Sounds

Thomas Edison sound recordings, hosted at the National Parks website. Ah! Feel that toe-tappin’ noise! Mp3s. Oh yaaas.

Mazel tov!

La bella Cubana – habanera

Snyder, does your mother know you’re out?

At the moving picture ball

Snazzy!

Avast me hearties! I’ve been swipin’ the booty from this scurvy site:

Pyrates TrArrrslator

Well t’streets have been swept, And t’leaves have all washed away,
And I find meself stumblin’, On somethin’ I’m tryin’t’say.

Ahoy! t’breathin’ has stopped, But t’hair keeps on growin’,
T’anchor’s been dropped, But t’crew keeps on rowin’,
Captain, what be our headin’ now?

Just t’echo remains, Of t’refraino’a splice t’mainbraceen song.
That I spent all me days, Trainin’ parrots t’sin’ along.

Now thar’s some kindo’answer, Bein’ demandedo’us.
But tonight be infected, I guess we should squeeze out t’pus.

Yeah thar’s dust on t’rules, Of this game we’re tryin’t’play.
So I can’t tell if I’m gettin’ closer, Or farther away.

Oh, where be you at? And where be you goin’?
T’wind doesn’t answer, It just keeps on blowin’.

Arrrrr!

(That be the Peg Leg Jason Weblevich shantey, “Captain, What Be Arrrr Headin’ Now“)

KUOW’s devoting the Swing Years and Beyond to the late Cynthia Doyon this evening; they also added a page with a selection of what are apparently considerable numbers of notes of condolence and shock.

bluejack has a little note expressing surprise; and the Little City Journal noted her passing, pointing to the P-I obit. Anita linked to me about this as well.

I’m actually surprised that there aren’t more blogland expressions of loss out there – I suppose blogger demographics don’t overlap with Saturday night public radio listeners very much.

Over the past few days, I haven’t really been able to shake brooding about this – I feel like I’ve lost a friend, as illusory as that is. In the comments on my original entry, at least one person expressed similar sentiments.

UPDATE: In January, 2004, the Seattle Weekly published a piece on suicide and led with Ms. Doyon’s last moments. There’s a lovely phptp of her accompanying the article, and that photo is also the magazine’s cover for the issue.

In the heat of battle today, I was listening to my old pal Bob Dylan – who really is more of a Johnny Come Lately than an old pal in my musical tastes, having dropped his battered guitar case in my living room after I had made the acquaintance of Harry Smith and Shane MacGowan for several years. Before that, I had sort of abstractly admired the man’s work but bever really got it, for all the usual reasons: whiny voice, obscure lyrics, too boring, you know the drill.

Anyway, Bob’s been couch-surfing in my mind for a while now, earning his keep mostly though his later stuff – Time Out of Mind is how he usually pays his rent, and I urge you to take him in for a night.

But this is old, old news, Mike. What brings you to wave the well-lofted banner of an artist who needs your praise like Norma Desmond needs Joe Gillis?

Cinderella, she seems so easy
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You Belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row

Well, I happened to focus my ear on the last song of Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row. So, I’m sure this is old news, but, like, the song is great.

On repeated closer listening, I found fault – it’s too long, and abandons the interplay of the fluent lead picking and fluent lyrics for one of Dylan’s squawling harp solos – but these are complaints of style, of manner.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They’re trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row

Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains
They’re getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row”

Listening to this as a break from the war news – so sad, so surreal – I was totally distracted from my project as a never-made film by Alex Cox, set in Missoula, Montana, one-hundred-and-fifty-years ago, unreeled on my inner eye.

It’s pretty rare that I hear a song closely like this anymore unless I plan on it – when it just washes in, grabs me, and reminds me why music interests me, I have to say: “thanks.” So, like: thanks, Bob.

And a footnote: as one might expect, Herr Doktor-Professor Marcus has a thing or two to say about the song that’s worth reading.

Forgive me for returning to this topic. I got a bunch of emailed comments on the series and wanted to get them up here as well.

First and formeost, the lyric corrections.

Both Steve and Mark noted that the line and couplet I don’t understand in The Midwest Can Be Allright is:

midwestern air is warm and wet
dogs are barkin’, happy that we met

While the not quite understood line from Bible Belt Babies runs:

To elicit both a world of sorrow
Thought alot about what’s for tomorrow
Picked herself a partner and a corner in a field of rye

Additionally, Mark Wilson, a VB listee who writes for an Evensville-based paper, also has his review of the new CD up on that paper’s web site. It’s an insightful review.

As I mentioned yesterday, Brian asked me to blog a bit on music and memory. He was specifically interested in the topic as a reflection of my series on Dale Lawrence’s music and career from last week.

He’s right to ask for a bit on it. It’s an important part of my relationship to Dale’s music. It was part of my underlying goals in writing as I did, from direct personal recollection and without pursuit of factual confirmations.

I also noted that one song in particular, “The Midwest Can Be Allright,” initiated my relationship with Dale’s music, because it presented an idealized, reflective space into which I and my sister could project our complex emotions about being away from our home as adolescents. In a way, the song provided a place for us to play with our own memories of Bloomington.

Similarly, when I became aware of the rest of Dale’s unreleased music, the pursuit of it in combination with its’ inaccessibility and influence on the development of musical styles in my hometown and surrounding region granted it a special status. That status prompted me to listen with great care to the music and to expend a much greater degree of effort in identifying and organizing the original contexts of its creation than I did, or had to, for, say, the Ramones.

In essence, then, the music’s rarity and status as an artifact of a past moment – invulnerable at the time to the possibility of commercial excavation and release – provided a sort of direct musical connection to the past, to a socially-constructed memory.

What I’m saying here is also an expansion of my point about Dale Lawrence and Robert Ray’s songwriting employing a private pool of floating couplets. The maturing songcraft and performance of Dale’s early musical career functioned, for me, exactly as folk music can in a social context. The best example of this is the recorded collection of folk music now known as the Anthology of American Folk Music. This collection has functioned as a provider of this sort of memory-space at three points in its’ long history. I will not provide detailed notes on the history of this set of recordings as many others have already done so with greater depth and clarity than I can.

It first functioned as the product of an organic and commercial context when the individual records were released, recording what part of the culture’s nostalgic, constructed recollections of the past might be commercially valuable. Then it provided the impetus for the folk boom of the fifties and early sixties that birthed Dylan and many other artists of the era. Finally, when the set was re-released in CD in the mid-nineties it exercised a similar hold on the imaginations and memories of many younger musicians and listeners – yours truly among them.

Listening deeply to the material on the Anthology presents another opportunity for the creative memory space I mentioned above to operate – at least partially in identifying the ways in which the material on the Anthology is already familiar to the listener either in quotations or covers, or in refraction. For example, the fragmentary glimpses of American life that Dale’s Vulgar Boatmen songwriting provides also echoes the fragmentary construction of some of the oldest material on the Anthology.

On the Anthology, of course, the fragments represent various organic effects of memory – from elderly persons’ inaccurate and creative recollections of the lyrics of songs learned as children to linguistic drift over time. In Dale’s work, the deliberate use of obscured narrative creates a sense of blackout – of stress-induced memory loss, or of an inability to convey information verbally.

One of the effects of this strategy, in the context of personal narrative, is to engage the listener’s imagination, creating spaces in the narrative to which the listener responds by inserting their own narrative – frequently personal memories. When Dale’s narrator says “It was late – I could hear your father,” the listener provides the details of the setting from whole cloth – the house, the color of the night sky, the make and model of the car in the driveway, the presence or absence of clouds and fireflies in the night air.

The other effect is to render the songs – and narrative – timeless. The songs on Anthology belong sometime before the car. The Boatmen songs, dislocated by careful generalizing, belong to sometime in America, after the advent of the car. However, by employing this fragmenting in the development of the lyrics, the songs also echo constructive techniques seen in songs that have undergone many generations of oral transmission.

I suspect that this is far from a conscious strategy on Dale and Robert’s – or Jake’s – part. I think it comes from the evident depth of thought that has gone into the songs’ development – and in some cases, the nearly lifelong use of the individual songs themselves.

So, in sum, I use my memory to project my consciousness into the narrative space of songs that provide narrative hooks. In comparing songs I hear to one another, I situate them in relation to me and to one another. I often seek stylistic or structural relationships in what I hear. I believe that pop and rock music represents the most recent chapter in an ongoing narrative or organic musical development that began in America even before our European, Asian, and African ancestors arrived on these shores.

