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!

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.

I don’t write too many “nice” songs. I don’t really see the point… if things are good, why waste time writing about ‘em when you could just be enjoying them?

But sometimes you just have to give props!

When your family’s not cutting it, friends get a free upgrade. I drew a shitty hand with the former but have been so lucky with the latter. Lisa Brennan alone is like an entire family in one beautiful little person. How did they fit all that awesome in there?!

After an early-aughts Collider show, a bunch of us ended up at the Moonstruck Diner on Second Avenue. I had some sort of mishap with my coffee and it spilled all over the saucer, making the bottom of my cup drippy. LB slipped a napkin between the cup and saucer when I wasn’t looking. Bryan Thomas saw her do it. He said: “Don’t let it go unnoticed.”

But it did. Mission accomplished, Lisa never said a word. I only found out about the makeshift doily years later. That’s the kind of person you want looking out for you.

“Please Don’t Eat Me I Love You” was an easy song to wanna write, but tough to actually pull off. Especially for someone who is not used to writing positive lyrics! I was still slaving over it the week of the session, and even now I can only hope I got it right. Many of the words come straight out of LB’s t-shirt collection, including the title/closing refrain and the Engrish slogan from the tee on the right.

Production-wise, you are hearing one unedited live take with surprisingly few instrumental overdubs. Drums, bass, guitar, piano and congas were all tracked at once, in one room – Studio Three at EastWest in Los Angeles. That is the space where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds (hence the yellow-and-white-Cooper-Black-on-green single cover art… though it’s also a nod to the “Please Don’t Eat Me I Love You” t-shirt, on which the slogan is set in Cooper Black for both the original and pizza-parody versions).

There are still two songs left to mix from the LA session; you’ll hear one of them soon. The other we’re saving for Christmastime. Next week Sevendys reconvenes in Woodstock to record five more tunes. Which reminds me… I’m supposed to be making charts right now. See you back here on Tuesday the 7th for my June Single of the Month!

This photo was taken on May 16, 2000, at Joey Ramone’s last birthday party. At least, the last one he attended in the flesh. Joey’s birthday is May 19. That party was a couple days early; this post is a couple days late. It’s all right.

Joey’s been gone ten years. Everything about the world is different from the way it was on May 16, 2000, the night Arturo threw down a stack of photos on his living room worktable – the very table the Ramones had leaned on to sign their first record deal – and instructed Joey to autograph and me to flip and stack while he snapped this picture.

I just read something about the plane that emergency-landed in the Hudson a couple years ago. One of the passengers referred to the water landing as a “miracle”. It wasn’t a fucking miracle. It was the work of an excellent, experienced and competent pilot doing his job in an exemplary way. Those lives were not saved by an imaginary god, but by a real human being.

Why is there no longer any appreciation of excellence in our culture, in our society? We don’t strive for it… we don’t even seem to understand it anymore when we see it. What entertains Americans in 2011? Shit we can poke fun at, ridicule. Things that make us feel superior. The “Friday” video, the rapture fail. Our spirits are broken. This is all we have left. We justify the time we waste picking over garbage by invoking “irony”… but there’s no irony here. Slapstick isn’t ironic. Ineptitude isn’t ironic. Self-flagellation isn’t ironic.

The Ramones made music that was simple. Simple can be a cop out; it’s easy to be simple and shitty, or simple and stupid. But Ramones music isn’t shitty or stupid, and it’s very, very difficult to play well. The generation that beatified the Ramones was X – my generation. Not coincidentally, we also wielded irony – real irony – as a weapon. We bludgeoned bullshit to death with it. Like the Ramones, though, Gen X is history.

I want to share a video with you. I found this earlier tonight on some old mini DV tapes and edited a couple of camera angles together. This is from October 8, 2004 – the Ramones “Beat on Cancer” event in New York City. Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny were all gone by then. CJ Ramone, Daniel Rey and the Descendents’ Bill Stevenson performed with rotating singers, including Suicide’s great Alan Vega.

This performance is funny, yeah; it’s a mess. But it’s touching, and it’s right. I offer this without a trace of irony… here is a true artist with giant fuckin balls doing what he does, doing whatever the hell he wants. Being excellent over excellent music. Happy birthday, Joey.

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!

——-

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 keep hearing that the ’90s are “back”. I can kinda see it… I mean, there’s flannel plaid on every mannequin at the mall. But it’s like when all the hair metal bands reverbed up their drums, strung half a dozen blues riffs together and claimed to be channeling Zeppelin. C’mon, Led Zep was about so much more than that.

Reality Bites was available on demand so I watched it last night. I had never seen the movie… at the time it got too much hype, so true to my Gen X roots I passed on it. Watching it now depressed the living shit out of me. I don’t know that the film really captured the essence, the energy of the time – in fact, nah, it didn’t – but it did serve to remind me how cool the ’90s were. How cool we were. How cool we’re not now.

