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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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!

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?

Here comes May… my last month of work in NYC. Maybe I’ll appreciate The City more when I don’t have to go there every week. Gimme a couple years on that one.

I’m really looking forward to summer in Albany. It was a messy first year; I still don’t feel established, but things are finally starting to settle. Some old friends have rematerialized, and I’ve made a few good new ones too. I’ve even been able to convince a couple people to relocate, which will be fantastic (for me, for them, for Capitaland). Once I’m in town full-time, I can finally have something of a life here – get out and see some shows, walk down to the riverfront, visit Saratoga, catch a few drive-in double features.

I am pretty desperate to find a haunt, and a little surprised that I haven’t after 11 months ’cause it’s not for lack of trying. I suppose for most people “haunt” means a bar; for me it’s someplace where grownups (or at least people of grownup age) can chill and chat over coffee, and get a decent bite to eat early or late. When I lived on the Lower East Side, that was the Moonstruck Diner at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 5th Street. LB and I went there every morning for five years. When their service got too shitty to ignore, we headed two blocks north to Virage. I never got comfortable enough in Brooklyn to haunt a place – everything closed early in Dumbo, anyway, and haunt rule #1 is that the place be open at whatever hour you need it to be. (Rule #2: it should be less than ten minutes away on foot.)

Denny’s is too far from me to qualify; the restaurants on Lark Street, even the ones open late, are too crowded and too expensive. I seem to find myself at Café Madison a lot, because their breakfast is so awesome, but I can’t walk there and they close at 2pm (which also disqualifies a few of the great old diners in town, and The Buttery, my favorite place within walking distance). Dunkin Donuts at the corner of Lark and Madison is always there for me, but it can get sketchy.

I did have a great cheeseburger at McGeary’s a couple weeks ago (it tasted like a Fuddrucker’s burger, which to me is an excellent thing), and the place seemed really warm and welcoming, lively but not so chaotic as to crush a good conversation. It’s within acceptable walking distance, if just barely. McGeary’s just may be the place. I’m open to suggestions!

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I feel like it’s been months since I put “She Loves You (NO NO NO)” online for download. It’s only been what, three weeks? Maybe I’m just antsy ’cause my May 7 single is really really cool. I’m not gonna spoil it… let’s just say it’s something new from the distant past, and if you’ve been with me for a while, it features some familiar folks brought together in a surprising way.

My June single is just about ready, too… and July’s offering will be crazy. Matt Biscuiti suggested I do “something big” on my birthday. Let’s see if I can oblige him!

I decided to move on the idea of a Hanslick Rebellion live archive. I’ll make everything available for download once I can get it all properly mastered; in the meantime, raw audio directly off the soundboard tapes will stream from this new site. Shows are as complete as the source tapes allow… there are a few glitches here and there. Most of the material comes from 15-year-old cassettes.

First one online is our November 2, 1995 gig at the QE2. The band had only been playing for about a month, mostly house party gigs. This was our first time in a real club. Also on the bill: Dryer, Splendiferous Monster and Queer for Astro Boy.

This was clearly before we started breaking our “no banter” rule, ha ha.

I’ve been archiving old Hanslick Rebellion soundboard recordings all morning. Rediscovering what an excellent band we could be, particularly once Kearns became the drummer.

The local blogs occasionally post flashback articles or polls concerning Albany bands of the ’90s, and I’m always amused by which acts folks up here consider the best of the era. Sorry, but the Rebellion was the best. Anyone who claims otherwise obviously never saw us play and forfeits their right to comment.

I’d like to make all existing live tapes available somehow. I do think they need to be mastered first. The sound quality is surprisingly good in general, but someone who knows what he’s doing can probably make them louder and less murky.

There is always the rebellion is here. But we were a very reactive band; every performance was unique and most are worth hearing.

I did find an extra-rare artifact while going through these old tapes… something I didn’t even realize still existed: the one and only studio recording by the original Rebellion lineup. We started tracking “The Four-Minute Mile” at Scarlet East in early 1996, but it wasn’t coming out to our satisfaction so we aborted. Being broke musicians, we eventually decided to repurpose the tape for another project, recording over “Four-Minute Mile”. I thought that was that, but this rough mix survived!

The Hanslick Rebellion | “The Four-Minute Mile (studio version)” | rough mix
Mike Keaney: vocals, bass
Jed Davis: vocals, keyboards
Alex Dubovoy: guitars
John Dobson: drums
Recorded by John Delehanty and Rich Libutti at Scarlet East, Albany, NY, 1996

Sounds to me like vocals were still scratch and the guitar solo was not a priority for this rough mix; I consider this more a curiosity than anything else, and would still refer you to the rebellion is here version for the real stuff.

