What Are The Odds

A couple years ago someone at Fictionaut interviewed me about my lit & arts quarterly Ramshackle Review. One of her questions was what’s the best concert you’ve ever seen? That's easy: Ted Nugent and Van Halen, Binghamton, New York, 1978. We went to see Ted, and Van Halen opened.  Their first record hadn’t broken on the east coast yet, none of us knew who they were, and they blew the roof off the Broome County Arena. Within a few months, every kid with a guitar was trying to learn Eddie Van Halen's groundbreaking Eruption licks, and the rest is rock and roll history.  
 
A few weeks ago I got an email from Greg Renoff, a writer who’s working on a book about Van Halen’s early years. He asked for any info I could provide on that Binghamton show, and said that it seems a lost date of sorts. He’d found only two online mentions: My Fictionaut interview; and a cached copy of a defunct myspace page, with this photo.

Long story short: The guy in the lower left corner, striped longsleeve tee, black headband, fist pump? 
‒ Yeah.  That’s me. 

They make you wonder, these kinds of improbable, seemingly random connections.  Not so much how they happen as why.  Probably no reason; probably their only worth is the wondering, the simple joy of their weirdness.  But even in this age of internet connectedness we couldn’t have imagined in 1978, you have to shake your head, and laugh, and say what are the odds of that.

Van Halen live in Fresno, January 1978.

Keep Getting Weirder

Pictured Within

Deep Purple, from In Concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, 1999. Vocal by Miller Anderson.

The DVD is available for streaming on Netflix.

Randy Rhoads

Randy would have been 55 yesterday.  Awhile after he was killed I stuck a note up over my desk: RANDY RHOADS WAS 24. DO IT NOW.  I was wrong about his age (he was 25), and it hadn’t occurred to me that the note would frighten people. I tried to explain:  I wasn’t suicidal.  Been there, done that.  I put the note up to remind myself to stop wasting time, to work harder at the things I wanted to learn and accomplish. I don’t remember when I took it down.

Angie and Twitch

The girl singer Angie was hot. She was maybe twenty-five and ignored the crew or tried to. More on this later. The guy singer was older. It wasn’t like we were knowledgeable fans of the Sammy Kaye Orchestra but you figured he’d been with them awhile. Maybe when Sammy was still alive. The guy singer wasn’t badlooking but he had a bad eyetic. It scrunched up the whole left side of his face in a big exaggerated wink. It fucked with his phrasing. I didn’t know his name. We called him Twitch.

Django

A great time last night catching up with our friends Phil McCray & Jean Callahan at Loudeac Tile Studio in Newfield- And when we got home, we found this tucked in the backseat of the car. So cool. Thanks, Phil!

Preston Reed

Rolling & Tumbling

Robert Plant from a 2007 Rolling Stone interview, on Led Zeppelin's film The Song Remains The Same:

I didn't know it was posing. It's only now with an older head, I go, "Oh, God, did that actually work?" But of course it worked. It was as genuine as the day is long. I didn't preen in front of a mirror. My mother said, "You shouldn't pout, it looks stupid." But I pouted because I wanted to be like, "Come on!" I wanted to be Steve Marriott, for fuck's sake. But in that environment, I was way past all that. I was part of some kind of new animal that included everything you see in that film. And I can't get embarrassed by it. At that point, in the film, I was yet to be twenty-five years old. And the group was dead when I was thirty-two. How can any of us have any critical overview about what we do? We were just on fire, rolling and tumbling — and most of the time, incredibly civil to each other.

Led Zeppelin's 02 Arena show was of course pro-shot and recorded but Jimmy Page seems in no hurry about an official release. In the meantime Wendy Records 2cd boot is the best I've heard.

The Architecture Of Dream

Another unearthed scan of nearly forgotten older work. Haven't turned up any accompanying documentation, but I likely made this drawing in 2000 or 2001; media was ink and graphite.

Listening to: Syracuse's Ledyard, Sky Burns Red.

Johnette Napolitano

An acoustic version of Concrete Blonde's Jenny I Read, from 2008.

Two More From The 'Tage

Sometimes when I haven't listened to these guys for awhile, I forget just how good Savatage was. The Gutter Ballet video, from 1989.



The Somewhere In Time/Believe medley from the Criss Oliva Memorial Concert, with Jon Oliva on vocals.