I’ve beaten generational demographics to death in other posts, and that’s only a smidge of the story here anyway. This is really about nostalgia.

I spend a lot of time dicking around in my own past. Not just musically. I use Facebook every day. For people my age, Facebook is a Ouija board through which we contact spirits from our past. You send out messages; ghosts reply from beyond. You can correspond with them, recount memories, share inside jokes. But you’ll never encounter one in person. They don’t exist in the real world – they’re spectral apparitions of people whose bodies still walk the earth, but are now being used for different lives, with different interests, different priorities, personalities marked and molded by experiences that did not include you.

I don’t mean to say that a Facebook seance isn’t enjoyable and comforting – it is, or we wouldn’t all engage in them every day – or that you wouldn’t appreciate the person your old pal has become if you got to know each other again in real life. But for the most part, the interaction is less a friendship than a mutual haunting.

My favorite musical endeavor lately is Sevendys – I think I’ve made that clear. Fresh music, wonderful new collaborators. I find it exciting and energizing. But my second favorite right now is Skyscape. Maybe it’s because the ’90s are back, or maybe it’s because, for Skyscape, they never ended.

Dom and I (and our legion of bandmates) generated so much material so quickly, and recorded so much of it, that I have albums’ worth of Skyscape music stored in bite-sized lo-fi chunks on old 4-track cassettes and floppy discs. A lot of it is terrible. Most of it is badly performed and indifferently recorded. But it’s full of energy and ideas which are begging to be harnessed and shaped by experienced hands.

When we work on Skyscape music, so much of it is about the people we are today – the skills we’ve developed, the attention to craft and context. But just as much of the process involves the people we were in the ’90s, the kids who built this foundation of ideas and sensibility, who laid down the trail of breadcrumbs by leaving so many recorded artifacts behind. On a Skyscape record, instrumental components are sourced from 20 years of material, as though everyone who was ever in the band is still a member – eternally young, free and full of passion.

For me, bringing these tracks together is like living in all times of my life at once. I think that’s how so many people my age are desperate to feel; I’m grateful to that younger version of me for the opportunity.

Here’s a perfect example in progress. This track started as a Portastudio recording made live at Dom’s 1992 high school graduation party. I was using my 4-track as a mixer and took the opportunity to pop in a cassette. The band was horrible… it wasn’t even really a band. Dom, Rob Hill, Sean Gould and I set up in a line – two guitars, no bass or drums. But our attempt at covering “Hey Jude” was as hilarious as it was awful, and I decided to see what I could make of it.

I thought adding a deadpan full-band arrangement would help the vocals seem even funnier and more absurd. Step one was to add drums. My preference was to have drums that sounded similarly 4-tracked, and sure enough I was able to find a suitable performance: drums from early 1993, when we were demoing songs for Band Of The Week. In this case, we pointed one microphone towards Loren Wiseman’s basement kit and he played “Age Song” at a tempo which was, coincidentally, a dead match for “Hey Jude”. I flew the drums in, added some tambourine, piano and a couple of backing vocals, and here we are. Still needs bass, guitar and more backup singers, but it’s turning into something listenable and fun!

Skyscape | “Hey Jude” | rough mix
Domenic Maltempi: vocals
Dom’s cousin Tina: vocals
Jed Davis: keyboards, backing vocals, tambourine
Lisa Brennan: backing vocals
Loren Wiseman: drums
Rob Hill: guitar
Sean Gould: guitar
Adapted from a live recording at Dom’s house, July 1992

I’ve been sick all week… flu or something. Whenever I lie down, my nose clogs up and I get too uncomfortable to sleep. The lack of rest is making it tough for me to get better. I was using nasal spray earlier in the week, but you can’t use that too many days in a row so I put it aside. Decongestant pills don’t seem to do much of anything. This is a tricky one!

This is the worst I’ve felt since my 2006 pneumonia, which was really bad. If you want to see something rough, search for The Hanslick Rebellion’s Checkerboard Kids performance on YouTube. I was just beginning to recover from pneumonia when we did that gig. I’m wearing like a dozen layers, I couldn’t speak or sing, and half the muscles in my body were pulled from coughing so every movement unleashed bolts of pain. Even after I got over that pneumonia, it was still two years before my immune system worked properly – I was sickly the whole time. I don’t want to get anywhere near that point ever again.

I’ve been trying to relax at home, do a little tidying up. I moved here way back in May but the unpacking part never really ends. I came across this old J-Bird Records box tucked into a milk crate; I assumed it was surplus copies of We’re All Going To Jail! or some shit, but it turned out to be full of 4-track Portastudio cassettes.

