CHEFILEPTIC

7. the deys of old

On August 9, 1995, I arrived in California with my 3 band-mates Timothy, Zoltan and Jon.  We had traveled about 2300 miles, all the way from Houghton/Hancock in northern Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 

It took us a few days on the road.  We had two vehicles, Jon’s beat-up eighties-era white Astro-type van and my ’78 Chevy Impala.  My car was pulling my trailer, which was the shell of the bottom of an old pop-up camper that we’d mounted a pick-up truck bed topper onto (a real classy rig).

We’d brought every damn large and small piece of music gear we owned, along with a relatively minimal amount of personal stuff.  Jon’s little dog Delta was also in his van; he wouldn’t have considered leaving her behind. 

This was back in the stone-age before cell phones were considered a common necessity, but we had some old-school radio tech going on–both vehicles had CB radios.  Thing was, the one in my car was lousy, and the one in the van was better, which meant it could hear and talk “back atcha” over much larger distances.  This meant that if we in my car wanted to find out what was going on ‘out there’, we had to call the van, and have them find out “who’s got their ears on out there”, and report the ‘skinny’ they could find back to us.

(Hopefully) I’ll never forget that trip, especially when we were in the final stretch on the road that last evening.  I forget what highway we were on, but I do remember as evening came that we were in a desert scene, and the sun was setting on the right side as the moon was rising on the left.  I guess that means at that point we were heading mostly south.

It was awesome weather, and all windows were rolled down.  I turned on my radio and the first station we found some music on was playing some obscure old Grateful Dead from a bootleg.  It was classic—I mean, here we were in Californ-I-A!  I called up Jon’s van with the CB, and they tuned in to the same radio station.  Soon we were passing each other on the highway, singing along at each other with some old song, with all of us just so glad we had finally made it.

Then, a DJ cut in and said something like “sorry if you haven’t heard it yet, but Captain Trips has left the planet.  That’s right, Jerry Garcia, age 57, died today…” and on on on with the newsflash. Both of our vehicles kind of slid around on the road with shocked surprise, and I remember looking over at Jon in the van window as he made exclaiming, disbelieving movements with his arms. 

What a day to just happen to arrive in the infamous Bay Area of jams.

Our band had been playing music together for a few years in our home-college town where we all met.  We’d been gradually writing and playing more and more of our own original material, and over time we had formed a pretty strong commitment to our project—we had already been through quite a bit together, and all wanted to see it somehow mean something bigger.

It was still a few years before any of us found out anybody had any strange diseases (or kids).  Not to compare those two kinds of major life-changing situations, but sometimes I do wonder how people manage to raise them things–or live through whatever number of diseases– but again no comparing going on there.

Jon was my dorm-mate at 350 West in Wadsworth Hall at Michigan Tech University where we spent our Freshman year of college.  MTU is in Houghton, a 500mile drive from my hometown of East Lansing in lower Michigan, and about 400-some-odd miles away from Jon’s homeland near Chicago.

We had met Zoltan immediately; he was just down the hall and he and I had helped each other get our lofts into our rooms.  He was also from the Chicago area.  The dorm is a big huge long monster-rectangular brick building, the biggest on the whole Michigan Tech campus, and supposedly was once the largest dorm hall in America.

I remember when my Dad was first dropping me off at the dorm; we had moved some of my stuff into the empty room, and then had gone out to get something to eat.  When we came back to the room, my roommate Jon had been there, and had moved a couple of his things in, but he wasn’t there. 

He had thumbtacked a photograph to the wall, which I was just checking out when Jon walked in and we met the first time.  The photo was a mediocre-quality color snapshot of Jerry Garcia, autographed ‘to Jon’ with a sharpie.

Me and Jon and Zoltan started playing music together pretty quickly, and eventually we played with a number of other guys over the next couple of years.  We had started playing covers of what we considered ‘classic rock n’ roll’, in other words hippie-era stuff.  As we progressed, the three of us got more serious about writing, performing, and conquering the universe. 

At some point the drummer we had been playing with left us hanging, quitting on us right before a big gig that we had set up with another band of our friends called Patchwork Apple.  The show was at the locally famous Calumet Theatre, an 18^th-century opera hall, and proceeds were to benefit the hall.  It was a pretty terrible show for me and Jon and Zoltan—we had to play sitting down ‘acoustic-style’ even though we had been advertising and planning it like a full-bore ‘plugged-in’ project, so it was anti-climactic for us (to say the least).

