The History of a Date Street House

29 Saturday Aug 2020

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Donkey Cart / Smokestack Coffee

The future is, plain and simple, just eviction from the past. Making what it thinks is a keen arrival.  Tomorrow is just a panther.  With its frustration there being that it can’t eat us today.  That established, it’s not the ‘speed of times’ fault.  It’s moving as fast as a donkey cart, made of rotting timber, can carry it.  Is the past any more than a patchwork of Nash/Ramblers, topped off at the filling station.  Burgers at the Smokehouse snooker hall. A  spark from a day-job of roil at the Artificial Limb and Brace Co.?  “One foot in the grave, and one foot in the choir loft”. That’s what a lonely somebody once said before ducking around a corner, forever.  Daydreaming in the blue-eyed grass. Which turns later to trace the iron black blades in night’s generous yet wind sewn failure of stars.  Hands behind the head, a reel of mind-footage smeared across a sky. All making way for an affection for trailer-courts, and scrapyard dogs. A father taking his son to a truck stop café.  There to dine alongside some real-live long-haul truckers. Benzedrine-made men in motion. Smokestack coffee, one eighteen-wheeler announcing the approach of another.  As if Tennessee Williams, dragging a shackle, grew up under house arrest in Daggot.

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Letters To Hardy

19 Tuesday May 2020

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PBPh Hardy White Horse neg copy

What comes to mind first when I think of Jack Hardy is “original song”, which is not, as it is often mistaken for, an ‘original sin’ that you can tap your foot to. It is often mistakenly thought that if you wrote the song that it is an “original song”. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  If you pen a song that is no different than any other, then it is not original, it is a fraud.  Jack Hardy showed us a major lesson when he gazed beyond our fraudulent works, not in dismay, but as if he saw the true thing hovering behind, puppet like, in waxen shadow.  We had just brought the wrong thing frontstage.  But like all other magic acts the masters make it look easy.  That spoken, I found Jack Hardy to be sweetly, and dangerously original, so to, to the detriment of his own deserved acclaim.  I and hundreds of others have benefited grandly from his generosity.  When I was penniless and nameless, on the merits of a bedroom labored cassette tape, he flew me, raw boned and blowzy, from my tumbleweed steel town digs in Fontana, California, and plopped me down on the time-honored stage of The Bottom Line in New York City.  It was there and then that I took my place amidst a bevy of real bona fide songscribes, and now I’m proud to say, after what seemed like a dream, the Smithsonian Institute is now grappling with the residue of those tin-horn performances.  Hardy was a perfect representation of himself.  What came so easy to him brought out the compassion to help others, and he kept that up until the day he died. Ultimately Jack Hardy owned a unique style of community that he purposely allowed to overshadow his craft as songsmith. 

He could kick your ass at songwriting, and he could then hang you out to dry if you though to yourself, maybe more creatively than your song, that you might be more compassionate.  The sound of his voice, which of course haunts us a little bit now, was most often that of heart-torn crooning, sometimes like a character actor from an RKO film noir, and yet other times even like Winnie the Pooh picking up gravel with a steam shovel.

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Aside

Waltzing Kokopelli to the Greek

24 Friday Apr 2020

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Remembering Michael Hedges by Patrick Brayer 2020

There is no present moment in time.  Case closed. The present is much quicker and stealthier than that.  The actual present is just a sword swish.  Try to be too present in that and you might well lose an arm.  Venus de Milo is a classic example.  The past, which is usually the sole barking subject of memoir, is just a string quartet of smoke, knee-deep in the ghosts of iron and ice.  Things die from day one, and then we find, using rationale, that we haven’t a sturdy enough shelf for the resulting mystery.  That in a nutshell is the human condition. I conclude that all great works are based more on mystery than on fact, despite contrary belief. Upon reflection I guess you could see this piece as a 23-year late sequel to my Starseed Eulogy (1997).

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(Martin prototype Bass / Speech and Hearing Clinic, Mendocino CA 1997 Photo: Patrick Brayer)

Our mystery here starts on August 10, 1996, the day I got a call from my pal Michael Hedges on my ruby red rotary-dial telephone.  He was inviting me to meet up with him at The Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, and asking if I might escort him later that day to the Greek Amphitheatre.  He was scheduled to open up for Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and suggested that I might pick up some jalapeno chilis at the store on the way, for us to juice with some carrots that he had brought.  I gassed up my crumpled eggshell pale Ford Courier, pushed back some of the springs ‘jack-in-the-boxing’ through the red vinyl upholstery, and climbed us, the jalopy and I, onto the west bound I-10.  It was as a vehicle, Tom Joad worthy, but it had plenty of room for a couple of siamese-twin shaped harp-guitars.  My bumper sticker read loud and clear, “Give Me Ralph Stanley or Give Me Death”.  My friend, photographer Robert Morrow (City of Quartz) once said that he would like to get one of those stickers himself, but that he was afraid, it being Fontana, that someone might take him up on the deal.  Both were wise men.

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Song Eulogy for Chris Darrow (1944-2020)

26 Thursday Mar 2020

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Photo: Steve Cahill

I wrote the song Empty Cage Behind (SH-V60) to eulogize in my own fashion my long-time friend and mentor, Christopher Lloyd Darrow who passed on January 15, 2020.  First off, I’ll talk a little about my songwriting process in the hopes that it will keep all apologies I might feel I need to spout nestled at bay, ghost grey, confined but peering out witchy between the lines.  For a video of the performance at Chris’s memorial, see the bottom of the page.

The need to avoid early compromise is built right into the process, so as a creator it’s always an ongoing struggle to not let the nagging voice of insecurity, perched on the shoulder, sucker-punch the whole affair.  Literary surgery may work later, but at the start it won’t help, due to the simple fact that you can’t go there if you don’t know what you’re doing as of yet. I started into motion, in this case, with just an overall image of Chris in my head, and then I begin to conjure the paint of language.  As soon as I get going it is crucial that I just get out of the way, side-stepping, and letting the imagery flood in somewhat cinematically on its own accord.  I won’t call it a trance, mainly for the well-deserved fear that Wavy Gravy might appear at my doorstop looking for his lost macramé commune sandals Continue reading →

Christopher Lloyd Darrow (1944-2020) Remembrance

17 Friday Jan 2020

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(photo: Robert Morrow)

It is with a bound and aching heart that I announce the passing of my dear friend Christopher Lloyd Darrow on January 15, 2020. He stood for me, as he did with many, as a treasured friend, mentor, brother-figure, father-figure, and professorial inspiration as to the inner workings of the artistic lifestyle. He had one of the most original voice stylings I’ve ever witnessed, tone somehow filtered through the jowls. “King of the jowl singers” I like to say. That originality spread over into everything he touched, be it slide guitar, fiddle, photography, or a self-realized philosophy. It was all one thing to him. Continue reading →

Carolyn Russell: Lucerne Valley Grassroots Pioneer

17 Saturday Aug 2019

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I’m saddened to report the passing of local Lucerne Valley musician and patron of the folk music arts, Carolyn Russell on July 21, 2019 at the age of 85.  She was born July 17, 1934 in Crosby, North Dakota.

Carolyn Russell was well known for her contra dances in Garden Grove California, and for her many notorious house concerts featuring such as Alasdair Fraizer, Mary McCaslin, Bryan Bowers and many more. She later played a pivotal role in quietly championing the resurgence of such legendary Cajun musicians as Wilford LeTour, Edgar LeDay, and most recently Joe Fontenot.

She had a brilliant and a sly wit, and will remain the epitome of the term “grass roots community”, and to speak of her as a “true renaissance woman” is and always will be an understatement.

Below is a collection of our correspondence over the years that I unearthed from memory lane, or my garage, whatever came first.   I hope others will add to this and join me in admitting that life seems a little dumb without Carolyn, though her memory will give us ample inspiration to persevere.

Patrick and Holle Brayer / Ontario CA

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The Brayers Become Claremont 2004

18 Saturday May 2019

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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.

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(Photo credit: Mike Brayer)

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Bouquet of Pitchforks: Lyrics

08 Saturday Sep 2018

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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

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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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