PopWars

When I first met Rich I couldn’t get over how he could ever have gotten through high school without a grounding in rock n roll. All my other friendships were formed over passionate responses to rock music. How exotic could Wantaugh, Long Island be that you could grow up without Mitch Ryder and the Stones? I found out when I visited him at his parent’s home. Later it was Rich who turned me on to Bitches Brew.

Rich was a guest dj on Howard Thompson’s WPKN “Pure” show yesterday. His theme-centered show looked at sisters, brothers and brothers & sisters who make music together. You know, Van Halen and the Ramones. I should have shared this link before the show but it will be archived here for the next two weeks. Rich has such a great radio voice. I told him so and he shared a few of his secrets. He used two vocal effects, plus a de-esser and he sped it up 5%. He sounded so smooth, like Adrienne Barbeau in John Carpenter’s Fog.

Madison, a young woman who has been coming to ME for the last six months or so asked me what I was listening to. I told her mostly 45s and she asked if I could share a playlist of them on Spotify. I have a short stack of 7 inchers, ones we’ve played recently, sitting next to the turntable so I limited myself to those. I found most on Spotify but I couldn’t find the single version of “Black & Tan Fantasy” so I had to skip that gem. And because I’m not a subscriber I can’t order the Spotify playlist so I’d recommend shuffling it.

Speaking of winter, Margaret Explosion will celebrate the solstice on Friday night at the Little theatre Café. The holidays can take care of themselves. The solstice deserves top billing. We played on this same date last year with a different lineup. It is probably a good thing that the whole Margaret Explosion band doesn’t seem to ever show up at once but this week we learned that cellist, Melissa, will be out of town with family, Phil, guitarist, will be in New Orleans with his son and Jack, bass clarinetist, has work duties.

2024

2023

We have played as a trio a few times and resigned ourselves to do that again. Bob Martin, in fact, had already requested we send him a copy of the trio date so he could play along with it in Chicago. But then we thought we could try something new so we invited Chris Zajkowski to play piano. Chris was ready to do it until he heard the weather forecast calling for snow. He has snow-removal customers that take precedence. Bernie Heveron was on our mind because we had just finished the reissue of Bob Martin’s remixed Personal Effects “This Is It” album. So we contacted him via Facebook and he will join us on guitar.

I like the idea of having all my stuff in the cloud, accessible from my iPad wherever I am. One of my favorite psychedelic trips was at IU in 1969. I think I might have been flying solo. I remember getting off in the student union and going out back where I laid down and looked up at the clouds. The ever shifting formations were so intricate and fascinating I felt like I was there at the creation. I thought of that trip when we watched Janet Planet the other night. The little girl liked to lay down and space out.

Bob Martin created two new videos for the Personal Effects “This Is It – Remix 2024” release. He masterfully synced old footage of the band performing live to his new mixes of the album tracks. When Peggi and I told him how much we loved them he told us how he overlapped footage on two tracks in iMovie. I didn’t realize you could do two video layers, I had always relied on long cross-dissolves, so I tried it for this video of the first song from the new Margaret Explosion cd, “Field Recordings.” I laid my iPad on the table out back and captured some time lapses of clouds. I grabbed some footage of the band performing a completely different song, stripped the audio and didn’t even try to sync it up to the song. I sent a link to Bob after I posted it. Bob used to be in the band before he moved to Chicago and I thought it was really big of him to be so generous with his compliments:

“That is wonderful at every level. Literally has my heart beating a little harder. Not only is the song great, not only is the image shifting and blending painted beautifully, but the band visual adds an imagined polyrhythmic layer that becomes part of the music. What you see isn’t what you physically hear, but I felt myself “hearing” the aural aspect of the video in perfect sympathy with the audio performance. Sorry, I am usually a little more succinct. Great stuff.”

Not only did Bob Martin remix 1984’s Personal Effects album from the original eight track tapes. He synced his new mix of “Fascinating Game” to old footage of Personal Effects performing live. He did this without using AI. He’s saving that for the 80th anniversary reissue. “This Is It – Remix 2024” is available now on all the streaming platforms.

The original dimension of the photo above was 1152 x 864 pixels. I enlarged it slightly (with Photoshop’s AI feature) to 1620 pixels wide, my current standard for the photos I post. The photo was taken in 1998 with my Kodak DC210 digital camera. The DC210 was released that year and is a significant model in the evolution of digital photography, one of the first cameras to feature a compact flash card for storage, a 2x optical zoom and a 1-megapixel sensor. My father worked at Kodak and he and I followed the birth of digital photography closely. Here is one of his early spreadsheets. He got me into the Kodak Camera Store on Lake Avenue and I bought this camera when it came out. I’m guessing Shelley took this photo in a moment when she wasn’t playing maracas.