Something good did come out of that event though.  When we finished playing, we met our new friend Timothy.  He had come to see the show, and as we were packing up, he walked up on the stage and introduced himself to us and told us he wanted to be our new drummer.

Timothy had grown up in the area.  He was like three years younger than us—still in high school and not even old enough to (legally) play bars with us at first—but as soon as we jammed with him, we knew we had our man.  From then on out it would be the four of us.  Before the opera-theatre show, Jon and Zoltan and me had decided to rename the band ‘how’syerday’, because Jon had exclaimed sarcastically “how’s yer day?!?” and threw his hands in the air as we had gotten the great news that our drummer was flaking on us. 

Once Timothy joined us, we had a ‘local guy’ in the band.  We adjusted the band-name spelling a touch, intending to emulate the local accent by working in a ‘schwa’ (you know, the upside-down lower-case e used in old-school dictionaries to spell out pronunciations).  Actually, maybe we just liked to say ‘schwa’ and thought it would be cool to have one in the name, and used the ‘local accent’ concept as an excuse to put it in there.  It was our damn word, and we knew what we meant.

Well, I could probably come up with a whole ‘nuther book’s-worth about all the crazy times we shared together over the next few years, but the big thing was we all had some great times and made true friends of each other and had some great times with lots of other great folks around us, too.

I quit school after my first year, and Jon about a year after that.  Zoltan was the only one of us who stuck it through and got his four-year degree (in four years!).  He’s like that–smart, stubborn, wise, eventually becoming a Metallurgical Engineer.

After the three of us Michigan Tech guys were out of the dorm, Jon and I became ‘roomies’, sharing a couple different spots with more and more geeked-out rehearsal spaces, in pads we’d refer to as ‘the band house’.  It was a pretty cheap area to live in rent-wise; it had once been an active mining region but that had all died off quite a while back, leaving lots of huge, half-sunken rusting debris leaning around, with much the remaining inhabitable housing and buildings usually being rented cheap to the students and staff of the University.

Overall, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan hasn’t kicked much economic-ass in quite a while.  It’s more sparsely populated than the Lower Peninsula, and it’s a more rugged environment that has considerably more fierce weather.  Up there in the upper north-western corner of the state where we were, there’s lots of ‘lake effect’ from Lake Superior, causing long, heavy winters with piles of snow, snow, snow.

It was a great environment for house parties.  Back then, word would get out that a party was going on somewhere and the hosting houses (which were usually frats and sororities) would be charging at the door and tapping kegs one after the other–all you care to chug. 

Word would go around after parties about how many barrels were consumed, which naturally was a direct function of how much fun was had by how many people.  Of course, many of us who consumed were underage, and of course whoever the host was would be very unlikely to be a ‘licensed distributer’ of alcohol.  Back then, people were just starting to take drunk driving more seriously (so there would be whatever designated driving arrangements or just stumbling home through the snow after the fun), but man, them parties did go on.

Sometimes, there would be bands at the parties, and sometimes we’d be one of them.  We made friends and shared shows with lots of other bands of different styles, like punk or alternative or folky or whatever… the town was only so big, and we were like one of the representative freaky-classic-psychedelic-rock influenced ‘jam bands’ on the scene.   

We stacked up and refined more and more original material, and gradually got more motivated to record it.  As we did, more and more, we learned more and more about recording.  We finally got serious enough to record a ‘demo’, and we were trying to figure out how and to who we would submit it to, and what we might do with our game, while we all sat up there feeling like we were stuck in a snow drift in a small town in the middle of northern nowhere.  That situation just couldn’t last forever, as much as I know we all loved living there.  Eventually we just had to at least try to make our combined efforts mean something more somehow.

I’d come to school at ‘Tech for an associate degree in ‘Forest Technology’.  Apparently at some point I was not only considering becoming a lumberjack, but even paying to learn how, until I made some realizations during my first year.  Although I liked the idea of working in the forest every day, I learned right away that it’s basically one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and the pay’s not usually exactly all-that-great, especially when you consider the risk. Then, I freaked out about how much money I had already borrowed to pay for the first year of school and just said ‘no thanks’ to finishing the degree. 

I got a job at The Library Bar and Restaurant, and ended up working there for the next few years.  I had worked in kitchens since I was 15, but a year of that was fast food, and the rest was scrubbing dishes.  The Library was where I’d learn my core cooking skills.

Jon had managed to hang in there a little longer with the school thing; but eventually he followed my bad example and quit school.  Soon, we were both working in The Library’s kitchen, and were roommates in a nearby three-story duplex.  The band’s gear was all crammed into the attic, which we had sound-proofed with old mattresses nailed to the rafters and covered over with thick black trash-bag-looking plastic.

