Constellations

Liner Notes to a Life as a Musician with a Lowercase 'M'

Constellations are mysterious products of someone deciding that a pattern of stars represent something wholly unrelated, and the difference between the connection of dots that represent the Big Dipper versus the imagined Ursa Major is like comparing a block of wood and the Kokeshi doll carved therefrom. This tale began with another block of wood that got carved into a guitar with a Fender logo, which I bought through a classified ad and paid with a paper check in 1993. It sat in its case for the past eight years, electronics gently rusty, the high E string broken and never replaced, until I took it to a guitar shop to have it cleaned and pretty much brought back to life, back into my life.

I wrote the “guitar’s point of view” essay recapping the three-plus decades that we spent in each other’s orbit, and overanalyzing things as I’m wont to do had me looking at the people, places, and events that twinkle like stars in memory, connecting those dots, and asking if there is a story to be told that isn’t some hero’s journey myth. What I think can be told a tale of a self-taught musician (with a lowercase “m”) inspired by and copying his heroes through modest ability and creative fortune, and what I’m able to see through the funnel of time is the repeating confluence of events that gifted me with friendships, songs, and memory.

There’s a lot of dumb luck at work, starting with the happenstance that landed me at Rice University, a college with a robust student-run radio station that was blessed with an expansive music library and enough presence and cred to get promos from the indie giants of the day: 4AD, Creation, SubPop, Wax/Trax!, Touch & Go, Homestead, etc. Soil doesn’t get much more fertile than that, and I found it effortless to plant myself, lay roots, soak up the inspiration, and eventually get into making music. Kyle got me into my first band, a post-industrial combo with a drum machine we named Hubris. Joanna lent me her acoustic guitar with which I taught myself the cowboy chords that became my first songs. I met Ron through an ad I put up at the local record store; Brian and Mike formed the scratch and abortive quartet that fumbled through Ride and Pale Saints covers.

Running parallel was the Great American Indie Label Cambrian Explosion™, ignited by Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thompson’s Simple Machines label. Anyone can make a record, and by golly my friends and I were that anyone. Kyle had his post-post-industrial, accordion-fronted lurching combo Lozenge, Chad was pursuing the Minutemen/Firehose vibe with his power trio Dyn@mutt, and I was looking to pay homage to Kurt Ralske, Dean Wareham, and Mark Kozelek with four-track and beatbox. Another radio station friend, Larry and I pooled our disposable incomes from day jobs to start Farrago Records so that we could do it ourselves.

Hindsight isn’t 20/20, but some weird optical compression of tangled timelines. I went from the bedroom with a four track to a four-piece in a downtown rehearsal space: Ron on drums, JJ on bass, Tracy Jo on guitar and vocals, and yours truly on the same. Sometime before then, JJ gifted me a copy of the Sarah Records compilation, Air Balloon Road, which she’d picked up in Grand Rapids during summer break, and that planted the “feeling over expertise” flag in a way that the Beat Happening and Pastels LPs at the radio station hadn’t. JJ also gave my musical project its name, Buddha On The Moon, something that she saw in a black and white silent film about a fanciful lunar expedition. I’d been writing and recording at home, feeling that this should go somewhere outside the apartment, and I asked JJ to join on bass–she could have my Peavy T40 (a.k.a. the boat anchor) and I’d teach her the parts.

This is when the Jazzmaster entered the orbit, and we recorded a demo, got featured in College Music Journal, got a few record label inquiries, played shows around town with Dyn@mutt and Lozenge, pressed our first 7”, a compilation with all three bands plus a track by Tit, our radio station’s riot grrl gang. Farrago footed the bills to get Lozenge and Dyn@mutt into a local, eight-track studio to record their albums, Buddha On The Moon took a road trip to Tracy Jo’s parents’ in Atlanta to try to record an album, experienced the usual fissures of personalities and priorities that young people bring to bands, cracked and mended to play opening sets for Catherine Wheel and Red House Painters before rupturing, with JJ taking off to London after graduation, and me retreating to the bedroom. A four-song 10” EP became the capstone: three tracks recorded with JJ, Tracy Jo, and Jason (Ron having stepped away in that rupture), plus a solo beatbox and guitar wall cover of Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies.”

Meanwhile we have the requisite montage of adulting, slices of life packed like a loaf of supermarket bread consisting of a day job as a mechanical engineer with design calculations for bits of cast iron going into the oil patch, the first time car buyer scene and the resulting monthly payments, and spending nights with headphones and guitar or out at Emo’s to see Stereolab, The Boredoms, Seam, et al. JJ would return from the UK and move back to Grand Rapids, enlist in a six or seven person indiepop combo called Madison Electric, and send me a copy of a cassette by ESP Summer, a one-off collaboration of my heroes Warren Defever of His Name Is Alive and Ian Masters of Pale Saints. Ethereal magic conjured with a mysterious domestic warmth. I made a copy for Larry who sent Warren a care package of Farrago releases and a note asking if there were plans for a CD version. To our surprise, Warren wrote us back: a friend of his was putting out the CD, but he liked what we did with the BOTM 10” and would like to do an EP of remixes.

