The LYL Band

Four Performances-Part Four: We play an Alternative Prom

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The experience of the fourth performance in this July series was unlike the previous three. Those reading along may recall that each of the first three I’ve written about this month left me with its own distinct feeling of disconnect, of ways that I had not been able to reach an audience. I could’ve taken the performer’s side in this failure to connect — there is a long and necessary tradition of confounding audience expectations after all — but emotionally I couldn’t live with that unreservedly. Given that the core of the LYL Band was a band of poets not reliable professional musicians, and those poets were reflexive non-conformists singing songs that held up to examination or ridicule civic and cultural matters, I should have expected that outcome.*   Intellectually, I understood this, but emotionally, it bothered me, particularly after the U of M concert I wrote of last time.

Society picks a few non-conformists, perhaps ones bound with redeeming qualities or compelling evolutionary necessities, and is fine dispensing with the rest.**  If it didn’t do this mostly, well, the non-conformists wouldn’t be non-conformists would they? The LYL Band in this metaphor is the platypus.

But as I said, today’s performance is different. Somewhere in the mid-1980s a couple of nurses at the hospital I worked at had an idea: they wanted to put on a Prom to remediate memories of less-than-accepting Proms from their high-school years. What a great idea! They set a date and went about decorating a house’s basement with festooned crepe paper and colored light bulbs, plastic flowers, and some cardboard gilding, just as small school gyms had been transformed in teenage midcentury America. One of the nurses knew I had a band, would we be the rockin’ dance combo for this event?***  Sure, we’d do it — if we could find a drummer.

If nothing else, the perceived (by me) failure of the U of M concert from last time cemented in my mind that playing electric instruments without a backbeat couldn’t sustain the illusion that we were a Rock band. Someone knew a drummer. He agreed. We rehearsed with him a single time, and Dave and I selected from our repertoire songs that might be fit for dancers.

When the night of the Alternative Prom arrived, we set up in the house’s basement. We had no PA as such for vocals at this time, so I used a small Radio Shack mixer connected to my home stereo for the vocals, with no provision for monitors. I even set up one mic for any members of the audience that wanted to sing backing vocals.

The Prom attendees arrived. Some had scrounged old formal wear from second-hand stores, and even accessorized with corsages, while others were in come-as-you-are casual dress. Some came with their we’ve-achieved-adulthood-now partners, others just themselves. Given the nurse-origin of the event, women were in the majority. How many in the audience? Again, memory can’t count, but the basement was soon quite full, just enough room to dance, maybe 30-35 people? I really can’t be sure. I think there was some food and drink, but I don’t recall the particulars as my mind was keyed up for the performance.

Our little trio began to play about 10 p.m., myself with my electric guitar, Dave with his Farfisa combo organ with grey bass-register left-hand keys, and our for-the-night-drummer at his kit.

Dancing broke out, and continued through our roughly 60 minute set which concluded with a cover of Wilson Pickett’s garage-rock classic “In the Midnight Hour.”   I don’t know what experiences any of my readers who play instruments have had, but let me say that if you ever get a chance to play for a dancing audience, I highly recommend it. I believe that music (and to a degree, its sibling art poetry too) are meant to move bodies. While I have never been a very good “rhythm guitarist,” here in a trio I had to fill that space however shambolically I could. It helped that the drummer was good, and fully-invested in “more cowbell,” and Dave’s left hand on the organ grey keys filled in well for no bass player.

I’d considered what should be our encore if the performance worked, and my idea was to lean on my still patent Patti-Smith-inspired vocal improvisation skills. The planned framework would be the ultimate chestnut of its era “Louie Louie,”  a three-chord song that I would connect with whatever songs came into my head by converting them to fit “Louie Louie’s”  three-chord-trick cadence.

Dave started the encore, his voice hoarse from singing without the benefit of vocal monitors that night. “Louie Louie” soon slid into Dave’s song “Sugar Rush.”   As the guitar breaks and audience sing-alongs carried us forward toward midnight, I merged in other songs: “Like a Rolling Stone.” “La Bomba.” “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Fortunate Son,”  and finally, tiny snippets of the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”  and “Sweet Jane.”

The performance was over. Art is hard to measure, harder yet when it’s rough-edged, imperfect, and improbable; but it may have been the single best LYL Band performance, despite (or because) of its unconcern for sophistication. The recording is crude too, and the vocals suffer from the lack of monitors and strained voices. The funk of the sweaty basement, the joy of the dancers remediating their teen-age years, the surrounds of dance steps and emotions: none-of-than can make it directly onto audio tape. But Rock’n’Roll isn’t a juried competition. On any one night, with any one audience, it’s a shared mood of ecstatic feelings, and no level of skill and fidelity sans those feelings can’t maintain it.

I can’t find any pictures from the Alternative Prom, but for visuals I put in a bunch of LYL ‘80s posters and pictures from other gigs, including the U of M concert I wrote about last time. One level of our non-conformity:  we tried and succeeded in not dressing for the part of a punk band.

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*If only in a footnote, I feel a need to note the death of Tom Lehrer this week. He really made an impression on me, and Lehrer’s presentation was, like the early LYL band, centered on the idea of gleefully rubbishing many cultural standards and pieties. I even tried to work in a punked-up version of his “We’ll All Go Together When We Go,”  as our answer to “99 Luftballons.”.

