Andrew Torch in the drawer of a 50-year-old witch

Please click twice on the thumbnail of this painting by St. Louis Surrealist Andrew Torch that he made for the 2006 Poetry Scores Art Invitational dedicated to Blind Cat Black. The painting is titled I am living in the drawer of a fifty-year-old witch and has some finely wrought and nuanced detail that repays close study.

I'm not sure I'm doing any favors to an avowedly Surrealist painting to subject it to rational analysis. I will say I like the way the photograph turned out, with a snippet of fine china in the frame. The poem Blind Cat Black has a whack Aunt Sadness drinking alcohol in the attic and embroidering. When I sea this tea cup in the context of a painting about that poem, then the tea cup belongs to Aunt Sadness, or to the fifty-year-old witch; same thing, maybe.

Andy was meditating upon (and drew his title from) the first section of the poem. It has a certain notorious jarring piece of language, none other than the N-word. Blind Cat Black was written in Turkish by Ece Ayhan and translated into English by Murat Nemet-Nejat. In a previous post, I presented Murat's explanation for choosing this controversial and, in most usages, offensive word in his translation.

Here is the entire section of the poem:

*

The Nigger in the Photograph

Accursed. The curse which with its curving unsheathed letter will never leave me alone, which I take everywhere, my invisible dog, the curse. Who can be friends with me? Who? It is rumored that I carry that monk's blood, and with a relentless agitation I run here and there, barefoot, and on my tiny chin a big beauty spot, I am known with my covered beauty still. Like the stain in the curve of the letter U.

Flower. I began my adventures as a flower vender. Flowers and children bedecking a string, dry petals. But how I was under a spell those days. Because of a little fairy's curse, I couldn't be looked at. Light Maltese fevers run in empty lots in summer evenings. And endless hallucinations full of clowns run in ruins. Then a stone arched passage. I am living in the drawer of a fifty-year-old witch, nailed. Am I really? One can not tell what season it is, and I am cold. Curved like the letter U.

... I went to Jerusalem in that exile of the flower venders and got settled in the town clock... But to remember these things, I don't want to remember them... It had run out, the money I had saved selling flowers... This far away from Smyrna, I was pawned. Let this be the nigger in the negative of a photograph from me, will you receive it one day? I had taken it while learning Hebrew with my invisible dog inside a Jewess. Lonely and terrible. Under a huge tree which had shed its leaves, barely touching a chair.

It is not out of pity, but I am worried it won't pass. The curve of the letter U.

- By Ece Ayhan, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat

*

And here is this part of the poem scored by Flatrock and Pops Farrar. Flatrock is the name I bestowed upon a trio of gifted musicians who improvised together every day playing homemade instruments (harps, drums, mbiras) in a cabin built on an abandoned hippie commune by that name in Middle Tennessee. Pops and I stopped there on a roadtrip and inadvertently embarked upon this score. Thanks Jerry, Leah, and John, wherever you are.

Free mp3

"The nigger in the photograph"
(Pops Farrar, Flatrock)

Our score to Blind Cat Black is in print and is available in independent shops in St. Louis and through us directly.

The use of "N-word" in "Blind Cat Black"

I wanted to explore the painting that St. Louis surrealist Andrew Torch made for the Poetry Scores Art Invitational dedicated to Blind Cat Black, in the context of the poem and the score we made to it, but I see there is an issue to address first.

Andy's painting is titled I am living in the drawer of a fifty-year-old witch. When I looked for this phrase in Murat Nemet-Nejat's translation of Ece Ayhan's poem, I saw that it appears in the first prose poem in the sequence that forms Blind Cat Black, which is titled "The Nigger in the Photograph."

I find it impossible to enter such a loaded and in most cases offensive word as the so-called "N-word" into a discussion of a painting and a poem without some explanation, so let's start with the explanation. Fortunately, we have an explanation from the translator, who chose to use the word in his translation of this strange Turkish poem.

