Tag Archives: Brayer Writing

Ray Collins: A World Without Ray Amen

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

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(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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Frizz Fuller: Sitting On the Dock of the Way

06 Sunday Mar 2016

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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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Ben Harper: Waylon Jennings Tribute

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

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The Waymore’s Blues Session (RCA): a solitary account

by Patrick Brayer 2003

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As I’m writing, as well I’m thinking, that what is most likely an everyday eventuality for Ben Harper, like this session for the 2003 Waylon Jennings tribute CD (I’ve Always Been Crazy <RCA>), is for me rather akin to getting the part as Toto in The Wizard of Oz.

I packed in my low strung chestnut violin, and my mandolin, closed the enormous trunk of my caprice classic, and pulled out of the shade of the elm trees and into the awaiting heat. Summer in the Inland Empire is a patient thing, it knows you can’t hide its belt of peripherality, and the analogy of Ben Harper as an artist is much like this same sun, and, or, the phoenix of his very own youth.  To look directly at it is not the wisest decision.  You become far more learned by observing what it shines upon, than to be blinded by actually staring at it for source.

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Chris Darrow / Under My Own Disguise

18 Thursday Feb 2016

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(photo: Patrick Brayer)

Chris Darrow / Under My Own Disguise / limited edition box set

Everloving Records 2009

In the form of a lavish LP-sized box set from Everloving Records, Chris Darrow / Under My Own Disguise (re-release produced by J.P. Plunier), we have the American re-emergence of two prime and pristine examples of straightforward Vietnam era country rock and folk from the forsaken vaults of United Artists. Part one contains the self-titled Chris Darrow (The Grey Album) from 1973. Part two contains Under My Own Disguise from 1974 (with one additional bonus track). The graffiti inspired box comes with a set of two CDs, two 180 gram vinyl LPs, a forty eight page booklet including within it an array of archival photos by Steve Cahill, and a full sized replica of the Darrow mask used on the cover of the Disguise album. The set lists for $80.00.

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My Dinero With Fowley

16 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Profiles, Southern California

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the persona of kim fowley is, to use his own vernacular, like lon chaney duct taped to david bowie, in the man who fell to earth / all that image compacted, he verbally hands you a live grenade while he swallows the pin and grins in meticulous disarray / he is too much americana for any one journalist, theatrical degenerate aside, melanoma scars tattoo his forearm, licorice like clark kent glasses, he whittles his roast chicken with a sculptor’s hint of royalty, and that is to be our first glimpse at the dropping of the guard into the belfry of a real life / to be all things at once is what honesty is, but to be all things at all is something the average joe cannot handle, not outside of the personal plushness of his own strip mall vaudeville needs anyhow

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You Gotta Start a Trinity Somewhere

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Music, My Journal

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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.

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Move to Fontana, 1958

28 Thursday Jan 2016

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Our family moved to Fontana, California in 1958. We came behind to join my grandfather John Brayer Sr. (1876-1969) already hunkered there. He moved into the valley region freeing himself from the past snow and cheese life of Marshfield Wisconsin. And this was where my father Ralph William Brayer (1921-1999) was subsistence-farm raised before his own WWII exodus into the Italian theater and purple-heartdom. In the 1950’s Fontana had a substantial population of Slovenians at the time, egg ranches, citrus orchard, and the Kaiser Steelmill was in full swing glory, later making our skies literally cough up iron. Slovenean polka music always swung hard at either the Slovene Hall, the KSKJ Hall, or at Mlakar’s Elbow Room on the main drag. It was also the nativity birthplace of the mythical real Hell’ s Angels motorcycle group, filling the taverns that embellished the mother road with smoke and threat, then later coming into prominence in print form by Hunter S. Thompson. My grandfather, upon migration from Yugoslavia, found himself in Calumet Michigan working as a copper miner, and there it was that himself, his wife, and two of their daughters were present in the tragic event which would lead to the Woody Guthrie ballad, The 1913 Massacre. It was amazingly a song which was already in my brother and I’s suburban hobo repertoire. When we finally learned or our grandparents involvement we were already barking it out on stage regularly at a coffee house plopped down in the barrio of Mt. Vernon St., San Bernardino, called The Penny University.

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