If the Fugs, that other band of poets, were arguably the first punk rock group, I suspect any acerbic singer-songwriter from my generation had listened to Lehrer’s LPs. Here’s one odd thing I noted in the reaction to his death, and the inevitable short pieces on his career: I have yet to see a conservative weigh in with their view. No tut-tutting from the religious cultural nationalists on Lehrer’s satire tearing down the church and militaristic state. No remarks on his musical asides to sexual laissez faire oppressing or not-oppressing in the proper ways. No public-health consequences drawn from his 1953 ode to “The Old Dope Peddler”  recorded when Lou Reed hadn’t turned 12 years old. Somewhere there may have been some “he’d be cancelled today” edge-lord free-to-be-fascist Lehrer elegy, but the respectable conservatives are leaving the field to the crickets. My theory: there’s an audience result that isn’t “enemy list” notoriety, but is more at “never heard of him” where Lehrer resided for 75 years or so.

**Frank Zappa, who understood a scientist’s cool examination of such things, had this quote: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”

***Let me do a capsule American Rock history lesson here. During the 1960s and into the early ‘70s the nation was full of small musical combos made up of young semi-professional musicians. They had different models: some wanted to be the Ventures, or Booker T and the MGs, others The Beatles, or Animals, The Young Rascals, The Rolling Stones, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, or the Yardbirds. By later in this era many of these combos took on psychedelic trappings and had converted to ballroom and movie-house stage ambitions, but for a few years before, these “garage rock” band’s gigs would be bars, under-21 not-bars or teen-clubs, and youthful social functions such as high-school dances and proms.

Four Performances-Part Three: Punk Folk. Folk. Folk!

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

It took me an extra beat or two to continue this series, because I soon see myself as inappropriately going on too long about myself — this recounting influences and small events, even if personally meaningful, starts to seem out of proportion. I don’t know if there’s another way to write memoir than to engage in that “objects closer to the mirror” distortion, but I can’t help but think it’d be more appropriate if there was some greater payoff in achievement. The simple fact of the matter is that these are not stories of a performer’s early days before finding a notable level of success with audiences — more its opposite.

I’m grateful for the hundreds that might read one of these posts, for the thousands of times someone has listened to one or another of the audio pieces over the years. I try and honor your attention by being respectful of your time. I’m not so much afraid of embarrassing myself as I’m afraid of wasting your time.

A number of bands that came out of Minnesota in the Eighties did gather national attention — the scene punched above its weight — but as in most artistic or commercial activities, even a successful scene had many more failures-to-thrive than notable acts.*  This band of poets, Dave and I, wasn’t going to be one of the notables. Today’s performance was an inflection point for that.

We’d recorded our official album, which was released on cassette tape for lack of capital funds to get LPs pressed.** The local alt-weekly, The Twin Cities Reader,  reviewed it, and its cover linked us, the LYL Band, with a new record from The Time.

LYL Reviewed in Twin Cities Reader

The Time article promised on the front page teaser was a longer feature in the same issue. Great, but too forgotten too often local rock band Fine Art and their guitarist Colin Mansfield gets mentioned here too.

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As reviews go, Paul Fishman Maccabee’s “So engagingly out-of-tune and cheerily offensive: it could well become a cult item” wasn’t exactly Robert Sheldon’s “Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months,” but it allowed us a modicum of creditability. We were trying to evolve from a pair of acoustic folkies to an electric rock band (the recording was largely played on electric instruments), but we were doing that in a meandering way. A neighborhood guy, Jonathan Tesdell played electric guitar — and, we were assured, conga drums. I hoped he might become our analog to the Fugs Ken Weaver as he joined up with us.

At the time of that Reader  review we got an offer to play at the University of Minnesota. We took them up on it. We were practicing regularly now, trying to solidify our repertoire. This could be, if not our break, our foot in the door.

A small blip in our ascension dropped before the show date: the University called and asked what kind of music we should be billed as. I think Dave gave them a capsule description of our weirdness — and Dave’s an articulate guy — whatever he said it included the genre label “Punk Folk.”

That week as I walked across the never-named-that John Berryman bridge to the U, I noticed the posters along that span and on into the campus. They said “local PUNK FUNK.” Typo? Mishearing? I don’t know, but if Punk Folk wasn’t yet a common genre category in the early Eighties, Punk Funk was a term Rick James was using at this time for his work, and in the less-commercial indie scene the term was used to describe acts like James Chance’s NYC No-Wave skinny-tie-white-guy James Brown extrapolation. We were a trio expanding from acoustic instruments to electric ones without a bass player or a drummer.

Okay.

LYL Band concert poster Univerity of Minnesota Willey Hall

Photo in the poster by Renee Robbins. L to R: Dave Moore holding my tiny CasioTone that was my first synthesizer (it was also a calculator). Jonathan Tesdell, the new guy in the group and 25th Century Quaker, and Frank Hudson trying to look like he had Jazz chops, which he didn’t. Yes, our backup singers “The Cookies” did serve cookies and cider to the audience. The Replacements confounded audiences at key times in their career, but they never tried that.

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The day of the concert came. We loaded Dave’s newly purchased used Farfisa combo organ and my homemade speaker cabinet for it, Jonathan’s Firebird electric guitar and Roland amp, my sound-hole pickup 12-string acoustic and heavily modified Japanese Sixties’ electric guitar along with my Fender Princeton amp into our rattle-trap old cars. On arriving, we found the concert location was a broad stage, the width of the room in front, with audience seats for a few hundred.*** The venue had supplied a full-sized Yamaha grand piano for Dave to play. I recall it had a paper band across the keyboard, which I joked was like the “sanitized for your protection” bands on a hotel toilet.

