I’ll be returning to the WCDB airwaves on the morning of Sunday, May 20. My new timeslot: 10am-noon Sundays! I hope you’ll join me… I love sharing music, even when I didn’t write it.

Still no word on whether the radio station will be open for overnight broadcasting. This is such a cowardly move by the UAlbany administration, and its timing is so suspect… handing down this “punishment” right before summer break is the equivalent of announcing bad news on a Friday. If these “Student Success” clowns think people are just going to forget and get over it, they’re as stupid as they are out of touch.

To their credit, the station staff has kept up the pressure and a ruling is supposedly forthcoming. Let’s watch closely.

- – - – - – -

I want to thank the folks who bought Sevendys merch this past week to help with Chuck Rainey’s medical bills – very cool and generous of you guys. I’ve forwarded the proceeds right on to Chuck with my match, and I’ll keep the program going until further notice.

Again, if you would like to donate to Chuck directly, you can do so here.

- – - – - – -

My next album is on track for a July release; I hope to make it available on CD and vinyl at that time. It’s twelve songs and seven are mixed. All but one are with the mix engineer, Pete deBoer, and he’s wrapping them up very efficiently.

It’s a weird record. The upbeat songs are very upbeat and the sad songs are very sad. I previewed the rough album for a friend and she cried at the end. Like real tears and everything. I thought it was maybe because she couldn’t stand to listen anymore – which was okay at that point because the record was over – but she said it was because the last two songs were that upsetting.

So I apologize in advance for whatever this album does to you.

Eschatone’s distributor requires a few months to properly set up an album, so while I’ll make it available here in all formats July, I would assume it won’t be in stores (if there still are actual record stores) until the fall. Not that this matters to you since you’ll be getting it the day I put it up on my site, right?

- – - – - – -

I got Eschatone Records a PO box in Albany today. We’ll be closing down the New York City address and preparing our next round of releases as a bonafide 518 operation. I’m excited to be back with the company; I withdrew from the partnership in 2009 and returned late last year.

We have a plan and some really crazy stuff lined up to release this fall and winter. We’ll be experimenting with formats. We’ll be working with artists whose music will shock you. And we’ll be working with artists whose names will shock you, because you’ll be like How the fuck did they get that guy?

One genre into which I am excited to expand Eschatone is noise. I’ve been dabbling with Avi in our Space Toilets project… it’s fun and visceral, and the recordings, as abstract as they are, really do manage to say something. I think noise can be the ultimate musical metaphor – all feeling, no context, a direct emotional transmission. We’ll be putting out some stuff from Maryland’s Pregnant Spore; I am always surprised at how listenable his work is, and how much it communicates.

Thus even as Eschatone brings you new folk from Brian Dewan, it shall also put out staticky scrapey instrumental noise.

Come to think of it… there is an artist – a guitarist – whose work has long bridged the gap between the two; we’ve got him also. To be announced.

One of my great musical joys is playing with Sevendys. It’s a dream lineup – Jerry Marotta, Chuck Rainey, Avi Buffalo, and Sheridan Riley – on a crazy musical adventure.

But Sevendys has been out of commission since last November, when Chuck suffered a major stroke. He’s recovering – slowly – but six months later, Chuck remains unable to work. We’ve got to help Chuck Rainey out!

Chuck has made your life immeasurably better and you probably don’t even know it. In his 71 years, the dude has played bass on so many classic songs (with everybody from Aretha Franklin to Steely Dan) that every single time we’ve picked him up at an airport, something he recorded came on the PA.
NO SHIT.

Here’s what we’re gonna do:
There are eight Sevendys songs available for download here. All of them are name-your-price downloads; whatever price you name, we will send that amount to Chuck after Bandcamp and PayPal take their cuts.

There is a Sevendys t-shirt available for purchase here for ten bucks. Buy one and we will pass all the money we get from it (again, post Bandcamp and PayPal) right on to Chuck, plus I will personally match that amount.

There is a Sevendys 7″ vinyl single here, which the entire band – including Chuck himself – autographed in a limited edition of 100 when it came out last summer. It also costs $10, and again, if you buy one we will send the proceeds to Chuck, and I’ll personally match them.

