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Patrick John Brayer

~ Fieldnotes from Wrongtario

Patrick John Brayer

Category Archives: Music

Patrick Brayer SHV60 My Sixtieth Shadow

04 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Music, Secrete Hits

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To purchase or sample this collection go to: https://patrickbrayer.bandcamp.com/album/my-sixtieth-shadow

1913 is my dustbowlian stab at the Steinway. I was trying to conjure the spirit of Thelonious Monk without letting talent get in the way. Let’s call it Thelonious Monkey. The piano is the only instrument my mother wanted me to play as a child growing up on a desert egg ranch. So hence I never really played it until after she passed. But it got me to capture a mood I could get no other way, so more or less I am just pretending to play the piano. When we listen to music, although we probably don’t know it, we often think that we control it. I was taking all of that away from you in the sonic dialogue between the keyboard and the voice, forcing the listener to relinquish control of the song, as the bottom dropped out, until you have no choice but to be present in the tragedy. It all just sounds like a joke to speak of it but if you listened to the original recording by Woody Guthrie you will find by comparison that I had indeed moved some molecules around, as well as paying an ancestral tribute to my grandparents who were present there on that very day in history.

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Letters To Hardy

19 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Correspondence, Memoir, Music, Songwriters, Uncategorized

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PBPh Hardy White Horse neg copy

Jack sitting in Dylan Thomas’ seat at The White Horse Tavern (photo:Patrick Brayer)

Below this nine-year sequel offering will be found the original eulogy piece I wrote for songwriter Jack Hardy in 2011, and below that, a collection of letters that I had written to him over the years, marking our friendship.  I think they speak as a memoir of a point in time, and of his influence upon me.  And I’m only one person.  You can take this and multiply it by five hundred and get a more accurate view of his impact.  I will add in a few facts that I had left out of the 2011 piece to flesh it out a little better.  I’ve yet to see a definitive biography on this extraordinary gentleman. Perhaps this will inspire that dialogue.

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The Patdemic Sessions 2020

30 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Music

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Concert

© 2020 Patrick Brayer Video recording/editing: @portermcknight

To support Patrick’s music, follow this PayPal link: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr…

For complete discography, see https://patrickbrayer.bandcamp.com.

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Bouquet of Pitchforks: Lyrics

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Music

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liner notes, lyrics, Secret Hits

 

SH-V59 Bouquet cov.jpg

 

The only guy who’s honest is the guy who sings in the shower.  Everyone else is a prostitute.

Kim Fowley

 

The collection here, Bouquet of Pitchforks, was recorded in the years 2017-2018 in Ontario, CA (Wrongtario).  In the mastering process I was forced to evaluate a place for a two year body of work (who does he think he is, Cool Hand Luke in prison sweat?).  I sense it might be how maybe an actor feels watching themselves on film (how would he know?), that is to say, at first embarrassed. The struggle is then to stand back (back back a way back) and hear the salty characterization embedded in the song and not of ones own self, barking out bleeding heart insecurities as the whole world’s whipping boy.  The songs are humbly backed by a plethora of imaginary sidemen on steel guitars, fiddles, Weissenborns, and Peruvian charangos.  A band that likes to call itself, The Shadders (Shadows is what he’s a’tryin to mispronounce).  I don’t know off hand who this annoying other voice is over my shoulder constantly but I just can’t seem to shake him (good luck trying).

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Wreckrium: Lyrics

01 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Music

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Tags

liner notes, lyrics, Secret Hits

SH-V58 cov 72d copy.jpg

The cover image for Wreckrium is one I culled from a Facebook feed of my friend Dieta Duncan.  It was an image that a friend of hers had taken out a backdoor on a ridge in Tennessee during a lightning storm.  I took it and squared it and thought I would try to recreate something with a similar feel.  You can see the wonderful ghostlyness of it. Then I thought why not just ask if i could use it.  I didn’t know, it could be a famous photo, or one taken by a famous photographer.  I contacted Dieta and she said she would contact her friend. The next day she got back to me and said that her friend said to “go with God” concerning the photograph.  Well I translated that to either mean it’s o.k. to use it, or that she would rather see me dead.  I opted to believe the first.  Then I researched the photographer, who’s name was Melonie Cannon, only to find out that she just appeared in a duet with Willie Nelson (To All the Girls…), and that her father was heavy weight record producer Buddy Cannon, who just finished producing Alison Krauss’ upcoming offering, Windy City.  Even before i knew all of this I was already contemplating wether it was wise to use an image that was so much better than the album. Then I thought, hey, you only live a bunch of times!

Someone kindly suggested that it might be better served if it had an image of my face on the cover.  “That would be false advertisement”, I responded.  My face is not what’s on the inside.  A big lightning bolt in a pissed of sky is way more accurate as to what you’re getting for your money.

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Craig Smith / Rounder Records CD 0357

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Music, Uncategorized

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published liner notes

craig smith : liner notes / patrick brayer

Craig Smith yng-2.jpg

When I think of the city of San Bernardino California, I think of a desert dust devil at a yard sale flinging a tattered moo-moo into a sun streaked sky. My suspicion towards divine intervention was once coalesced through that same paradoxical valley of smog and hard wind, amidst the early seventies, when I met a 16 year old Craig Smith. What could be more unlikely, I questioned, seeing the Virgin Mother of Guadeloupe in mud on the door of a Buick Riviera, or an Inland Empire surf rascal with shoulder length blonde hair being in love with, and mastering an Appalachian syncopation, alone and in the dark of his room. I have come forward to give Smith his due credit for the years of working with a clock maker’s precision at his craft, in the humblest of self defined manners. The musical notes are just the residue of the dedication. An applied dedication to create something mysteriously transparent to everything but the heart. That long drawn byproduct is manifest in the commodity called “tone”. Try to steal it and it turns and follows a tumbleweed up the San Gabriels. Segovia had tone, Django Reinhardt had tone, God knows Earl Scruggs lathered with tone. And tone comes from one place, and that place, my life of contemplation tells me, is “the house of process”. The love of the process of music is so much bigger than the music itself, that when the material tries to stand on it’s own, it is almost always considered illusion.

