Category: Field Recordings of the Future

The instrument above comes with a reflector so you can find it in the dark. The others, on the same chunk of guard rail, stand straight up but this one has been clobbered. I use the reflector as a lever to push down on as we walk by. Peggi recorded the sound on her phone.

We stopped in Canaltown to pick our usual order, ten pounds of Rochester Choice whole bean. We ordered two lattes while we talked to Pete about business and retirement. He’s sixty now and toying with not being in the shop seven days a week. While we talked a customer came in and ordered a cold brew. It was sitting on the counter in a large glass jar with a spigut. I asked Pete if he brewed it in that container and he started to explain his 18 hour process. While he talked the cold brew was overflowing and I felt bad for having distracted him.

Over at the Co-Op they were playing a satellite radio station with early disco and things like Blondie’s “Dreamin” mixed in. Last time I heard that was in Home Depot.

NYT had a nice obit for Pee Wee Ellis, Jame’s Brown’s musical director and co-writer of “Cold Sweat” and “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Pee Wee spent his formative years in Rochester, played with Cheryl Laurro‘s father and every jazz band in town. The story had a great photo from that period taken by Rochester’s Paul Hoeffler at the Python Room when he was playing with Ron Carter.

The scooter below brought Bob Martin into town from Chicago. He’ll be joining us at the Little Theatre Café on Wednesday.

Margaret Explosion played a weekly happy hour gig at the Bug Jar for a few years in the late nineties and I occasionally brought my camera. I took a series of mugshots there one night. Almost everyone who was there that evening agreed to sit for one. I printed them out large and had a show there with them in 1998. I recently searched my computer for “BugJar” jpegs and created this movie with them relying heavily on the Ken Burns tool in iMovie to animate the stills.

The song is one we recorded a few years later in 2003 called “Floating at the Bug Jar.” We recorded it in the basement of our home in the city. Peggi Fournier plays sax. Jack Schaefer plays guitar. Greg Slack plays bass. Pete LaBonne plays Yamaha electronic piano and Farfisa organ and I played percussion.

At least five of our friends, pictured here from that period, have moved on. RIP Bug Jar Bob (the creative force and one of the three original owners), Bill Jones, Chuck Cuminale, Ted Williams, Janet Williams, Michael Barone and Shalonda Simpson.

As hard as it is to believe, the new owners of the Playground Tavern, located across the street from School 33’s playground, are changing the name to “Jackie-Ray’s Tavern.” I always thought that was a killer name for a bar.

Our band was in the middle of a month of Wednesday night gigs when the pandemic hit. We have not been back since and the only gig we have had since was in the theater in front of a blank movie screen with masked people sitting in in pairs separated by police yellow tape. The gig was so nerve-wracking for me I unplugged the recorder before writing the nights’ music to disc. I’m hoping tomorrow nights return to the café will be a return to form for Margaret Explosion.

Peggi and have been warming up  for the gig by listening to a minute of so of songs recorded at the café in the last few years and then playing duo versions of the themes. “Sonata,” originally performed with Jack Schaefer on bass clarinet, “World’s Fair” and even the dark brooding “Witness.”

Chuck was my brother’s best friend in high school. We shared friends back then so he was one of mine. Always curious and always with an opinion, he was like a magnet. Baptized James he was also colorblind. He was Colorblind James, with and without a band.

His longtime band members including Phil Marshall (who doubled as his brother-in-law), Ken Frank and Chuck’s son, Mark will be performing his songs for two nights in October at the downtown honky tonk, Abilene. They asked me to design a poster for the event, one with some of Chuck’s funky spirit.

I hardly have any fonts on my computer anymore. So many of the ones I was using back when we were churning out graphics are incompatible. I found what I was looking for on a cd we had filed away and I completed the mission without stomping on his grave.

I was thinking about Chuck while I worked. I remember him coming by with a mock up of the first album on Earring. He and his wife, Janet, had created a classic. We mostly helped by getting out of the way. Chuck was working a circus theme on the second lp and he came to us to realize it. I was left with distinct feeling that he could have done a distinctly better, personal touch, version himself and I told him as much. Professional execution does not make it better. That’s why they invented punk rock.