You can also donate to Chuck directly here. I mean, I will be doing so, whether you buy Sevendys shit or not (but then again, I already have the entire Sevendys collection).

To all of us in Sevendys, Chuck is a mentor, friend and inspiration. Chuck, you are in our thoughts every day!

To whom it may concern:
I’m a UAlbany alum and local resident with strong ties to WCDB Albany. I was a station member as a student in the 1990s, and I have served as a community member DJ since mid-2010.

I also worked for UAlbany’s University Auxiliary Services in 2010, as assistant director of communications; during my stint, I helped to implement a number of well-received campuswide student involvement campaigns. Quite a bit of that UAS programming – and this remains the case, I’m told – relied on the WCDB staff for technical a/v assistance, equipment, promotion and manpower.

I’ve heard that a DJ recently broke station policy and let seven non-station-staff UAlbany students into the WCDB offices, where they were caught smoking marijuana. This is unfortunate; I can say from experience that student DJs take their responsibilities very seriously, and this sort of thing is not and has never been part of the WCDB culture. It’s music that intoxicates us… we’ve always left the drinking and drugging to fraternities, sororities, kegs-and-eggers, the SA board, and the UAlbany students who inevitably imbibe at every Dippikill retreat, Fountain Day, Fallfest and Parkfest. Anyway, I’m glad this one student has been permanently removed from the radio station roster, and that he and his friends are now in the process of being duly punished by the proper authorities.

However, I’ve also heard that something called an office of “Student Success” (did this even exist in the ’90s?) has begun investigating WCDB’s FCC license terms and organizational status. This is troubling. An awful lot of people are being penalized – the current station staff, which includes about 100 students (well, about 99 students now); WCDB’s base of local listeners; and the sizable contingent of UAlbany alumni (34 years’ worth) who maintain a keen interest in the station’s well-being – for the actions of one UAlbany student who happened to be a DJ, and seven others who were not.

In the past year, I’ve proudly watched the current WCDB staff grow to include enough students to broadcast around the clock, as we did in the 1990s, and as generations of DJs did for almost two decades before us. A radio station is to an extent a public trust, and this year’s administration has been an exceptional group of custodians. But now I’m hearing that WCDB DJs will not be allowed into the Campus Center to broadcast overnight (2:00am-7:30am Monday through Saturday and 10pm-7:30am Sunday) for perhaps the first time in the station’s history. That seems more than a bit draconian.

Is this really to be the case? And on what basis?

I hope someone from the university administration will respond here, allay my worries and tell me this is just procedural, due diligence to cover UAlbany as the University answers questions about the criminal behavior of eight of its students (who, I’m sure, could just as easily have been caught smoking weed in the dorms, or frankly just about anyplace on campus day or night), and everything will be back to normal soon.

Or is this development something that should concern the community and our alumni?

Luv,
JD

The Hanslick Rebellion played a gig on March 2 – our first in four years. It was awesome (for us, anyway). We agreed to keep things going in spite of the band members’ various familial commitments and the physical distance between us. Playing shows together is difficult, but recording is always possible, and since the Rebellion always goes big we decided to tackle the most daunting monster project in my catalog: the unfinishable Rise And Shine.

We’re talking 40 songs in almost as many genres. 15 singers. Two-and-a-half hours of music. My last attempt to record this thing put me off music for over a year.

Rise And Shine is a musical stage play I’ve been working on since 2000, when Arturo Vega informed me that he’d strung together 20 or so of my already-released tracks to tell a story and had already begun writing the script. We brainstormed a complete three-act arc and I began writing new songs to fill in the gaps – 20 additional pieces of music in all. By 2005 I was well into a fully-cast demo of the thing with an incredible and diverse group of singers that included Dicky Barrett, Brian Dewan, Jessy Moss, Matthew Bair, CJ Ramone, Maryann Fennimore, Bryan Thomas and Kitty Kowalski. But we couldn’t stop tweaking, and what was, in retrospect, the perfect version of the play got mauled to death by revision after revision. I gave up on the demo in 2006 because I just couldn’t keep up with all the changes. By the time we took our last meeting, in 2010, we couldn’t even explain to an interested investor what Rise And Shine was supposed to be about. That’s when I packed it in.