The audience arrived, accumulating to not a full-house. My memory isn’t clear on this, perhaps just a third or a quarter of the seats. Even so, that could mean at a minimum there were 80 people there, and unlike the shows at Modern Times, most weren’t folks we knew from the neighborhood. I don’t know what Dave or Jonathan felt, but I was hoping to put on a good show, to put forward our intent: some satire and civic points, some music with the not-necessarily-perfect, but perfectly-necessary energy of the still underground indie music movement that was also called around then “College Rock.” How well would we go over with this barely-Rock, with this audience, at this college?

I was on the stage performing when my nerve started to fail. That came during the song that the audience showed the most response too: four-songs-in we played a number that I think we informally called “Booker T”  or “Memphis Thing”,  an instrumental based on a nice riff I’d come up with as something of a concession to new-member Jonathan, the non-poet who wasn’t much of a lyrics guy. I could sense the audience perking up with that piece’s groove, hopes out there in the seats that things were going to lock in for more of a Rock show. Did some of the audience come for the poster’s Punk Funk? Did they at least expect something more like the other young Twin Cities rock bands that would play the Longhorn, 7th Street Entry or Duffy’s? Whatever, I knew “No, it’s not going to lock in. We’re going to do more folk songs about social issues and weird observations from two poets.” Not being able to change that, however true the set list was to our concept, dismayed me — yet I needed to carry on, while confidence was draining away.

I recall those feelings hanging on after the concert. Rather than having stubborn pride in presenting our band and its shambling, eclectic, cabaret setlist, I felt I’d let the band down. If Dave, the better performer felt any of this, he didn’t show it, and Jonathan , as ever, was by nature a quiet, pacific guy. I remember sitting in the car after loading back out immersed in a sort of punk folk funk, and on the radio — of all things — came Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile/Slight Return.” I, the guitar-playing poet. heard him in my mood not as the obligatory guitar-great Hendrix, but as the lyricist Hendrix, the kid who’d scrawled spaceship doodles and poetry in his school-lined notebooks.

I stand up next to a mountain
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
I pick up all the pieces and make an island
Might even raise a little sand

That’s what artists do. We are at essence pretentious, that thing we fear, that prideful sin we are sometimes called on. And the charge, that indictment, is sometimes true: we fail, or sometimes certain audiences fail, sometimes we lack conviction, sometimes we are convicted, a just verdict. Still, we think we can raise mountains, raise up islands from our imagination. Sometimes that imagination lets others climb on those mountains, take shelter on those islands — other times we fall through our dreams. When nothing is beneath our feet, are we falling or flying? Hendrix continued, singing:

I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time
I’ll give it right back one of these days

When I took up your time today with the continuing shaggy dog story of my band of poets, I asked if it was worthwhile telling this story about a band that didn’t make much of an impact. Here’s a plausible reason: despite that outcome, I’d do it again — maybe harder next time— and the music-making with fellow poet Dave Moore continued, continues. I know some of my readers are younger and are making music or other art within a career that doesn’t yet know it’s apogee. Have courage: you’re falling or flying.

Here are two pieces from a lo-fi tape of that U of M concert in 1981: Dave’s adaptation of a poem by Kevin FitzPatrick “Bugs in the System”  and my own Surrealist summer meditation “China Mouth.”   You can hear them with the graphical audio players below, but if you don’t see those players, the highlighted titles are links that when clicked on will open a new tab with an audio player.

Here’s Dave Moore singing a tale from the front-lines  of minimum-wage, “Bugs In the System (keys to the drop safe):”   This was the second song in the 1981 concert.

And here I am singing the third song in the concert’s set list, “China Mouth”,  a song of Summer discontent. The “Memphis Thing”   groove-oriented instrumental I write about above was the next song we played.

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*An off-the-top-of-my-head Eighties Twin Cities list: Prince, The Time, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, Alexander O’Neal, The Jayhawks, Flyte Tyme (Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis, largely as important producers). And like most scenes, the above acts are a quick list of those someone elsewhere might have heard of, when there’s a list at least as long of good acts that remained at local hero status. Given the LYL Band’s penchant for satire, I could also have mentioned that the Eighties saw the Twin Cities grow a substantial comedy scene, one participant in that became our bass player for a while.

**I believe it was the first cassette-only release in the Twin Cities scene. I duplicated the cassettes myself, and Dave made the packaging for them. I got the idea from ROIR in New York City who in 1981 put out its first cassette-only release (James Chance and the Contortions). Their release and ours followed the introduction of the Sony Walkman, a small battery-powered portable cassette with headphones that was a cultural artifact of the era. I wrote a press release for our recording that exclaimed “Teach your Sony Walkman to crawl!”

***Looking online today I see there are two possible Wiley Hall rooms, one that seats just under 700 and another 362.

The Terror of the Blank Page

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I think today’s audio piece is something many writers will relate to, but since it’s one I wrote I’ll be brief later down the page in writing about my encounter with it. The top part of this post will be a process post about music and working “live in the studio” with Dave Moore again after a long break. Feel free to skip to the bottom if this process stuff isn’t your thing.

For many years I’ve taken time every September 18th to remember guitarist and composer Jimi Hendrix. This September 18th I planned to get together with Dave Moore to do what we’ve done off-and-on for more than 40 years: attempt to make music together as The LYL Band.*   For almost all that time we’ve done this in a peculiar way.

