Find here notes for a talk I intended to share regarding the new Bamboo Dart Press release, in chapbook form, of my short story, The Coin Cold Heart.  It’s a story that is told as if the imagination had its own imagination, and it regards my home caliche, the town of Fontana, California.  It’s an example of just how far in telling I will go to assure the world that I’m not a historian.  It reminds me of the time my good friend Ben Harper contacted me about his bringing David Lynch and Laura Dern out to our house in Upland, California to talk with me about the dust of our region.  Lynch was woodshedding ideas about a movie to be titled Inland Empire.  So far all he had was the title.  I wanted to just tell him that I’m not an authority on anything, and close to proud of it, but I couldn’t resist the chance to meet Lynch, so I agreed.  Well, the plans were made, and the day came, and because it’s my life, they were deluged by a rainstorm on Holt Blvd and then forced to retreat.  Close but no cigar.  But it did get me thinking of what a good idea it seemed, so I went out that week and took a series of photographs of Fontana to submit for location fodder.  The Fontana Boxing Club, The Iron Skillet (Ontario), as well as a healthy collection of decrepit alley ways, every run-down bar and every vestigial church to match it.  As it turns out, I like to think that it was my agoraphobic bumpkin contribution that inspired them, in the long run, to film the entire movie in Poland.  To quote my own self, “It’s the thought that almost counts”.

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

(Excerpt from The Coin Cold Heart)

That’s what sunglasses achieve.  They take us back to the vision we peripherally remember from underwater, a time before we evaporated that tell-tale dimension and parked our gills at the curbside for a wiggle onto terra firma.  Arriving at the present, greased beyond our grasping, in that million-year vehicle that we call, “our today”.  We are brave enough to harken it, but we are stupid to ever think it might come when we call.  Notice how when you go to jump into the ocean, treadmill waves like a roll of nickels perpetually try to muscle us back onto the earth, linebacker fashion, cast from its garden of brine.  To each his own, say the elements, but to themselves only.  For what to one person is a comically painted sunset, a rendered attack of yellows by some blue-haired art-club grange-hall bitty, was to another an acetylene gold ray raining down upon a sparsely attended graveside.  No one is alone in the casket, every person is buried with their shadows. 

(Photo: Patrick Brayer)

I began working on two collections of short stories, thirty long years past, as a sort of palate cleanser for my songwriting pursuits.  One set I called The Pomona Sorrows, and the other, The Fonta Files (a nod to The Rockford Files, and the gang slang terminology for my hometown of Fontana, California).  I didn’t cotton to my being a historical expert of any kind, I rather reveled in the poetical mythological license I would wield, as if it were regional paint peeling, adulterating and filleting the crown rich memories of a blue-collar shanty.  In a mirror I don’t look like any writer I’ve ever heard of, in the light of a dim bulb, with a secondhand physique my reflection barley looked back.  A frost-bitten Micky’s Big Mouth malt liquor gives my day and its cock’s-crow what personality it can.  I sport a mud-colored t-shirt, two sizes too tender, that confesses that I’m in fact “Powered by Frijoles”, a humorous attempt that I’m amiss to live up to, which is excusable because I woke up in the shirt, only slightly remembering a time when the slogan was funny.  Closing out the haberdashery of my statement are some apostle-like footwear and a pair of overzealous cargo shorts that have pockets I’ve never used on this side of the Costa Mesa Dixen Line.

(Photo: Patrick Brayer)

At first glance I thought that songwriting and short story scribbling could be seen as one and the very same.  But I’ve come to realize that they are night and day, maybe brothers from a different father’s mother.  Songwriting is like giving birth.  Which is true, albeit it sounding more like something your grandma might say in the shade of a magnolia, tracking in mud from the truck garden.  Out of my control I deal with it when it comes out of me, before the swaddling cloth.  I let it be what it wants to be, while on the other hand, a prose story, is created inside of me, a ship in a bottle, that begs to be relentlessly combed over hundreds of passes until I throw my hands up and curse infinity.  I can’t say for sure, but The Coin rather looks like it was inspired by my emersion into the mind space of Italian novelist, Italo Calvino.  What I’ve learned over the years was to just finish your thoughts before you start second guessing the work.  When I write I go into sort of a trance, for the lack of a better word, a trance state that must convince me that I’m writing with the masterpiecian powers of such as Calvino.  Later, when my ego sobers up, I realize that I’m nowhere near Italo, embarrassingly so.  If everything works as it should, before I try to find bullets for a gun, I look and see that my failure is a unique voice beyond its own control, an originality that I didn’t sign up for.  I rarely take my own advice, but I often suggest to others, “rather than being something you’re not, take your weakness and make it your strength”.  During the pandemic, besides the death and destruction, I was in heaven.  My wife took over my recording studio (this is not the heaven part) to teach English Literature, and I moved into the house to attempt to unearth and bring back to life these practically Sanskrit writings from three decades afore.  I then set out to read in exercise all of Nabokov, Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and Charlie Wiliam’s (the Mangel series), not to mention devouring Moby Dick (the greatest doorstop ever written), following that with Heart of Darkness, and Don Quixote.  I was spinning in masterful sentences, and accepting their impossible benchmark, setting it upon myself not to concentrate on the hard polished genius but rather the overall essence. That’s the only part that can’t be stollen.  Making it sacred.  Whether I learned a lesson here cannot be the point.  The point is that its achievement is not in any sort of goal oriented final enlightenment, but more in the liberating power of the search, a searching that has no author.

(Photo: Hollace Brayer)

(Excerpt from The Coin Cold Heart)

   At one time all the people of Fontana lived on self-fashioned boats or barges, for this was a prehistoric period in which the world was all water, and dry earth had not yet been invented, nor mountains pushed up into eruption, yet to meet their carnal destiny with the cobalt vestment slashing shadows of the future.  Scientists of today have come to discover the fallacy within the long-adored Big Bang theoretics, its galaxy turning to a floating congregation of globes, only to find that the San Gabriel Mountains were, in anthropological terms, no more than a muddy bootprint left behind by a giant, step-stoning from planet to planet on its trek across the universe.  It was later known to have been distracted by a meteor, tripping on Jupiter, and banging its shin like a bloody sunset on the sharp corner of a black hole.  

All artists of all mediums have one thing in common, a never-concluding interest in the human condition.  I once wrote a song called Note to Self to Say Goodbye, that started, 

“The moon was drawn and quartered, and there on its back, and rightly symbolizes a champagne that’s gone flat”.