The storyline, as plotted in 2000 and held consistent until 2005, is fairly simple – two college friends reunite at a New York City nightclub five years after graduation. One night, a girl from their past appears at the club and fucks all their shit up. That’s basically it. You’ve got a cast of colorful supporting characters representing various denizens of early-aughts New York nightlife, each with a mini-drama woven around the main thread, but it really is straightforward, linear and fun.

Hanslick Rebellion is the no-brainer choice for a Rise And Shine recording. A number of the songs Arturo wrote his script around, including “We Wait And We Wait”, “Leave Your Boyfriend”, “Starlet” and “Grub”, are Rebellion tunes. Better yet, because the Rebellion only recorded live, there were never studio versions of these, so it’s not like we’re being redundant. Plus Mike and I sang the two male leads on the original Rise And Shine demo, with some surprising lead vocal reversals that add a twist for longtime Rebellion fans (for example, Mike sings “Grub” in the play). It’s just right.

My first move in reopening the Rise And Shine case was to sift through the aborted demo recordings and see what might be salvageable. Sadly, not much. For all the vocal talent we had lined up, most of the tracks are unusable. We had such limited time with many of the singers that in some cases we were racing through 20-30 songs in a day. You obviously can’t get good takes that way. Then there’s the file management and handling of those vocal tracks – many were hastily and poorly auto-tuned by the engineer and then the original tracks were discarded! Unbelievable now, but at the time there were no best practices for Pro Tools workflow. The only singers whose work I can confidently keep are Maryann Fennimore, Brian Dewan and Jessy Moss, and those only because their vocals were cut so late in the process that the project stalled before the engineer could mutilate them. Everybody else has to be rerecorded (which is impossible in several cases) or replaced.

On the other hand, all 40 songs are written and arranged right down to the vocal harmonies. It’s all laid out… everything just needs to be properly performed. The undertaking is massive – recording it is only the beginning. Mixing and mastering 40 songs will cost a fortune. I get queasy just thinking about it. Unfortunately, the folks who were willing to invest in Rise And Shine the stage play are probably out on Rise And Shine the album. I understand; there’s a lot more potential ROI in the former.

In order to make this happen as quickly as possible (ha ha) I’m throttling back on my other projects for a while. That means April’s Single of the Month will be the last. My next solo album is just about done, so I do plan on putting it out later this year. But other than that I’ll be in Rise And Shine land for the forseeable future.

As we power through this thing, we’ll do our best to document the process with a series of video clips. Here’s the first one. This is actually an excerpt from a short film made by Emily Sheskin and Serena Kuo in 2004? 2005? I forget exactly. But it features Arturo and me talking about the musical and how we came to be writing partners:

They say that you can’t learn from anyone’s mistakes but your own. I disagree.

I’ve been present for the end of a lot of things. I don’t look like much, so nobody seems to care that I’m in the room when they’re talking about important shit. I was around at the end of the Ramones; the end of CBGB; the end of the music business; the ends of a dozen magazines and print media in general. I’ve watched people make mistakes that impacted countless lives in fundamental ways, including mine, while there was nothing I could do. It’s hard not to learn something from that.

An obvious lesson to take is that everything ends. I once did a design-related interview with a magazine called FPO. At the close of our conversation, the reporter asked me for a quick rundown of publications I’d worked for, so I rattled off a list. More than half of the titles were defunct. Some had gone down in spectacular, even legendary ways, and the reporter said: “That’s like a who’s who of magazine disasters over the past 15 years! I can’t believe one person worked at all of those!”

Well… it’s not like there was anything particularly mystical happening here. If any one of those publications had not failed, I’d still have been working there and would never have moved on to the others. But that’s not how it goes. Everything ends.