I have a space with various guitars, basses, drum pattern software, and a couple of keyboards. Dave comes there after I’ve setup the recording equipment. I start playing something harmonically simple (often a one-chord groove) and Dave walks up to a keyboard. I start with some words (usually something from another writer) as we play off the top of our heads while the recording software rolls.

After that, Dave hands me a sheet of paper with something he wrote or wants to play. Sometimes there are chords handwritten on the sheet, sometimes not. I ask for a key center. He starts off and I try to follow and figure out a part on the spot. We finish playing to that set of words. I hand Dave a chord sheet with chords written out, something I’ve composed or want to play. I start out and Dave tries to come up with a part on keyboards.

We almost never do second takes. We rarely present the songs to each other by playing the sections through to demonstrate before recording. This alternation of I, then Dave, leading a piece continues for a couple of hours with a short break in the middle to rest our hands and voices.

A great many musicians cannot do this, wouldn’t do this, are perhaps afraid to do this. It is not an exact way to accomplish the art of music. Many skilled folk, Blues, and Jazz musicians can do this if they choose to.**  Dave and I are not at that skill level. What comes out can be inarticulate, chaotic, of no use whatsoever. We give it permission to utterly fail.

Are we just lazy or eccentric. Well, maybe the latter, but the aim is to catch moments when something happens spontaneously that has a quality of that type of creation. You know the expression “Building an airplane while it is flying?” That’s the feeling when something coheres as we feel our way into the piece. I believe the best of the pieces that come out of this process may transfer some of that feeling to a listener later on.

When I work on the Parlando Project pieces I work as a composer, usually playing or directing most of the parts myself. It’s a thoughtful process, painstaking to a degree though I try to create more pieces rather than a few most perfect and maximally impressive pieces. There’s lots of do-overs, retakes, instruments attempted and rejected. What Dave and I do when we play together uses a very different part of the brain. I love the change, each type of music-making refreshes the other.

Epimetheus Unbound Cover picture

Part of collating the useable material from a session is creating a cover image. I had no idea who Epimetheus was until I encountered this Greek titan in a Longfellow poem that you may hear more about later this fall.

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Today’s new audio piece

Back to today’s new audio piece. It’s the first thing Dave stepped up to the keyboards to play with me this past Monday. “The Terror of the Blank Page”  is a poem I wrote more than a decade ago during what the US liked to call “The War on Terror.” I think the germ of the idea may have come from finding out that Saddam Hussein had fashioned himself as a novelist and had several books published attributed to him as an author. The finished piece isn’t really about that, it’s about how we punish ourselves if we are writers for fearing and avoiding starting new work. What if it’s not the best idea? What if it’s bad, embarrassing, revealing of our faults as artists? In the end, I think my poem and this performance makes fun of that fear as it names some imagined incarnations.

The process I talked about above, the one that Dave and I use to make music quickly is a way to get out the door before the fear arrives to arrest us. To hear our live in the studio performance of “The Terror of the Blank Page”  you can use the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link is there for those whose way of viewing this doesn’t show the gadget — it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Various other musicians have played with Dave and I from time to time in The LYL Band. Given our peripatetic musical path, it takes a special kind of musician to enjoy playing with us. One could easily say that a model for The LYL Band is The Fugs, an intently impolite band created around a core of two poets and assorted others. Don’t go listening to The Fugs recordings around your parents, your children, your school board censors, or anyone who can’t help but mention when your singing or guitar is out of tune.

**Two accomplished musicians who have used something like this approach are Miles Davis and Bob Dylan. Dylan’s classic mid-60’s ensemble recording sessions would start off pieces live in the studio which (just maybe) a music director of a sort had prepared the musicians somewhat for. He’d try a few takes, and if it didn’t work, he just went on to something else or some other combination of musicians. A record like Highway 61 Revisited  is corralling the best attempts to make chaos cohere. Miles Davis hired exceptional musicians with extraordinary ears and knowledge of the Jazz repertoire. Even though Davis was comfortable with charts and pieces with set forms and sections, he had periods when he worked with a roomful of musicians given little direction. He made a series of records from In a Silent Way  on that were mostly assembled after these live sessions by editing and collaging the best parts of this spontaneous playing.

That approach by Davis is similar to what I do with some pieces that Dave and I originate together in spontaneous live playing. I’ll add parts and remove or edit parts to create a resulting hybrid recording that contains live and composed playing.

Coyotes

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today let’s examine the place of hands and humor in poetry and music. Let’s start with hands, before we turn to the subject of humor and a poem about farming.*

You just heard alternate Parlando Project voice Dave Moore last time here, but besides letting you get a break from my vocals, Dave has played keyboards with me since the late 1970s as the core of The LYL Band. That’s a long piece of work, particularly in that I’ve needed him more than he’s needed me with this. Here are the basics of that: I’m a poor rhythm guitarist. I like to add color and decoration whether the song is fast and loud or quiet and moody. Groove, beat, a solid march of chords to carry you along? Not in my wheelhouse. The LYL Band has had other guitarists over the years to handle some of that, but most of the time it’s been down to Dave for the chords and groove. Back in the earliest days of recording us, when four tracks were a fresh luxury, I’d put Dave’s keys on the same track as a drum machine, sure that he’d be solid as the machine.

Now we’ve both got some mileage on our hands, and Dave has encountered some issues with both of his arms and hands. He tells me that the fingers just won’t do what he asks them to do some of the time. He’s become more like me now as a musician: able to do some things, some days, within limits. My own hands have had problems too, which currently are no worse, and many days a little better. Oddly, writing and composing can let my hands weaken. To wrangle a guitar as I often like to takes not just flexibility but also finger strength which is best approached by regular use with a gentle uptake, not a two-hour live session where I need them to work right off after weeks of musing on poetry and tapping out a sonnet. I’ve been trying to carve out more time to “just play” in order to keep my digits loose and strong.