Remembering Criss Oliva

Edge Of Thorns
Ink, Graphite; 6" x 3 1/2"

Looking this morning through files of older work, I found this drawing, inspired by and in tribute to Savatage guitarist Criss Oliva. For those not familiar with his playing, here're a couple tastes.

Armageddon Monks

For us, the highlight of September’s Porchfest, an eclectic afternoon of music played on porches throughout Ithaca’s Fall Creek neighborhood, was an acoustic set by Armageddon Monks. First time we’d heard them play, but it won’t be the last. Their self-titled 2007 CD Armageddon Monks, a collection of new recordings of the band’s favorite tracks from earlier releases, is available on their website, at Amazon.com, and other online retailers; each track is also available as a 99¢ MP3 download.

Their website characterizes their sound as metal-influenced rock, blending oldschool metal influences with modern rock melodies and structures–Not always an easy mix, but these guys make it all work, and seamlessly.

Armageddon Monks is a kickass CD–Well-written songs, great performances and production, no filler here. Personal recommends if you’re previewing online: Lines, Long Way Down, Where We Lie, Get Your Fill, Come Inside, No Day Like Tomorrow. Check out the samples, and download City Limits, an EP of five demo tracks for an upcoming CD–It’s available as a free download here.

Links:
http://www.armageddonmonks.com
www.myspace.com/amonks
City Limits EP

Small Steps

If someone unfamiliar with any of my work were to view an unidentified selection of my drawings from ten years ago, or five, when I was working primarily in ink and graphite, then view a selection of recent pieces, say from the last year or two- Would they sense or imagine or expect them all to be the work of the same artist? I wonder.

If not, well, that’s probably a good thing. Considerations of marketability aside, if my work isn’t continuing to evolve in a way that’s perceptible in the finished pieces, then I probably haven’t learned or grown much in their doing.

I wish sometimes that the differences between a new piece and the last were more obvious, more radical, that the growth represented were greater. For me, growth has never seemed about big leaps, but a series of small steps. Like most aspects of personal artmaking, it’s hard to be objective about that; maybe I’m just too impatient, and not giving myself enough credit.

Dissatisfaction, though, is a good thing. I’m always trying to narrow that gap between what I want to achieve, and what I can. And as long as I’m continuing to move forward, small steps are okay too.

Keith Jarrett, interviewed by Ted Rosenthal for Piano and Keyboard, 1996

James Skvarch

James Skvarch, Going Over the Sketches for the Last of the Big Paintings
Etching, 18" x 24", 1989

I first saw James Skvarch’s work nearly twenty years ago at an arts festival in Ithaca, New York. The Commons were crazy that weekend, James Skvarch’s booth was busy, and I didn’t stick around to tell him how much I liked his work. I should have grabbed a card; I probably thought I’d remember his name. Or if not, I’d run into him again at another show, another year. But I didn’t.

Years later, when finding an artist’s work became simply a matter of Googling their name or a work’s title, one day I thought, Hey, what about that guy we saw that year at the Ithacafest? I remembered, I was sure, at least one title–Well, as it turned out, not exactly. So Google couldn’t help either.

It’s hard to reach back now, recapture much of my initial impression of James Skvarch’s work. Memory-postcards of that day have browned to sepia, corners curled up the way they do; detail is lost in the creases, bleached away in the faded sunlight of that long-gone summer afternoon. Mostly, I remember thinking that those drawings (I’d find I'd gotten that wrong too; they were etchings) felt like illustrations for John Crowley’s Little, Big.

That much, at least, I got right.

Then in January 2007, on Charley Parker’s blog Lines and Colors, this post on James Skvarch. And in his site’s Archives, the image I’d remembered, Going Over the Sketches for the Last of the Big Paintings.

James Skvarch's work is imaginative, inspiring. His etchings and paintings have a timelessness about them, a wonderful sense of mystery and distance and intimacy and endless beckoning possibility, all at once. All qualities, of course, that I admire, and hope remain at the heart of my own work.

James Skvarch on Lines and Colors
James Skvarch’s website

Reading: John Crowley’s Love and Sleep. New trade paperback reissue of the Aegypt Cycle from Small Beer Press

Now Playing: Jay Calder’s The Second Quadrant. Stellar acoustic guitar from the cd Breakfast With Barnabas