One thing I’ve never had much of is ambition. That may not ring true to those of you who’ve been with me since the ’90s, but think about some of the folks I ran with, and my relationship to them, and try to appreciate how I may have reflected certain things about them – like the moon reflecting sunlight. All I’ve ever wanted to do was make my stuff. I don’t really care about anything else. Having a goal, or a passion, is not the same as having ambition.

Goal: I want to make a good record. Ambition: I want to make a million-selling record.

I think a goal is something you can realistically accomplish with your own resources and work, while ambition makes success contingent upon the action of others… the need for them to buy something, or love something, or give us something. We have very little control over that. So little that it isn’t really worth a bother. I can make what I consider a good album by writing songs that have meaning to me, taking the time to craft them into something I’d want to hear, and working for the resources to realize them in the form of a recorded object. What happens with that record once it’s available to other people is, for better or worse, out of my hands.

The lesson I’ve learned working with ambitious people is: don’t get too involved with ambitious people. Just do your thing. The wages of ambition are disappointment and agita for all involved.

I’ve liked the expression “failing upwards” since I first heard it back in 2000, when it was used to describe a shitty coworker who had inexplicably gotten bumped up to middle management. But there’s more to it than the negative. After all these years of watching great endeavors end and fade away, it’s hard not to think of success and failure as arbitrary. We fail upwards, we succeed downwards. The work continues. My wish for all of us in 2012: let’s do our best work.

Last night I watched a Saturday Night Live broadcast for the first time in a while – I usually just cherry-pick on Hulu after the fact. Jimmy Fallon was the host, which is weird because I remember that in one of the dude’s very first appearances on the show, like late ’90s, there was a Christmas Carol sketch with a glimpse of a future in which he hosted the 2011 SNL Christmas episode. Whoa!

Though I haven’t seen much of his Late Night, I do think Jimmy Fallon is pretty funny. I watched him open for Tenacious D at the Town Hall ten years ago with a bit of musical standup that was fuckin awesome. But every time I see Jimmy Fallon on a stage or a screen, I am reminded of this thing that happened back in 1993 or ‘94, while I was a student at UAlbany:

I got a call from a friend of mine named Jenn Donovan. Jenn needed a lift to an audition for Metroland’s Loose Camera, a locally-produced sketch comedy pilot that was to air on the Albany FOX affiliate. I was promised dinner if she got the part, so I said of course I’ll drive.

We arrived at some officey-looking building. I don’t remember details; I was a college student so every building that was not a restaurant, bar or mall looked like an office to me. There was a waiting room with two guys sitting in it… one of them was Jimmy Fallon.

A few minutes passed and no one else came in. It began to dawn on me that Jenn and these two dudes might represent the entire pool of potential Loose Camera cast members. Now, I’d been a fan of sketch comedy, particularly SNL, since I was a little kid. And I thought: This turnout is so weak, these TV folks might get desperate enough to hire anyone who can move around and say words… and those are definitely things I can do. With odds this good, maybe I should audition?

Jenn had been given a script to read; I asked her if I could look it over. I’m a little hazy on it now, but I think the sketch was about two mechanics who were either in gay denial or obsessed with masturbating. Either way, the piece struck me as ignorant, cliché and unfunny. I decided there was no way I was saying that shit out loud in front of strangers. I handed the script back to Jenn and hung out in the waiting room until it was time to go.

Anyway, Jenn got the part; so did Jimmy Fallon and, I guess, anybody else who bothered to show up and read. She never bought me dinner, though. I didn’t watch Metroland’s Loose Camera when it aired – I was too pissed off about the dinner.

A year or two later, I was living at 1011 Madison (since razed by Saint Rose), one floor below a fellow named S. Dion Flynn. All I knew about my upstairs neighbor was that girls never stopped coming to his apartment, and he played “Blackbird” on an acoustic guitar every night at 8 right above my living room. Maybe whichever girl came by at 8 really liked that song, I dunno.

I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but Dion had once been the singer for a band called Empire, which included John Delehanty on guitar and Sirsy’s Rich Libutti on bass. He’d also been a cast member on Loose Camera.

One day Dion mentioned to my roommate Mechno that a new sketch comedy show he appeared in would be airing on public access. I don’t remember the name of the show. Wait, yes I do – 40 Whacks! So Mike Keaney whipped us up a big batch of his signature dish, plain spaghetti with some bread crumbs in it, and we all gathered round the TV.