I could do the honest thing and research my own damned chronology, but let’s just jumble it out. Chris in Portland, Oregon, put out two songs of mine that I’d programmed and recorded at home, the flipside being a slo-core cover of Pale Saints’ “A Deep Sleep for Stephen.” Farrago co-released a three-way compilation 7” and zine with Chip at Audrey’s Diary: one song each from Chip and myself, plus a track by Jessamine. JJ flew down from Michigan for a long weekend to visit friends, and Mike, the co-founder of Quiddity Records that released Madison Electric’s 7”, sent me a two word email: “Start writing.” It turned out that I had two songs in mind for JJ to overdub bass parts, and that became the first release for Mike. Meanwhile I met Dan who published an experimental music magazine, N.D., in Austin, and was also a big fan of indiepop. I think our mutual friends in Voice Of Eye had made the introduction.

Dan had co-founded a record store near the University of Texas campus, 33 Degrees, and would recommend my band to a friend of his, a manager at the Talking Book Program of the Texas State Library who had a weekly radio show on KOOP, a community radio station. One weekend when I drove from Houston to hang out with Dan, he took me by the KOOP studio to introduce me to the host of Ear Candy, Nancy—effervescent and charming beyond words—and I was smitten. I’d spend the next six months asking Dan for her email address to avail, but I’d eventually run into her at Dan’s shop almost a year later. I had a guitar with me for some inexplicable reason, she played on it a song she’d written and said that she was going to be in Houston soon for a work trip. I suggested that we get together to record it, and after a spinach and garlic deep dish at Star Pizza, we put “Marigold” to tape. A cover of the Magick Heads’ “Hear From You” came about somehow, and Mike released both songs on his new label, Drive-In.

[I took a break to walk the dog, and as I typically do while waiting for Delia to sniff and do her thing, I think.]

All this happened between 1991 and 1995, and there’s a lot of stuff, musical and not, that whizzed past the window like mileposts on I-10. There’s the phone call out of the blue (in the days before caller ID) from Keith in the UK, asking if I’d be interested in doing a single on his label, Wurlitzer Jukebox, and I happened to be at home sick that day to answer. There’s the Spoonfed Hybrid CD that Ron got me as a gift, and some time later, a phone call to Ian, eventually resulting in a CD EP on Farrago. There’s also me sending the four-track cassettes of two, six-minute songs to Warren to remix and edit. The resulting reconstructions would comprise the Wurlitzer Jukebox 7” which would end up on John Peel’s turntable. A friend on the indiepop mailing list would email me a WAV of Peel announcing “Crepe Paper Airplane” on the air. I didn’t see this constellation from the inside, spinning and drifting through a blue shifted star field of wondrous events.

Nancy and I would start dating, long distance at first, and me eventually persuading her to leave a perfectly fine state job to move to Houston. We’d get our first apartment together, merge CD and record collections, tie the knot at a drive-through chapel in Vegas, and make a couple more singles as The Imaginary Friend. I’d fall to the dark side of shadow IT, eventually going from mechanical engineering to groupware application development, slinging words like “knowledge management,” landing a gig that would foot the airfare to go onsite to an office in Aberdeen, Scotland a few times a year.

We’d detour through London to meet up with Ian, seeing This Heat’s Charles Hayward play at Spitalfield Market, getting introduced to private room karaoke (years before Lost In Translation) where Nancy would wow the room with her take on the Carpenters’ “Superstar,” hitting the car boot sales in his neighborhood of Tooting, and hanging out at his flat where I’d see the painting that became the Spoonfed LP cover. Ian would pull up stakes and move to Osaka, we would buy a townhouse a few blocks down from our apartment, 9/11 would signal a sea change that’s still rippling, and I’d eventually stop trying to write songs. Nancy would gently suggest that she killed my muse; I think I might have said what I needed to say, because I had the unbelievable fortune to say it.

