Category: Field Recordings of the Future

Peggi accidentally Face-timed Phil and Ken last night while we were sitting on the couch. She was cleaning her phone with a Clorox wipe and suddenly we were connected through a group text. It was like a virtual band meeting with no agenda. Phil told us would be doing a FB live thing tonight so we tuned in. I sent it out to our tv from my desktop and we cranked it though the stereo. Phil’s solo performance was fantastic and I was really impressed with the whole presentation.

We were eating dinner while Phil played, some little white pizzas with mushrooms, and the computer was in the other room so the FB video feed just went along on its merry way when Phil finished. Duane’s video of homemade tea followed Phil, then a clip from the Daily Show of someone interviewing people at a Trump rally and then some crazy Corona virus exercise routine. Right into some dumb thing from the early sixties with guys on the beach ogling girls in two piece suits. It was a rapid descent from Phil’s brilliant performance.

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Steve Black is back in town with a new collection of video footage. It has been a joy to watch him work. He commandeered Peggi’s computer and finished this one last night in iMovie.

We managed to lose another set of Margaret Explosion music. Ever since Bob Martin left town it has been somewhat a struggle for us to get our sets recorded. This time we remembered to to turn on before we started but one off us unplugged the power before the Zoom recorder had written the files. You’d think the battery would take over in a situation like that but it doesn’t work either. There was some interesting stuff in the first set. Peggi played keyboards with her good hand and led us in a particularly good fugue. Mark Bradley played tenor sax and Roy Marshall played drums in the second set and made sound like pros.

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Wednesdays in March promise to be interesting. Our saxophone player has broken her wrist. Of course, the shows must go on. Hope you can stop out. Wednesday 7-9 pm Little Theatre Café.

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We were at the Bop Shop for a “With The Cows” performance and I spotted this crude poster on the wall behind the band. I had not seen it since I did it. I was taking a silk screen class with my father at B.O.C.E in Fairport. Loretta Murawski was the teacher. I sort of remember painting the words with a rubber cement-like substance, something that rinsed off once the screen was coated with a fixative. You can barely read it. If you weren’t ready for the new wave in ’77 you could could have caught New Math (a much later version of the band) at the Lovin’ Cup last Saturday.

Amy Rigby has really hit the big time now. She was interviewed by Terry Gross in connection with her fabulous memoir, Girl to City.”

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Our friend Duane, tells us “Parapliers the Willow Dipped,” the first show of Don Van Vliet’s paintings in New York in over a decade, opens January 31st at the Michael Werner Gallery on 77th Street. We may not be there for the opening but we plan to see that show. Years ago (1982) someone told us Gary Lucas was the guy to talk to about purchasing a Beefheart painting so we wrote him a letter. Peggi had a radio show on WRUR at the time and we told him she played Beefheart. We thought the prices he quoted were too high. We were part owners of ten Warhol prints and they weren’t even near a grand a piece. Our reasoning was seriously flawed!

Stan the Man gave me a box of Beefheart stuff from Justin Sherrill, someone who was leaving town or something. These photos were in there, from an opening at Michael Werner in 1995.

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I was lucky enough to see the Captain a few times, in Cincinnati in 1970 for the Trout Mask tour, Columbus in ’71 for Lick My Decals Off and here at Red Creek in ’77. I recorded that show on our little Sony mono tape recorder.

Captain Beefheart performing Low Yo Yo at Red Creek in Rochester, New York 1977.

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There must be plenty of snow around the corner. Until it flies we will keep walking. Cross country skiing calls on a whole different muscle group and they want their fair share.

We had dinner down the street at our friends’ (and neighbors’) place. Their Jamaican relatives were there and they were talking about how everyone in Jamaica has a nick name, a “yard name.” They were talking like no-one knows your real name. They wanted to know if I had a yard name. Kids called me by my last name for a few years in high school but that doesn’t really count. I told them my name was too short to be abbreviated but that didn’t fly.