In Louie, Louie you can hear the voyageurs canoeing down the St. Lawrence; in Cry Real Tears you can hear the jilted wail of Omie Wise; and since I know Margaret changed her name from Morgan, I’m pretty sure she led at least one knight from the true path. My memory, American memory – American music.

Last week, as I wrote about my understanding of and relationship to the career and music of Dale Lawrence, I was careful to note that inaccuracies might well be embedded in the accounts. I had constructed the narrative and creative histories largely on my own, from community knowledge and personal close observation. Part of my goal in recording the information based on only my personal understanding of the information was important to me, in order to clarify what parts I had invented for myself from the creative material presented (and determinedly scavenged).

Dale was kind enough to write back with a few thoughts and clarifications that he’s permitted me to share here. Additionally, Brian Sobolak (who apparently had some Boatmen hoodo fall upon him at the Schuba’s show) and Anne Zender spun off the material I was covering last week as well into a discussion on music and memory, and have asked me to blog on that topic here this week. Starting tomorrow, I shall. It is the precise subtext to the stuff I was posting last week.

Before we begin with his annotations, he also wrote, “We’ll have copies of the CD at shows in the coming weeks, but the official street date is August 12. We’re told there’s a very nice review of it in the new Blender, but haven’t been able to score a copy yet.”

So if anyone out there has a copy of that ish of Blender, share away! Dale also noted he wasn’t going to correct my by ear on-the-fly lyrical transcriptions.

Dale, take it away. Now I can say I’ve opened for you!

Part one

Nothing to add.

Part two

The first Dale Lawrence/Robert Ray “collaborations” occurred around 1983 and were simply Robert taking four Gizmos songs that he especially liked and reworking them slightly (or, in the case of “Tilt-a-Whirl'” more than slightly. The other three were “Cry Real Tears'” “Heartbeat'” and “Stop Alternating.”) These songs then entered the repetoire of the band Robert had joined the previous year, the Vulgar Boatmen. We started actually exchanging tapes and working on new songs in (I think) 1984, though a lot of the Satellites material was just me.

The Satellites stuff you have was recorded not by Paul, but by Dave Langfitt, the group‚s guitarist at the time. He ran a small studio out of his garage (Hit City, still in business today, though Dave’s no longer involved). As such, it was the first time I got to really play around/call the shots in any kind of studio situation, which was fun and an education. Dave (who plays on two tracks from You and Your Sister) was also an accomplished harmony singer — the first time I got to use that element in a band as well. Dave is a great guy and was an important connection at the time. (If any of your tapes include “Sea of Heartbreak'” that’s Dave singing lead.)

The Baade/Speake/Myers lineup of the band did not emerge until 1988. The Satellites broke up sometime in 1985. About a year later I started playing out as Right to Left, whose first lineup was me, Erik Baade (who stayed onboard for eight years), Tony Philputt (replaced almost immediately by Shadow), and Langfitt (soon replaced by Mannon Kersey, then Matt).

[ed. interjection – This explains a peculiarity in my recollections from the series last week, in which my recollections of immediate post-high-school time – 1985 – blended seamlessly into my recollections of seeing shows at bars after I’d turned 21 in 1987.]

Shadow never lived in Austin. He was slightly older than the rest of the Gizmos, married, and had no interest in relocating to New York. Hence, the change of drummers.

You write more than once of my consciously wanting to pursue a different direction (from the Gizmos) after I moved back to Indiana. This is correct but overstated I think. I was interested in pursuing a looser beat than punk — but I was heading there already in the New York demos. In fact, basically when I started playing out again in Indiana, I remember wanting to forge a whole repetoire that would take off from “See About You'” “Biscuits and Gravy” — the stuff I’d written out east, but still the Gizmos. The single biggest conscious change I wanted to make was to employ a cleaner guitar tone. I was bored by distorted guitar — to a large extent still am — and it was eye-opening to see how many people equated “distorted guitar tone” with “rocking out.” Your article made me think about this again, how that is still largely the case. It‚s something I really don’t understand. To me, “rocking” CAN involve timbre, but ALWAYS involves rhythm, how you manipulate that beat.