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Brayer Archives Signed Instrument Museum

05 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Instruments, Music

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Influences, Instruments

I’ve always allowed the musical instruments of my life to influence me more than I did actual people. Then at one point I thought to maybe somehow join the two, to adhere the human influence with the tone wood. When they are all put together like this I feel that they tell an extra-dimensional story to and beyond me, which affirms in it’s own biography, of what I have been pointing myself at, and into, as far back as I can even remember, that maybe, just maybe, all this is not a fluke.

When debating with long time friend John York about the subject of what we ourselves are actually doing in the arts, we kept coming back to the same conclusion, that what we do is plain and simple “beauty recognition”. There is no higher job, nor one more transparent to the ego. Just even the story of the history of the luthier’s craft here, and the voice given to a sawn tree, should be enough in itself. But I like layers and layers there are. For me, it’s not just the fact that they represent periods of American history, they are embedded with my own particular time phases, and then, not to mention the songs I’ve written on them, which there contain little head-of-a-pin portraits of threadbare family and foothill friendships, swaying naturally, because no one is watching. All this ending in, or bottoming out, in a sort of mythological lore.

Sometimes I was inspired by the shear humor of it, like getting author Joan Didion to sign my Dan Electro Longhorn bass. Still profound, perhaps diamond witted, but it was worth it just for the devilishly sweet cut-eye look in her eyes.

bradbury-chirango.jpg

Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and The New York Times once heralded him as “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.”

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You Gotta Start a Trinity Somewhere

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Music, My Journal

≈ 3 Comments

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Brayer Writing, Childhood, Fontana, Memories

One electrifying set of childhoodish memory came rushing back to me today as I sat to watch a documentary film celebrating the career of record producer Ahmet Ertegun. The 1969 memory in question was presented to me via an old stand up, spring-motor driven, hand cranked, rosewood cabinet victrola that was stored in my grandfather’s house. I was fifteen years of age and just noticing, frightened by the stillness, how lonely it was in his empty house after his passing. I then happened across the player, and a clumsy black stack of musty shellac discs. It became my secret place of solace, and I hid in the listening, and it became the soundtrack of my life because nobody else wanted it. When you have three other siblings, and no money, you acquire your power where ye may. It was there that I stumbled across one particular 78RPM recording of one Big Joe Turner doing, Shake, Rattle and Roll on Atlantic Records.

img_0662.jpg

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Video

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by patrickjohnbrayer in Music

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Alison Krauss, Song Interpretation, Songwriting, Union Station

This is the song adaptation chronology of my slide guitar version of, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn.

My first experience with the tune was in my teens from the Harry Smith LP box Collection on Folkways Records, a folk goldmine which my brother Mike and I would wrangle from the Fontana Library every chance we could.  The song was originally titled The Lazy Farmer Boy.

Here’s a link to that first influential 78RPM recording, which was recorded for Columbia Records in 1931 by Buster Carter and Preston Young

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Online Music Store

https://patrickbrayer.bandcamp.com/music

Pages

  • Brayerian Blog Introduction
  • Patrick Brayer : The Father of Dank Country
  • Short Chronological Trip to the Attribute Farm
  • Patrick Brayer Song History
  • Patrick Brayer Song Adaptation and Sessionography
  • The Secret Hits of Patrick Brayer Discography
  • Brayer Interview: Valley Daily Bulletin Sept. 2008
  • Patrick Brayer Acoustic Guitar Magazine Oct. 2001
  • Patrick Brayer: Video and Music Samples
  • New 2022 CD Available / Cabbage and Kings
  • Brayer Photos: Heroes in My Camp
  • Patrick Brayer Blog: Fieldnotes from Wrongtario

Recent Posts

  • Mike Davis (1946-2022) Fontana’s Own
  • Patrick Brayer: Unhinged and Unmistakable
  • Brayer: Cabbage and Kings / quotes and testimony
  • Patrick Brayer: Cabbage and Kings Lyrics and Commentary
  • Dick Barnes: Creosote Speaks
  • The Starvation Cafe Posters
  • Tim Weed: Calfskin Wonder
  • Saving the Dust for Last / Song analysis January 2021

Categories

  • Home
  • Journal
  • Music
  • Literature
  • Profiles
  • Southern California

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Alison Krauss Autobiographical Brayer Family History Brayer History Brayers Brayer Writing Charlie Williams Childhood Chris Darrow Concert Correspondence Fontana Hardmans Historical Fontana Influences Influential Influential Writer Inland Empire Inland Empire Hall of Fame Instruments John Brayer Kim Fowley liner notes Literature Local Music lyrics Memories Michael Hedges Nutters Obituaries and Memorials published liner notes Secret Hits Song Back Story Song Interpretation Songwriting Starvation Cafe Union Station Writers
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Discography and Resources

https://patrickbrayer.bandcamp.com https://patrickbrayer.com

Recent Comments

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Recent Posts

  • Mike Davis (1946-2022) Fontana’s Own
  • Patrick Brayer: Unhinged and Unmistakable
  • Brayer: Cabbage and Kings / quotes and testimony
  • Patrick Brayer: Cabbage and Kings Lyrics and Commentary
  • Dick Barnes: Creosote Speaks
  • The Starvation Cafe Posters
  • Tim Weed: Calfskin Wonder
  • Saving the Dust for Last / Song analysis January 2021

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