By Patrick Brayer

(Photo: Peter Figen)

“When you hear my music played, you’ll know that I”m not far away” (from The Golden Flute)

  The first time I met David Lindley I had a cassette of my songs in my fist.  My friend Chris Darrow had brought me over to the Lindley craftsman in Claremont, Darrow being his longtime bandmate throughout the 1960s, not to mention that Dave was married to his sister Joanie.  I was in heaven for a second as he impishly jumped with glee upon looking over the song titles, especially, Kittens on the Cross.  Of course in the long run the songs were not good enough, but I didn’t care, for I got to meet one of my all-time musical heroes.  Thanks to Joanie and their daughter Rosanne I was invited over on numerous occasions in the early 2000s. At one point in walking around their house, I spied an event poster on the refrigerator that caught my eye.  It was advertising a gun show in Pomona California to be held in 1996.  I just couldn’t imagine what that would be like, so I wrote a song about it where I ran some characters through the paces of what it might be like, in strictly mythological terms.  It was aptly titled, Gun Knife Militaria Western Fishing Show. 

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(Photo: Robert Morrow) From the book City of Quartz

In honor of the passing of Fontana’s own Mike Davis (1946-2022), world-renowned prophetic writer of social unrest, environmental disaster and dystopian ideals. Here I will include a few email exchanges between us and flesh that out with some photos from The Brayer Archives.  When people come to me for a lesson in what the Inland Empire is all about I have them first read Davis’ City of Quartz (with photos by Robert Morrow), advising them to read it backwards from chapter seven: Junkyard of Dreams, which in a way nails Fontana to the cross in diction.  From there I recommend Joan Didion’s essay from the collection: Slouching Towards Bethlehem: an essay entitled, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, and Jack Olsen’s true crime book, Salt of the Earth (the first hundred pages anyway).  For dessert I have them finish up with the San Bernardino Valley poetry of Dick Barnes, A Word Like Fire.

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by Mick Rhodes / Claremont Courier January 20th, 2022 photography: Andrew Alonzo

Ontario-based singer/songwriter Patrick Brayer, “The original brooding author of hardscrabble country-noir songsmanship,” is unhinged, in the best sense of the word.
“If I was totally in control I think I would be bored,” Brayer said of his songwriting process. “This stuff happens, and one thing leads to another, and then all of the sudden I seem to have written something that’s more profound than I really am. I’m surprised by it myself.”
Rich in vivid poetic imagery, much of it mined from territory familiar to Inland Empire residents, Brayer’s lyrics demand attention. Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits come to mind, but his writing has an extra dash of cinematic surrealism and a hypnotic magic even those esteemed lyricists can’t reach. His narrators pull you in like no other songwriter working today. He is his own thing.

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“Pat Brayer has built—with his own handwriting—a wilderness of his own design to howl in. When I need some inspirational humor, I know whom to check in with. His epigram has adorned my every outgoing email for the last 25 years. Thanks, Pat! That and $50 will get you a Frappuccini Grotte.”

Darol Anger (David Grissman / Turtle Island String Quartet / Mr. Sun)

(The Brayerian epigram which Darol Anger speaks of is: “If the search for reason had an end, and it hired a band, it would be a small army of old-time fiddlers on horseback.” This quote appears on Anger’s CD “Heritage”, which was a star studded neo-harrysmithian compilation which included such as Willie Nelson.)

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“Patrick Brayer…..we’d all be writing like him if we could.”

Richard Stekol (Ricky Nelson, Kenny Loggins, Kim Carnes, Arista Records, etc)

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‘The time has come’, the Walrus said

  ‘To talk of many things:

Of shoes-and ships-and sealing wax-

  Of cabbages-and kings-

And why the sea is boiling hot-

  And whether pigs have wings.’

Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) 

When a clock stops tracking time does it then cease to be a clock?  When a fish is caught and frozen does it forget to be a fish?  One is still useful, the other not, unless in sleuthing you wanted only to know whenst time froze and cried out at the crime scene. Both exist, but then that very existence proves to itself that it is almost never enough?  Answer these questions and you will see what I am on about.  Writing about myself, it seems I sorely give myself the impression that I fear no subject.

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Richard Gordon Barnes, was born November 5, in the autumn of 1932 in San Bernardino, California.  He was reared in a Mohave Desert dust-devil that seemed to continue to revolve in his eyes, even after a barnacle of a year at Harvard, then coming back to earn his PHD from Claremont Graduate School. He then went on to serve 40 years as a professor at the revered Pomona College in Claremont California, specializing there in bringing Medieval and Renaissance literature to life. He accomplished all of this while raising a family, while at night constructing poems with a tinker’s fervor, and on top of all that playing the washboard with thimbles in a cosmic New Orleans jazz ensemble.  To read his poetry for yourself was to understand that he had all the angels of literature cantankerously looking over his shoulder.  So strong a presence that even if you didn’t believe in such balderdash, they were still there.  When following my own artistic process where and when I follow an opportunity to archive a work of just importance, I do so exactly as I scribe a song, or as I concoct a dinner driven by the memory haze of forthcoming aromas.  I have inherent in me a deep seeded need to correct what appear to me as faulty patterns, albeit in words or in a poet’s career, those that arrive before me as self-educated apparitions.  Non-ego selfishness if you will. 

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Tim Weed, his hair a paintbrush of sterling silver, his eyes as if turquoise could fade, and his life a car full of rain sticks, Vietnamese mouth organs, and weathered pre-war Martins beaten to a shroud of toran shade.  His life is an endless possibility, and the mobius strip of raw and unadulterated idea is all and present here. 

I’m no longer intimidated by the fact that nothing is what it seems. That stands as the first polyphonic revelation of a life in song.  There is always some pin pointable form of music that becomes your anchor of what.  For Tim Weed, that enormous weight, invisible in deep water, was bluegrass musing, or the miniature sawmill of hill music.  To some it is a narrow and limiting field, but that, as an entity for our salvation does not concern us, for those are only the narrow at heart, sadly blind to the hands of genius.  Bluegrass is a mobile swinging, hanging around the corner from itself.  The fiddle ushers Celtic influence in on horseback, the banjo brings African plunk and savanna tone, then the guitar from Spain rings like a tambourine, while the dobro ushers in the relief of grass-skirted tropic islands.  Bill Monroe’s mandolin playing itself is no more than the pounding down-stroke of a pine top juke house piano.  On top of this you add vocals that tap a gospel field-holler like forest turpentine, and an angelic choir forced through a nasal dimension, or the third eye, until it simulates a high lonesome wind through a trademark coulter pine. 

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The Inland Empire is the only part of the country I’ve ever seen that is virtually built on a swell of heat and wonder.  I was raised on an egg ranch in Fontana California, my father was a carnation milkman, and my grandfather made his own brandy in the basement of our Spanish revivalist Date Street dwelling.  He was actually one of the fabled copper miners in Woody Guthrie’s acclaimed ballad, The1913 Massacre.  I remember crawling and climbing through the black walnut orchard in a 1960’s sunshine that struggled with the steelmill emissions like Cain and Abel chosing a reality. My friends and I grew up on the music of Grand Funk Railroad, Blue Cheer, and Buck Owens like a good swatch of our individually stamped pubescent America, but I still brought my steel guitar to high school and kept it in my book locker, taking the pick-ups apart at recess.  We all had the slight varnished inkling of a 4H vibration; smoking pot turned the clouds to sheep.

(Photo credit: Mike Brayer)

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