Chuck was also a poet.

People were ready to go out and it felt good in a giddy sort of way. We kept our masks on in the Little Theater but removed them when we played. The patrons, sitting in one half the available Theater 5 seats, the ones without yellow caution tape on them, did the same. The pattern, pairs of seats side by side with empty pairs between, kept people apart enough to change the vibe. The chatter, the squeaky chairs, the espresso machine, the laughter was all missing and missed. The band which typically slips into that atmospheric milieu was now the uncomfortable focus.

I read an article in the Times about some live Can recordings that Mute Records is releasing. They quoted Irmin Schmidt, the founder, as saying, “When we went onstage, we didn’t know beforehand what we would play. We just reacted to the atmosphere, to the acoustics, to the public, to the whole environment spontaneously, and started playing something, which we had never played before,”

Phil and Ken were in the cafe while Peggi and I were setting up the recording equipment. Peggi pounded my drums while I set the levels. There wasn’t enough light in the theater to get a proper photo. We had not played together since March of 2020 and we should have at least done a sound check in this new venue but instead we just dove in, in front of a rapt audience. I found it sort of nerve wracking. I forgot to stop the recording at the end of the night so it never wrote to disc before we unplugged the extension cord and we lost whatever it was that we played. But we did it. We emerged from the pandemic.

The café at the Little Theatre is not hosting live music yet. We were in the middle of a month of Wednesdays when they pulled the plug. Fifteen months later we have our first live gig, this on in one of the theaters, Little Theatre 5, the Jack Garner theater. When Jack was alive and working at the D&C he wrote this description of the band.

“One of the most original and unusual bands in Rochester; a five-piece ensemble exploring all sorts of musical dimensions linked to free jazz, Third World melodies, exotic instrumentation and a spacey, enveloping sort of music. The Explosion plays with a single-minded purpose and organic oneness that’s most impressive.” 

Tickets for the Wednesday performance are available at the www.thelittle.org

I love this photo because it features Peggi. She was the star and wrote most of the songs. I wish I knew who took the photo. They deserve credit. It may’ve been Gary Brandt or his friend Al. And even more credit should go to Duane Sherwood for the dramatic lighting.

Frank De Blase at City News wrote a piece on Personal Effects that went online this morning. “In the ’80s, it seemed that the bigger the show and the bigger the venue, the bigger the band sounded. It manifested itself through the keyboards and lone sax. The rhythm section swung mightily and dreamy along with the ethereal guitar. It was as if they were playing to the walls and threatening the roof.”

Nothing lasts forever.

This soccer ball was washed up on beach this morning. I was wondering whether it came across from Toronto, the wind comes from that direction, or whether it was just left on the beach by someone here in Rochester. It looked pretty beat up.

We watched El Classico yesterday, the Real Madrid Barcelona match. We love both those teams but lately we love Madrid more and they won 3-1. Today we watched Athetico beat Real Betis so we’re all caught up with our favorite teams. The games during Covid are a little strange. I spend a lot of time thinking about how they do the fake fans. Is it all green screen trickery? And I get distracted by the sound engineer mixing old crowd noises in, one channel for the chanting, one for the applause and one the stadium din. We sometimes watch with the sound off but it is always fun to hear the extremely excitable announcers in Spanish. Maybe we’ll check in on the World Series tonight.

I ripped the cds I wanted to hang on to years ago but I kept a few, mostly ones I needed to listen to to determine if they were worth the effort. Now I don’t even have a CD player but there is a small portable one out in the garage. I out there painting this afternoon and I put on an Ornette Coleman boot, a live thing from Paris in 1965 with David Izenson and Charles Moffett. Ornette plays violin, trumpet and sax and all three players solo or sit out. Ornette’s violin sounds like the Contortions and Izenson spends quite a bit of the night bowing. The performance knocked me out. I played it twice in a row. It had been a while since I’ve done that.

