumn as it begins to work it’s way out of the dry, late August earth–it sounded like the smell of a change coming on–dark, dry and rich.  I had been  listening to David Gray’s Lost Songs over and over again and somehow knew that he smelled the same thing.

I wrote “If I Wake Up” which ended up on What’s Your Sign?during that period.  (Click and scroll to the bottom to hear me today, playing it solo, how I wrote it, on that dark, dry and rich Guild D-25.) In my head back then, David Gray was singing it and I was just trying to harmonize.  Now I know better.

I had also been dating this girl for about 4 months then–there is something in our DNA that makes that the time in a relationship to, as Ray Wylie Hubbard so eloquently puts it, “fish or cut bait.”  We saw each other everyday.  When she came home from work she smelled like ginger spice and wore black polo shirts.  We spent all our money eating out and swam in my parent’s pool at night and watched movies in their furnished basement room.  We walked by the tracks and sat by the river in the gorge–it was the land of milk and honey and we were, like everybody else I knew, drunk on its sweetness.

barack obama and the reiki healing of america

all biography is fiction, all fiction is biography.

i got a job as a garbage collector about a year and a half out of college. i didn’t really want the job at the time but was sort of offered it and too polite to say no. i’d also heard it was hard to get a job, so i figured i should feel lucky for the opportunity and went through the necessary motions to get that which i didn’t really want. it was a good experience–made me appreciate things that people throw away. it also made me able to empathize with people who dedicate their life to pursuing that which they don’t really want–there are a lot of them. you’d be surprised how many valuable objects end up in the trash.
there was an unwritten code of conduct amongst trash collectors though. hands off the valuables. it never really made sense to me. i mean, if someone is going to throw something out, why shouldn’t i be able to make use of it. my route was in a wealthy area so the temptations were endless. one day, for example, i broke my back over a perfectly good recliner chair that took three of us to get into the truck. it was leather and way better than anything i could afford. i could have used one at my apartment–but no–it wasn’t to be. why couldn’t i just leave it there and come back with my buddy and his pick-up later on? i guess some high brow sitting in his mcmansion didn’t want to see trash like me looting his fine throwaways. ok that’s cynical, but still . . . another time there was a beautiful mahogany lamp that would have looked perfect in my study–yes, a garbage collector can have a study too, you know. there are a lot of things you wouldn’t guess about people just by looking at them. garbage taught me that. let me ask you, where do anthropologists get most of their info about the day to day of ancient people? garbage. don’t think it’s any different today. i know if i’d seen my garbage (yes i thought about what kind of message my garbage was sending to the world–i was deeply submerged into the garbological culture by then) i would have never doubted for a second that the owner had a study. not that it was full of bottles of port and pipe tobacco and worn out tweed jackets or anything–garbology is rarely that obvious. it takes a subtle sense to cipher it out and i had that sense. i would have never lamped my trash for that of a trash collector though. goes to show there’s a limit to every science. but one thing about me, no matter what i do i want to find that limit.

so there was this one day in particular that i found the limit and my two worlds collided and i almost didn’t make it out. Did I mention that I was also a musician? Well yes—that was the other orb in the collision of the fateful summer Thursday when the refuse had been particularly smelly ad the sky particularly blue. after getting home from work on the back of the truck and washing the film of the days dirty doings off i went online and started doing my other job–the one that didn’t pay. i was struggling at the time trying to decide exactly how i could manage to devote the proper time into my music and still pay the rent and feed myself without having to revert to dumpster diving, which is below the standards of even the most serious garbologist. i was going through an artistic phase where i was experimenting with ultra-realist poetry set to trombone accompaniment. i really believed that i had found the formula to take the pop market by storm. i was listening to a lot of old spice girls records at the time along with some bing Crosby and was certain that by forming an all female, canadian super group of ultra-realist poets to recite my poems while wearing sweaters and fur boots, all accompanied by a bald trombonist playing my original scores, and wearing only a sarong, that i could be the next p-diddy or at least least randy newman.

i had been surfing craigslit for weeks in the musicians community section and had stumbled upon the chance of a lifetime. i saw an ad for an unpaid gig at the yippie cafe on bleecker street near bowery . the ad called for original, avant-garde music with a pop sensibility–right up my alley i thought! it was also perfect timing because i had just met four conservative-dressing canadian tourists that past weekend when i accidentally got on one of the red double-decker ny sightseeing buses instead of the metro while trying to make it from the port authority to jonathan berger’s set at the sidewalk cafe. they all had great voices and a poetic vision, so we exchanged numbers and I said I’d be in touch. And of course trombone players are a dime a dozen in the city so i was set–i had responded to the ad three days previous and had been figuratively and literally (i was a garbage collector) holding my breath since.
the poster of the ad’s name was aj. my heart skipped a beat at the thought.

aj weberman was a yippie and my hero. i knew by rumor that he was the curator of the new yippie café and of course the whole world knew he was the inventor of garbology as well as one of the most penetrating and interpretive music critics of all time. He was the man who had gone through bob dylan’s garbage. He had since written volumes on dylan, shedding the deepest insight ever published into the deepest published man of the 20th century. He uncovered dylan’s secret zionist political doctrine, he knew of the years spent as a heroin junkie, he knew that dylan was addicted to crack in the eighties and was also, perhaps the only man to recognize that dylan had been one of the early contractors of the hiv virus. how did he determine all of this? by searching through dylan’s trash in the 1970’s. the man was an icon and a martyr to all of us who followed. this groundbreaking action led to a series of confrontational phone conversations with the rock poet himself and climaxed on a dark, cold day when dylan assaulted aj, my hero, on the street leaving him bruised and battered like an old tin receptacle rolling nowhere in particular, blown by the cold city wind.

now how could dylan’s nyc trash from the seventies have shed such light on the man and even his future? well aj knew, as i had come to learn while pursuing this stinking career that i never even wanted, that time and space is only an open receptacle for spirit. he who has peered into enough trash cans can learn to predict what garbage will come to fill them. he knows that ultimately, the can is insignificant—it is left behind, turned over on a wind-blown street, empty, forever rolling away–only the garbage makes the final ride to the consecrated grounds where the inexorable law of the landfill slowly leads it through another cycle of vanities and swirling of winds, towards the inevitable, next landfill.

the e-mail i read that day said, “I dig your stuff. Call me. AJ,” and his number.

by the time I finally got up the courage to call aj i felt like my whole world was an empty receptacle, just waiting for the next glad bag of fate to be heaved into it.

heard myself on the radio:-)

our last record got played a little bit in a lot of different places all over the globe but not so much where i’m at! but last night i was driving down route 78 in eastern PA, listening to my good friend Torchy Blaine’s show on 89.7 WDVR and she played “find my way home”!! now, she’s played us a lot before and i’ve even been on her show a few times, but there is something totally different about driving down the highway at sunset listening to a real, honest to goodness radio station, reception coming in and out and everything and hearing yourself come on the radio. that’s pretty damned cool! to top it off she played a townes van zandt song afterwords to make my night, hell, at some stage of it all that would have made my life!

joe