Our band stayed pals with Patchwork Apple.  Their band was a seven piece, and like us, they were gradually making more and more of their own songs.  One of their members was this asshole Mike Formenti.  (Naw, seriously, absolutely way not an asshole…  I’m just getting a smile out of him in case he reads or hears that.)  Anyways, for some reason we let him hang around with us and geek out on the sound-mixing stuff.  After a while, Mike was kind of our regular sound-guy, and we all had this kind of ‘graduated’ band experience together when how’syerdey toured, with Mike’s sound-support, all the way around Lake Michigan during the final summer we all spent in the Great Lakes area together.

Mike had grown up near the San Francisco Bay area of California.  Like Zoltan, he had come to MTU to get an engineering degree and he did it.  He was then planning to migrate back to his native land and get a kickass job and start up his own recording studio.  At some point he asked how’syerdey about if and when he ever got his own recording studio together back in California if’n we would come on out to make an album, and we were all like, “of course!”.  There was no question that we would—things weren’t exactly going to be happening fast anytime soon for a rock n’ roll band in Houghton Michigan, and we knew it.  What we didn’t know was that Mike was actually really serious.

After he graduated and then did that tour with us, he moved to California.  The band stayed and diddle-fucked around doing whatever we were doing on through the next winter, then he called us up.  He now had the recording gear and was setting up his studio, and he wanted us to come on out and make an album.  Not just one, actually.  I forget the exact whens and hows but at some point, we had ended up agreeing to cut two albums with his company, the new indie label he had named quilted fish records.

Mike and three other members of Patchwork Apple, singers Pete and Dianne and flautist Kevin, had all moved out to share a big house in the small mountain town of Boulder Creek, near Santa Cruz, just a ways south of San Fran. 

He now had some nice decent recording gear and some relatively nice microphones and stuff coming together in the garage of this house, and we were all able to kind of more or less ‘couch-surf’ as the band landed.  I ended up in sleeping in that little trailer we had pulled from Michigan in the house’s back yard under the redwood trees with an extension cable running out to it for a hundred bucks a month for the better part of the next year.

A short time later we were all working local jobs, which in my case was once again cooking. 

We had sound-proofed the garage and made a separated booth in one corner for mixing, and we were learning more (but certainly not everything) about recording, as fast as we could. 

Recording our album was educational, but often frustrating.  Sometimes, we’d have something that we did a poorer job of recording, but was a good performance, and sometimes it worked the opposite way and we’d have mediocre parts that were recorded well.  When we were really kicking ass, something would be both recorded well and performed well, but it would often still end up in the cloud of every other thing that was sometimes working well and sometimes not.  Whether or not we wanted to admit it, we didn’t have all the studio skills, we just had some start-up tools and some time to work with.

We had lots of ideas, and we tried many and kept many.  That was fun, but without having some kind of producer to bully us into writing shorter, simpler, less eccentric-sounding stuff and getting the album done by a deadline, it turned out to be a long album full of mostly long songs that took us forever to complete. 

By the time it was finished, we had learned so much about recording while working on it that it seemed like we could almost just record the whole thing better if we’d started over from the beginning–but there was just too much time and energy invested already.  We needed to wrap that project up.

Thing was, in spite of however much better we could have done with whatever list of details on the album, we were all still proud of it.  We decided to name it Stumble Proud.  We pressed a thousand copies, which was and is still really the basic smallest number you can get pressed and wrapped up for a reasonable deal, if you’re still considering printing CDs, which have become less popular fast lately.

After being at that house for a year, the band moved a few blocks away into a local ‘flip’ house we had learned about right in downtown Boulder Creek behind the liquor store.  It was being remodeled by a couple of guys we had met, and they were working on it on-and-off but letting the band rent it cheap while they did.  Meanwhile, Mike bought a house a few miles away in an area called Bonnie Doon, and he was permanently converting the garage there into a more serious studio with even better gear.  He was doing pretty well with his job, so I guess that engineering degree did him well.

My brother Bryan is six years younger than me.  After he graduated high school back in Michigan, he moved out to join us in California and shared a big room in the liquor-store band-house with me.  I think that more or less both he and the parents kind of wanted him to just take a little time and decide what he wanted to do after he’d graduated, and they all knew we’d have some fun and he’d learn a lot by moving out to hang with his bro’s band to help us with our gigs and stuff. 

