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.

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 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’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?

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.

The 7th of every month is my day. (If you’re reading this because you give a shit, then let’s call it our day!) I can keep music steadily rolling out while working at my usual deliberate pace behind the scenes. Costs stay down because I’m not biting off entire albums at once. And every new track becomes important because each is featured for an entire month. It’s good. I feel like all the model needs is some fine-tuning.

First of all, I’m gonna start folding Sevendys tracks into the process. I think it’s confusing and distracting to say I’m gonna bring out one thing every month on such and such a day, but then go ahead and release additional tracks at random. Whenever a Sevendys track is ready, it’ll come out simultaneously on my music site and the Sevendys site on the 7th of the month.

Also, I still like albums. I like to think of songs as belonging with a collection of other contextually appropriate songs, best enjoyed together and offered in an optional physical format which might enhance the listening experience even further. Every single I’ve released since April has been, in my mind, lifted from an album to come.

I’m going to meet the process halfway on this one. Going forward, I’m going to define “album” a little differently than I have been: no longer so much an aggregate of component songs as it is a container for songs.

For example, I have ten songs that I’ve been working on which, in my opinion, will sound great together as an album I’ve decided to call Failing Upwards. Four of them are mixed and ready to go; six are still being polished. I am slowly filling up the Failing Upwards bucket with finished tracks. When the bucket is full, you get the whole thing at once with a physical version offered. Prior to that, the tracks arrive as completed, one at a time, mixed in with other singles-of-the-month which are slowly filling other buckets.

So I kind of no longer make albums; I make music buckets.

I’ve already been doing this in a way with the Green Plaid Recordings. I bring those out as they happen and kind of sneak them up onto that page. If I can make one sound better after it’s been put online, I’ll just replace it. There’s no real plan for that stuff; I don’t even know how much of it there actually is. But eventually all of the appropriate material will be there, and it will sound as good as my crack team of engineers can make it sound, and then I’ll consider that bucket full and get you a nicely mastered digital version and an interesting physical version.

I can tell you that right now I am working to fill quite a few buckets, with the goal of completing at least one a year. These include, but are not limited to: three solo buckets, the Sevendys bucket, the Green Plaid bucket, two Skyscape buckets and two Hanslick Rebellion buckets (one of which used to be the Jeebus bucket, but it’s the same exact band so we figured what the fuck). And a Rise and Shine bucket.

One more thing.
Lately I’ve been listening back to some of my mid-90s sequence-based stuff: Physics, We’re All Going To Jail!, Blowing Shit Up. A great deal of this material was written to be performed by live musicians on acoustic and analog instruments, but I didn’t have access to any of the above so it’s all programmed and recorded right out of my keyboard – everything from the drums and bass to the horns and piano. I’ve often considered going back and reworking the recordings with a band, ditching the canned sounds. In fact, the Rebellion has cut new versions of some BSU stuff, which you’ll hear eventually, and a few of the WAGTJ songs may end up getting reimagined by Sevendys because the fit is there. On the whole, though, I don’t think I’ll be doing any full-scale rebooting of these albums. While far from perfect, they kind of are what they are – raw, of their time and not without charm. I’d rather forge ahead with new material for now.

I still wouldn’t trade the experience. We learned a lot and along the way helped midwife some great albums into the world. It was worth doing… and I think it still is.

I resigned my position at Eschatone in 2009. Wasn’t thrilled about it, but we felt my presence on “the board” was a conflict of interest since I was aiming to release a ton of music through the label – everything I had spent years pushing back so we could put out stuff by other people. Eschatone released I AM JED DAVIS! that year, followed by “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo”, Celebration Party! and The Cutting Room Floor in fairly rapid succession. Then I decided to draw down a bit music-wise, concentrate on Sevendys and my monthly independent singles, and circumstances were such that I was able to return to the company.

But what could I do there in 2011? Nobody wants physical manifestations of music anymore. And anyone can distribute music digitally. Even stuff we developed for our website, like the ability to package digital downloads with multi-option physical products like t-shirts (unfathomable when we implemented it in 2007 – there was not a single shopping cart system that could handle it!), is now being done better by awesome sites like Bandcamp.

And the whole nature of interaction and information gathering on the Web has changed. Interested persons – of which there are fewer than you think – now learn about your project from third-party gatekeepers and then get the latest info about it from Facebook and Twitter feeds, which in turn help you aggregate fans and keep in touch with them. Loading up a remote homepage in the wilderness with features and minutia is kind of pointless. I’m not sure what the Eschatone website really needs besides the online store with streaming music, and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter links.