A fuzzy guitar tone can be (and often is) used (like speed) to mask inferior rhythm playing. And even as a device, it’s so overused as to be ineffectual anymore. I much prefer “overdriven” (like the Sex Pistols) to “distorted” (like Jesus and Mary Chain). What the Boatmen often end up using in its place (in the studio) is compression, which is weirder and harder to read (and responsible for those overtones you’re hearing on “Anna”) than simple distortion. So I think THAT was my single biggest departure from the Gizmos aesthetic, back in the eighties.

Part three

Most of my Gizmos songs (including “Bible Belt Baby”) were written without collaborators; I seldom actually wrote with Billy. The handful that were co-written, though, are definitely among the more well-remembered: “Tilt-a-Whirl” (w/Ted Neimeic), “The Midwest Can Be Allright” (Liz Main), “Melinda is a Lesbian” (Doug Holland), and “Reggae Song” (Billy). (There was also “Tin Foil Chew” — Holland — but no one remembers that one.)

Part four

“Drive Somewhere” and the live “Cry Real Tears” are both sung by Carey Crane, a founding (pre-Dale/Robert) member of the band. As someone from the list noted, I sing “Allison.”

I’d never before noticed that “Street Where You Live” quotes the riff from “Sweet Jane” but you’re right. (Except for that move, this would be the elusive two-chord song.)

Your point about us having our own private pool of floating couplets is very cool (and funny).

The one lyric correction I’ll indulge is “In a Station” — since apparently neither you or anyone on the list who chimed in hear the word “the” in the line “I’m on THE line.”

This is the last of four initial parts of a long Jason Webley interview conducted by Mike Whybark in spring, 2003.

The first part mostly discussed Jason’s plans for the July 20 Monsters of Accordion show and tour; the second followed that up and veered into some technical minutia about microphones. In section three, we examined busking for a moment or two.

Today it starts getting good. Unfortunately, it’s near the end of the tape, and on my microcassette tape recorder, at the end of the tape, the recording speed varies and sometimes the recorded voice begins to break up. This happened on this tape and is denoted as “[tape flaw]” in the final paragraphs.

[Responding to a question about busking, Jason highlighted three songs he uses in street performing situations: “Old Man Time, Last Song, Drinking Song, and sometimes that damn Aardvark thing.”

“That damn Aardvark thing” is one of Jason’s most absurd songs, in which the audience invariably joins in singing the barked chorus, “aardvark, aardvark.” The basic tune of the song is taken from the Blue Danube Waltz by Strauss, familiar to LITERALLY EVERYONE as the space-station docking sequence theme from Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s film, 2001.

Invariably at Jason’s concerts, requests for the song are shouted. Sometimes he plays the song immediately; other times it’s clear that he’d rather not. At any rate, as his comment notes, his feelings for the song are mixed.

I took his bait.]

M: “that damn Aardvark thing.” Let’s talk about “that damn Aardvark thing”, and additionally your ambivalence at “teaching monkeys how to sing.” Beginning, I think it’s on Against the Night, that’s a consistent theme in I think almost all your music from then on, there’s sort of this ambivalence about what I perceive as your awareness of your being able to accomplish certain performance goals. I don’t think I have a specific question, but I’m interested to hear you talk bout it. Where does that come from?

J: Yeah, where does it come from? There’s that one line from “Captain, Where Are We Going Now? [ed. – links to a Jason-hosted real-audio file]” – that is what you’re talking about.

But I’m wondering where – you hear some echo of that in almost everything since then?

M: Sure. “Follow the Carrot”; the “Webley of Destruction” incident…

[ed. These are references to some performance themes Jason has played with – one in which audiences were incited to “Follow the Carrot” and at the same time mocked for engaging in herd behavior; and another incident in which after a show Jason pulled a toy gun out of his pocket in a park after leading his audience from a show down the street. The gun was not obviously a toy; that is, it was not bright orange or of outlandish design. As he began to proceed with his performance involving the toy, the police showed up, thankfully not seeing the gun but consternating not a few of the people in the park.]

J: That wasn’t my [book? Gun? Inaudible]

M: There’s a desire to sort of engage the audience into this kind of call-and-response behavior at the same time as –

J: – making them –

M: – to present a critique of it. There’s like, a tension between the two things. I mean, it seems to me to be a really consistent theme in your work.