So, when Dave and I got together this month to honor our friends who’ve recently died, I assessed that my hands were ready to rumble by current standards; but Dave, while game, wasn’t sure. During the session, he did all right, even if he wasn’t nearly as strong as he was in our little band for years.

Now on to humor. Kevin FitzPatrick was a poet we got together to honor. We both knew him for decades, and Kevin even played a little blues harmonica with us a few times in the early days. One thing that Kevin’s poetry often used was his dry sense of humor. If his poems “had other people in them” the interaction between those characters was often humorous. Humor is like that, isn’t it? With poetry one can easily fill a chapbook with solitary musings, singing philosophies, and hermit’s prayers, but humor generally requires other people, our rubs, our missed and kissed connections.

Kevin’s final collection Still Living in Town  has several characters, but the central ones were his own persona, a city-living office employee and his life partner, Tina, a woman who had decided she wanted the rural life — and not a Walden cabin in the woods, but a farm growing a variety of produce and sheep.**  Kevin was in his 60s, but he was a big fit guy (he boxed and taught martial arts in his youth) and however urban his life had been, his character pitched in with the farm labor.

Kevin’s farm poems are and aren’t like Robert Frost’s to compare them to a famous example. That Kevin could approach a blank verse feel in some poems would connect them — but Frost, urban-born and professionally an itinerant teacher, liked to cast his persona in his farming poems as knowledgeable and in place with farming, while Kevin portrayed himself with beginner’s mind on the farm. Given that fewer living readers have any connection with farm work, Still Living in Town  invites us into that milieu wonderfully.

The poem of Kevin’s I used for today’s piece is looser metrically, but while it’s set in like weather to this current March (wheeling rain and snow and thaw) it most wants us to hear a little story about the two characters, the labor of farming, and yes, the humor in hands and their stubbornness.

Jazzmasters!

Jazzmasters! From the upper left: Jimi Hendrix without a Strat; Pete Townsend about to decrease the supply of used guitars; some guy named Jimmy James (wonder what became of him?); Frank Zappa, who didn’t say “The Jazzmaster isn’t dead, it just smells funny;” my Jazzmaster painted the homeopathic color Sonic Blue; Tom Verlaine, vanguard of the alternative nation which latched onto the bargain unwanted Jazzmaster in the 1970s.

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A few notes on the music. I sometimes create the drum tracks for my compositions before the live session begins. And since I’m usually needed in the guitarist role, I sometimes lay down the bass parts with those tracks ahead of time too. That’s how this piece was. On the day of the session, I sang and played the wailing lead guitar*** and recorded the reading of Kevin’s words live with Dave playing a baaing/buzzing synth part live. Dave’s part, subject to his current hands, didn’t fulfill all the groove chop I thought the piece needed. So I added a second guitar part doing my best at rhythm guitar on my Telecaster, but a lot of the final groove you hear is an electric piano part that I laid down trying to imitate my friend and partner Dave’s playing as I recall it from the past.

By now I hope you’re ready to hear the musical story of Kevin FitzPatrick’s farm poem “Coyotes.”   The player gadget is below for many of you. Don’t see that? This highlighted link is provided as an alternative so you can hear it that way too.

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*I have to repeat this one, which I read in a comment thread this month regarding the upcoming Hollywood Oscar awards event: “The only Oscars I care about are Peterson and Wilde.” In the context of Dave Moore, even the young Dave wasn’t likely to stand toe to toe (finger to finger?) with Oscar Peterson on piano. On the other hand, I’ll hop on top of Oscar Wilde’s tea table in my slush-muddy Minnesota shoes and declare Dave’s poetic wit with Wilde’s.

**Other reoccurring characters weave in and out in the farm poems too — and while four-legged, the couple’s farm dog, the incongruous poodle named Katie, makes a cameo appearance in this one and others.

***The lead guitar part is played on a Jazzmaster, a famous failure in Fender’s otherwise wildly successful line of mid-century electric guitars. A couple of decades into its Edsel-hood of “what were they thinking” failure, unwanted used Jazzmasters became an affordable choice pragmatically chosen by some punk and alternative musicians. Even so, few think of a Jazzmaster for this kind of wailing lead guitar with a bit of funk flavor. As long as one is able to address the Jazzmaster’s bridge design issues, it can  do that sort of thing.

The Story of Dave Moore and Love Songs

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Don’t worry, we’re only taking a break from our regularly scheduled mix of various words (mostly poetry) with original music to tell the history of the Parlando Project’s alternate voice Dave Moore. So far in our story, he’s gone from poet to pioneering Twin Cities indie band lyricist to full-fledged songwriter to singer-songwriter-keyboardist for a two-person band of poets with instruments in about two years. If you’ve been following along, I’m the other poet.

How did this turn out?

Returning to 1980 after the release of the Lose Your Lunch Band’s Driving the Porcelain Bus  recording, the two-man-poet-band thing seemed to be a problem. Around this time a handful of Twin Cities indie rock bands had eked out a local circuit of venues that would book them. This was all very tentative, and only sufficient to give bands the initial toe-hold on a career, and it wasn’t really open to something as sparse and loose as we were. Could we possibly have tried to push that square peg, a “hardly rock band,” into that circuit?

