In the sewers of Fred Friction's veins, there, a rat

Should you ever have the need to sing about a rat in the sewers of your veins nibbling at the hanging tree in you, or of a charred corpse in your cellar, call Fred Friction.

That's what I did.

I was scoring Blind Cat Black, a masterpiece of Turkish surrealism, with my friend Matt Fuller. It's a book-length prose poetic sequence by Ece Ayhan, translated into English by Murat Nemet-Nejat (a Turkish Jew who lives in Hoboken and sells antique Oriental rugs to support his poetry habit).

And we came across this amazing piece of language! Check it out!

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The Secret Jew

Lidless, one of the devils, he is pulling out with my streetcar money. From time to time, going downtown like this, I feel sad and shaky. In the hotel I sleep in his (my Corpse's) bed. When his hair keeps growing jet black like that what is it that my live body begrudges and I try to give to him. With my large beefy hands. A sharp spur. Odor of sulphur. A scarred copper-branded ass. In the sewers of my veins, there, a rat. It nibbles at the town and the hanging tree in me. Crazies, rats, male rats, share (you must share, children) a charred corpse. In the cellar. There were no little words of loving him, these keys on his belt (warden, lover!) couldn't be little cooing words of loving him. I ran away, scared, not to meet the porcelain doll. To meet him. That would be my going back to the Lexicon of Torture. The widow plant of the idiot forests eating up joy, the poppy hatred of seven years, the silk hand with cowhide gloves doling out inheritance. He doesn't want to be buried, he says. He is cold. On the back platform of the streetcar the young devil on fire disappearing. I am picking out my spectacles from the swamps of my envy. After the arsonist’s fire the brother of my Ex-Mistress (my Corpse) who disappeared. He can be recognized by the delicate insect-eyed family mask covering his coarse face. That guy. Why should I sob anyway. He loves easily, passes his hand below the belt of my vault, forgets easily what a secret Jew I am.

*

We already had the crusty old Ozark Merchant Marine Pops Farrar reading this entire piece live, backed by improvising musicians playing homemade instruments on an abandoned hippie commune in central Tennessee.

And, just like I always say, "Class, it's good when you can get the father of an important indie rock musician with an Ozark drawl, reading Turkish surrealist poetry backed by improvising musicians playing homemade instruments on an abandoned hippie commune in central Tennessee."

But sometimes that's just not good enough! Sometimes, you need more!

See, we have this rule we set for ourselves in scoring long poems. You have to score every word of the poem in the order it appears. But, once you have scored a longer stretch of the poem, you can backtrack along the way and picked up choice bits you have already scored and do something else with it.

How is this for a choice bit?

In the sewers of my veins,

there, a rat.

It nibbles at the town

and the hanging tree in me.

Crazies, rats,

male rats, share

(you must share,

children) a charred corpse.

In the cellar

Yeah! What do you want to do with that? Say, score it as sung text over a twangy guitar figure, and have Fred Friction sing it? Yeah!

So, we did that.

Twangy guitar figure by Matt Fuller, recorded in his sister's garage in Hollywood, sent to me on a guitar tape, set to melody by me in the car somewhere. Singing by Fred and me recorded by Meghan Gohil in the Senate Building in St. Louis, just off Forest Park. Drums, bass, and swirly keyboards added at Lij's Toy Box in Nashville, years later.

Then I went and made a movie to the score, and Kevin Belford made a seriously trippy video miniature to this piece.

Free mp3s for the people:

* "The Secret Jew"
Lyrics by Ece Ayhan and Murat Nemet-Nejat

Music by Flatrock

Performed by Pops Farrar and Flatrock

* "In the Sewers of my Veins"
Lyrics by Ece Ayhan and Murat Nemet-Nejat

Music by Matt Fuller and Chris King
Performed by Fred Friction with Three Fried Men

*

To commemorate the release of the new Fred Friction debut solo record Jesus Drank Wine, I'm doing a little series of posts devoted to Fred's contributions to Poetry Scores. Also in this series:
Fred Friction sings "Cheyenne" w/ Three Fried Men
Fred Friction and Pops Farrar on backing vocals
Fred Friction, spoonsman, in a jailhouse ensemble

"Epitafio": Fred Friction's fate in Spanish

*

Sewer shot from the journal of a trip to Mumbai.

"Epitafio": Fred Friction's fate in Spanish

Fred Friction wrote me a letter years ago in which he mentioned that he had spent the previous evening "in a roomful of Spaniards and a guitar with a broken string."

The line stays with me, though I've lost the letter and forgotten the occasion for his sending it. Maybe that line is why I thought of Fred when Matt Fuller and I were scoring Blind Cat Black and we needed a singer for a strutting guitar song in which someone's fate is "in Spanish."

The strutting guitar figure originated with Matt, worked out in his sister's garage in Hollywood. The words are by the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, translated into English by Murat Nemet-Nejat, a Turkish Jew who lives in Hoboken and sells antique Oriental rugs to support his poetry habit.

The piece we wanted Fred to sing is called "Epitafio"; it's the second piece in the prose poetic sequence that is Blind Cat Black.

*

Epitafio


They came drowned in the afternoon to the blue house on the wharf of brown broadcloth cafes. Her fate was in Spanish.

They are bending their heads again, for their sister, as in the morning. She promised. She will comb their hair and part it in the middle. The deadtangle.

And it is calling them, screaming, screaming, from an alley of card players, a children's game with thousands. The jack is up.

They see it and how they laugh with their enduring chuckles. But they can't join the game. What can one do? Their bundles are being wrapped. They are in a hurry. Rotten ...

Will she appear again before them, the fat woman who wants the hooks and eyes of her winter coat to be clasped, and their sister, also, on the mossy rocky road to Africa?

*

I liked Matt's sketch on the guitar tape he had mailed me from Los Angeles so much that we used it on the score. Meghan Gohil transferred the guitar track from Matt's cassette into a digital format and we had Fred over for a memorable session in the Senate Building in St. Louis, just north of Forest Park on Union, where Meghan was living at the time (he has since ended up in Hollywood, too).

Fred followed the melody I had written for the song, but paced his vocal differently. It took him a little more time to get through the lyric and he couldn't quite squeeze in the final line of the poem - "Will she appear again before them, the fat woman who wants the hooks and eyes of her winter coat to be clasped, and their sister, also, on the mossy rocky road to Africa?" So our song "Epitafio" trails away on the line "Will she appear again ...?" which I thought was effective.

Since the rules we set for ourselves in scoring poems requires that all of the words be used, in the order they appear, I set the rest of that line to music myself, and we recorded that as the next song in the score, "The Fat Woman".

To finish "Epitafio," we later added Matt on drums, Lij on bass, and the angelic Heidi Dean on backing vocals at Lij's home studio in Nashville. When all of these other elements had the effect of drowning out Matt's original guitar part, we had him layer another guitar track over it, with more distortion. That was the last thing we recorded, in Meghan's studio in Hollywood, which means this track began and ended with Matt laying down the same guitar part in Hollywood, nearly a decade apart, and Meghan recorded sessions in two different states for one two-minute song!

Free mp3s for ya ...

* "Epitafio"
Lyrics by Ece Ayhan and Murat Nemet-Nejat

Music by Matt Fuller and Chris King

Performed by Fred Friction with Three Fried Men

* "The Fat Woman"

Lyrics by Ece Ayhan and Murat Nemet-Nejat
Music by Chris King
Performed by Three Fried Men

* We also have a rough cut of the corresponding scene from the movie posted up on YouTube. It's crying out for color correction, but there it is.

The Blind Cat Black CD is still in print and available in various independent shops in St. Louis and through us directly.

The photo is by Mathew Pitzer and was taken during the filming of the movie to Blind Cat Black at CBGB, which we conceived of us "the blue house on the wharf of brown broadcloth cafes."

*

To commemorate the release of the new Fred Friction debut solo record Jesus Drank Wine, I'm doing a little series of posts devoted to Fred's contributions to Poetry Scores. Also in this series:

Fred Friction sings "Cheyenne" w/ Three Fried Men
Fred Friction and Pops Farrar on backing vocals
Fred Friction, spoonsman, in a jailhouse ensemble

Fred Friction, spoonsman, in a jailhouse ensemble

This is a pair of spoons that actually has been played by the great St. Louis spoonsman, raconteur, drummer, and songwriter, Fred Friction. I acquired them one late late night (early early morning) in the kitchen of his former home, adjacent to the former Frederick's Music Lounge, as folks were passing the guitar and telling tales.

When I told Fred I wanted a pair of spoons he had played, he got this pair out of his silverware drawer and gave them to me. When I asked how he could be sure he had played them before, he said, "Give them here" and proceeded to play them for awhile against his spindly leg, before returning them to me.

I would like to think the autrographed diagram of how to play the instrument dates back to one of Fred's epochal "Night of a Thousand Spoons" events in the old Cicero's Basement Bar, and The Skuntry Museum does possess one ticket stub from one of those shows I attended, but those nights were drenched in Jagermeister shots and memory no longer serves.

The white substance on the one spoon, by the way, is baking powder. I thought it would be good juju to use one of Fred's instruments as the prop junky spoon when we were making the film Blind Cat Black, based on the poetry score to Ece Ayhan's classic of Turkish surrealism, which has a junky transvestite streetwalker (played by local hip-hop diva Toyy) at its heart.

Anyone who knows Fred's ouvre as a songwriter will appreciate how very at home one of his spoons must have been in the filming of scenes from the life of a junky transvestite streetwalker!

I can't be certain that these are the spoons Fred performed on the score that Lij and I produced for Crossing America by Leo Connellan, though it's possible. Fred brought his own spoons to the session (at Pops Farrar's house, on the outskirts of Belleville, Illinois) and took them back home with him. They may have passed in and out of his silverware drawer over the years until finally passing into The Skuntry Museum collection that early early morning in his kitchen.

Lij and I heard Fred's spoons clacking away on part of the score that deals with the poet's petty jailhouse days in Colorado towns.

XXI

Friday night in Colorado towns
helping the sheriff make his count,
he’d work with you all week if you
helped him look ridding the community
of vagrancy and bums when the good
working voters came out to drink
and spend their futility on
draining beers and didn’t want
to stagger against indigents.
So into a cell with the door left
wide open unlocked, as long as
they were off the street, out
of the way provided with cigars
and cards and a chance to read
the paper, rest up for your time
on the town, when Monday morning
came again and none of the
sheriff’s men would do a thing
about your bumming people on
the street, no matter how many
complained, nor would the
sheriff’s deputies do a thing
about your even falling down
drunk of heat any other day
of the week, as long as you didn’t
fall head first through any windows
or knife anyone or do anything
you shouldn’t.

Our work on the score started with recording the poet Leo Connellan reading the entire poem in the basement of Curbstone Press, one of his last publishers, in funky Willimantic, Connecticut. Leo's reading of this section of the poem is one of his more wryly comic performances. I can hear in his voice all of the hard wisdom of the downbeat straggler who knows that cops and street criminals collaborate on the terms of the games they play far more than "the good working voters" would ever guess.

One of our motives in scoring Crossing America was to incorporate fragments of as many forms of American music as possible. For this piece, I came up with a singsongy melody built around the phrase (which would provide the song's title) "Ridding the Community of Vagrancy". The intent was to arrange the piece for a barbershop quartet, and I even made an overture to a local quartet, but in the end we did it ourselves: Lij, Matt Fuller, and myself, with Pops Farrar bopping along with a bass chorus of "bums! bums! bums! bums!"

Fred added his signature spoons to the stew, with Matt adding additional percussion intended to sound like something you might find to beat on in a jail cell, like steel bars, for instance. Lij's harmonica line completes an ensemble of bums you could imagine making do over the weekend in a jail cell "with the door left wide open unlocked," riffraff kept "off the street, out of the way, provided with cigars and cards and a chance to read the paper" and to make a little jailhouse music with their mouths, spoons from the evening mess, and a harmonica produced from a grubby pocket.

To commemorate the release of the new Fred Friction debut solo record Jesus Drank Wine, I'm doing a little series of posts devoted to Fred's contributions to Poetry Scores. Also in this series:

Fred Friction sings "Cheyenne" w/ Three Fried Men
Fred Friction and Pops Farrar on backing vocals

The Crossing America CD is still in print and available in various independent shops in St. Louis and through us directly, though all of the posts in this series have links to free mp3 downloads of a part of the poem and the accompanying movement of the score.

Fred Friction and Pops Farrar on backing vocals

To commemorate the release of the new Fred Friction debut solo record Jesus Drank Wine, I'm doing a little series of posts devoted to Fred's contributions to Poetry Scores.

Fred's is one of many voices in the rabble of a choir doing background vocals to "The Apple Country" on Crossing America by Leo Connellan. Here is the section of Leo's poem we scored:

XX

The apple country when

Sunday smelled of our taste buds,

our loneliness rattled in freight

eluding irises of law men, north

to apple picking and then to pick vines.

There is nothing so wrong as steel bars

on wide open land like daggers in

innocence, a life of jails, camaraderie

with sheriffs tolerantly turning the key

on our weekends because we were not

prison time, but to be yanked out of sight

once our power was in tavern cash registers

and out anguish blew up in the drink.

Staggering behind Sally Tambourines

down your main street. All you saw

was your flag, never the wrecks of men

who were broken in your service or

shook Mamma loose, scattered in

Father dictum “if you do this

you are on your own.”

Now, here is the poet Leo Connellan reading it (recorded in the basement of Curbstone Press, one of his last publishers, in funky Willimantic, Connecticut).

And here is our musical response to this part of the poem, "The Apple Country." I'll have to admit it's not the most amazing stand-alone piece of music we have ever made, but it provides a nice departure in the middle of the long journey of the score, and I like that we arranged it as a worksong to fit the subject matter of seasonal, migrant labor. Call it imitative form, if you will.

There also is quite a bit of music history packed into this tiny snippet of sound. Banging on the piano (with chains draped across the strings) and leading the worksong is jump blues legend Rosco Gordon, the progenitor of ska and reggae. Rosco grew up outside of Memphis and did farm work as a young man, learning and singing the field hollers that formed one of the raw ingredients of the blues - which is why I asked him to sing this piece.

He did it as a favor, but he made a face when I mentioned his past life experiences that made me think of him in this context. I think of field hollers and worksongs in terms of musicology and folklore. This stuff reminded Rosco of racism, long days, backbreaking labor and, ultimately, slavery.

Lij and I recorded Rosco singing and banging the piano in the apartment of Lij's brother, the jazz pianist Nate Shaw, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (just then enjoying the beginning of its hipster revival). We recorded the rabble of a background chorus in Pops Farrar's house on the outskirts of Belleville, Illinois, and Pops' old sad sailor voice is in there somewhere, along with Fred, Lij, Matt Fuller, and myself.

It's a small category of people who fully appreciate Rosco Gordon, Pops Farrar, and Fred Friction - all three of them - but those of us in that tiny category have to cherish this ungainly little piece of music.

If you also have heard and dig the call-and-response singing of the pygmies of the Congo rainforest, as Lij and I have and do, then you may also discern a thoroughly unexpected and unintended parallel in the way our voices come unglued at the end of "The Apple Country." Pops called his spread The Belleville Rainforest, so you could call our chorus The Pygmies of the Belleville Rainforest - and drunken pygmies, at that.

The Crossing America CD is still in print and available in various independent shops in St. Louis and through us directly.

The image of Fred has me in the background. We are in the old Cicero's Basement Bar, preparing for the first-ever Three Fried Men gig, which featured Fred on spoons (you can see the set list in my hand if you double-click on the image to enlarge it). My Polaroid of Pops and Lij was taken during the multi-day session when we tracked these backing vocals and, in fact, finished Crossing America.

*

Also in this series:
Fred Friction sings "Cheyenne" w/ Three Fried Men

Fred Friction sings "Cheyenne" w/ Three Fried Men

I have been spending some time enthusing on my Confluence City blog about the new Fred Friction debut solo record Jesus Drank Wine, which I consider essential listening, particularly for anyone who ever washed up in this old river down.

The instinct to spread the word about great art made by an old friend gives me the excuse to devote a little series of posts to Fred's contributions to Poetry Scores. He goes back to the beginning with us. He was a sideman with the band Enormous Richard that turned into the band Eleanor Roosevelt that turned into the field recording project Hoobellatoo that turned into the arts org Poetry Scores. He showed interest in our field recording subjects, especially Pops Farrar, and he has sung on two of our poetry scores, including the first one, Crossing America by Leo Connellan.

