Fish is Biodegradable

One of my favorite musicians passed away suddenly. However, unlike Bowie or Prince, I’m afraid very few people ever heard of him. Enough that he maintained a music and recording career for forty years, but still, pretty obscure.

Pat Fish recorded under the name the Jazz Butcher. It was, technically, the name of the band he led, but as the only consistent member of said band, it was pretty common for Pat to be referred to as The Jazz Butcher. His first album, In Bath of Bacon, was released in 1983. He was part of the post punk, new wave, pre-alternative, college radio wave of British artists. He released thirteen studio albums, several compilations, and two or three live albums.

I didn’t hear the Jazz Butcher until 1986. I had just started grad school and moved into an apartment with a bunch of other guys. One of them, Steve, had a record collection that changed my life. That first semester I was exposed to tons of artists that I had either never heard of before, or had only the vaguest awareness of: Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Japan, Hoodoo Gurus... many, many more. Steve would simply put on a record and it filled our days. It took awhile for some of these to really register with me, at least in terms of recognizing who they were. There was a lot of challenging new sounds, and I admit a lot of it really had to grow on me. Some of it joined the list of my favorite bands. Some of it never grew on me.

In the midst of all of this new music, one album, one song specifically, kept catching my ear. "This is partytime, and we’re all having so much fun." But the tone of the song belied those sentiments. There was a sadness to the lyrics, as if simply partying just wasn’t enough to bring one happiness. The words were fun and ridiculous and conveyed a deeper sense of meaning than a first listen would indicate. They were, to use the title of a later Jazz Butcher album, Glorious and Idiotic. And, once I finally singled the album In Bath of Bacon out from the all of the others, I was a fan. Over the years his music became a very personal soundtrack to my life, one that I didn’t share with too many people.

There’s a lot of silliness in Pat Fish’s lyrics. He sings about Bigfoot, and goldfish, and buffaloes, and Shirley MacLaine, and alcohol. A whole lot of alcohol. But somehow he manages to never, at least in my opinion, devolve into simply a novelty act. Given his subject matter, this was a real possibility. But he rounded his oeuvre out with a lot of more serious fare, what I once heard him refer to as ‟Art Misery Songs.” These were a mix of heartfelt ballads and social commentary.He played with a wide variety of musicians. David J, bass player for Bauhaus and Love and Rockets was on two of the early albums. But his most regular collaborator was Max Eider, a guitarist with a singular, jazz-influenced style. Max left the band in the mid-80s and then rejoined around the turn of the millennium. The albums released between these events were good, but something, specifically Max, was missing. It was their collaboration as artists that lifted both of them. 

I saw the Jazz Butcher in 1988 at Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland, and again at the same venue in 1992. As I related in a previous blog, ‟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 managed 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 one of these.”

I saw them twice more, in 2000, once at a small bar in Erie, and again the next night in Pittsburgh at the Millvale Industrial Theater. This tour featured Max and Mr. Jones, the original drummer, so of course I got both of them to sign the booklet.

It took another twelve years, but I finally got David J to sign it as well.

Pat had a Facebook page, and few years ago I reached out and we became friends on that platform. Obviously, I didn’t really know him. But, he would occasionally comment on one of my posts, or wish me a happy birthday. He was friends with Alan Moore, of Watchmen fame, among many other things. A few years ago I reviewed Alan’s book, Jerusalem, in which he mentions the Jazz Butcher. Pat commented on my post in a very surreal, meta kind of way.

So this feels like a loss to me. Not really personal, except for the role his music has played in my life. I’ll miss just knowing he’s out there somewhere in England, still performing, singing ridiculous songs about elephants and broken hearts.

There’s an early Jazz Butcher song called Big Saturday, and though I forget all of the details, he told us in Cleveland in 1988, that it was cowritten by a girl he had loved who had died. He then performed the song Angels, in her honor, wherein he says, ‟It’s always Saturday in Heaven... Just one big Saturday in Heaven.” The song has broken my heart just a little every time I’ve heard it since.

https://youtu.be/Cj6lU1ykzsA

Thanks, Pat! Thanks for the music, and the laughter, and the art, and the misery. I know the devil is your friend, but what if there were angels?

Connections and Vectors and Degrees of Separation

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.

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.

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