J: Yeah, yeah. I guess I want to have the cake and eat it too. I want to –

M: – the carrot cake.

[both laugh]

J: I don’t know. It could be my big flaw. [tape flaw] being this character, being this super thing and like spending all this energy trying to make that thing be really important and integral and necessary to people’s lives and appreciated and loved – and then to say – you don’t need that. You don’t need that thing. At the same time, that’s kind of it. It’s sort of like. . .

[tape flaw]

That’s all I have to say about that. It’s true, I think a lot about it.

M: Do you fret about it? Like, do you worry about it like a contradictory thing?

J: Not really. Oh I don’t think it’s contradictory at all. I mean it feels contradictory when you talk about it – in application, it’s easy. It’s exactly what it is. It’s beautiful. I mean I hope that people feel that way about it.

I don’t feel any kind of contradiction – heh – [grinning] in teaching people how to sing songs about not singing along.

M: Here’s another thing, this is kind of a less aesthetically unfocused question. I’ve seen you, at shows, engage with the street performer instructional mode, where you like, you know, tell the audience to do certain things, the audience immediately picks it up, gets it, and takes it someplace the audience is going to take it, you know, creates spontaneously based on your suggestion.

More than once, when I’ve seen you playing especially with new musicians, people you haven’t done a show with before, when you do that, and the audience not only takes your suggestion but expands on it, the people on stage, you can see them react: “Oh my god, how did he do that?”

I mean, I kind of feel that way sometimes as an audience member. I’m like “How did that happen exactly?”

There’s this very economic kind of presentation of the information to the audience and the audience is completely willing to follow your suggestion.

I’m curious about the relationship of that and performance – theatrical performance – to the experience of learning or developing or hearing about those techniques in the context of street performing. Did you learn how to do it in street performing?

J: I don’t know. What you’re talking about is interesting, but that actual question is not. I mean, you’re “where did I learn these things?”

I’m interested in the phenomenon. What happens there. I mean, “Why is it that this small miracle happens?”

Actually I’m not that interested in the why. I’m interested in that it happens. That’s wonderful that that’s what you see. Often from where I’m standing, it’s actually hard for me to see. But it is something that makes me really happy.

[tape flaw]

What it shows is, it shows some kind of trust. There’s some sort of trust happening.

[tape flaw]

To follow – it’s dangerous.
I mean that’s my whole, where the whole game comes in – I mean our whole country just followed along on some… [inaudible]

[tape flaw]

and when is that good and when is that EVIL! And it’s not always so binary.

So if, um, you can acknowledge that, acknowledge that whole leader-follower thing to some extent, look at it a little bit, and with that consciousness then still go into a situation together, it’s beautiful and it shows some kind of trust.

[Jason and I talked for another two or three hours. I have another ninety minutes of tape which I have yet to transcribe. Hopefully I will be able to place a piece deriving from the interview in a print publication in the fall, as Jason returns to Seattle. The balance of the interview will be published here as a transcript once any articles deriving from it see print.]

This is the third of four initial parts of a long Jason Webley interview conducted by Mike Whybark in spring, 2003.

The first part mostly discussed Jason’s plans for the upcoming July 20 Monsters of Accordion show and tour; the second followed that up and veered into some technical minutia about microphones. In this section, we examine busking for a moment or two.

M: [eating] Pretty good chow.

J: So are you going to ask me any more questions?

M: Yeah, definitely.

J: Or did I not answer some questions?

M: No, you’ve been pretty good, actually. I mean I kind of had to chase you around the table on that one, but…

J: That wasn’t one of your questions. I mean that you have written down. That was me stupidly going off into giving you information that I didn’t want you to ask me about.

M: Part of the joy of the interview. So some of the stuff is gonna be, like, you know, you already know it; part of the reason is to get it in the context of the interview. So how old are you?

J: You know, I don’t think that appears in print anywhere. [pause]

M: So how old are you?

J: Uh. Twenty… well, actually, I haven’t even been born yet. Incredibly young.

[ed. Jason is probably referring to the fact that his annual birthday show has yet to occur at the time we were talking.]