I could use a nickname. My one syllable first name is hard to enunciate. When someone on the phone asks “who am I speaking with?” I try to say my name slowly but there is not much there to work with. It makes matters worse. I often just spell it out.

Someone in this morning’s paper described the orange one as a “popinjay.” We looked it up and have added it to our vocabulary.

Here’s a late, unsolicited entry to “If All Rochester Wrote The Same Song.”

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Ucal Bernard lived in Jamaica where he made money by doing drawings for the tourists. Most of his family lives in Rochester so when Ucal passed away recently they held a celebration of his life at the Baobab Cultural Center on University Avenue. Ucal’s artwork, mostly pencil drawings on big sheets of paper, was hanging on the gallery walls.

Ucal was our neighbor’s youngest brother so the group moved to his house for food and drink after the celebration. Our neighbor showed us a big volume of Ucal’s drawings, dramatic fantasy-like drawings, many with voluptuous women. I found them inspiring.

One of the drawings in the show (above) was done when Ucal was in Rochester. It depicts his brother-in-law’s record store on Chili Avenue in 1996. I had heard about this shop from my neighbor and we had met Courtney, the owner, at his house. I asked Courtney what the address was and found out it was right next door to where the Dodd/Miller Tavern (formerly the Munich Restaurant) was, at the corner of Thurston.

I sent Duane the drawing. Duane went to West High and grew up in the neighborhood. In the late seventies we used to buy imported Jamaican 45s from Andy’s shop on Genesee Street and I remember checking out some other places with Duane but all he remembered the reggae shop by Bullshead or further down West Main near Jefferson. I see a date of 1996 in the bottom corner of this drawing so that is after our time and long after my grandfather’s.

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There is not enough snow for us to safely ski down the big hill in the woods across the street so we put our skis in the car and drove down Hoffman to the golf course. The conditions there were somewhat shy of excellent but the sun was out and it was perfect for us.

I love how the ski tracks, going every which way, abstract the game that is intended to be played here in the warmer months. Something so orderly and controlled is entirely free. We followed someone’s tracks that skirted the periphery of the course staying just a few feet from the woods that surrounds the fairways. We skied most of the nine holes on this side of Kings Highway but we did it in an almost random order.

Last night’s Ossia program included this spellbinding piece, Tria ex uno by Georg Friedrich Hass. It was based on Agus Dei from a mass by Josquin in 1502, a piece described as “astounding in its control of harmony under fearsome conditions of polyphonic complexity.” I like that sentence and took it from the program but I really liked what I heard.

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Tom Kohn at the Bop Shop asked me to dj a set on Record Store Day. I have the first slot, noon to one, and I discovered how fast an hour will go when I put this set together last night.

Last Poets This Is Madness
Ornette Friends and Neighbors
Silver Apples Oscillations
Suicide Ghost Rider
James Brown Funky President
Bo Diddley Ooh Baby
James Blood Ulmer Are You Glad Tao Be In America
Margaret Explosion Juggler
Miles Davis Miles Runs The Vodoo Down
Peggy Lee Fever
David Essex Rock On
Beach Boys Do It Again
Marvin Gaye Got To Give It Up
Donna Summer I Feel Love

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We waited for the rain to stop and took the shortcut to the Point Pleasant fire house, our polling place. We cast our ballots and then used the bathroom in the back. They have the coolest little bar in the back of the building, a firemen’s social club. I think they rent it out and each year I contemplate organizing a gig there for Margaret Explosion.

As great as the Little Theater Café is we really need to get out more. We’ll be there each Wednesday in November.

Here’s a song recorded at our last gig in September.

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I looked for a picture of all three of us from that time period but couldn’t find one. This one is from almost a year later. The “D” on the wall was the last of three letters. The first was an “L.’ Dave Mahoney and I went down to the Woodstock festival in Joe Barrett’s family car, a Corvair. We bought our tickets, three day passes for eighteen dollars, from a local radio station. We were most excited to see Sly & the Family Stone. We left a day early but I don’t remember bringing any food or anything to sleep on.

By Thursday afternoon the small roads leading to the festival were already jammed with cars. We left ours on the side of the road and joined a long procession of people on foot. At an intersection lines were moving in two directions and each seemed equally sure the festival site was ahead. We picked one and decided to take the acid we brought down with us.

Things got stranger. We stopped at a house where can goods had been arranged along the railing of the front porch. The contents of their cupboards were being offered for sale. We fumbled with our money and bought something but I don’t remember what it was.

We found the festival site where they were soundchecking the system. The sun was blazing and there was screeching feedback and dogs barking. We tried sleeping in a cornfield but I couldn’t sleep. We were exhausted the next day and Dave was worried that this was all going to be a disaster scene. He was mostly afraid that there wouldn’t be enough food. He suggested we leave early but I insisted we hear some of the first night’s acts.

We ran into a friend from high school and he sold us some blue mescaline tabs. We drove home with those and all slept over at Joe’s. We took the mescaline and went down to the Stutson Theater where a matinee of 2001: A Space Odyssey was showing. We started out in the seats but found it more comfortable laying on the floor in front of the first row of seats. The only other patrons were little kids who were all running around, laughing and throwing things.

My brother and Brad Fox stayed the three days. They brought home tents and sleeping bags for everybody, stuff they rounded up when the festival was over. I kinda wish I had got with them.

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Last time we heard With The Cows they performed with a trumpet player, Mike Kaupa. The music was free flowing, complex and engaging but the instrumental interludes threatened to outshine Rick Petrie‘s poetry. At the Bop Shop on Friday night Phil and Roy Marshall performed with Chris Zajkowski on keyboards, in place of the trumpet, and the set was focused and supportive. One was not better, both were great but the readings were more rewarding this time.

As Peggi and I sat there, behind rows of of teenage Roy fans, we were remembering what it was like backing Ted Williams‘ readings at Jazzberrys, Roy, about to start school at the Eastman, sound great and looked great with his Pharoah Sanders t-shirt.

Joe Tunis has been doing Day Tours, a series of performances with guests in six or seven locations, for twenty years. We usually catch at least one of his stops and the ones at Durand are easy. This year Joe played a small, distorted keyboard, Nuuj played some homemade horns, someone gathered solar powered noises, a woman played cello and Brian Blatt walked around and around the giant peace sign near the beach. He was wearing a Phish shirt and a small speaker around his neck while he smoked hand rolled cigarettes and read from the paperback version of Rocky II. It was brilliant.

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We listened to “On The Beach” yesterday because we read it was the 45th anniversary of that record’s release. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. There is a newspaper depicted on the cover and the headline reads “Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon To Resign.” Almost a half century on we have another president leading a “Love It or Leave It” movement. 

We bought two 22 ounce cans of Estrella Jalisco at Southtown Beverage and we brought one of them down to the pool today. I noticed that it was brewed by Grupo Modelo, a large Mexican company that was bought by Constellation Brands, the local company that got their start with fortified Wild Irish Rose. The Estrella Jalisco tasted great in the hot sun and we were reminded of a cd we bought in Mexico, by a group from Jalisco called Mariachi Reyes del Aserrado. We called that up and it felt like we were on an exotic vacation or as Louise says “living in the afterlife.”

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Bob Dylan reminds us, “Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself, and creating things.”

Dylan’s Rolling Thunder movie on the big screen at the Little Theatre was a blast. It was like going to a concert without the sameness that sets in. We saw the rambunctious tour when it stopped at the War Memorial in 1975. Scorcese captured that and so much more of the heady era. With masterful editing we hear just enough of the songs before getting another glimpse of the enigma that is Dylan, our generation’s foremost bard.

Joan Baez is strong enough to wrestle Dylan. Patti Smith, influenced by Dylan is shown influencing Dylan. Scarlett O’Hara is the foundation of this band’s gypsy sound. Joni Mitchell’s guitar rings above all the strumming. Allen Ginsberg cuts above all the cynicism with an optimistic mystic’s summary of what we’ve witnessed reminding us of our duty to create. The long movie felt short. We will watch it again on the small screen.

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