Our double-Grammy-nominated in-house producer Adam Long was still working out of Clayton Studios (where he did Nelly's first recordings with the St. Lunatics) when we were adding the finishing touches to Crossing America. Lij and I coproduced that score, and from our earliest notes on what to do with the poem, we knew we wanted to arrange a couple of the more scrappy bits for country-inflected band songs and recruit some great, growly voices to sing them. We set our sights high, at Fred Friction and Brian Hennemann (who was, at the time, just putting together The Bottle Rockets) - and we got them both.

Adam and I tracked Fred and Brian on the same night - a late night, done afterhours, off the clock (we have never had money to pay for anything). Brian was pretty calm, as usual, no work whatsoever, but Fred was kind of high-maintenance that night. He arrived drunk, promptly put out a cigarette butt on his tongue, barfed in the men's room, and then continued drinking - all before we could get him in the vocal booth for his take. Which he nailed.

I'll give it to you three ways. First, the part of the poem in question:

*

XIII

Now, outside that bus station was Cheyenne, see,

but I didn’t go look. I was young and I’d be

back! What could it be but a city with buildings,

because I was on my way to the Dakotas, where I

never got, and the thing that hurts later is that

I was right there in Cheyenne and didn’t stay

awhile and look around. I never got back there.

The bus we rode into Wyoming that time

when I was young pulled in to the run down part

of town. Even the idea of days-old cellophane

wrapped sandwiches for sale in the dirty old

bus station of cows, revolted us. Somebody hanging

around the station, gawky with a blank face, said

that across the street from the station you could

get a real good steak. I really didn’t believe it,

the place looked gray, but it was one of the best

steaks I ever ate anywhere, right across from the

old Cheyenne, Wyoming bus station.

*

Now, the poet Leo Connellan reading it (in the basement of Curbstone Press, one of his last publishers, in funky Willimantic, Connecticut.

And finally, the moment we have all been waiting for, Fred Friction singing the passage scored as the song "Cheyenne," backed by Three Fried Men (Matt Fuller, drums; Chris King, acoustic guitar; Dave Melson, bass; Steve Rauner, slide guitar; Seth Timbs, piano).

Steve was on loan from Nadine and Seth from Fluid Ounces. We tracked the band and Steve in the old Undertow studio in Downtown St. Louis, and Seth at home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. We crossed America to record Crossing America!

After the session at Clayton Studios, I remember driving Fred home to somewhere in South St. Louis, near some gigantic cemetery, still drinking (both of us) in the early morning light.

The Crossing America CD is still in print and available in various independent shops in St. Louis and through us directly.

**

Image is of Fred Friction playing spoons onstage with Enormous Richard at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago the night that Operation Desert Storm broke out (January 16, 1991).

Robert Goetz scores Les Murray (x2)

People who wrote songs in collaboration with others, especially long-distance, before the advent of digital recording technology and file-sharing media have memories like mine.

It started with leaving melodies on the answering machines of bandmates. It then progressed through (my favorite phase) receiving guitar tapes in the mail and driving around for months inventing melodies and attaching scraps of lyrics to them. I'm still up for that experience, any time anybody wants to send me a guitar tape, though this blog thing is proving to be a great workshop tool.

Today (Merry Christmas 2008!) I am posting up two songs that are finished and were not written in collaboration. Robert Goetz wrote these on his own when we first started scoring Les Murray's great poem The Sydney Highrise Variations. My gut feeling is that they are done, in their stark simplicity, and will provide two quiet centers to the score. We'll see.

I am posting the recordings here because I can (Goetz showed me my new best friend Box.net), and because Robert and I have assembled a new working group of Three Fried Men that also includes Dave Melson, Tim McAvin and Anne Tkach. Whether or not they add touches to these recordings, they'll need to learn them so we can perform them. And now here they are to be learned! We plan, for the first time, to have a working band that performs songs from the poetry score at gigs, which seems to lead, logically, to including a live set at the CD release party and art invitational next fall (which is about to become this fall; yeek).