When I started scoring the poem, to clarify the matter for myself, I asked Murat about his choice of the N-word in the translation. Of course, it’s a jarring and controversial word, and it’s not a word in the social vocabulary of anyone who works on our projects (which is why I use the goofy phrase “the N-word” here).

This is what Murat said in response:

*

The original word in Turkish is “arap” (Arab). This word in Turkish has two meanings, one more or less official and the other in street slang, as a lot of words in Ece Ayhan's poetry have.

One meaning of “arap” is “the negative of a photograph.” At the same time, in the street argot, when kids see a black person on the street, they call him “arap.” In that sense, “arap” is the outsider, the suppressed, which obviously is what a lot of Ece Ayhan's poetry is all about. In “The Nigger in the Photograph,” Ayhan is using the word in both senses – not only the “negative” of the photograph, but also the “hidden” identity which the photograph contains.

One characteristic of Ece Ayhan’s early poetry, and one of its greatest sources of power and shock, is his references to "forbidden" people (Jews, Armenians, Greeks, etc.), to their names and language. I decided “nigger” would have a corresponding shock value in English; besides, blacks have had a parallel outsider position in American society.

– Murat Nemet-Nejat

*

This is a complicated explanation of the complicated use of a complicated word in a complicated poem that has been translated into a complicated piece of music (which in turn has been translated into a complicated movie).

Here is a little more of the context of the poem where the word appears:

*

... I went to Jerusalem in that exile of the flower venders and got settled in the town clock... But to remember these things, I don't want to remember them... It had run out, the money I had saved selling flowers... This far away from Smyrna, I was pawned. Let this be the nigger in the negative of a photograph from me, will you receive it one day? I had taken it while learning Hebrew with my invisible dog inside a Jewess. Lonely and terrible. Under a huge tree which had shed its leaves, barely touching a chair.

– Ece Ayhan, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat

**

The image is from a paper on the recognition of faces from photographic negatives. Next time: Andy's painting!

"The Secret Jew" by Chris Dingwell (and Pops Farrar)

This evening a blogpost from my old friend, the tattooist Chris Dingwell, begat a blogpost of my own reminiscing about wandering down Cherokee Street with him long before the current Cherokee Street revival (such that it is). This in turn got me up and gazing at the magnificent painting, The Secret Jew, that Dingwell contributed to the 2006 Poetry Scores Art Invitational devoted to Blind Cat Black. It lives with me, now, because I bought it.

It's a large diptych - 24" x 64" - and I'm no museum-grade art photographer, but hopefully the two details suggest some of the marvelous artistry that went into the piece (if you double-click to enlarge them). I might add that if you came to my house just to look at the piece, you would not be the first person to do so.

The art invitational rules require that the artist respond to the poem and title the work after a verbatim quote from the poem. Dingwell chose the title of one of the individual prose poems that form Ece Ayhan's prose-poetic sequence. Here it is, in Murat Nemet-Nejat's translation:

*

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.

*

Our score to the poem began inadvertently on an abandoned hippie commune in central Tennessee. On a road trip, Pops Farrar and I visited with three highly creative musicians who improvised every day in one of the cabins on the abandoned commune property, where the bandleader lived. They were doing their strange thing on their homemade instruments, when I handed Pops my copy of Blind Cat Black, expecting that something good would come of it.

Something really good came of it.

"The secret Jew”
(Pops Farrar, Flatrock)

But Pops didn't follow the poem as it continued after a page break, which happened to fall at a sentence break, thus leaving the final four sentences of the piece unscored. Adam Long and I caught this mistake while mastering what we thought was a finished score, which sent me digging through my satchel of masters for an appropriate piece of music we had not yet used.

I found a guitar fragment Tom Hall had recorded for the score to Crossing America that we never used. I could hear Stefene Russell reading these lines in my head, so we called her and recorded her voice through through my cell phone.

“That guy”
(Stefene Russell, Tom Hall)

Strangely enough, "The Secret Jew" provided the occasion for the very first and (more than ten years later) the very last pieces we recorded for the poetry score - and it inspired one of the most magnificent works of art yet submitted to one of our art invitationals.

*

More work by Dingwell on his MySpace page.

A Nashville Halloween for a "Blind Cat Black"

I recently discovered a session note from Halloween 2002 when we tried to finished the score to Blind Cat Black in Nashville. This is long, but worth it for those who want to know how we work or who enjoy studio stories. Lots of free embedded mp3s so you can listen as you go.

*

A Nashville Halloween for a "Blind Cat Black"
By Chris King

We had converged at Lij's home studio in Nashville to finish a record of Turkish poetry set to music. Matt Fuller came from Los Angeles, where he works as an illustrator; I came straight from our travel magazine's office in New York; and Lij, his hair pared down to a mohawk, came from Chicago, where he is producing a rock record in Steve Albini's studio.

Home studios once carried the stink of amateurism, but no longer. Computers revolutionized the art of recording. With a software package called Pro-Tools and plenty of hard drive space, anyone can now have a subtle, flexible, sophisticated multi-track studio in their home. The only problem is importing the musical values of old, pre-digital sound - warmth, crackle - into the computer's cold clarity.

To perform this trick, people like Lij are constantly on the scrounge for vintage gear, especially microphones and mic pre-amplifiers (known as "mic pre-'s"), which boost the sound coming from a mic into a soundboard or computer. Lij had a line on some vintage mic-pre's, so in the morning we went off down the streets of Nashville looking for them and for phantom power. It being Halloween, I would prefer not to spoil the magic by describing phantom power (something you need to run old mic-pre's); suffice it to say it was Halloween and we were in search of phantom power.

*

Once phantom empowered, we were joined by Heidi Dean, a singer trained for opera but with an ear for pop who drove down from St. Louis (with several pounds of kielbasa and her two dogs) to lend her pipes to our weird Turkish poem. Blind Cat Black by Ece Ayhan, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat, is the poem. Actually, it is a sequence of haunted prose poems, full of curses, sorcerers, blind black cats and "endless hallucinations of clowns run in ruins" - an apt project for a Halloween session.

Heidi howled and trilled behind raconteur barfly songster Fred Friction singing about coming drowned in the afternoon to the blue house on the wharf of brown broadcloth cafes. She harmonized to my singing about a son who is a queen and a brother who used to hold the boy's hair, black coal.

*

We took a break to meet friends at a German wursthouse. Freed from the deadtangles of Turkish poetry, we swayed with fishbowls of Pilsner, danced the chicken dance to the oompah band, and ate even more kielbasa.

"The oompah guy came to me and asked what band I was in," Lij said. Lij ran his fingers through his mohawk, the very item which must have attracted the oompah man's attention. "I told him, I am the chicken!" The mohawk did look like a rooster's comb.

*

The name of Lij's home studio is The Toy Box. True to name, it has its share of toys and childish things, but the same can be said of most recording studios run by rock guys. They are all islands of lost toys. As Matt said, pointing to a collection of gewgaws sitting atop the speakers Lij uses to monitor his mixes, "Somebody has to be the keeper of plastic dinosaurs and metal lunchboxes."

*

More Heidi Dean: she had to wail a snippet of a nightingale aria and then howl bloody murder behind the translator, Murat Nemet-Nejat, as he describes how the boy prostitute at the center of the poem steps on danger and comes to harm. Between takes, a train passed behind Lij's house, well within earshot. "Get that next time, if you can," I said. "It wouldn't be the first Tennessee train in this poem."

Years before, as we tracked Pops Farrar (a merchant marine seaman who has since died) reading with musicians from a nearby abandoned hippie commune, a train passed during a quiet moment. On that part of the poem, a Tennessee cargo train helps to illustrate the boy's adventures as a flower vendor.

*

Rock recordings typically start with the drums. Everybody plays through a song, but you stop once you have a good drum take, and then build up from there with overdubs, starting with the bass and guitars and finishing with color instruments (strings, organ, piano) and, finally, vocals.

As befits a score for an inverted Turkish poem, we were all inside/out on this project. The rock songs for Blind Cat Black began six years ago in Matt's garage in Los Angeles. He made rough home four-track recordings of song ideas and mailed them to me. I drove from St. Louis to Georgia to New York to Nebraska to Mississippi, listening to these tapes, finding words and melodies and fitting them into parts of poems.

Over the years I scheduled impromptu recording sessions with our friend Meghan Gohil, where people would sing or read poetry over Matt's guitar parts, and we would capture it on digital audio tape. The method used was live mix, meaning what went to tape was final in that form, with no possibility of separating the voice from the guitar and redoing one without the other.

Of the voices we captured in those sessions, one had now vanished forever (the Merchant Marine songster Pops Farrar), and the other is elusive and moody (the raconteur Fred Friction, who recently survived open-lung surgery). The only way to keep their voices in the score was to keep Matt's original garage guitar parts.

So in Nashville, Matt was in the bass-ackwards position of overdubbing drums to his own guitar. In a basement in Nashville he found the beat implicit in old guitar doodles he had made in his Hollywood garage, all to preserve the grit of these vanished and vanishing voices - all to keep some Ozark twang in the sadness of a Turkish boy with sewers for veins who tattooed pharaohs on his biceps and was destroyed by love.

*

We also spent time in Nashville matching various readers with fragments we had been given by a generous Turkish musician, Latif Bolat. Another piece we had in mind, an alternatively teasing and explosive blues guitar piece by Tom Hall, the National Steel guitar wizard of St. Louis, still needed a reader. We landed Warren Pash from down the street.

Warren had played bass for us on the last recordings the jump blues legend Rosco Gordon made, right here in Lij's house, before passing away in July. "I walked home that night and laid in bed and stared at the ceiling until 3 in the morning," Warren remembered. "All I could think was this was what it was like to be young in the Rolling Stones and play with all those blues legends."

*

Reality has a way of returning rudely. On the last day of our session, Lij fielded a call from the leader of the band he has been producing up in Chicago. This guy had been listening to his vocal tracks and decided each and every one needed to be re-recorded.

His band is going for a big, scary rock sound - Marilyn Manson is a reference for Lij when he mixes their tunes - which calls for the singer to practically eat the microphone when he records. Lij's sin, it seems, had been to allow some hint of wind, of actual human breath, to intrude into the vocal track. Nothing was usable. Every vocal must be done again. Lij was about to lose the next two weeks of his life to recording this man's voice without recording his breath.

Brother skulked around his home studio. Just when we should have been finishing our work in a mood of celebration of Turkish poetry, our own love for one another, and our ability to keep doing this despite living in far-flung cities, Lij was shattered.

He had one, final chore for us: a whistle solo. I had written a folk song setting for a piece of the score called "My Son is a Queen." It has a jauntiness that fits one of the poem's lighter moments, though the lyric does have one dark image - "a gradual burning is forgotten" - that calls for a disturbing musical undercurrent. So I had asked Lij for some sad, warped whistling.

He trundled downstairs, where he tracks vocals, and I hit "record" on the Pro-Tools up in the control room. "My son is a queen," I sang on the recording, "has spread his wings. A cape of fine taffeta." But you know that boy won't stay aloft for long. You know he is heading for the sewers of his veins, for "the hanging tree in me," and downstairs, out from under Lij's mohawk, came the whistling of a very unhappy man to finish the tune.

Free mp3s (embedded above)

“Epitafio”
(Fred Friction, Three Fried Men)

“My son is a queen”
(Three Fried Men)

"Black Coal"

(Three Fried Men)

“Mitsrayim”
(Murat Nemet-Nejat, Latif Bolat)

"Geranium and the child"
(Pops Farrar, Flatrock)

“In the sewers of my veins”
(Fred Friction, Three Fried Men)

"Babyleaves that kill the raven or the poison tree"

(Pops Farrar with Three Fried Men)

"The horse with two wheels"

(Warren Pash, Tom Hall)

From Blind Cat Black
Poetry by Ece Ayhan
Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Produced by Chris King

Available at independent shops in St. Louis or through us directly.