Perhaps. We started looking to fill out the band, with the drummer being the biggest problem. I had started to dabble with electric bass, and Dave’s Farfisa combo organ had left-hand gray keys which could be dedicated to keyboard bass duties in the Ray Manzarek mode. The first third was Jonathan Tesdell, a guitarist who had a set of congas, and who was drafted out of a commune down the street. Jonathan practiced and played with us for a few gigs on electric guitar, but I can’t recall us ever even trying the congas as a replacement for a more rockist drum set live. But after a few months, Jonathan left town, traveling light. I once heard that his Gibson Firebird electric guitar that he sold before packing for travel was bought by The Replacements’ Bob Stinson.

Next up was a very talented guy who I believe was working then in the live comedy and theater scene,* Dean Seal. Dave somehow recruited him**, and Dean played drums and bass. Of course, not at the same time, a limitation we overlooked because he was willing to play with us. Dean could write great songs as idiosyncratic as Dave’s, and he had a good singing voice (later recordings with Mr. Elk and Mr. Seal demonstrate his cabaret-ready performance chops***). Dean later went on to a long and unique career, leading the Minnesota Fringe Festival for several years, and in this century becoming a UCC minister who combined his theater and comedy experience with religion.****

A fully operational LYL Band

Performing “Magnetized,” the rarely seen, full LYL Band live in the ‘80s. L to R: unknown drummer (see below) Dean Seal, Dave Moore, and Frank Hudson

 

Alas, Dave and I had sort of lost the fire to play out around the time Dean joined up. I’m not even sure if Dean could have been the singing drummer (harder than it looks) and songwriting voice that could have given Dave a rock-club ready band. With us, Dean played mostly electric bass, and he took a liking to a cheap Japanese copy of a Gibson EB0 bass that I had found in a second-hand store. We traded basses, mine for his similarly low-quality Made In Japan bad-translation-of-a-Fender bass. That instrument sits next to me as I type this, and I still play it often on pieces you hear here. Somewhere in the later ‘80s the LYL Band went, as press-releases still say these days, “on hiatus.”

Why? When I asked Dave today he said he hadn’t thought of that, but as we chewed it over I think it was the matter of both of us, in committed relationships and needing to pay the rent and bills at the lower edges of the economy, gradually converting the concept of the public band to a private joy.

But as that was, almost imperceptibly to us, happening, Dave’s songwriting took one more turn. The goth and gothic Fine Art lyrics and the agitprop and Dada characters of the early LYL songs were joined by unconventional and sincere love songs.

It’s more than 30 years ago, but I can still remember the first time I heard Dave sing this song, as I have heard Dave sing many songs before or since, stone cold fresh. We didn’t often discuss songs before playing them. Unless specifically working out a live set, we didn’t work out arrangements, run through the changes or discuss accompaniment. We just let it happen for fun or failure.

So, there we are in the 1980s. Dave’s standing at the Montgomery Wards electric piano, I’m no doubt sitting with my Cortez 12-string acoustic guitar with a DeArmond soundhole pickup. I’ve programmed a simple three-drum beat on a Mattel Synsonics electronic drums toy. I hit record on the cassette recorder. Dave hammers out some chords and I figure out the key and some kind of pattern as quick as I can. He begins to sing—and I suddenly realize this is, surprisingly, a love song, a damn fine love song, though still uniquely Dave. What do I think next? Well, that I had better not screw this up. Playing lead/melody lines on a 12-string has a catch: the two highest string courses are tuned in unison, but move to the G string and lower, and they jump up to courses tuned an octave apart. Listening to this now, I can still feel how I kept that in mind as I played. If music be the food of love, don’t lose your lunch.

I have some later, better-recorded versions of “(I Think I’ve Lost My) Total Recall.”  The lyrics Dave wrote as a younger 30-something were good then, but when I perform or listen to this song now, thoughts of memory loss mixing with love are real as well as art representing the impact of love. As songs occasionally do, it’s gone from heartfelt to heartbreaking—but this is the moment I first heard it, and so, excuse the archival audio quality and listen.

 

As a bonus, although also low-fi, here’s what a putative ‘80s LYL Band as a fully realized rock band would sound like. We’d planned this gig at a Native American center with Dean Seal playing drums or bass on alternate numbers. We’d setup and sound-checked ourselves, and then left our instruments sitting on stands at the end of the building’s gym. As we left for the rest of the event before we played, four guys, unknown to us, went over to our instruments, and began to play them. They were pretty good as I recall, sort of blues-rock. We figured there was no reason to stop the better, volunteer musicians. They played a short set, maybe two or three songs or so. Later that night, the drummer asked if he could sit in for our set on Dean’s drums. Trusting in chance, that’s what happened. The song “Magnetized”  is a Dave Moore lyric, another love song, but I think I wrote the music and sang it here. Once more it’s a cassette recording, taken from the vocal PA that night. You can hear me slightly off-mic trying to let the band know when I’m going to the bridge and walking over to let the rhythm section know that it’s time to end the tune.

 

*Someone should write a book on that circa ‘80s Twin Cities comedy scene, and yet oddly enough no one has. Louie Anderson, Liz Winstead, Joel Hodgson, Kevin Kling, Jeff Cesario—and I could go on—were all starting out in the Twin Cities in this era.

**Dave remembers he was working as a record store clerk for a time at the Wax Museum on Lake Street, and his manager there, knew Dean, and probably introduced them. Dave doesn’t recall knowing anything about Dean’s theater and comedy work then, only that he played bass.

***One story is that when Mr. Elk and Mr. Seal recorded an album at Prince’s Paisley Park they did it so quickly that it was the least expensive recording ever made there. Here’s some of their work.

****Here’s an article that touches on Dean’s 21st century take on Christianity.

The Story of Dave Moore and Politically Pointed Songs

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today we’re going to have our first Parlando Project double-header, two pieces whose words and music were written by Dave Moore back in the 1979-1982 era and both of which appeared on the Lose Your Lunch Band’s only official release, the cassette-only Driving the Porcelain Bus  in 1982 1980*.

The LYL Band and Porcelain Bus  were not entirely political, but the elements of political protest and social commentary were a big part of it. Some of this was based around the election of Ronald Reagan as US President in late 1980 which at the time seemed to be the culmination of a long conservative struggle dating back to the early ‘50s.**  You could say it was like today’s post-Trump election era, and one could point to similarities, although the pendant in me could list considerable differences too. I’ll just let that rough likeness stand to simplify the history for our younger readers. It’s close enough for rock’n’roll.

Dave also points out that his spouse and her relatives at the time were politically interested, and discussions in their circle often included political analysis and issues. I’d add, knowing Dave from a decade before that, that the same could be said about him. Let’s just say that around 1980 it wouldn’t be strange for political dialectics to be part of a casual conversation in South Minneapolis, again, just as today.

But here’s something interesting I noted as I rethought those years, the local music scene really didn’t reflect that directly. I recall folk-singer Larry Long, a man who has sought to continue the legacy of Pete Seeger, as being around the cities during this era, but at least as far as recordings he comes later. John Trudell an activist and singer was based out of the region later in his career, but in the early 80s his musical expression was just beginning, and he was living in California then.

Of course, artists portraying the world and how people relate to it cannot help but reflect political and social connotations in their work, and to that degree that any of the biggest bands to eventually emerge out of the Twin Cities indie scene were political, it was largely that.***  Those bands had something to say about life: what they opposed, what they preferred. An argument can be made on both artistic and commercially-distributed subversion levels for that. But the songs Dave was writing then were sometimes upfront about their political stance. In those songs, subtext, which was also there, was what was beneath the politics, not the other way around.

See the LYL Band Modern Times Cafe Ash Wednesday by Dave Moore

Traveling to a telephone pole of the past, we see a Dave Moore Dada poster for an early ‘80s show

 

So, let’s step out of the history and into the songs.

Here’s “Scrap”  a companion song to “The Night Inspector”   which you’ve already heard here, inspired by Dave’s work in a machine shop in this era. There was a good live version sung by Dave on Porcelain Bus,  but I don’t have access to a digital copy of it right now, so in its place here’s a later solo acoustic guitar version where I sing it.

 

And here is an actual cut from the Porcelain Bus,  engineered by Colin Mansfield, just after he was helping Husker Du get underway, a song asking the rhetorical question “What’s Wrong with That?”

 



 

If you’re asking yourself, where’s the poetry and various musical settings that you’ve seen here before, know that I plan only about one more history-of-a-band post before returning to our regularly scheduled programing. If, on the other hand, you wonder how this all turned out, the next post will be about that.

 

And, of course, footnotes, but we reject the hierarchy of superscript numbers for asterixis!

*I’ve just located a few digital scans I made years back of the even then moldering materials form this era, and they show the the Twin City Reader reviewed Porcelain Bus (see footnote below) in their issue that covered the upcoming week interval of January 7th to the 13th 1981. This would mean we recorded it in late 1980 and probably released it before the turn of the year.

**for a detailed history of this conservative effort, I recommend Before the Storm  by Rick Perlstein. For me a lot of what he covers was current events, but for most present-day Americans, it’s history. His two follow-up books are good too, but why not start at the beginning?

***Two exceptions I can note, even if neither are the best-known songs in their respective catalogs: Paul Westerberg’s “Androgynous”  from the 1984 Replacements LP Let It Be,  a heart-felt yet casual sounding and appropriately ambiguous song about busting gender roles, and then Prince’s arch “Ronnie Talk to Russia”  from 1981’s Controversy,  where Prince sounds like the LYL Band would sound if they had Prince’s skills, work-ethic and recording studio (or at least a drummer and bass player). Perhaps Mr. Nelson was paying tribute to The LYL Band and our sound, but Prince’s song was released a little less than a year before “Driving the Porcelain Bus.”  OK, the new date for Porcelain Bus  means that theoretically Prince could  have heard Dave’s Farisa drenched sound before he used a similar punky combo organ sound on “Ronnie Talk to Russia.” File this under “improbable.”

OK, that last part is irony for you English majors, but Porcelain Bus  was reviewed and got a cover blurb on the local alternative weekly in 1982 January 1981, along with Prince protégé’s The Time’s LP. The blurb said “The Time Ain’t No Lose Your Lunch Band,” a statement that I think we can all agree on. The review said we might become a cult band. If you’ve read this far, you’re our last chance as cult adherents. You don’t have to shave your head, sell tracts, move to a compound in the country, or worship Dave as a semi-divine incarnation—unless you think it’ll really help. I believe Dave would rather be worshiped as an Andy Devine incarnation anyway.

The Story of Dave Moore and the LYL Band

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

The ‘70s outburst of new bands that were called punk, then new wave, and finally indie can be traced to a beginning (or beginnings), and here’s what’s too-little recognized about that: it started with poets and writers.

Some who know that punk didn’t start with Johnny Rotten, say that it all can be traced back to a band that called itself Television who convinced a desperate bar owner that his Bowery bar called CBGB should let them play music there in 1974. Television wasn’t a gigging band, rather it was the idea of two poets, friends since high school who had moved to New York City and started to call themselves by suitably poetic names: Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell.

But even before that, two other NYC writers were combining poetry with rock’n’roll: Lenny Kaye, a guitarist and rock critic with tendencies to musicology, and Patti Smith, a poet who thought that if she wanted rock’n’roll to be a fit subject and context for poetry, maybe the sound of rock should come along explicitly. In 1971, the pair linked up to perform at St. Marks in the Bowery with Kaye on electric guitar, at a long-standing reading series (instigated by Paul Blackburn, who we’ve met here previously). Eventually there would be a band, the Patti Smith Group, but that band started as an idea of two writers, and for awhile it was just Kaye’s guitar and a piano player with Smith’s chanted vocals.

So how far back does that idea go, two poets or two writers, imagining a rock band? Let’s set the New York wayback machine 7 years further back, to 1964. Two poets and well-rounded Greenwich Village bohemians Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg looked at the folk music scene, understood that the term means what it says, that any odd folk were allowed to make music, and so they gathered some handy musicians and imagined a band they called The Fugs. Their first recording was titled on its first pressing on Folkways The Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction,  and it was produced by Harry Smith, the important folk anthologist, but they eventually became a rock band touring with an irregular accumulation of Village musicians. Besides having the foundational indie spirit of we’re going to make music without asking for permission, The Fugs were also sometimes gleefully obscene—something that bohemian poets had already done, and they brought this with them to music. In today’s world of autotuned rappers, their sexual hijinks may not shock as much now as their naked-to-the-world out of tune vocals.

And what bridges the Fugs to the ‘70s NYC punk-rock poets? Poet Lou Reed, musician John Cale, and eventual English Literature PhD Sterling Morrison formed the Velvet Underground. Like the other poet bands, the idea of forming a group preceded any complete organization into a band. The Velvet’s original drummer famously quit when the band got its first gig, because he thought accepting any gig would be selling out.

Do you notice a rhyme scheme here? None of these situations started with a full band of musicians looking for their chance. These weren’t musicians looking to get poetic, these were poets looking to get musical. Of the seven writers above, I believe only Kaye and Reed had ever played a gig before they dreamed their bands. What musicians were recruited, what musical skills would be developed or obtained, all came after the idea, an idea that was launched in performance before it became a fully-formed rock band.

These weren’t musicians looking to get poetic, these were poets looking to get musical.

I’m not suggesting this is the best way to start a band or establish a career, because this is pretty much the way the LYL Band started. Dave remembers that Fine Art had looked to him for words, and once asked, the words that could be songs started building up in him. I had been writing songs for a year or so before I came to the Twin Cities. I had an acoustic and electric guitar, Dave had an old upright piano in his living room. Sometime a few months after Fine Art got underway, in 1979, we started playing together, a two-person version of the traditional song pull. He’d do a song and I do a song and we’d try to figure out what went with what the other was playing.

Whose idea was it to form a band? I think it was likely Dave’s. Dave’s not entirely sure. The broader gestalt of punk and indie breaking out was part of it, including the example of Fine Art of course. We both shared an appreciation of The Fugs, and that anarchic idea of a band that would perform any idea for a song, even if their musical execution might be imperfect. Hell, their LP title “Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction” could have been our tagline too.

The idea of just an acoustic piano and a single guitar as a band was incomplete and we knew it. Even in the loosest standard in the era, we couldn’t be a rock band. As Dave’s songs built up, we performed at a few open mics acoustically as a duo, and we started to call ourselves “punk-folk.” We played several midday informal gigs at the Modern Times restaurant on Chicago Avenue (I worked nights, which cut into more conventional times) and from this short-lived noon-time schedule we named ourselves The Lose Your Lunch Band.

Dave Moore at LYL keys 1982

Poet to songwriter to performer: Dave Moore at the keyboards during a 1982 LYL Band concert.

Still a duo in 1982 we recorded our only “official” release, the mostly electric (Dave had bought an old Farfisa organ) Driving the Porcelain Bus.  Recorded by Colin Mansfield on what was probably the same 4 track open-reel deck that recorded those Husker Du demos. You can see that we weren’t shy about the emetic band name, but it had nothing to do with the songs we were singing. We sang songs about political subjects, blue-color experiences, and satirized the Me generation.  Driving the Porcelain Bus  was probably the first cassette only release in the Twin Cities indie scene, but it came before there was a regular distribution method for pre-recorded cassettes. Besides the usual direct sales, I reverse-shoplifted the cassettes (each packaged in a folded brown-paper lunch sack with the track list printed on the paper) dropping them into spaces in the LP bins of record stores. I wonder if any clerks remember being asked to ring up a strange recording that wasn’t actually in inventory?

It was the Reagan decade, the rise of the new affabulatory GOP. Dave had lots of song material. We’ll continue the story of Dave’s new-found songwriting in another post, but here’s today’s audio piece: Dave Moore performing his song “Evil Man”  live at the Modern Times sometime in 1981 with the two-person LYL Band. Dave is pounding the house piano within an inch of its life and has a vocal mic. The MT sound system had one more channel which meant that I’m trying to get my little acoustic guitar to be heard over the piano while shouting backing vocals into the mic halfway down my body to where the guitar was. I believe I recorded this on a portable cassette recorder sitting somewhere on one of the restaurant’s side tables. As they say in collector’s circles: archival interest only sound quality.