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~ Fieldnotes from Wrongtario

Patrick John Brayer

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Old Time Fiddler Dave Madron

10 Thursday Nov 2016

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Madron-ghost twn '72_edited-2.jpg

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 →

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Heritage : 1998 Introductory Liner Notes for Darol Anger

14 Friday Oct 2016

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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

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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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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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Long Live Okie Adams (When He Died)

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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okie adams headstock.jpg

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

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Pat Cloud: The Five String Trane

By Patrick Brayer

PBPh Cloud brilliant pain.jpg

(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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Ozark Eulogy On the Valley Floor

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Historical Fontana

 

Ozark Eulogy On the Valley Floor

Bobby George Rowell: 1932-2016

Life is not one if not ten thousand acts of florid find. That, then a ramrod exit, past a star’s worth of candled footlights, stage left. Which, mind you, is stage right to the audience, if there is any. That’s the rub, being that everything is a bell wrung opposite to the audience view. But once you know this, a path is crystal cleared. To pursue any craft is to first understand this. One must then write that into the quotient of their tale, bearing on the first account. But it seems somehow that we find to feel that just because the stores replenish fresh costumes for us, that we might, or shall live forever.

rowell horse.jpg

I had only a few mentors growing into a writer’s space, but the few I did have I did have. One was a razorback whom I’ll tell you about. He hailed from Hattieville, an unincorporated collection of dust, ensconced in tandem beside such other luck-thirsty Arkansas towns as, Old Hickory, Lick Mountain, Buttermilk, and Jerusalem. Arkansas was not so subtle as California, it was a tad hard edged, more like a golf course for dinosaurs. And this was the birthplace of one Bobby George Rowell in 1932, a man blessed with a perpetually embarrassed skin tone, and lips that didn’t bother to volunteer much movement when he spoke. Relocating to Fontana, California he ventriliqued his way through twelve sun belted years of the attempted teaching of English literature, through a blue collar stunted audience’s gaze, to a bevy of mill spawned and pubescent youths. Only one being me.

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Ray Collins: A World Without Ray Amen

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

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Brayer Writing, Influential, Inland Empire Hall of Fame, Local Music, Songwriting

PBPh Collins-02.jpg

(photo: Patrick Brayer)

Included below is a song I wrote in honor of my friend Ray Collins. As a musician with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention he was legendary. As a humble street personage around the college town of Claremont, California, a Mount Rushmore of Karl Marx, Moses, General Custer, and Santa Claus, he daily gave Birkenstock life lessons to us all, and to me will always stand as a benchmark in zen heroic non-materialism. “You are only as wealthy as you act”, he once told me.  The lyric sort of sketches my feelings and the frozen event in which I found him comatose in his Chevy Astro, in one of those herringbone parking spaces, directly in front of the Claremont City Library. It was amazing how he just seemed to be sitting serenely in perfect balance in the driver’s seat. Some uneaten fruit awaited on the dashboard as, like him, a humble posthumous feast. When I came afterwards to check on him at Pomona Hospital I brought him a statue of General Lee, in hopes to to make him laugh as soon as he regained consciousness. Although that wasn’t meant to be, I said a farewell to him and headed out to Alabama for Christmas. I sat to write the song on Christmas day there just after hearing the news of his death from my friend, and noted columnist, and Collins champion, David Allen, of The Daily Bulletin. When I arrived home we were Rayless. I’ve also include below a link to him singing “Anything” from the Ruben and the Jets LP, which I think establishes him without a doubt as one of the greatest white soul voices of his time.

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Song Backstory: World Trade Sinner

01 Friday Apr 2016

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Song Back Story, Songwriting

Song Backstory: World Trade Sinner / Patrick Brayer

I thought it might be interesting to offer up some song backstory as part of this ongoing online journal effort. I was at breakfast this morning with my daughter Eleanore. Was that the sound of bacon cooking, or the smell of ship to shore radio static?  I started whistling a song, almost more in an attempt to see if I could even still whistle, than it was entertainment. I don’t know where it came from, as I tried to place its source. First I thought it was an old famous melody, and then it all came back to me, I wrote it. And then the background circumstance behind the behind began to trickle in. I can’t remember the original name of the song, as that shortsightedness is part of the circumstance itself. The song it became I re-titled, World Trade Sinner.

PB Mind Museum sign-1.jpg

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Frizz Fuller: Sitting On the Dock of the Way

06 Sunday Mar 2016

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Brayer Writing, Influences, Inland Empire, Inland Empire Hall of Fame, Local Music, Songwriting

Frizz Fuller: Sitting on the Dock of the Way

By Patrick Brayer 1996

Making the pilgrimage from the mattress to the writing typer, I look back briefly to distinguish a fossil in the sheets in the shape of a coiled man. I greet you with wet hair and only the best intentions, like as if I were jazz bassist Sam Jones distracting a listener, with rodeo clown flourishes, from an unbeknownst outside world. I’ve been to Vegas, stayed at a motel where only colorless fighter pilots stay. Its’ not as if they’re boring, or that they keep CD’s exposed in the blistering heat on the dashboard of their industrial looking muscle cars for no good reason. Perhaps it’s just that the U.F.O. creatures have removed the portion to their brain that buys into a great deal of the adult contemporary acoustic shinola. We can only hope.

Frizz Paint orig copy.jpg(photo: Patrick Brayer)

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Michael Hedges: Starseed Eulogy

01 Tuesday Mar 2016

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Michael Hedges

Michael Hedges : Starseed Eulogy

written by: Patrick Brayer (12-3-97)

Today I got the life altering news that my dear friend Michael Hedges perished in a dangerous curve automobile accident in Mendocino California. The caller was Hilleary Burgess, Michael’s longtime friend and manager.

Michael Hedges_1BW_by-Irene-Young

(photo: Irene Young)

It was a day that had started with promise. I awoke, spun a bagel on my finger like Wyatt Earp and French kissed a soy-ed out cup of coffee. My Alabama girl friend had rushed off into the world in a floor length skirt to do temporary work at a fire department that had lime green fire trucks. Her destination was Riverside California, two blocks from the spot, now etched in my memory, where on the pale sidewalk outside of the municipal auditorium I was unknowingly to say my last face to face farewell to my friend Michael Hedges, there on the evening of October 26, 1997.  Michael was performing that night in a guitar summit with three other prominent players, Herb Ellis, Rory Block, and Sharon Ibsin.  As a little backstory I’ll add that earlier that morning, after coffee and cactus enchiladas, I set out to go to yard-sales in and about my Fontana weed patch. In doing so I came upon a little battery operated handheld T.V., displayed alongside of some lipstick smeared martini glasses and a taxidermized chihuahua, grouped black-comically on a rough corn colored horse blanket.  I didn’t really want it, but in the spirit of yard-sailing, I offered a pittance that I assumed they would refuse, but to my surprise they took it.  That’s what I always liked about yard-sales, they seemed like free admission to a one-act play, that while they were busy being joyous and humble, at the same time there was always the slight scent of downfall.  I could just picture the sun striking down on a car up on blocks, that isn’t there, but should be. After soundcheck that evening Hedges took me backstage to meet famed jazz guitarist Herb Ellis (Benny Goodman, Joe Pass, etc), where we were both reduced to kids in awe.  As we talked I noticed that Ellis seemed really sad, and questioned him if he was o.k.  He said that he was just a little upset to have to miss game seven of the World Series, between the Cleveland Indians, and the Florida Marlins.  I told him I was thinking along those same lines, that his lucky day was my lucky day, and handed him over my new salvaged T.V.  He seemed surprised at first but eventually lit into a smile, after he realized it wasn’t going to explode. He tuned into the game as we sauntered away.  Later, after the concert, Herb played me a few lines of Danny Boy on his sunburst Gibson, and told me, like he wanted me to know, that he played that song for his wife each night before they went to bed.  As I thanked him, I pictured him at home with a Chanelle bedspread, and grossly flattered myself to think that we were in any way even.

Michael was on his way into Los Angeles where later that night he’d study Yin Yoga in a garage with his teacher Pauli Zink (who also taught movement techniques to David Lee Roth and others). “Don’t bend anything I wouldn’t bend” were my parting words, and the words now that I peel from my memory like the adhesive side of a bumper sticker

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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

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Recent Posts

  • Mike Davis (1946-2022) Fontana’s Own
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  • 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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