Soon to be a minor motion picture.

*

Image is a still from the movie by Mathew Pitzer

Fred Friction is not Orthodox - Orthodox

On his brilliant debut solo record Jesus Drank Wine, St. Louis songwriter and raconteur Fred Friction declares, boldly, "I am not proper."

It's a forceful and slightly scary mission statement. The things that entice young people into rock music and tend to scare older people about it, Fred is saying, are still with him as he is getting older. I didn't burn out yet, and I don't aim to fade away. "I am not proper."

The song doesn't shy away from the danger of continuing to let it all hang out, of not picket-fencing off the restlessness and risk-taking of youth as a grown man. The song offers an elegy for Michael "Miko" Fleming, South St. Louis' latest in a line of rock & roll suicides.

Sometimes, Fred sings, in a ragged voice that is very believable as it sings such things, life is not a novel. "It just writes a suicide note."

These qualities in Fred's temperament and artistic persona have been strong in him since he first came at me, running down Delmar Boulevard in 1988. And that is why I thought of Fred instantly when we were scoring the great surrealist Turkish poem Blind Cat Black and came across a passage - the next to last piece in the long poem - that is about not being proper.

And the consequences of doing that, which might not be pretty.

*

Orthodoxy – Orthodoxy

A heretic dropped in a lake in Holland. His clipped wings, beeswax, in the swaddling fever. I saw thirty step-brothers jump me. Death isn't thought in good taste. At the water mill. Its crude incongruity, massive, a harlot's orthodoxy.

(Poetry by Ece Ayhan * Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat)

*

I could think about those lines for the rest of my life. In fact, I think I will. Of one thing only am I certain: when confronted with the line "I saw thirty step-brothers jump me," the first choice to read it - as long as he is alive to draw a breath and deliver a line - has to be Fred Friction.

And, if you can, you would want Pops Farrar creaking along behind him, adding the orange and red colors of his concertina and harmonica. We could, so that is what we did.

Free mp3

"Othodoxy - Orthodoxy"

By Fred Friction and Pops Farrar
From Blind Cat Black

Poetry by Ece Ayhan
Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Recorded by Meghan Gohil
Produced by Chris King

*

In the silent film we made to this score, we dramatized the stepbrother jumping of our hero as a zombie beatdown. After the violence, her corpse is replaced by the baby doll she cradles in the film's opening scene when she (as a he) is reading a comic book in bed. The Pharoah and Bodybag Man - the ancestors and cold hard death - come and pray over the baby doll. That is the image you see, above, with Christopher Y. Voelker standing in for the late Pops Farrar as the zombie concertina player.

*

I am writing a series of posts about Fred Friction's contributions to Poetry Scores in commemoration of his brilliant new debut solo record, Jesus Drank Wine.

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
In the sewer's of Fred Friction's veins, there, a rat
Fred Friction's blue bead, against the evil eye

Modoc shamanism via Robert Goetz / free mp3

For some time I have hoped that the form of a poetry score would be adopted by other songwriters and composers. I'd love to hear of other people scoring long poems like one scores a film and releasing them on CDs like we do and calling them "poetry scores".

Not yet happening, as far as I know, though setting shorter poems to music has been going on for a long time and is still going on. Since that fits into the provenance of Poetry Scores - our mission is "to translate poetry into other media" - it's fair to present it here.

Here is an example of such work by one of our own, Poetry Scores board president Robert Goetz, from his personal blog. I know about this piece because I contributed text to it. Robert has an ongoing songwriting project devoted to Acoustic Death Music. At some point he asked me to contribute some lyrics, and I sent him the words to a Shamanic song of the Modoc Indians of California.