We recently read a list vintage horror movies and added a bunch to queue. We had seen most but not in while. We’ve checked off Vincent Price in “House on Haunted Hill,” “The Haunting,” “Let’s Scare Jessica To Death” and Brian DePalma’s “Sisters” in the last week. Sisters was better than ever.

MX-80 Sound did a version of “Theme from Sisters” on their Ralph Records Crowd Control lp. That lp is out of print but I helped recreate the lp artwork for a new release, on that contains an additional track, “Theme from Halloween.” It’s on red vinyl at an incredibly low price and it too sounds better than ever. MX-80 is rumored to be in the studio now working on an all movie themed lp.

Went through the box in the basement a few months back and pulled this batch out. Still haven’t listened to them, not even sure my cassette deck works, but I’ve enjoyed looking at them. We usually had one one cover in our set and “Heartbeat,” from the black Peppermint Lounge tape, was one of my favorites. I put it on the Personal Effects website.

I got the cassettes out looking for a recording from Club Mirage where the video below came from. I found a Mirage tape but not this one.

Check out the sign behind the band in this photo. Forty years ago today Hi-Techs played the back room of the Record Archive on Mount Hope. I’m pretty sure Richard Edic took the photo. There’s more here.

Hi-Techs were only together for two years before morphing into Personal Effects. There is only one video of the band but there are three songs in the video. It was produced by Channel 31 TV for a show called “After Hours” and it was simulcast on WCMF in 1981. We played live in their studio but they added some wacky post production. There was another band on the show the same night – Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Rhoads!

I remember how easy it was to record the Margaret Explosion album, “Skyhigh.” Pete and Shelley were in town for a few days. I think Bob came over the night before and we set up the mics and recording equipment. Ken came over the next morning and we made a few pots of coffee. We recorded the album in the basement, just started playing, and we got five keepers that first day. “Sleep of Reason,” named after the Goya print, was one of them.

Just before the pandemic Steve Black was here with videos he shot in NYC the week before. He picked “Sleep of Reason” to accompany his butterfly footage. Easy.

Short entry for a short song. Still sounds good to me. Personal Effects. Mid 80s. Video shot at a downtown Rochester bar called Club Mirage. Song clocks in at just under two minutes. Peggi Fournier – keyboards, Bob Martin – guitar, Paul Dodd – drums, Robin Goldblatt Mills – bass. Kevin Vicalvi – sound. Duane Sherwood – lights.

I was playing drums in the front room of our house on S. Milton Drive when three older guys rang the doorbell. I was certain they were going to complain about the noise but instead they wanted me to join their band. They had a couple of gigs that weekend and they would not take no for an answer. I guess I was taking Frank Canada’s place, the name on the business card they gave me. I played those two dates and Red, the rhythm guitar player, announced they wanted to get rid of Butch Miller, the leader. They had a young guy, who sounded exactly like Johnny Cash, to take his place.

They named the new band the “On Fours.” “You know, how we start songs, on four,” Red said. My brother, Fran, made the new calling cards in his high school shop class and enlisted my father to do the band’s logo type and graphic.

The band was was dyed-in -the-wool country, something I knew nothing about. We rehearsed once a month in Red’s trailer or the bass player’s barn and we played four sets every Friday and Saturday for the next year and a half. We played every smoke filled Elks Club, Moose Lounge, American Legion, VFW and Eagles Club in the area. One Sunday afternoon we played on the back of a hay wagon for a coon hunting convention. When Peggi and I moved to Rochester I gave the gig to Dave Mahoney. Dave told me they changed their name to “The Breakers” after the CB craze.

I grew to love the music. Peggi and I saw Merle Haggard when he came to Bloomington and we started buying Merle, George and Waylon records. When we moved to Rochester in 1974 there was only country rock, a hideous hybrid which took the rock out of rock and the country out of country. Bands like Old Salt were everywhere. Our next door neighbor, Sparky, was into country. We got to see George Jones before he passed. I’m thankful for the forced exposure.