As I wrote a couple days ago, I’ve been helping to promote concerts on the UAlbany campus. There’s a room in the Campus Center that was supposed to be a coffeehouse; they even built a small stage in the corner, complete with lighting. But plans changed and the space now holds a Wendy’s instead. Every Tuesday night, we claim the room in the name of Rock and Roll (and University Auxiliary Services), bring in free coffee and tea, and turn it into the coffeehouse it was meant to be. We call it the Fake Coffeehouse.

I play every week, but I’m not the attraction. What draws students to the Fake Coffeehouse – and they come in increasingly large numbers – is their eagerness to support friends who play on that stage. I’ve brought in local and touring acts, too, and so far it’s clear that students prefer their own. The audience is big and generally polite no matter who’s on, but when UAlbany students perform, the place comes to life. It’s awesome. We started with two acts per show, but response has been so overwhelming that we added a third slot, plus an open jam at the end of the night.

This past week, we had James Blackshaw and his acoustic 12-string in for a set. James turned our modest space into a cathedral with gorgeous playing that was at once delicate and majestic. But it was the opener, a duo from Brooklyn called Mountains, who provided the Fake Coffeehouse’s finest moment so far: they built a crushing wave of ambient sound so intense, powerful and just plain loud that everyone in the room appeared windswept, as if we were all caught in the wake of a rocket engine. The crowd was shocked… you could feel minds expanding to accommodate new definitions of music. When was the last time you were truly shocked by a pure musical experience?

For some student musicians, the Fake Coffeehouse also serves as a classroom of sorts. Sure, a few people are content to get up and play shitty Jack Johnson covers; that’s their prerogative… I’m not going to turn anybody away just because I don’t care for what they do. There are a couple of regular participants, though, who seem genuinely passionate about creating, growing and improving. To that end, I’ve brought in a professor: Jerry Marotta. Jerry’s been supporting me on drums during my set, but then he generously stays late to jam with students at the end of the show. Last week, Jerry conducted two student guitarists through an increasingly complex series of starts and stops in an otherwise straightforward blues, and they just got better and better before our eyes. It’s a weekly masterclass with one of the best drummers on the planet.

Will every student who comes down engage with the music? Of course not… right now, the experience is largely social. But there are 17,000 students here, and even if a fraction of them develop a passion for playing and listening locally, we’ll have an awesome scene in this town. Something is definitely happening on campus – there’s music almost every night in the Wendy’s lounge now, including a WCDB open mic on Mondays and a Hillel-sponsored jam on Thursdays. I see all this imitation as proof that we’re on to something. Will the student musicians and fans ultimately take the action into town? I hope so.

I want every good musician in Albany – and there are a lot of them – to play to a packed house every night. I want everybody in Albany who appreciates music to be able to see a great show every night. Thousands of potential new participants show up in this city every year; they come to the region’s dozen-or-so colleges full of energy and fresh ideas; then they return every summer to the faraway places from which they came, eager to share the great things they discovered here. I will proceed as if anything is possible.

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I pissed away most of the past decade working on a stage musical called Rise And Shine. I actually hate musicals, but a friend convinced me that I should write one with him. When we completed our first draft, some heavies told us that it was almost there, and we were only about ten years from getting it produced. Ten years later, we were told that it was almost there, and we were only about ten years from getting it produced. That’s when I decided I had wasted enough time on something I couldn’t really stand to begin with.

When I turned my full attention back to rock music, I discovered that in the decade since I had last put out a solo album, my entire audience had gone and decided that babies were preferable to… I dunno, name anything fun. Releasing The Cutting Room Floor felt great – so cathartic, after all I went through to get it done. But just as making that album was a learning experience, so was putting it out.

Now I want to do something new, completely new. Brand new songs; musicians I’ve never played with before; new audience, even, building from scratch. Maybe I’m just caught up in the college energy… dunno, don’t care. I’m going with it.

If I had to start a band from zero, and I could fantasy draft any musicians I know, my first-round choice would be Avi Buffalo’s Sheridan Riley on drums. And then I would pick Avi Buffalo’s Avi Buffalo on guitar. They inspire me and restore my faith in things… and they can play their asses off! Lucky for me, they’re both game. So in December, we’re going to SugarHill Studios in Houston, TX, to record our first batch of songs as Sevendys. Why Houston? Why Sevendys? A more important question would be: who’s playing bass?