This ad from City Newspaper helps date the band. Margaret Explosion started playing a regular Friday evening Happy Hour at the Bug Jar in late 1997. Twenty-seven years later on Wednesday, November 27 at the Little Theatre Café we celebrate the release of our newest CD, “Field Recordings.”

Still finding more uses for the unused billboards I got from Dave Mahoney’s father back in the eighties. The front sides make good collage material and the paper is heavy enough to support paint on the blank backside. I projected an image of the cd cover on the wall in our basement and we painted the shapes and lettering, an extra large facsimile of our new cd..

I was looking at Jean Arp when I came up with the design. I started with a few layouts using photos and Peggi pushed me to do something catchier like our earlier cd, “Skyhigh” That one was named after the place Peggi’s only relative, Zimmy, lived with her life partner, Stevie, in the Smoky Mountains and it featured a flat white cloud.

Promoting a show at the Little makes for a noisy crowd. And with no mics on the bass and drums it is hard for the band to rise above the din. The espresso machine and the sound of chairs dragging across the floor are all part of our sound but we don’t do solos and there is a no room for the crowd to solo either.

We recently turned to our friend, Rich, for some legal advice. He told us he enjoys talking about the kind of issues we like to put off. He was very helpful, of course, but he is the same individual who coined the phrase, “Often in error, never in doubt.” He told us that a song of his, the instrumental, MX-80 version, had caught on in Russia, probably in TicToc circles, and he was recieving respectable royalties from it.

Peggi and I played with Rich in a band called “Chinaboise” before moving to Rochester at the end of 1974. Rich gave Peggi her first saxophone lessons. Hava Nagila was the first song she learned. We played Self-Conscious Pisser (the lyrics were written about another friend of ours) and I guess I hung onto the sheet music. It belongs in a museum. The Chinaboise, with new members, recorded a 1975 album with SCP on it. Rich Stim and Dave Mahoney left Chinaboise and joined MX-80 Sound. They recorded a version of SCP in 1976 for their “Big Hits” ep. The song was also included in their 1990, all instrumental smash, “Das Love Boat.” And today it is big in Russia.

I wrote a review of Greg Prevost’s fabulous new lp a few weeks back. And at the time I did not want to mention that Greg had reviewed our recent lp. “per la prima.” This wan’t payback. We really love the album, mostly because it appeared to us that Greg had really transformed himself, stepped into another realm. No longer just the former lead singer of the Chesterfield Kings but Greg “Stackhouse” Prevost. Now is the time to reprint Greg’s review of our lp – taken from his Facebook page.

“Really enjoying the latest album ‘per la prima’ by the Margaret Explosion led by Paul Dodd (drums) and Peggi Fournier (soprano sax). I have known Paul since his time as the drummer in New Math back in the late ‘70s; in fact one of the first times I ever appeared in public was with New Math (when I was invited onstage by Gary Trainer and Kevin Patrick) at a Record Archive party circa ‘79. Paul was the drummer at this time so we go WAY back! I met Peggi shortly after this when my former now-defunct band opened for Paul & Peggi’s band, the Hi-Techs at the end of 1980. For those that may not know, the Hi-Techs morphed into Personal Effects who made a number of hugely successful albums and were a staple in the Rochester scene through the years that followed.

Paul and Peggi then re-invented themselves as the Margaret Explosion and are a constant in the Rochester music scene, performing intimate shows at the Little Theater where this album was recorded-LIVE. A perfect NATURAL recording the way albums are supposed to be recorded. Other members appearing on the album are Jack Schaefer (my close friend Bob’s brother, on tenor sax, bass clarinet and guitar), old pal Bob Martin (guitar), Ken Frank (double bass), Pete LaBonne (piano) and the lovely Melissa Davies on cello (thanks to a chance meeting Caroll and I had with Paul and Peggi at Durand Park, Melissa appeared on my latest album). It is nearly impossible to describe the album. If I had to, I’d say surreal, freeform and euphoric. Comparing to other artists would also not do justice since the group is so original, but think on the lines of early Popul Vuh, Lol Coxhill (at times), Ash Ra Temple, Traffic at their most experimental, Miles, Coltrane … Yeah! Hear for yourself!  Beautifully mastered and pressed on vinyl.”

With a little bit of editing, looping of intros, abbreviating mid-sections and cutting off the extended, musicianly endings we squeezed seventeen songs onto our new cd,. The Margaret Explosion crowd still buys cds and a few even complained that our last release was only available on vinyl. Our distribution amounts to the record stores in Rochester and the people who come out to hear the band at the Little but they are a reliable market. I prefer streaming and I’m happy to announce that our new release is available on all the streaming services today.

Field Recordings includes 17 improvisations recorded live in stereo at the Little Theatre Café in Rochester New York. Various combinations of the following players are featured. I hope you enjoy it.

Peggi Fournier – soprano sax
Ken Frank – double bass
Melissa Davies – cello
Phil Marshall – guitar
Jack Schaefer – bass clarinet, guitar
Paul Dodd – drums