Only seconds into the song and I’ve already pulled the moon from the sky and chopped it up before you like a Black Dahlia investigation.  That’s what the power of the imagination can do, so why not use it.  In The Coin I take you back to Fontana in pre-historic times when life was just then crawling out of the ocean.  The part about Woody and Lena’s Good Time Shop was true to life.  He really did play me a reel to real recording of Johnny Reb, a shocking racist spoof that left me stunned.  It left one with the darkened sensation of not knowing what to do with such information, and challenged you as to your original interest in the voodoo aspects of the human condition in the first place.

(Photo: Patrick Brayer)

(Excerpt from The Coin Cold Heart)

I checked the revolver; it was loaded all the way around.  I tip-toed into the living room and without ceremony shot Sin Coalfield four times in the back and he fell like a sack of turnips, just as a dead man’s supposed to. His trucker-style ball cap tumbled across the floor as if blown by a ghost, reading ‘Pomona Feed’ on its skulled bonnet.  I would ordinarily think that that was a clue or an omen, but I was beyond all that now. I then realized for the very first time that transcending and giving up are identical twins, although, as the rules go, one of them must still choose who plays the black sheep in the family.  I gathered up the teakwood guitar and amplifier and made a few lumbering trips loading them into the coalmine darkness of my Ford Fiesta, the scene outside lit just barely by the bone saw teeth of the moon.  I came back into the house and sat and cried in a widow’s moan until sunrise, with Coalfield at my stocking feet, with the blank expression of an egg, in his bathrobe and kilt, in sort of a nautilus shape, looking, in the same manner, both absurd and regal simultaneously.  The doomed nature of the scene reminded me of a story my uncle once told me regarding the true history of Saint Patrick.  It seems that when he was driving all the snakes out of Ireland each one in exit got placed a potato on its back, thus putting the famous famine in gear.  Outside the weather changed to hard sheets of rain, jostling the trees into the shape and surrender of desperately blind bodies clumsily dressing in the dark. 

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

I was once cornered by a kid backstage at The Bottom Line in New York City who informed me, regarding my Fontana songs, that his friends and himself were planning to move to Fontana.  Having never even considered that possibility, I told him he was getting it all wrong, and that I was just trying to get others to at least consider the corrido-Steinbeckian-charm of their own hometown, and surely not to transport themselves to the burial ground of my own personal dolled-up disappointment.  Before I scampered back to my steel town digs I agreed to meet him for coffee the next day.  Fast Folk Magazine had recorded me that night at The Bottom Line which would eventually find itself, to my surprise, of its own volition, put out by The Smithsonian Institute in a collection that also included Dave Van Ronk, Suzanne Vega, and Shawn Colvin.  It was one of those selfsame songs I wrote about Fontana, called Funeral Town.  The next day he probed me further, being young and almost carrying a skateboard, questioning “how do I dream up this stuff?”.  The double expresso I was having was almost just as guilty as I was for my answer in parting.  “If you can tell me where your dreams come from, I will then tell you where my songs come from”.  In other words, it is in the art of lucid dreaming that comes forth a formally clueless bard.

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

A shout out to two maestros of publishing, Dennis Callaci and Mark Givens of Bamboo Dart Press for giving underdog exposure to a catalog of local writers.  I don’t flutter in the business world with any noticeable success or acumen.  In, at one point, looking for a periodical to submit my writing to, all I could come up with, that looked interesting, was Modern Drunkard Magazine.  I sent them a story from my Pomona Sorrows collection; one called The Bloody Mary Mountain Boys.  It was about a bluegrass band that formed in prison that took Shakespearian turns.  I felt it had everything an alcoholic could dream for.  But alas it wasn’t accepted and didn’t even merit a rejection slip.  In response I did what I’m best at, I gave up, went back to writing for my original inner audience, motley and malnourished as they might be.  I wanted to give up on them also, but how could I, they were already in the starting gate.

Find here a collection of emails and photos that I gathered back in 2005 that I have yet to share. I lace them together now to prove that we have not forgot our steel town hero, Bill Bergan.

WILLIAM Curtis “BILL” BERGAN, 51, a resident of Fontana, passed away March 5, 2005.

Bill was the beloved son of Curtis W. Bergan (deceased) and Dorothy J. Bergan of Fontana. Bill graduated from Fontana High School. Upon graduation from high school he attended Chaffey College. After attending college, he worked at Kaiser Steel until it closed. Bill is survived by his loving mother, Dorothy J. Bergan; uncles, Guy Huffaker of Porterville, Jim Bergan of San Diego; aunts, Joan Huffaker of Porterville, Joyce Kaplan of Orange County; cousins, Randy Richardson of Highland, Odis and Stella Terry of Reche Canyon, Loretta Bragga of Redlands, Dana Deely of Clayton and Erin Guinn of Porterville along with numerous other cousins. A private memorial service will be conducted this week with internment following at Hermosa Cemetery in Colton. Arrangements being handled by Inland Memorial Mortuary. 
Published in the San Bernardino Sun on 3/10/2005. 


*********************************************************************************************

I spent many of my formative years with Bill. He helped to mold me. He brought a certain “color” into my life like no one has before or since. He helped my grandfather and Aunt Mary around the house and was a friend to my Aunt Donna too. I will dearly miss him. I had hoped our paths would cross again soon. 

To me, he was Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and he was The Rolling Stones when the Beatles were cool. He was Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Buffy Saint-Marie, Gene Pitney, Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette. He was Kaiser Steel, and The Salton Sea, and “The River” and a shiny steel guitar. 

Knowing his Mom and Dad and him, together being supportive of me in their own way, and that scene in my mind, I contrast with so many other experiences of my life, to shape what I am today. I can still see the spinning wheel as objet d’art, in their picture window on Merrill. His cousin Byron and I had an enduring friendship which I also attribute to Bill’s introducing us. 

Let us all honor his memory.
Thanks, just thought you’d like to know

Mitch Powell

—————–

Mitch / 

I was much saddened by the loss of our friend Bill Bergan.  Growing into manhood he was much more of a Neil Cassady than I was of a Jack Kerouac, but that’s always the way I felt our relationship.  He was a complex individual with the most basic and sometimes heroic principals.  His memory will be crucial to me and my own road ahead.  What is the story of his passing?  The obituary said it was a private memorial, does that mean that we can’t go, and if we can, when is it?   

my best,
Patrick Brayer
Claremont, Ca

———

(A painting Patrick Brayer made of Bill Bergan at Mr. Bakers coffeeshop in Fontana in the 70’s.)