I thought I knew where all my old 4-track tapes were… this was a secret stash of about twenty cassettes dating all the way back to 1992. There are Skyscape tunes I had totally forgotten about; collaborations with old friends like Joe Aversano; some of my earliest solo demos; the only existing recording by Pavlov’s Dogs, my freshman-year band with Mike Keaney; even multitrack takes of live gigs where we used my Portastudio as a mixer. I’ve started dumping them into Pro Tools and playing around – the perfect way to pass sick time at home!

I’m no mix engineer, but the raw material is lo-fi enough that even I can’t mess it up. There is a lot of charming stuff here. I’m polishing and putting snippets online as they catch my ear. Here they are, with more to come – a work in progress, 19 years and counting.

I particularly love “Wheelbarrow Rosebud”, the Joe Aversano track. Joe was (and still is) a really unique guitarist, and he writes such pretty stuff. His delivery on this tune is totally 1992, straight out of “Valerie Loves Me”.

Then there’s “Hippies On The Road”, which always started as Skyscape’s cover of “Riders On The Storm” but inevitably morphed into whatever Dom wanted to sing about that day (most often something concerning the Brady Bunch). The drums were recorded mono, so I shoved them into one channel and compressed them until they blew up… then I dropped them out in spots and added some 909 kick and snare. The bass is the keyboard bassline as I originally played it, but dumped into Melodyne, converted to MIDI and now triggering a Fender Rhodes Bass sample. I then EQ’d the bass out of the keyboard track so only the new Rhodes part remained. I guess I could just do clean, faithful mixes of everything, but this isn’t about preserving history – it’s about making cool shit!

Dom and I have been secretly working on a new Skyscape record: Dr. Des Moines. Like Zetacarnosa, it’s a mashup of hi- and lo-fi sounds from the present and the past. I recently unearthed a couple of unfinished tunes from 1992, “Poetry Read-In At Bob’s” and “Motorvate”, with the intention of slipping them in amidst the newly-written material. We’d gotten far enough with them that keyboard sequences exist, but I couldn’t find lyrics anywhere. Turns out there were 4-track demos of both songs that I’d completely forgotten – so not only do we now know the words, but I’ve got classic takes of Dom singing them that I can weave into the 2011 versions. This is awesome.

I lost about half my wardrobe to water damage right before I moved upstate; what remained when I got to Albany included a number of green plaid shirts that I hadn’t worn since college. Some had purple accents so I busted ‘em out and started wearing them to work on Fridays. School spirit thing, purple on Fridays. Anyway, I’ve named the project after these shirts, which, like the 4-track jams, originated in the early ’90s, sat in the dark for almost twenty years, and are now back in action. These are my Green Plaid Recordings.

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.

——-

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?

The Hanslick Rebellion is returning to action, and we hope to have a new EP for you soon. We started writing and rehearsing earlier this year but things sorta ground to a halt. We seem to be back on track now. Richard Lloyd, who had been producing and engineering the new record, is still producing and engineering the new record. He has been very, very patient with us!

I can say with all confidence that the new material sounds nothing like our last release, Let’s Get To The Fucking. Which is not to say LGTTF is anything less than awesome. I reacquainted myself with that EP recently and was stunned by how great it sounds, and how much fun the blend of rock and reggaeton can be:

The new Rebellion material is closer to our live sound, a la the rebellion is here. Richard’s studio is one small room, and we’re just gonna bang this shit out. Richard recorded all of his recent solo work in that space; his amazing The Radiant Monkey feels totally in-the-room-with-the-band, and that’s what we’re hoping for here.

And now, a few quickies.

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I’m really getting into the singles thing – the flexibility of it. As long as I can keep making physical versions to go with digital, I’ll be happy. I’ve got a bunch of new tunes ready to record in easy-to-release pairs; December should be a busy month for that.

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I’ve got a couple of crayon drawings in a Schenectady art show this month. It was a Hallowe’en-themed exhibition, so I used the Eisenstein stills from The Cutting Room Floor as my basis. Here they are… you can see them in person at the Jay Street Gallery (163 Jay Street, Schenectady, NY):

Both were done on large sheets of Bristol board (I forget the exact dimensions) with Crayola crayons. I’m doing the album art for my pal Matt Johnson’s new record the same way, so this was a nice warmup.

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I recently started DJing at WCDB Albany. That’s 90.9 on the FM dial; you can also listen live from anywhere by following this link. My regular time slot is 2pm-4pm on Sunday afternoons, though I’m off this week for Rebellion rehearsal. I’ll remind you again before my next show.

I was a station member in the mid-90’s, when college radio was in its glory. Things are obviously different now, but today’s station members are just as passionate about music as we were back then. Probably moreso… it’s easy to be involved with something when it’s cool. Harder when you have to fight to make it cool. And they do – WCDB is very cool.

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Finally, I’ve been secretly blogging someplace else, fictionally and under an assumed name. Just a heads-up, so you can play detective if ya really want to… you probably won’t find it, but good luck!