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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“I believe there is scarcely a corner of myself that is safe from me”

(something Henrik Ibsen almost said)

If you know me, you probably then know just about how not interested in the feat of contest I can be.  “Contests, a little nosegay of common flowers!” (to further misquote Ibsen).

So on a note of hill-torn paradox, I’ve  entered of late the NPR Tiny Desk Concert’s battle to honor the terminally unsigned.  You will see, as evidenced by the video included below, that i’m not trying all that hard to emerge the victor.  I’m doing what I alway defer to, and that is in the act of statement.  One of the rules of the contest was that the filming contain a desk, thus I raided my daughter’s doll house one last time.  ‘Doll House’ will be the last Ibsen reference, i promise.

Let it be know that I’m not making fun of the music series on NPR, quite to the contrary, i think it stands as one of the best bare bones music shows going.  It gives you some great examples of how an artist can be set astray by the vaudvillian layers called production.  I’ve seen some acts on there that I then ran out to investigate in exuberance, only to find out that they were really thier most powerful and honest sardined around just one weisel-shaped microphone.

My wife thought that I could have done a much better performance of my song. I said yeah maybe, but then i might win.  As you know, musicians are  nothing if not notorious for being non-present parents, evidenced so much so that the contest lures one on with carrot-dangling promise of airfare, whisking one in to do one career bursting concert on their inter-nut show, dragging you around on tour, and then never once in the ant-like fine print do they ever talk about maybe paying up front for the babysitter while you are out doing all of this.  Proving perhaps, once and for all, that being a musician is perhaps not the best job for a person with a life.

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Here is a picture i had taken of old time fiddler Dave Madron (1894-1978) at Calico Ghost Town in 1972, with my flesh and blood older brother Mike beside me.  Originally hailing from Indian City, Oklahoma, in Payne County, Madron was to become a hero to me in the guise of musical inspiration and leanings towards and about the devil’s box.  I remember visiting his home, a humble fruit picker’s shack, a floor lamp making tea stain shadows on the walls, while outside lurked the disappearing farmland of Norco, California.  The picture above is the day i first met him.  He eventually gave me the fiddle pictured.  It had a lion’s head scrawled into the peghead, dime-store diamonds around the bouts (like the kind Stratovarius used), and a stain made assaultingly by rubbing in plugs of tobacco. Continue reading →

I wrote these notes upon a request from my friend Darol Anger, who preformed and produced the epic recording (1998).  As per usual my stream of consciousness style didn’t get past the label heads, sailing like every other free bird, above the heads of a martini lunch.  The project included contributions by Willie Nelson, John Hartford, Vassar Clements, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Stuart Duncan, Michael Manring, and others.  So, needless to say i was edited out in good company.  I hope that you are amused by my humble efforts.  After you are done marveling at my shear disregard for sentence structure feel free to revisit this rare sonic masterpiece.

Patrick Brayer

Heritage : Introductory Notes for Darol Anger

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. We ourselves, as if playing in a similar unison, have the identical questions, as if reason were a short artery rising up independent of meaning. To the same rhythm of hooves on leaves, in the corn colored rays we have all the information of the civil war cherry orchards yet sleeping in our blood.

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Long live Okie Adams when he died

Hot rod and banjos, and California pride

Who has an answer when it’s a parable crime

It won’t be water but rather fire this time

The flame’s own boarding school light on doom

He inlayed a figure on a sawdust moon

Like my grandpa always asked, “what was that that won’t forget”

Every memory as silver as an overhead jet

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Pat Cloud: The Five String Trane

By Patrick Brayer

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

The moon glimmered like a belt buckle with a gut of baby’s breath clouds hanging over. It was below all that, to the tone of the December Santa Anas of 1986, that I found myself in a modest track home amidst the diamond street lit glower of Los Angeles, California. I was attending a party unencumbered by invitation. A party in which it wouldn’t hurt to believe that bluegrass music could, would, and should be the battering ram to birth a new year, or the repercussions of a moonshine lunch. I rode in conveniently on the tailcoats of a long time friend and local coffeehouse five-string banjo godhead, Craig Smith (Winston Salem by way of San Berdoo). As I was, as usual living straight for experience, I watched an indelibly pink Byron Berline (Bill Monroe, Rolling Stones) work the pathos out of a room, trance fiddling, with his eyes locked and closed. Claustrophobic as I may have felt, I was getting in good shape just shifting politely, chess like, across the lavender shag pile, trying not to block in any way the very flux of the pumping event. Bluegrass can be very industrial in that sense. The Appalachian circus virus leapt ghost-like from every corner, but corners not without a certain fuel of gayety. In trying to sum it all up, the rhythm was infectious, even though the interpretation was obviously more from the computer-learned side, and more than a century’s stones throw from its hayfield and pre-tractor origins.

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