William C. “Bill” Bergan / by Patrick Brayer

I will always remember Bill Bergan in the light of fondness.  We once drove his brand-new Audi sedan across north America together (which he purchased with his compensation check received over the time Kaiser got caught importing Chinese steel), the car brown like shiny dirt, driving all night through Texas-looking states and writing poems by flashlight.  Washing our cowboy shirts in a laundromat in Shawnee Oklahoma and trying a beer from every state like we were Jack London and Paul Newman (in the movie Hud) in a science project.  Unfortunately, we had so much fun that by the time we got back the car had to be put to scrap

In high school he was tall and handsome with a blonde haired, blue eyed Nordic stature, part surfer, part cowboy, and two parts Leif Erikson.  I remember us in my parents dim lit basement on Date Street in Fontana in the late 60’s.  It was a beautiful Spanish revivalist structure surrounded with pomegranate and walnut trees, and a few of us outsider teens would meet down there with our acoustic guitars, Bill’s Fender lap steel and White amp, and fight our way, tooth and nail, equally through both the Buck Owens as well as the Black Sabbath songbooks.  I think at that time we actually dreamt of a time when we would all probably be the age we are now.

One of the greatest things, advise-wise, that anyone has ever told me came from Bill Bergan on the sad occasion of one of my other friends father’s upcoming funeral (I was with Bill at his father Curt’s funeral and he was with me at both of my parent’s funerals, my mother Eleanore also, like Bill, passing at 51) / I was trying to back out of going to the service out of normal fear, my excuse being that I didn’t know the father all that well.  Bill looked me in the eye and said simply, “Did you ever say hello to him?”.  To which I replied, “well of course”.  Then he replied, “then go and say goodbye”.  Goodbye Bill Bergan with all my love.

Patrick Brayer Claremont, Ca 03-12-05

(photo: Rob Powel)

I called the cemetery that was mentioned in the Bergan obituary, and they said that there was a mock service last Thursday (I’m not sure what a mock service is?).  He’s buried at Hermosa cemetery in Colton, probably by his dad.  I think it is fitting that he be near the saint that was his dad and that he be buried in the same cemetery that some of the Wyatt Earp family of Wild West fame are resting.  Find attached a great photo (one which I can’t remember ever seeing) that I got from my sister Monica.  It is a shot of that same 1971 basement (garage band) phenomenon of which I spoke in my personal eulogy of Bill.  There I am flanked by the late Bill Bergan and the late Jeff Morning. Life is certainly snub-nose-short when it’s not busy being unnecessarily long and drawn out.  I hope to see you soon

Patrick of Brayer

A Note From Chris Leroy (Redlands CA)

Bill Bergan, Keith Grimes, Gary Adams and myself made up The Mondo Combo (1978-91), a rocking R&B band of which Bill was the kingpin! We started by meeting at a recording studio in Berdoo midnights and jamming til morning. We played at my club, THE BEAT (1980), for every cancelled band, which meant we played a lot. Again, Bill called the tunes! Musically I gained so much hanging around these Fonta boys, the raw sound of blues and soul. From Bill at a 3:00am doughnut joint, after a sad girlfriend breakup, I learned…”LeRoy, if you get on the wrong train, you don’t have to stay to the end of the line.” Bill was smart like that. I still miss that dude. Bill WAS a true Fontana hero!

(Bergan, Brayer, and Jeff Morning, rehearsing their band, The Shadders in a Fontana basement.)

(One of Bill’s early girlfriends, Jeri Maxem)

(pictured below: On Bergan’s wedding day L-R Brayer, Bergan. and Prof. Thomas Giannotti)

This is a letter I wrote to Dorothy Bergan (Bill’s Mom) in the spring of 2006.

Mrs. Bergan (Dorothy)              2500 W. Henderson Ave / Porterville, ca 93257                                  04-17-06

First off let me say that Fontana and the entire Inland Empire are a much paler environment in meaning without your presence, your polished stove, your always immaculately coiffed hair and open smile.  I have so many fond memories of you, and Billy, and papa curt on Merril Avenue.  Your front yard with that high step of grass.  I’m sure it just got that way when they widened the two lanes.  I remember your home’s great south facing picture window with the spinning wheel lamp, where you no doubt casually watched the trees grow in the green park’s progression of time.  My heart of course aches at the thought of Billy and his last days.  He never alluded to me of any ill health, although our later days became a sort of struggle of wills.  The last time I saw him I was in town taking photographs of Fontana, (for I could not for the life of me think of our hometown without thinking of him), and I took him out for a Mexican dinner, an event that was as usual peppered with an assortment of warmth and tad bit of verbal abuse on his part, which was sadly the cause of my staying away and removed at times.  I am a writer of sorts now and so I guess I study the psychology of man, and so it is not hard for me, though sad, to understand.  Billy was always the stronger one in our relationship, he was a pack leader, that was the only way he knew.  He could always talk to fill the spaces when I wanted to be silent, he was generous when I was poor, and then I felt we were profound together as you only can when you are young.  I will always be indebted to him for that.  But when I got my legs, so to speak, and began to lead my own way in the world, he seemed to refuse to acknowledge my tiny accomplishments, so that when we met up again any of my attributes would just be dead end conversations.  But like I said earlier of psychology, Billy was in that sphere a complicated individual, but I still admired, appreciated, and sort of worshipped what he stood for, I just rather felt invisible in the vision of his eyes, and that is what hurt.  I will try to include a recent CD of my music which includes a funeral piece that I wrote for Bill culled from the last phone message I received from him around Christmas time.  I saved it because on that phone recording was the Bill Bergan that I remembered, and of course it breaks my heart now that I didn’t get back to him in time.  But honestly, i was afraid to break the great feeling that I had if he should turn back into the other Bill who at times, I couldn’t help but feel, resented aspects of a lot of his friends.  But now that’s all in the past and I just want to celebrate Bill and thank you somehow for bringing him into all the lives of which he enriched.  I have worked every day for the past 35 years or so at the craft of writing and only hope to some day, if I’m lucky, make half as big of a contribution as you have.  You and your family, beyond my own family, have been one of the few real things of which my faith in the world is based on.  I hope the recording doesn’t make you too sad.  In composing it I wanted to work on it a lot longer than I did, but it just got too sad for me and I had to accept it as perfect the way it lays.  Let me know if you are up for a visit sometime.  My wife and I make trips once in a while.  She’s an English teacher at Chaffey high school in Ontario.  If you still have Billy’s steel guitar and would like someone to make it continue to sing for him let me know and I would be honored to buy it and cherish it.  I remember it down in my parents’ basement on Date street, Billy and I and the late Jeff Morning, when the music was more innocent and full of mystery.

Anywho, I hope this finds you in the best of the happiness you deserve.  We are quite envious of those people up in Porterville who get the precious Dorothy Bergan, but don’t we all in time have to learn the simple art of unselfishness.  Please feel free to write or call anytime you need a friend.

With much love and admiration,

Patrick Brayer

315 n.  Cambridge Ave., Claremont, Ca 91711

(An incinerator in the Bergan’s backyard: photo Patrick Brayer)

By Patrick Brayer

  My last remembrance of an encounter with Kim Vincent Fowley on this beer-stained plane comes and goes as thus.  It was at a sleigh-bell Christmas Eve party, no less, one staged by himself himself. It was well worth going, not just historically, but just for the simple fact that Kim never threw a party ever, at least in my education of him.  Kim Fowley didn’t throw a party, he was too busy being one.  I didn’t know what to wear to such an occasion, being fashion exonerated, so I opted to sport a cast-off mothball, pool table green sweater, the leavings of my late brother Michael, who beat Kim to the grave by a month chronologically, in a mad rush it seems now, give or take a eulogy.  I followed that up, costume-wise, with a straw pork pie hat I procured in Destin Florida on the Redneck Riviera.  I approached Kim Vincent slicing my way through a glockenspiel of guests, bedside and apologetic, “Hey lover boy, I thought the invitation said that everyone was supposed to dress like Rex Harrison, all except Rodney Bingenheimer of course, who could still, being the sanctioned movie mayor of the Sunset Strip, still likening himself as Little Lord Fauntleroy”.  For this, I got a slapdash rye acceptance in the eyes of Mr. Alley Oop.  I didn’t know he would go so soon after, as far as a nail-hard beeline to the hereafter. 

Harvey Kubernick and Rodney Bingenheimer (photo: Patrick Brayer)

I was, as usual, party-wise, out of my given element socially, so then, aided by his wife Kara, I embraced a newfound bottle of Merlot, and a crock stash of regimental Fowley comfort food (mashed potatoes).  On that buzz, I got to then tell music history scribe Harvey Kubernick that his most recent book, one concerning air wave radio in L.A., held most excellent and entwined company on our shabby sheik wood slat coffee table, arm in arm, almost incestually, alongside an early 1900’s book by Kandinsky about spiritualism, and the ragged art thereof.  The party attendants on that last occasion numbered only about fifteen to twenty.  I had brought along a song lyric to share, one that I wrote for Kim entitled, The King of the Dust and Oranges, but it turned out the buzzing Los Angeles chitter chatter never got to where I could out-win its sonic favor.  So I remained silent, which is how I came, so I had consistency on my side.  Which was, I’m finding out, a good way to sit with Rodney Bingenheimer, us there side by side in a couple of plastic bus depot chairs.  Not aloof, he’s just that stonewall shy.  I last remember him graveside, Bingenheimer, tear-stained, and not giving away an inch to a disco haircut, there at the service for his pal at the Forever Hollywood cemetery, in close proximity of a youthful dish, all this, as I helped my long time friend Annie Carlson (from Spin Magazine fame) in kimono satin, to find her missing pack of Marlboros beneath the bruise shadowed underbelly of a lacquered limousine. 

Tracking back to the Christmas party, I remember hearing Chris Darrow, one whom Fowley and myself both mutually considered, to be the Buddy Holly of the Inland Empire, him now there doing a guttural jowl-slung version of his composition, Evangeline, to and into the cantankerously cocked ears of bed-sheet Fowley, who was an erection of energy and wanting to just break out of his smorgasbord of illness then and there and spawn lyrics, as always, on the spot and in a sort of lethal carney spirit that he owned alone and earned.  Well, “earned”, that’s a whole other subject with its own sugar plum fairy set of entirety. Nonetheless, I plopped my cell phone video thing down before his noodle plate in the midst of the perfect confusion to catch a headshot of him holding wide-angle court in his classic yet comically staged rancor.  I don’t know if anyone will ever see it but me, but it was grand in that I saw in it the sweetness of the father that he was never to be, and perhaps even the aspects of a fatherliness that I myself never had, or at least one I longed for, presently not unlike him.  I brought him a photo-shopped portrait of himself that I took in our draught tolerantly infested backyard in Claremont California in 2004, this just before we moved back in magnetism to the ditch-weed San Bernardino county, where I belong, at least according to most of my songs.  I always like to call the photographic shot in mention, The Bee Keeper, as he was there hiding behind a flowering plant with his green flaming ski hat, which etched to one a certain period in time for him.  Maybe a skyscraper on a Blarney skateboard fantasy.  Upon the image I superimposed a faint headshot of his dad, Douglas Fowley, one that I obtained on eBay, from a movie he once did with Myrna Loy.  When I pointed it out to him he grimaced just like you knew he would, could, and did.  To which I there added, “In your greatness, you have conquered your father Kim, and now you need to forgive him”.  We only winked. 

Fowley at the Brayers with Douglas Fowley superimposed (photo: Patrick Brayer)

At some point later in the evening they traipsed out this singer fellow named Arial Pink, who was sort of a big deal in that present tense, and one that Fowley was presently doing some songsmithing with, or for.  After Fowley’s passing, I looked up the new recordings in revelatory curiosity and they were just dog shit awful of course.  Fortunately, I am not the judge and the jury of anything, yet still, this made me sort of sad, but then I thought to myself, they were awful, agreed, but they were an awful that only Fowley could make art of, and was famous for.  Alley Oop, Popsicles and Icicles come to mind, both of which sold millions.  You definitely had to bend your mind to address their level, if you even had the energy, which was his energy.  He definitely had another side of the coin that had a couple of extra dimensions tacked on. 

This leads me finally to my last and parting words to my resting friend Kim Fowley, as he tired, and the conglomeration, as was ushering by his bedside, a line, in rosary fashion, like the broadcasted seeds of his life story, each bead a character, not unlike a papal visit to the Pope, not of a Sunset Strip, but one that rather stripped the very idea of sundoown.  I had nothing rehearsed, so this was it, so it just sort of came blurting out, for I didn’t know in fact that it was to be the last, but it was.   “See you later Kim, I’ll have to say in all honesty that I don’t actually know where you’re going, but I want you to know, wherever it is, that we’re right behind you”.   “When we’re gone, people listening will be the only music we hear”  He was considering all of that, his eyes a soup of ray ban glass, as I passed by, trying my best to hold back the hunched back of reality, before his last nod to me under the sci-fi guard of a big fake Christmas tree adorned with not so fake 45 RPM records, many as not, of this friend’s very most thought and production.   

I still had my brother’s eulogy in my coat pocket at Kim’s funeral, Joan Jett doing the honors this time.  Fowley’s grave is situated right in company with Cecil B. DeMille in the Hollywood Forever Cemetary.  Among the necessary dates and name on the black marble marker leaves his advice in quotes, “Stay Teenage”.

Rodney and Kim bid farewell (photo: Patrick Brayer)

What you’ve just read is part three of my Kim Fowley trilogy

Part One: My Dinero With Fowley

Part Two: King of the Dust and Oranges

(painting by Rob Ring)

On June 23^rd 2024 a memorial was staged honoring the life and times of Nick Sandro.  He was perhaps best known as the owner and operator of Nick’s Caffé Trevi in Claremont California.  We were introduced to each other by one of the areas main music connection-makers, Chris Darrow, in the early 80s.  Our purest connection was our parallel concert venues, mine The Starvation Café (1982-1997) in Fontana, and his Caffe Trevi in Claremont.  I never thought of it then, as I do now, how we complimented each other as tribal expression that together created a sort of slap dash music school and grassroots community.  Mecca being of course The Folk Music Center nestled in the village.  Looking back I see that it was a perfect architecttonic chemistry.  When I presented an act it was like church to me.  I would not let anyone talk during a performance; you could not only hear a pin drop, you could hear a pin dropping.  I was so serious about it that it almost makes me laugh today.  I grew up and got my prototype education from a coffee house in San Bernardino called The Penny University.  

(Ben and Ellen Harper / photo: Brian Wade)

At The Starvation I tried to show the performers, many just new to their craft, what it felt like to be respected as they decided, or considered, whether this, albeit songwriting, singing, playing an instrument, or just public speaking, might be something they might do for a livelihood.  At Nick’s you learned, on the other hand, to not be so thin skinned, as you might have to play a duet with the operatic baritone of a coffee grinder, and then to project your music over top of a couple of college students, high on expresso, in act of loud verbiage, taken over by the shear excitement of just discovering Frierich Nietztche.  I now see that you need both factions to decide your life path.  You need to graduate from both.  Treating something as spiritual is not enough.  Learning something in church doesn’t mean anything if you don’t take it out into the world, the sanctuary being just the starting place.  Nick Sandro’s Caffe Trevi supplied just such a breeding ground.  As many will attest, you can’t think of the Caffe Trevi without seeing a hologram of Nick, and visa versa.  One of the great things I witnessed, and tried to learn from, was how he was able to make this all happen without forcing his personality in front of the music, humbler that just a puppet master.

 (Nick Sandro and JP Plunier)

  I was honored to be asked to perform at the memorial but was forced to cancel at the last moment due to health issues.  I rehearsed for an entire week to try to get in shape, but finally concluded that I just couldn’t survive the 100-degree heat, which exasperated my dizziness, along with a smattering of other issues.  

   In considering what songs might be appropriate I chose a song that I wrote in 1989 called Little Precious State of Mind.  I performed the song for the first time at Nick’s that year with my mentor-pal Chris Darrow, and after that I just forgot about it.  I’ve written over five hundred songs in my day, so it’s nothing unusual for some of them to get buried in the mind’s landfill.  But, over the years whenever I would stumble upon Nick he would always mention that song, and he was the only one that ever did.  So, whenever I would think of it, I would always pleasantly think of him and him alone.  

   The other song I was considering was one that I wrote with my friend John Dietrich called Tell Me Darlin’ (What’s Your Name) which we wrote in my teardrop trailer in a weed choked field in Fontana.  The song later appeared on a CD Sandro had recorded with his group Slim or Lefty (1996) which also included Marc Dietrich, and the photography of JP Plunier.

(Nick Sandro and Chris Darrow at The Starvation Cafe in Fontana California)

 Little did Nick know that he would produce one last festival of love which would include a review of the best of an era that belongs exclusively to the Inland Empire.  I was pleased to be able to view the streaming concert from my easy chair, eating fried chicken from Stater-Joes.  The musical evening consisted of, The Citrus Sisters (with Ellen Harper who runs The Folk Music Center and Museum, Elizabeth Hangan, whose father was the great Clabe Hangan, and Margarette Millard)  Also to “Pick for Nick” where, Jeff Masters and Don Gasiewicz, Jerry Waller, Roy (Dang Darn) Durnal, Jack Housen, John McKnight, Henry Barnes, Mahlia Jones, Lauren Jones and Silas (Dutchboy), Jerry O’Sullivan, Bill Barrett, Jim Shirey, The Baldy Crawlers, The Desperation Squad, Los Guys, and the man, Ben Charles Harper.  Special thanks go out to Robin Young (coordination) and Pat Keegan (sound).

Little Precious (State of Mind)

Secret Hits V17

https://patrickbrayer.bandcamp.com/track/little-precious

Tell Me Darlin’ (What’s Your Name) 

Secret Hits V27

https://patrickbrayer.bandcamp.com/track/tell-me-darlin

The Nick Sandro Festival Video: Part One / Part Two

(black and white photography below by Brian Wade)

(Jerry O’Sullivan)

(Mahlia Jones, niece of both Chris Darrow and David Lindley)

(Jack Housen)

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

  As a storyteller, the hardest thing to do is to imagine beginning at the severed end of a life.  When someone dies, we each go our own individual way together in a low flying trance.  Not in a static saunter but rather in a rhythmic march through our own version and cadence, clocked through a rusty red claymation.  Me, for myself, I questioned if Roy Hyde were not, after all this, just a personal dream, with a capital “D”.  Too good and salty to be true, with a sickle smile as if something were constantly up his sleeve behind his eyes.  The beekeeper, the Wizard of Oz sawmill owner and operator, capable of rooting the truffle out of any situation and sanding it until it’s his own.  Peafowls in the side yard crying out as if in Flannery O’Connor’s voice stark in her wallflower anguish, at being long most barren.  For ultimately it is agreed upon that the peacock’s sound is the sonic signature of full-cry loneliness.

  The very first time I laid eyes on Roy Hyde historically was in 1997 while he was hired to put in a road to snake up to a creek house in south Alabama.  We eyed each other north to comparative south in evaluation, a task in itself due to the squinting sun, and shrugging in our apposing perspectives.  He wore a mercurial patterned tie-dye t-shirt, sporting a forgotten hula skirt of scraggly hair the shade and timber of a wooden nickel.  He was a hard worker and you just knew he had history tucked away somewhere in the hardscrabble viny woods of Arkansas and perhaps Birmingham.  Me, in diametric opposition, hailed from Southern California where whilst living on an egg ranch with no surf boards my dad ran a steel town donut shop.  Roy concluded in his mind immediately that I would be on the farthest edge of worthless on his road gang.  “Don’t show anybody that you can do back breaking work if you don’t want to end up in such”, seemed to be my motto.

  A week later I performed a house concert in Fairhope Alabama.  I was flown out originally to help promote a recording of an old friend Eric Schiller, called Leaf of Absence.  In my decision to take on such a frightening trek, I talked myself into doing so beyond the reaches of my agoraphobic nature.  I would go as a journalist, I told my gullible self, delve into the source history of racism, maybe attend a snake handling trance-church or two.  Boy, was I disappointed on that front.  Imagine my chagrin when all I got was a bunch of kind and thoughtful people living in a single tax colony.  I met Roy the night of that concert, but he just stood there like a hardened church mouse, sussing up the situation, wearing a leather jacket over the same aforementioned tie dye shirt, calling it now, evening attire.  On a cassette I made of that performance I noticed that I called it: Live from Eric’s Velvet Lung, which did no better than to just remind you of my slipping mindset.  A week later Roy arrived at the place I was holed up in and handed me a stomp board he had fashioned for me from his sacred stash of Cherry and Walnut lumber.  He commented on the piece of plywood I was previously using to keep the rhythm to my songs: He spouted, “That just won’t do!”, and he likened it to kneeling at a kudzu cross.

  He had already heard my music, and when I saw that stomp board, we instantly recognized each other as what the other was always looking for, a missing piece of brotherhood artistically, and into a wealth of even deeper indescribable reasons.  Roy was a world class person, humble yet animated, not to mention a world class woodsmith.  I christened him as The King of the Wood Imaganeers.  You could look into one of his furniture pieces and be reassured of a depth beyond believing, and an even more far-reaching dimension.  It was like examining the iris of a God.  Thanks to him I began to try to look at, or at least consider my own works on that very level.  We spoke often of such things, which to sidestep sounding self-flattering, we kept just between ourselves, close to the vest.

  There were many tales of his early exploits, such as meeting Willie Nelson in the early 70’s, involving the lore of marijuana and turquoise smuggling.  About them walking into a room together through opposing doors, like two golden hearted gunslingers, looking identical and shocking even themselves in a funhouse manner.  He attended the tail end of the Selma Civil Rights March with Martin Luther King, a display for which he was railroaded out of the town in which he lived and taught, which inspired him to then take up a job as the only white instructor in an all-black school in Prichard Alabama.

  This was all before he met the love of his life, his Lithuanian bride, Allie, who was his Ginger Rodgers, doing everything he did quietly and backwards in high heels.  They purchased a chunk of wooded property and had a one-story house moved there in pieces which they then rejoined, building a high spire betwixt the two pieces, thus make an ‘eighth wonder of the world’ caliber haven, what I like to call, The Hyde’s Wooden Cathedral.  Another thing worth adding is that their philosophy concerning woodworking was one wherein they wouldn’t work with any lumber that came from a tree that didn’t fall of its own accord.  They sawed no trees down in the making of their movie.

  One time when I was preparing to do an impromptu concert in their farm kitchen I cornered our 14 year old daughter in what I considered a life lesson.  I told her to watch Roy’s eyes and body closely as I played and take in the sight of someone who knows how to listen with his soul.  I was humbled when I felt that he could listen better than I could play.  I never knew until I played for Roy that others, even though present, weren’t quite in attendance.  It reminded me that I wasn’t crazy when I stepped away from a life of stage performance.  I just couldn’t believe that they were listening.  It’s not their fault of course, but it’s still true.

 (Here’s Roy Hyde acting out the entire Old Testament in Elsinore California: photo Patrick Brayer)

 Then there was a time, some thirty years later, when his hair turned from wooden nickel to trail a ponytail of feathered alloy, that we bonded over a similar love of literature, both citing that our favorite book of all time was Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree.  The last time I saw His-Royness in the flesh, Christmas of 2024, I gave him a 1957 copy of another one of my favorite southern scribes, Andrew Lytle, a book called The Velvet Horn.  It was at his bedside when I walked out for what was, it turned out, to be our last visit.  I imagine that it was still there when he decided that he had better places to be, and that now it was time for the peace that was well earned by a life lived as colorful and kaleidoscopically-hopeful as a hippy lightshow.

   Posing in one of his many earthly incarnations Roy, regal and deacon-like, decked out in a neglected suit, in the spring of 1999 joined my wife and I in holy matrimony beside a cottonfield in Daphne Alabama “By the powers vested in me and Rolling Stone Magazine” he would tell you. 

  I wrote a song upon first meeting everybody and dedicated it to both him and my wife, a psychedelic ballad called The Invisible Mark.  It contained a line that he remembered from a fellow prisoner in the House of Corrections, “I’m walking in chains and flying in my dreams”.  In another, Bar Owner’s Daughter, I quoted him with “Don’t make me raise my guidelines.”

Don’t make me raise my guidelines

Don’t make me venerate.

Barstools full of ex’s she tried to incinerate.

But now her eyes turn to candy on the vine.

   The Hyde’s were infamous for their New Year’s Eve burn-piles at which couples were known to arrive as friends and after an evening of inebriated ritual, “Salem Style”, wake up in the dirt of dawn as lovers, like potatoes cooked in cinders.  It apparently was also used to clean the yard of fallen debris if one were searching for a practical sense, which seemed to slip all minds.

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

   One day, in fatherly fashion, to a Mormon Tabernacle of frog’s chorus and prairie chicken’s choking on the humidity, he taught me the fine art in how to properly skunk a beer in the sun, and then made me several fish-throat tacos, made from fisherman’s salvage on the docs, grilled out in the yard upon our taking a smoke break from a self-inflicted marathon of W.C Fields black and whites, which Roy took as serious, scratching the tumbleweed of his biblical beard.  Then he brought me out a plate of cantaloupe, which though it appeared as mortal, was the best I had ever eaten, leaving me thinking, “This guy’s onto something”.  Leaving me ultimately with the obvious conclusion: “If I wasn’t busy being me I’d wanna to be this guy”.  This left me in mind of an old Harlan Howard song The Wall which spouted in a prisoner of life’s lament: “Many have tried and so many have died, but they never made that wall, no they never made that wall”.

  The very last time I talked to Roy Hyde we were on the same page, the static of the telephone like a soft jet engine, time ticking like the heartbeat of an orphan tapping on a barn door, both of us agreeing that if dying was going to be this much work, that we perhaps might just as well not bother.

The Invisible Mark

There’s a bachelor awakening / with a pocket full of swizzle sticks

Her gray wool coat hair pulled back / and a heart of rosy bricks

Like crayons and star fish / melting on the beach

Over black and white TV set / for her I begin to reach

Lurching before January flowers / in the square foot slow of molasses

Plastic magnolias blossoming / in her costly sunglasses

That’s why I’m walking in chains / and flying in my dreams

Look how perfect the body / that has no seams

My hands turn to gloves / playing the fiddle they turn to doves

But against her jaw in the dark / I draw an invisible mark

Like jello moves through razor wire / I will dream of a fire

And at least warm the chains / as we fly a little higher

Each link is a link as freedom / each a feather in black

Each one the difference between / holding and holding back

I hope you won’t notice / as I come into view

In public tranquility / I walk in chains to you

—–

World aching harmonies / to a flailing of heart beats

Sounding black walnut under the foot / tossing jewelry into the sheets

Pork baked in apples / and an Everclear mao-tai

Fortune has a plywood center / salt and radishes will make you cry

Fire wouldn’t even know what to do / it couldn’t even light the face of a clown

If you didn’t hold out a bright hand on a golden road / for it to wrap around

—–

When I walk away from you / I feel I mispronounce passion

And I can’t help but feel / I walk away from all form and fashion

But let’s never forget / that the parents from which the rose is born

Are ever hard at work / being the parents of the thorn

We sometimes live our whole lives through / and when it’s done

We realize that the rhythm was always / waiting patient inside the drum

Written by : Patrick Brayer

2-17-97  Alabama (for Roy Hyde and Holle McKnight)

Here are some autobiographical notes written by the man himself:

“I grew up on the outskirts of Birmingham. The Japanese surrendered on my 5th birthday. I had a Tom Sawyer childhood. I taught Wilt Chamberlain how to do a yoga headstand, I was at the King March in D.C. and lived off the land in a teepee in a commune in Arkansas. I am also licensed and can marry people. It has been quite a life and I never thought I would get this old. I am a cancer survivor and have had several surgeries. Physically I am a mess but I feel like I am 18 years old.

My father died when I was 18 and I got into college on a bet in a poker game. I barely got out of high school with a D minus average and went to Alabama College, which is now the University of Montevallo. The school was going broke and they had to take in men for the first time and I was in the first class that had men. It was 14-to-1 women to men so our odds were pretty good.

I was a redneck and had read only a couple of books until I went to college, then I got interested in religion and philosophy and Plato. I was exposed to so much and I loved it all. I went to Tuskegee and met up with a group of black students and ate dinner and talked. That changed me. I was in Montgomery for the end of the Selma march and saw the big show with Peter, Paul and Mary, they were my heroes. I was stupid and bragging about singing protest songs and people got after me when I got back to Birmingham and I lost my teaching job.

After Sputnik, there was a lot of money in science and they paid me to get a masters degree in the teaching field. Instead of going to graduation, I went to Woodstock and didn’t come back. I have a couple of masters degrees, one was in radiation hygiene which was nuclear safety. I taught science for several years. For a while, I was the first and only white teacher at Blount High School.

When I was a kid, my father came home with weird stuff. We raised rabbits and quail and parakeets. One time he came home with a pool table from the pool hall. He also came home with a print shop and we had a whole print shop in our basement. He had a jigsaw and we made Christmas decorations out of plywood that we hung on top of the house. I got interested in building things.

When I was living in Arkansas, there were some persimmon and black walnut trees and I had a jointer. When the limbs fell off the trees, I played with them and whittled them down. The thought of getting a sawmill turned me on. I appreciate the tree and what you can do with it. I have been thinking about teaching a class to help other people learn how to make things out of wood. I am not as strong as I used to be and I have to trick people into helping me.

These are from a tree in Daphne and will turn into coffee tables. That board is beautiful, it is a piece of red oak and a special sawing technique brought the flecks out. One of the tree services lets me know about the trees and wood they find. A lot of the high-end builders let me know, too. Cherry is my favorite, but I like them all. Black walnut and magnolia are a lot of fun and I make benches, tables, and beds. I try to use all pieces of a tree. I love the feel of smooth wood. When it is right, God it feels so good.”

Kim Vincent Fowley (1939-2015)

A remembrance regarding my friend Kim Fowley who passed away on January 15, 2015 in Hollywood, CA.

Written By Patrick Brayer 2015

My introduction to counter culture figure Kim Fowley came in the mid-90’s at Studio Nadine in Claremont California working then on his solo project, Worm Culture.  The session was being produced by country rock legend and local surf-folk Svengali, Chris Darrow, who was Fowley’s long time Inland Empire confidant in what he later referred to as his ‘tumbleweed days’ among us.

Fowley’s entrance could not have been staged any better or purer by David Lynch, or Clifford Odets.  First off there’s a garagesque room setting of about four punk gothic musicians waiting for him,

Dressed in their deepest black lo-fi apparel, as if they all shop-lifted at the same store, aptly pierced, with ironed hair covering an eye or two.  The big turquoise door swings biblically wide and in steps a tall handsome praying mantis of a man with a crime scene looking brief case and a make shift plus size suit, Kim Vincent Fowley.  No introductions muttered, nothing.

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

“We’re not here to chit chat, this is rock hard business.  He began:  “Entertainment Tonight starts at 5:30 sharp and I don’t want to miss a lick of it, so let’s just do this dog shit.”  He opens his beat leather case, pulls out a handful of polaroid pictures of his current girlfriend in blood red lingerie, and handed them around full circle to the boys in the band (to be named The Rubber Room Freaks by press time).  As they ogle the pictures he says, in the way of a pep talk, in reference to the images. “First off, I’m Kim Fowley, I’m the king of things you’ll never understand, and here’s my urine.”  

After ample pause and time for dazed looks to set in he continues:  “O’K’ here’s the deal: Imagine you’re driving in a white van through a ghetto in San Berdoo, the van breaks down, you turn around and Jim Morrison is in the back of the van sitting on the spare tire, of which the walls are shag carpeted. That’s exactly the timber of how I want this to sound, so let’s start to finish this.

Right now as I sit here somewhat stunned in obituaryness, I don’t think of the endless reel of the illustrious and purposely outlandish career.  All I see is the residue of kindness, the shear landmine of wit, and a man who had a profound chosen gift for accepting the underdog as heroic.  In a sense he truly was Grapes of Wrath Jr.  In that, and our friendship, he gave me something that can’t rightly be pilfered, misspelled, or exploited

I once wrote a song for him, inspired by him, and somewhat about him, called, The King of the Dust and Oranges.

(Icicles and Popsicles Gold Record in Fowley’s freezer)

One time while visiting him in Redlands, California I somehow curiously looked into his refrigerator freezer to see what this counter culture creature might eat, and sure enough, there it was, the gold record to Icicles and Popsicles by The Mermaids.  With Kim Fowley there was always one thing that you could count on, that you would never be surprised by always being surprised.

King of the Dust and Oranges

(The Ballad of Billy the Kim)

he’s the king of the dust and oranges

stands before the clouds like a kindling fire

the darkness grows square / that is seen everywhere

but it’s the hours that I admire

the hours spent on the telephone wire

he has a beautiful house, or a beautiful shack

talking to Europe, Detroit, or Decatur / or just merely trying to date the operator

the worlds just a room to be worked

he’s got six tall brown file cabinets

full of fools cap paper and songs

and from each breath, he does bring back from death

that from whichever a teenager longs

he’s got a line of bus seats and gold records

and he’s 25 inches from noon

his hair straight back and clean / like a silver machine

eyes as heavy as bright sand dune

he won’t take the train or drive an automobile

says there’s enough right here at the door

for whatever’s out there / could never compare

that’s just for an imagination that’s poor

I once saw him with glistening meat in his hands

at a Redlands backyard barbecue

no butter-beans or potatoes / or green fried tomatoes

a little Jehovah smile breaking through

written by: patrick brayer

12-16-04

for sir“billy the kim” fowley / x-mas 04

“Family souls whose coal mine brains were scarred from hard soot, and the easy handling of weapons”

(Carla Coldiron Mcgill)

   What makes this an American story is the fact that it can be told as a history of a string of vehicles.  In my mind, there is a metaphoric junkyard dead-grass cemetery that splays out all our vehicular histories, Nash Ramblers, metallic Buick coupes parked, seemingly obedient, holstered in its own parking slot, before clap trap apartment complexes, Caprice Classics, and the crown jewel, my father’s Carnation milk truck.  Once while on his dairy route he traded his Army luger to a housewife in a floral caftan for a honey-colored Spanish guitar, which was, unbeknownst to me, to start me on my own particular path of rejection, and its black sheep half-brother, poverty.  Whenever I remember back to that rusted and retired Carnation milk wagon I always just see the word ‘reincarnation’ instead.  It foretold of my predestination as a 1970s-caliber headshop hippie.  But it always got me thinking of the possibility of a cosmic return.  But in my imagination, I never thought I would come back to earth as a turnip, or a bluebottle fly, let alone a celebrated astronaut who had eventually fallen from grace, rattling some bushes with a teenage beauty queen.  Nor would I have ever thought why any of my words might live on, hugged from the sweet hereafter in parentheses.

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Maybe it’s even more like a thing that has no outside, a thing which encloses its only possible observer. 

(Jonathan Lethem)

    (photo: Patrick Brayer)

“They took her away in a Bonneville hearse.  All the live long day.

      Things couldn’t get better when they’re busy getting worse.

      All the live long day.  They carried her away.”

   We’ll start when my Daphne Alabaman wife and I, with the help of oxen-backed friends, moved to the foothill community of Upland California.  It was in the spring of 1998.  At this point in time, there was nary a fabled lemon grove to be found.  Nowadays if someone found a smudge pot they might think it was a part fallen off the fuselage of a U.F.O.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, one might still get the faint sniff of blossom time and again. But these were trees just symbolically planted in the leeched topsoil of sodden vanity, standing guard below a ring-tailed moon.  Or it might just be the scented candle broadcast out from the open-jaw window of a pack of temporary steel mill squatters.  The area still had its merit though.  One could still go up to the humbler heights of Mt. San Antonio, park on the caliche shoulder beside Old Baldy Road, and witness a sugar bowl of human lights.  It was as if this might well be where all chandeliers went to obediently die in genuflection before the criminal moonlight. 

   We moved from Fontana to a hulk of a house situated directly across the street from the Upland Post Office.  It was situated such that it could be eagle-eyed from the second story through the pale-ash screened porch of the dove-white Craftsman.  It was sawed at some point, in a grab at practicality, into a duplex, of which we rented the upper portion.  This neighborhood was what they like to consider the historic district of Upland although it was more so considered a suburb, with houses close enough to hit within the wack of a croquet ball.  The homes are rustic but come with politics.  A friend of ours had a Spanish revivalistic bungalow on the next block over and they threatened to railroad him out of town at one point because he wouldn’t put up one of the customary eight-foot-high illuminated yule tide candy canes, which showed brightly in an almost KKK heraldry, stabbed into the neighboring lawns, warning of the sweet tooth of Christ’s birthing, viewed from the sky from a jumbo-jet’s flightpath of Ontario Airport like gilded fireflies.

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These are the liner notes from the CD, Hank Williams: Alone with His Guitar (Mercury Records) written by one of my favorite southern writers, William Gay.

Long Gone Lonesome Blues

   The voice was coming from the radio, but it had such an easy, affable tone that it could have been coming from the swing at the end of the porch, just the familiar voice of a neighbor dropped over after dark for a glass of iced tea and a little conversation, his disembodied voice coming out of the summer darkness where the shadow of the climbing roses fell.

   But it was the radio, a wooden cabinet hooked to a dry cell battery and an antenna and a ground wire secured to a steel rod driven into the ground. The combination of these three things, when they were all in place and the fates were kind, performed a sort of alchemy on a southern night, jerked voices and twanging guitars and a provisional kinship out of the very air itself. It tied you to the rest of the world, pushed the borders back and showed you that you were not as alone in the night as you might have thought. The battery itself was a source of mystery. They were heavy and expensive, and we were often without them, and a radio deprived of its battery was as silent as the grave. Once I had even disassembled one with a hatchet, laying out the tin-sheathed electrolyte and carbon rods as if somewhere among them were the depleted and uncharged husks of musicians, gap-toothed country comedians, folksy announcers hawking Warren paint, moon pies, Groves chill tonic.

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Nationally known song scribes John York and Patrick Brayer will appear in conjunction with the Smiley Library Americana Roots Series. The event will be held at The Contemporary Club (est. 1894) in Redlands California on May 24, 2023.

Concert starts at 6:30. Admission is free. The concert was lovingly produced by Iggy Henderson along with the historic Smiley Library. Sound reinforcement by Patrick Keegan.

Location: 173 S. Eureka St., Redlands CA

John York joined The Byrds in 1968 replacing founding member Chris Hillman as the group began to tour for their LP Sweetheart of the Rodeo upon the exodus of Gram Parsons.  Also joining that year was the legendary guitarist, Clarence White.  York would go on to make two historic LPs with the group, Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, and Ballad of Easy Rider, both in 1969.  Despite being disillusioned by the ruthlessness of the business of music he continued to pen songs and produce a string of independent recordings from then and leading up to this day.  He later went on to work with such greats as Johnny Rivers, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Chris Darrow, and Kim Fowley.

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