Hello We Are Here
25 Years and One Show Intro
Migration. Peregrination. I’m attempting to migrate my missives to this place, still learning the Substack form so please enjoy my fumbling evolution and subscribe or follow? it is free and hopefully tidy, a way to keep connected outside the algorithms. Once I had a mailing list and that was consumed by bots. Hopefully this will be more fun.
Though I am on a sort of loose hiatus this season, this place will be a place to find out about shows, releases and happenings. Also a place to enjoy archival ephemera and portraiture from a kaleidoscopic few decades.
To break the loose hiatus contract, I am happy to be doing a show with my friend Chris Cohen in Ojai on February 15. If you are in the region, please join us. There has been too much trouble in the world, may our show be a place of ease as well as good jams. More about that good show HERE.
Today is 25 years since the release of my first solo record Peregrine. I didn’t have my own email address then, or social media or much of the internet at all. I did have a lot of ideas then and fit so many on to the record. I worked at the first street café. I lived above Max Fish the bar and the Pink Pony café on Ludlow street in the late 90s version of the Lower East Side. I turned the tenement railroad apartment where i lived with Cynthia Nelson in to a studio, recording vocals in the bathtub, straight to ADAT. Peregrine was remastered by Kevin Ratterman and repackaged and released in 2020 by Sweet Dreams in Tokyo. I wrote about my experience making the record, my friends Cynthia Nelson and Dan Littleton too wrote essays about that time on the Lower East Side and making that album with me. There is a demos, rarities and audio collage of those late 20th on a second disc, you can listen to it at Bandcamp. The cd itself is a very sweet thing that was trapped in the pandemic mail shutdown but you can now get it from Me or Norio in Japan. Maybe one day soon I’ll get the remastered version on the internet, but digital proprietary lines are hard borders to cross.
Please enjoy this working mix of Sunday Song from 1999. Josh Diamond worked at the Pony, one day he had his guitar at work in a terrible tuning, a very terrible tuning. It was some kind of a game to see if anyone could write a song with such a terrible tuning. I took his guitar upstairs to my apartment and wrote Sunday Song in this terrible tuning.
It feels like I’ve played music with a thousand different people and released at least two hundred records. I’m quite sure I quit myself 1 million times since then. Today I can shine back on the 27 year old me, then already deemed a veteran musician, and hope to continue the work we started. Thanks to you who have been here these 25 years and to those who hopped on at any point along this circuitous route.
As I publish this introduction I know so many folks, distant and close, looking for housing and immediate forms of help in LA and SoCal in general. This post cannot directly help but there are so many ways to support the people most in need, look around for the ways. I’ve experienced my own version of house burned by wildfire, and so to any that need to hear this, it is a long mountain road, but there certainly exists the other side of that mountain.
more soon. love to you and we as we move deeper in to new unknowns.
Hi.
hey hello, glad to see you here.