*

What do I remove from my mouth?
The pain I remove from my mouth
What do I take out?
The pain I take out
What do I suck out?
The pain I suck out
What do I blow about?
The pain I blow about
As a head only, I roll around
I stand upon the rim of my nest
I am enveloped in flames
What am I? What am I?
I, the song, I walk here
I, the dog stray
In the north wind I stray
An arrowpoint I am about to shoot
A bad song I am
The earth I sing of

(Source: A.L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California)

*

These words originally existed as a song or chant, but they came to me and were passed to Goetz as words only - as a poem, in effect - so I consider his song setting of this text to be a poetry score.

Free mp3

A Bad Song I Am
(words, traditional Modoc; music, Robert Goetz)

Peformed by Acoustic Death Music
Robert Goetz - guitar, vocals
Dallas Woodson - guitar
Anne Tkach - drum
Sherman St. Sherman - bass

Recorded by Roy Francis Kasten

*

Image of a Hupa (rather than Modoc) shaman from a postcard in Carl Mautz's online gallery.

Fred Friction's blue bead, against the evil eye

I hope I don't sound self-righteous when I say I tend to live with intent and enjoy the life I am leading. So it's natural for me on New Year's Day, not to turn over a new leaf, but to go right back to what I was doing. What I was doing was writing a series of posts about Fred Friction's contributions to Poetry Scores in commemoration of his brilliant new debut solo record, Jesus Drank Wine.

When we were scoring the surrealist Turkish poem Blind Cat Black, I thought often of Fred as a solution to our compositional needs.

It's a difficult poem, and could be about many different things, but the translator Murat Nemet-Nejat suggests that it's the coming-of-age story of an Istanbul boy streetwalker who comes across as transgendered in several passages, and Fred is the man who brought us that timeless classic, "I Bet the Rent on Transvestites and Wine".

The poem also breathes with the dangerous, ragged life of the city streets, something I have always heard in the scratchy grain of Fred's voice and in his gimlet-eyed delivery. Fred is as street as anybody would ever need to be.

It's also a seaside poem, set in one of the world's great port cities that is literally surrounded by water. The great Merchant Marine songster Pops Farrar was still with us in those days, so of course I heard the wheeze of his concertina and harmonica breathing in and out of this score, like the sea encroaching on the shore of a port and then creeping away again into its own mysterious depths.

Pops was an old man at the time, a divorcee enjoying an unforeseen additional breath of life after raising four sons (one of them, the indie rocker Jay Farrar, my contemporary in the St. Louis music scene). -- When I first wrote that sentence, I wrote that Pop raised "four songs," rather than "sons"; true, too. --

I took Pops around with me everywhere I went, or rather I told him where I was going and he would drive us there. Of the many intense friendships he formed among my coterie was a deep bond with Fred Friction. If you knew these two widely traveled, deeply wise, rough and tumble, slightly guarded open souls, it would seem inevitable that they would either become the fastest of friends or be forced to avoid each other completely, irritated beyond patience with what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences".

They became the fastest of friends.

They looked perfect together, and they sounded amazing when they made music at the same time, which I had the good sense to help make happen at a number of guitar circles and on the Blind Cat Black score, which features two Pops and Fred duets. Here is one: the poem followed by their performance.

*

The Blue Bead, Against the Evil Eye

Madness put on a porkpie hat. He ran to the regions where sellers of guns go bankrupt. Founded the empire of truants. And, then, found a golden cannonball in the town of Monastery.

Pinned on his coat collar a forest in September. No one should know of the secret treasure full of trinkets. The hyena was there, too, with the face of a rotten apple. He fought madly to grab the dagger.

There was talk one Saturday of the Crimea. Wars. The sorcery stores were closed. They hanged him inside a liquor bottle, heavy silver boots on his feet, smiling. Against all sorts of jinx. This little, vagabond imp.

(Poetry by Ece Ayhan * Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat)

*

Free mp3

"The blue bead, against the evil eye"
By Fred Friction and Pops Farrar
From Blind Cat Black

Poetry by Ece Ayhan

Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat

Recorded by Meghan Gohil
Produced by Chris King

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

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

**

Photo of the blue bead against the evil eye by Mehmet Masum Süer.