So many websites are now just CSS-treated WordPress blogs (for example, this one). I’m trying to reconcile that with necessity… most of the shit on the rhetorical you’s website is just not that important. Content is – if you’re a musician, you should have music; if you’re a writer, you should have writing; if you’re a visual artist, you should have artwork; if you have a piece of pertinent information that just can’t be found anyplace else, key word pertinent, then make it available. But – and I fall victim to this as much as anybody – the potential for self-deception is so high when you’re trying to imagine what people might be looking for when they visit your website.

I spent the weekend fucking around with the Eschatone Web situation… thinking about utility, but also design and color as I relocated the online store to the superior Bandcamp platform. I ran with bright colors on an almost-black blue background; extremely simple, with boundaries defined by text and the weight and color of that text – no lines, no boxes. The old site was all lines and boxes and dullish colors. It was sophisticated, very “grown-up”. I’d like something more whimsical this time around. The colorful little Eschatone omegas in the upper left corner remind me of those floating glowy* eyes you would see in old cartoons.

But no amount of design can redeem a pointless endeavor. So what can Eschatone do? And what can I do to help?

I have some ideas. Stay tuned!

(You can do so by becoming a fan of Eschatone Records on Facebook and following us on Twitter.)

*Dang, I love getting an opportunity to use the word “glowy” in a sentence.

There are 22 albums in the music section of this site (and some, like my In The Presence Of Presents and Single of the Month comps, are already set to free download). Finding the free tune each day will be a bit of a scavenger hunt. Here’s a tip, though: it’ll be marked in the track listing as “(free)”.

I hope this introduces you to stuff you’ll like. And who knows – perhaps as you search some of the song titles will pique your interest or spark a memory. There are worse things than finding new music to enjoy!

One track is already set up for ya. Why are you still on this page when you could be downloading that shit?

Shoot The Piano Player was recorded a couple summers ago in Chicago. LB, Lucy, Joe Abba and I spent a weekend at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, fluffy coffee and Pip the cat. With Joe on drums, I tracked 13 songs live to tape, vocals and all. There are maybe three overdubs on the whole album – an organ part and a couple of backing vocals. Lucy and LB hung out in the control room, where they got to watch Albini work. That is a true privilege.

For me, making a record with Steve Albini is up there with working with the Ramones. I love that dude as a concept and admire him as a human being. Albini is, in my opinion, the incorruptible avatar of Generation X’s finest values. Most of my contemporaries have sold out but Albini marches on. He’s tireless behind the board and radiates competence in a way that is somehow simultaneously intense and reassuring. At the end of the session, he congratulated me on coming prepared and getting my work done. That’s like Wade Boggs telling you, “nice at-bat.” One of the best moments of my entire life!

The songs on STPP were written over a 15-year period, and they are generally pretty songwritery. Lots of roleplaying here. A few of the narrators are unsavory characters (“You Make Me Feel So Young” in particular… that song is just fuckin gross but I had to record it. I lost multiple girlfriends to nasty old dudes when I was in my early 20s and the lyric was born of my outrage). “I’m On Your Side” was originally part of Rise And Shine – it’s sung from the perspective of a bigoted asshole cop, and my job is to make you like him if not inadvertently agree with him.

I do a bit of side-switching in these songs, too: “Piece Of Crap” (the oldest composition on the record; it’s from 1994) comes alternately from the point-of-view of the cynical, sneering wannabe pop star and the spoiled teens who worship him; “For A Girl In Promotions” starts out like a snipe at the title character but the narrator is revealed to truly care about her and appreciate what she does. I dunno, this is starting to sound a little navel-gazey… so how bout: I’m proud of this record and happy that I can share it with you!

In addition to the digital release (it’s for sale at iTunes, Amazon and all the rest today as well, but why would you buy it out there when you can get it right here?), Shoot The Piano Player is also available on 8-track tape. The 8-track run is limited to an edition of 20 copies, manufactured by a really cool company called The Dead Media out of Ft. Worth, Texas. Interesting fact about 8-track tapes: they play back twice as fast as cassettes and use thicker, higher-quality tape. It can be argued that a well-built 8-track cartridge sounds better, and preserves more of the analog experience, than vinyl. I most likely will release a vinyl pressing of Shoot The Piano Player at some point, but it could be argued that this 8-track tape may provide the ultimate STPP listening experience if you’ve got the means to play it. My 8-track deck broke recently, so I picked up an old 2-XL robot on eBay. His eyes light up in time with the music. It’s awesome.

Here are some photos from the Shoot The Piano Player recording session: