So,
I decided I needed to reread all of Gilbert Hernandez Love and
Rockets Palomar stories before continuing my ongoing Favorite Comics
posts. That's taking a little time, though the experience has been
rewarding and worth it. But, in the meantime, I wanted to write about
something else.
So
I decided to write about Love and Rockets. The band this time, not
the comic.
Well,
sort of.
This
past Sunday night I went to see David J perform at the Thunderbird
Cafe, a little bar about a two-minute walk from my apartment. David J
was the bass player for Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, as well as
having an ongoing solo career, plus having played in some other
random bands over the years. It was a really great show, featuring
music from his entire career. I was a pretty big fan of most of this
music at one time or another, so there were a lot of great moments
for me last night.
But
the main thing I want to talk about here are the random connections
between people and events as we spiral around this planet of several
billion people over time. During his performance, as he sang songs
from his thirty-plus years in the industry, my mind started recalling
all of the various connections I have with David J, though we had
never met until last night.
This
is rambling and out of any kind of chronological order, and probably
of no interest to anyone but me, but I find these sorts of things
fascinating. Bear with me.
I
discovered Bauhaus late. They originally existed as a band from 1978
to 1983 when I was living in a place with no access to music that
was, at that time, fairly obscure. I have since seen video of their
live performances from the time, and I'm pretty sure, given my
penchant for costumes and theater, that if I had seen them in 1979 I
would have gotten into them. As it was it was 1986 before I
discovered them when I moved into a college apartment with five other
guys. One of them, Steve, had an amazing collection of vinyl records,
most of which were alternative bands I had never heard of. To say his
record collection changed my musical life is an understatement. That
fall, 1986, Love and Rockets second album Express was
relatively new and spent a lot of time on the turntable at the
apartment. I got really into L&R. It took awhile to associate
them with Bauhaus in my mind. I found Bauhaus to be more challenging
for me, and it took longer to get into. At the same time I got really
turned onto a band called The Jazz Butcher. David J had played bass
on two of his albums between his time in Bauhaus and Love and
Rockets.
About
a year later (November 9, 1987 to be precise... thank you internet
search engines), still at Edinboro University of PA, we discovered
that Love and Rockets were playing at Indiana University of PA. It
was one of those spur-of-the-moment road trips where a friend
borrowed his father's van and 10 or 12 of us piled into it for a road
trip. L&R were touring for their third album, Earth, Sun,
Moon. We got to the Fisher Auditorium and for five bucks, if
memory serves, saw not only L&R but another band none of us had
ever heard of prior to that evening, Jane's Addiction.
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| Lookie what I found on the internet! |
Two
years after that on August 31, 1989 I saw L&R at the Syria Mosque
in Pittsburgh. The Pixies, who I had just discovered, opened. Say
what you will about L&R, but they could pick great opening bands.
The Pixies completely blew me away.
Then,
twenty-three years later, I met David J at a bar near my house. We've
been pinging around on this planet together for years. This was the
same person I had seen on stage all those years ago and our
individual trajectories had finally brought us to a very nice
personal conversation. That's when I started piecing together all of
the various overlapping vectors in our lives.
Back
in 1986, at the same time that I was first getting turned on to David
J's work, was when I was reading Watchmen for the first time.
I didn't know then that David J was friends with Alan Moore and that
they had worked together on various projects. I found out most of
this not too long after the fact, but still. David had written the
musical score for This Vicious Cabaret, a specific chapter of Moore's
V For Vendetta, which I had read at this point. He was in a
short-live band with Moore called the Sinister Ducks and recorded a
song called Old Gangsters Never Die which came with a comics
adaptation of the lyrics by Lloyd Thatcher (you can see it here
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/474540.html).
Since then he has contributed music and participated in Moore's
spoken word performances like The Birth Caul and Moon &
Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels among others.
1986
is when I first met Steve Bissette and John Totleben, the artists for
Moore's Swamp Thing series for DC Comics. For a couple of years I saw
Steve and John on a pretty regular basis and hung out with them
enough that they know and remember me years later. So even then I was
only one degree of separation from Alan Moore, which I knew, and
therefore two degrees from David J.
Around
this same time (the details of this are a bit fuzzier because I
wasn't directly involved) was when the Pixies were coming together as
part of the Boston indy music scene. Among several bands that were
part of that scene was a group called The Five who were originally
from Pittsburgh (The Pixies used to open for The Five). I didn't live
in Pittsburgh at the time, but I was coming here fairly regularly for
comics and record shopping. One of the comics shops I went to was a
place called BEM. Turns out, as I discovered many years later, the
proprietor Bill Boichel was friends with the guys in The Five. So I
was only three degrees from the Pixies.
In
1990 a couple of friends and I made a trip to Cleveland where we saw
The Jazz Butcher at a club called Peabody's Down Under. I met Pat
Fish, the Jazz Butcher himself (the only consistent member of the
band over their thirty year history), and I also randomly ran into my
friend Joelle who had been one of the people crammed in the back of
the van with three years earlier (Joelle now lives in New Zealand,
opening up a whole new country of potential connections). While there
I had Pat autograph the booklet that came with my CD copy of Scandal
in Bohemia/Sex and Travel. These were his second and third albums,
the ones David J played bass on. At the time this was a very rare
German import that I had manged to get my hands on, and for years the
only way these two albums were available. When I showed it to Pat his
response was something like, “Where the bloody hell did you get
this? I've barely seen these.”
A
few years later I'm writing for In Pittsburgh Magazine and get the
chance to do a phone interview with Frank Black/Black Francis of the
Pixies. It ends up being my first cover feature article. One of the
musicians opening for Frank at that Pittsburgh show is Reid Paley,
former lead singer of The Five. Through a lot of mutual Pittsburgh
friends I met and got to know Reid, as well as Five guitarist Tom
Moran. At the time Tom was in an Alt-Country band called TheDeliberate Strangers. I saw them a lot and one of my articles about them in No Depression ended up being my first in a nationally
published music mag. A couple of years later I met with Reid and some
other people for hanging out and drinks at a local bar called the
Squirrel Cage and Frank Black is there, just hanging out.
In
2000 the original members of the Jazz Butcher reunite for an American
tour and a new album and I met the whole band at the Millvale
Industrial Theater (as well as at some small bar in Erie whose name I
don't remember). While there I got signatures from drummer O.P. Jones
and guitarist Max Eider. Eider had also played guitar on David J's
1989 album Songs From Another Season.
I
have a friend, a remarkable poet, by the name of Margaret (check her
stuff out at http://margaretbashaar.wordpress.com/).
I met Margaret as one of my customers at Phantom of the Attic when
she was like twelve. Through her teen years we bonded over Elfquest
and now that she's an adult I'm happy to call her a genuine friend.
She is part of what for lack of a better term I'm going to call an
artist's community that gathers at the Grand Midway Hotel in Windber,
PA. The Hotel is home to a mixed group of artists, poets,
photographers, musicians, filmmakers, and pretty much anything thing
else creative you can think of. I have only been there once, to a
really amazing Halloween party. One evening, while having dinner with
Margaret the topic turned to music and I mentioned Bauhaus, or Love
and Rockets, or something, and Margaret casually mentioned that David
J hangs out there occasionally. She had met him one morning in the
kitchen of the Hotel while he was attempting to make tea.
Small
world.
Margaret
and several other denizens of the Midway were at the show on Sunday.
And
on Sunday night I completed my quest and got David J's signature on
the booklet.
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| Twenty-two years in the making! |
I
could go on with these connections. One of Reid's albums was produced
by Eric Drew Feldman, former member of Captain Beefheart and regular
PJ Harvey collaborator. Reid and Frank Black just released a
collaborative album. The lines drawn between musicians seem to
connect that whole world, and if you end up knowing one of them your
world just gets a little smaller. The same is true of the world of
comic books, or of any one of a number of hobbies and professions.
When these things overlap it's even more true. What I find most
fascinating about all of this is backtracking the history. I was
listening to David J, the guy who wrote the prototypical Goth song
Bela Lugosi's Dead, and reading Alan Moore, the guy who wrote
Watchmen, both genre-changing, significant pieces of Pop
Culture history, at a time when they felt worlds away from my life.
Twenty-five plus years later I know they weren't a world away, just a
couple of steps.
And
not to overstate something that we've all known since the advent of
Kevin Bacon, that's true of everyone.
Anyway,
I just want to end this rambling post with a quote from a Love and
Rockets song called A Private Future. I've always thought this was
really good advice.
Live
the life you love
Use
a god you trust
And
don't take it all too seriously