M: Incredibly young. So how old were you when you actually, uh, embarked on the uh,

J: [interrupting] Ninety-eight.

[ed. Understood to mean 1998, at the time, by Mike.]

M: That was right after – not right after, but shortly after you’d finished college at UW, is that correct?

J: That was after – at some point after I had finished college. [pause] More than a year.

M: Did you play out in Red Square while you were attending college?

J: [vehemently] Never. Never. Never would have even remotely dreamed of doing that. [Laughs]

M: I think you were living in Wallingford – convenient to campus after you were done with school for a while. Is that when you started busking on the Ave, regular, like Red Square and the Ave and stuff?

J: Yeah yeah yeah. That was the first – it’s funny, I think in a lot of people’s brains, a lot of people remember that as this being this huge period of time. But for me it feels like it was really brief.

I came back, I traveled that summer after I had put out Viaje a bit. And then I got back. I slo-o-owly got up the courage to go out on the street and play. I think I played for an hour or so at Bumbershoot that year. I remember going to class – to University of Washington class – to the first day of classes. Playing in Red Square. That was the first time. And it went horribly.

I remember playing in front of the U Bookstore and it going horribly.

I remember though at some point that winter – I’d go out and I’d occasionally and take a stab at it. Playing – I played like one song, and I think I sold like five CDs. They were five dollars each And I played one song and made like twenty-five dollars. And it was this sort of revolutionary, like “wow”, you could actually make a living doing this.

Seemed pretty incredible at the time. Now it’s just [inaudible].

But that was pretty much all that year. But since then I’ve really only played, as far as street performing goes, I’ve really only done Bumbershoot and Folklife. I don’t think I’ve been down to the Pike Place Market, since back then except for maybe like you know one time.

M: So how like long a period of time was busking sort of like your primary venue for what you were doing with music? Eighteen months, a year. . .

J: About a year. I guess from when Viaje came out until… well it depends, I did busking after that but it was at festivals, which feels really different. That next summer was when I did Folklife and then I went on tour and I did all the Canadian fringe theater festivals. Then I recorded Against the Night, then that winter went to Australia and did this other festival there, and then I came back and did the Canadian fringe festivals again…

And so I guess I occasionally show up – like at the UW campus is the one I’ve occasionally done since – I don’t think I did it last year at all.

M: I guess the reason I’m curious about that busking stuff, is because of the way that like audience – inclusion and guidance, I guess – is such an important part of your performance style. I mean I always just assumed that you sort of learned those performance tactics as a means of – I don’t know – improving the ambience of the street performance.

Obviously that’s a really tough school. You have a real clear metering system in place for how well you’re doing. I mean either they’re putting money into the case and listening to what you’re doing or they’re not.

J: Mmmh… Well, the better measure is whether they’re actually engaging and having fun. The money, well, that’s kind of irrelevant. I mean it depends on what kind of street performing you’re doing, what your game is. I mean I judge everything by like, “will something extraordinary happen?”

I mean, not judge, but, I’m trying to create environments for something extraordinary to happen, regardless of where I am. And I still do street-performance-like situations, like at festivals and stuff.

But I’m not likely to just go blindly out on the Ave hoping for a miracle anymore.

I don’t know – they feel really different to me, the two different things and I guess that things carry over from one to the other. I don’t have a lot of flexibility on the street. I developed certain tricks that I developed over that first year and a half and they got to a certain point and they are just there. That’s how they are. New ideas come really slowly.

Whereas in a theater situation, I can have a whole show that feels to me like a lot of new ideas, you know, several hours of new ideas, a couple times a year.

The street performing doesn’t feel like it evolves much. That used to always annoy me about street performers – watching friends that were street performers, you know, they had their banter, they’d do their thing like twenty times a day, and be word for word verbatim exactly the same…

It used to really annoy me. I used to really dread that, and not want that to happen to me. And it’s happened as far as street performing. I’ve got my thing that works, even though for years I’d try to always shake it up, do different things.

Now when I do that, I’ve got this very concise thing – basically only three songs – I play ’em over and over and over again. Because it works. It’s sort of a framework that can, sometimes cause something extraordinary to happen.

M: Which three songs?

J: Old Man Time, Last Song, Drinking Song, and sometimes that damn Aardvark thing.