Sure enough, there was Dion – opposite Jimmy Fallon in that mechanics sketch from the Loose Camera audition, repurposed… nay, regifted for us by the masterminds behind, apparently, both shows. It still wasn’t funny, but I guess Dion and Jimmy were good in it!

So there you have it: another chapter from my never-to-be-published autobiography Shit That Would Turn You White. Merry Christmas!

Sevendys’ “Duck And Cover” was my final release of 2011. I’m happy to see this year go, to be honest. Yeah, it was a great year for me musically – I was able to implement the Single of the Month program; revisit old four-track jams as Green Plaid Recordings; release a studio album (on 8-track tape!), a massive live album, and some of the best and most fun-to-make music of my life with Sevendys. But on a personal level, 2011 really blew. I plan to use the arbitrary changing of numbers on a calendar as a metaphor for ALL kinds of shit… bring on the new year.

2012 happens to be the 20th anniversary of Skyscape’s formation. It’s probably safe to say you can expect some brand new Skyscape material next year… at least a couple of singles. And we’re having a birthday party for the band in Albany on Saturday, February 4 – right around the date we began rehearsals for our first gig back in 1992. Dom and I are set to perform an acoustic set at Hudson River Coffee House, my new favorite haunt and a great place to see a show. Several former and current Skyscapers will be in attendance, and in fact it seems like the gig could turn into a full-on electric set with rotating band members. I’m pretty psyched to see everybody, regardless of whether they pick up an instrument!

On March 3, the Hanslick Rebellion will play our first show since 2008. That’s also in Albany, at Valentine’s. The circumstances must remain a secret for now. We’ll be working on new recordings throughout the year, as well… you may see a single before too long.

And sometime next year, you will get another new full-length solo album from me. This one’s called Failing Upwards and it fulfills the promise I made back in 2009, when I released the sampler CD I AM JED DAVIS!

I AM… was put together so I’d have something to bring out on tour with me; it featured a couple tracks from each of my next three planned studio albums. Of those, The Cutting Room Floor came out in 2010, and Shoot The Piano Player this year. Failing Upwards (represented on I AM… by “Invisible Girl”, “The Bowery Electric” and “Run Don’t Walk”) completes the trinity. It’s by far the record of which I’m proudest, and I can’t wait to get it into your hands. You’ll see that later in the year.

Oh yeah… more Sevendys in 2012, too! We’ve still got a handful of tracks to wrap from our 2011 sessions, and we’re hoping to record more as soon as schedules permit.

ONE MORE THING
I’m playing a solo set at Valentine’s on New Year’s Eve, as part of the B3nson/Swordpaw “Last NYE” event. Joining me for this auspicious occasion: David Schulman (Plastic Party) on guitar, Dan Maddalone (Barons in the Attic) on bass, and Ryan Stewart (Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned) on drums. I am very excited to play with these guys, though I’m a little concerned that we may ROCK SO FUCKIN HARD that the apocalypse descends early, thereby preventing me from bringing you all of the awesome music mentioned above. We’ll be careful.

I spent a lot of time at WCDB Albany in the ’90s. That was college radio’s moment. Listenership may have peaked in the late ’80s, but the rewards were our generation’s to reap.

I fondly remember representing CDB at the 1996 Gavin radio conference in Atlanta, GA – driving all the way down there with Alex Dubovoy, Adam Monaco and Rob Babecki, no cash in my pockets, hauling a sack of dirty laundry because the Rebellion had played the night before we left and I was too preoccupied with gig prep to do a wash. My trip fund was a Ziploc bag of quarters, most of which I blew at a 24-hour laundromat when we pulled into town at 4am. We were in Atlanta for four days and I didn’t have to spend a dime on food or entertainment – if you had a badge with college radio call-letters on it, labels would just sort of take care of you. The promotions folks didn’t care if you broadcasted at 10 watts from a bathroom stall. They wanted your spins!

CMJ was the most important magazine in the universe back then. That seems really funny now.