I am including the fragments of the poem that Robert scored so you can appreciate his artistry in getting some dense and tricky language to fit a melody simple enough to remember and hum. Achieving that feat is one of my favorite things about scoring a poem. I was ecstatic to get these recordings from Robert and am excited to share them now, even out of context. (The titles are hot links to mp3s.)

The starving spirit is fed upon the heart

(Lyrics by Les Murray, music by Robert Goetz)

clearing bombsites for them. They rose like nouveaux accents
and stilled, for a time, the city's conversation.

Their arrival paralleled
the rise of the Consumers
gazing through themselves
at iconoclasms, wines,
Danish Modern ethics.

Little we could love expanded to fill the spaces
of high glazed prosperity. An extensive city
that had long contained the dimensions of heaven and hell
couldn't manage total awe at the buildings of the Joneses.

Their reign coincided
with an updraft of Ideology,
that mood in which the starving
spirit is fed upon the heart.


*

In the age of piety

(Lyrics by Les Murray, music by Robert Goetz)

It rose out of the Nineteenth, steam pouring from venturi
and every man turning hay with a wooden fork
in the Age of Piety (A.D. or B.C.) wants one
in his nation's airline. And his children dream of living
in a palace of packing crates beside the cargo terminal:
No one will see! Everything will be surprises!

*

I snapped Goetz admiring wine, iconocalsms, Danish Modern ethics and Michael Lynch's illustrated guitar.

Rough "Sydney Highrise" sketches w/o Matt Fuller

On Monday the Three Fried Men working group in St. Louis that is tending to the poetry score for The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray welcomed into the fold two musicians: Anne Tkach on drums and Tim McAvin on lead guitar and vocals (and, eventually, organ).

Anne was seen as the major coup. Not so much because I've been playing music with Tim as long as I have been playing music (literally; that's another story), but because the drum chair is so very hard to fill.

My principal songwriting partner, Matt Fuller, is a drummer, and a very good one, so I am hard to please on drums. Matt lives in Los Angeles, so we have no choice but to find a local option if we want a local working group. The original Three Fried Men used the great jazz drummer Billy Teague, but Billy moved to Tennessee.

When I moved back home to St. Louis from New York, I started a new version of the band for one reason only - I saw my old friend Hunter Brumfield jump up onstage at a Nadine reunion show (where the drummer was late) and play perfectly tasteful rock drums, much to my surprise (I knew the guy as a rapper). But then Hunter killed himself.

I next asked David A.N. Jackson to replace Hunter on drums, and David is a magician - but, unlike the rest of us, he makes a living off of his art, and I really don't want to assume the burden of trying to make money playing original music in St. Louis.

So Three Fried Men went dormant. And then Bad Folk broke up.

Most people in the St. Louis scene would understand this to be a bad thing, and I am not rejoicing at someone else's loss. However, I have heard Tim Rakel's new project with Brien, The Mayday Orchestra, and it's the best thing he has been a part of (to my ears). And, then, there is the phenomenon of Anne Tkach, suddenly being a little more available to play in another band (for example ... mine!) - which is, to me, a very great thing.

She fit in perfectly and instantly. Immediately, we recognized we would be able to put together a set of songs from the Sydney Highrise score by Wednesday, February 18, when Michael Friedman will be in town (venue to be determined; Anne's other other band, Rough Shop, also on the bill and backing up Michael).

Coproducer, audio engineer for the working group, bassist and sideways-at-the-omnidirectional-mic vocalist Robert Goetz showed me how to upload mp3s to be shared; so, by golly, here are our first roughs from our first session with Anne (and Tim; except he and I were born joined at the musical hip; another story).

* Hot air money driers
(lyrics by Les Murray, music by Matt Fuller and Chris King)

* In the land of veneers

(lyrics by Les Murray, music by Matt Fuller and Chris King)

* Six hundred glittering and genteel towns
(lyrics by Les Murray, music by Middle Sleep and Chris King)

No duh, but like, uh, click on the titles to hear the mp3s. These are rough mixes of rough sketches, but we were satisfied - especially for a first rehearsal.

**

The image is of Matt Fuller tracking drums in the living room of the late Pops Farrar's old house, working on the Eleanor Roosevelt record Water, Bread & Beer which (gasp) we actually plan to finish this year, too. Note sophisticated sound separation of drums!