There are also the stories that didn’t get told. The stacks of boxes of unsold 7”s that would follow you for years until you finally relent and consign them to the landfill. The microindie labels that run out of energy and money (usually the latter first) and gently collapse. Brian and Ron resurfacing as Coterie, self-releasing a CD and then disappearing from my line of sight. The first BOTM album, an open love letter to all my heroes, quaint and cringy in its earnestness, and the best seller on my Bandcamp page. The second BOTM CD, a co-release with Wurlitzer and Drive-In, a dreamier outing with a Nick Drake cover on which Nancy and I duet. Even the giants retire from the field: Ivo exits 4AD, Sony acquires Creation; Factory shutters, and so on. Meanwhile in the cubicle, there are the moments of doubt, envy, and wondering whether you did all that you could. The gradual numbing of the ache of not being a musician with a capital “M” as when you make the mortgage payment

Time dilates with relative velocity, I’m told. We’d live through hurricanes, refinancing, recessions, layoffs and job searches, an adopted dog who passed too quickly and suddenly. Nancy would enter the orbit of ADV Films, dubbing Japanese anime into English, giving voice to teens with spectacles and pigtails, as well as to girl assassins, fighter aces, and UFO princesses. She’d also volunteer at my alma mater as a DJ, weaving magic through turntables and CD decks, and discovering the weird Finnish folk of the Fonal Records roster. She’d introduce me to the shamanic wanderings of Richard Youngs whose dissociative sonic rituals would influence and form the improbable third BOTM album–improbable because I didn’t think I’d make another one. The field of stars would now include systems in Glasgow and Edinburgh, where we’d get to meet Richard, Andrew, Brian, Caroline, and David. The effort of songwriting would start melting into crafting amorphous drones, as if ambient music were the last refuge of the songwriter fleeing from chords and lyrics.

In 2015 we packed the moving van and relocated to Portland, Oregon, where JJ and a number of other Rice Radio alums had set down. I got into cloud computing and devops engineering, Nancy started DJing at a couple of community radio stations, and the Jazzmaster went into hibernation sans E string. Nancy discovered and embraced shape note singing and the songbooks of the Sacred Harp, and I would drift along. COVID-19 made landfall, society would rupture and try to mend, and the muddy meltwaters of polarized cultures would flood the tributaries of politics.

I think of the two Voyager spacecraft, each at least 15 billion miles from earth, where the sun is a slightly brighter dot in the star field. It’s too tidy to say that I blasted off in the early 90’s confluence of people, place, and events to reach a cruising velocity in deep space, far from other stellar objects. Nancy and I still hold our orbits, and while our companion of almost a dozen years, Wanda, drifted away, we have a new satellite, Delia. The data centers of the cloud continue to provide a livelihood, and we’re able to enjoy regular jaunts overseas, lately to Finland whose inscrutable language and culture continue to puzzle and delight me. Nancy’s radio shows continue to serve as weekly lessons on what music can be beyond the gravity wells of rock and pop. The fact is that I married my muse. There.

I’ve been talking with machines a lot of late, initially for the day job, more recently as sounding boards and collaborators for role-playing game design and systems theory analyses of politics and technology, a reverb chamber and thought amplifier for analyzing the cloudy runoff of the pandemic era’s thaw. A recent AI conversation had me wondering what the Jazzmaster would have witnessed as the enabler of my musical meanderings. And that got me looking at Wurlitzer Jukebox’s discography and the artists whom I might call labelmates, hubris permitting: Broadcast, Mogwai, Pram, Boyracer, Stereolab, The Apples In Stereo, Third Eye Foundation. If that’s not a blazing constellation, I don’t know what is, and yet I know whose star is the dim dot in that arrangement: mine. It’s like imagining a group photo of the Bletchley Park code cracking crew, with yours truly as the out of place slacker loafing in the corner. There’s no self-abasement intended; this is just my awe at the company in which I found myself.

Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good” may be the least indiepop cut to reference, but its bemused bewilderment at fortune rhymes strongly with how I feel about my walk on part of the indie rock war, to borrow a phrase from Pink Floyd. John Lennon sang about watching the wheels, and I feel a bit of that too, minus the pantheonic stardom from which he’d walked away to make what I think is the literal dad rock album with songs about his woman and beautiful boy. And yes, it’s way too convenient to conclude this retrospective with those two songs, and perhaps a rephrasing of a favorite song by The Fall might be more appropriate: “Right Place Right Time Right Folks.”

The carrier signal still hums, I’m still tinkering with drones and instrumentals (now reinforced by the Jazzmaster returning to the field), and as if the cosmos had been reading over my shoulder I just got an e-blast from Ian announcing his latest project (he sent Nancy a promo download yesterday; she’ll be playing it on her radio show soon). A year ago Nancy picked up the bass on her own. Now she’s rehearsing with Dusty, Kim, and Andy every Tuesday, getting ready for a video shoot in a couple of weeks for a local YouTube channel.

On an episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan showed that thanks to the constant movement of the universe, the shapes of constellations shift over time. The span I’ve described here is a quantum blip compared to the geologic spans that would make Ursa Major shift, and in that human frame of observation I’m sure the dots of the people and places have shifted, from their original position and from my relative vantage point. And each of those stars has its own tale, its own constellation. Nonetheless those bright lights still shine in my heavens for me to arrange, connect, and weave from them my own private mythology.