I was not a WCDB DJ. I did the training, but it never occurred to me to take the tests and get a timeslot. All of my friends had shows, and most of them had musical tastes which at least overlapped with mine, so I was comfortable just hanging out. You don’t have to DJ to be a station member… I went to all the meetings and was assistant music director one year. 1995, maybe?

When I moved back to Albany, my friend Joe Schepis introduced me to a couple of the current DJs. Joe has been the station’s patron saint since the early ’90s. He graduated from UAlbany before I did, but his passion for radio, spectrum of technological skills, and generosity have kept him in the mix all these years – the students know who to call when things get really fucked up. And his voice can be heard on WCDB almost every hour; most of the station IDs and promos Joe recorded almost two decades ago remain in regular use.

Through Joe I met Andrew White and Eric Michelson, two awesome 2010-vintage DJs who convinced me to return to the station. I was working on campus anyway, so I figured why not? I finally got my DJ clearance and weekly slot that fall, 17 years after I started training.

Being at WCDB is so much fun… I love the current group of station members, and I’m actually glad I waited this long to become a DJ. With the collapse of the format, much of the pomp and pretense has drained out of college radio. Now we’re free to spin what we like, stretch out and be ourselves. Ragged and raw is a lot more acceptable than it was back in the day – some DJs still do a superpro job, but it’s because that’s their way, not because we’re mandated to an arbitrary standard. The overall result is content that’s much more personal, genuine and endearing than college radio could afford to be back when everyone was up its ass.

I’m on the air every Monday morning from 10am until noon Eastern time. The stuff I spin is as eclectic as the stuff I write, and if you enjoy my music at all (that is why you’re visiting this website, right?) you’ll probably like my radio show. You can listen in Albany at 90.9 on the FM dial; WCDB also has a live webstream, which you can access from any computer OR your smartphone’s music player. So you don’t have to be in Albany to listen. My show is called I Fix Mondays, and even if you’re stuck at a desk in a dreary office I will do my best to help kickstart your shit.

A person has asked me, by email, to outline what I’d like to see in an Albany music festival. Figured I may as well share my response in this space; I tried to keep it short.

I’d like to see a weekend festival that:
1. Features multiple venues all over town, including performances on both the UAlbany and Saint Rose campuses… college kids are the Albany arts community’s greatest untapped resource.
2. Includes at least one noteworthy, contemporary national headliner per show.
3. Does NOT favor local bands… Sonicbids should be used to allow artists to apply for showcases from anywhere (and the application fee can go towards paying the national headliners). I think we serve the region best by making it a magnet for artists and art-lovers, not by simply gathering a pile of the same local acts people here can see anytime. Don’t get me wrong – locals should play; I just think competition from outside is a good thing, for many reasons.
4. Encourages all performers to busk around town, at malls and on college campuses to promote their appearances, and encourages non-participating venues to independently host art and musical performances for the weekend.

Anyway, those are my basic thoughts… it would be a significant undertaking, but even if it builds slowly, I think we could have something very special here in a matter of years. It’s not so much about consolidating the current music scene as it is about changing the culture, enouraging locals and students who have never thought twice about music and art to become interested and proud of it…

Comments are open… will I regret this?

Drove around Long Island today with Jax. We followed the Babylon LIRR line down Sunrise Highway, then buzzed Route 110 for a while and ended up cruising several Main Streets before spending an hour or so on a desolate Jones Beach.

Long Island is the ugliest fuckin place in America. I can say this with 100% confidence – I just spent a week driving across Texas.

An unending sprawl of amateur-hour signage screaming from fly-by-night-looking storefronts on dingy, squat concrete slab buildings, broken up by the occasional brown and scrubby public space. Was Long Island always this disgusting? It must have been like this when I was growing up… most of the nasty shit I saw today appeared unimproved since the late ’80s. How did I not notice?

Downstate NY friends who snicker at my Albany move: come visit. See how charming and cool an old city can be when you don’t smother it in tacky bullshit, traffic and cement. Yeah, fine, we have Central Ave. But fuck. Your entire ISLAND is Central Ave.