I’d like to think that’s what ended up happening most of the time over the next seven or so years he lived with me in the area, in spite of him having to take care of me more and more of the time, and I’d like to think his time as my roommate left him with more memories of funs-and-happys than memories of scarys-and-sketchys. 

Back when we were all in that liquor store house, we didn’t know I had seizures yet—and though I did end up having one for sure, we didn’t realize it.  We didn’t understand that there was any kind of real problem, so we didn’t worry about any health matters and life was totally different back then.  I know we had at least some fun!

So, the band did have manage to have some great times out there, and it played plenty of lame gigs but a few fun and crazy ones before it finally fell apart.  And it didn’t fall apart easy.

Over time, Jon (vocals and guitar) was getting more distant and disinterested.  I don’t think it was anybody’s fault or intention, but I do think he thought the rest of us were naïve about the ways of the world, and I’m sure he was right.  I don’t think it was that he thought any of us bandmates were jerks or anything, but I’m pretty sure he just wasn’t always having so much fun anymore in general.  I saw less and less of him socially too, but then I didn’t go out to the bars so much; I guess it could be said that I was less social.  Either way though, I’m pretty sure now that he didn’t take very good care of himself after a point.

When he and I had first become dorm-mates, he didn’t know how to play guitar, and I hardly knew how to sing–but after that year we were both doing both.  Jon then thought of himself as more of a singer that also played guitar, and I was the other way around, a guitarist who also sang.  He and I both got into writing songs, sometimes together, and of course Zoltan and Timothy also often wrote with us, but some of the songs were clearly mine and likewise some were Jon’s.  So naturally, our album Stumble Proud included some of Jon’s tunes, and when he stopped playing with us, we were then stuck with an album with him all over it, and some songs we really couldn’t really play without him.

The rest of us weren’t quite ready to give it up yet, but we now had not only a bunch of copies of this album (that we wouldn’t play all of) but we also had t-shirts and bumper stickers and whatever other promo-crap that the band with Mike and quilted fish records had generated.  Not only that, but we had been paying for a mixer and various other gear that the band owed for on a credit card and we all knew we had to eventually pay that damn thing off.

We played for like a year on Thursday nights at this bar in downtown Santa Cruz called The Asti, which was a weird but fun time.  The crowd was there to drink, and kind of ignored us most of the time, but they weren’t usually too mean to us.  It was a small place that had an unused kitchen at the back behind an unused service window, and we had gotten into setting up Timothy’s drums in the kitchen behind a sheet of plexiglass we put over the window.  This helped us keep the drums quieter in the barroom so Zoltan and me could play super ‘small-sized’, crammed into the back the corner of the place with a tiny little mini-PA system.

Naturally, all of us bandmates are full of (probably) years-worth of stories from the life of that project.  As I had mentioned, all of us got a little everything-happens-for-a-reason learning.  So when something happened that must have meant something to any of us, what can you say, it’s lived on as part of our ‘how’syerdey family folk-lore’, and any time I talk to any of these brothers I get to reminisce some of the ‘good stuff’ that I may now not have thought of in quite a while.

For example, when I talked to Zoltan on the phone a while back, he reminded me about the famed ‘miracle guitar-case’ event.  Like many other stories from my history, I had no memory of what he was talking about at first, and it took him getting into it a ways before my memory of it finally ‘lit up’, but so many other associated memories around it lit up, too–which is how it’s been a lot for me in recent years (especially since the series of surgeries I underwent at Stanford).

This was after one of our gigs at The Asti, and for some reason I had gotten sick during the show.  Maybe I’d drank too much or maybe I had even seized at some point, but all I knew was I didn’t want to drive from The Asti, in Santa Cruz, all the way back up into the mountains to Boulder Creek where we all lived.  Timothy knew my car well, and he’d agreed to drive it home while I lay down in the backseat.  I thought I was going to puke.

It was probably a little over a half-hour long ride, and the road (mostly highway 9), is very, very curvy.  Timothy was, as usual, a methodical and focused driver, which was a good thing, because I was trying not to hurl. 

Right when we pulled into our house, and he shut off the motor, my eyes popped open with immediate horror: OH-MY-GOD-MY-GUITAR WAS ON THE ROOF!!!!

I immediately knew that I had left it (in its case), on the roof of the car as I had first crawled into the backseat.  And there was no way it could have stayed there this far, so it had to have either slid off miles ago, or been picked up by someone walking past the bar or something.

Somehow, though, the unimaginable had then, in fact, happened for me.  When Timothy and I got out of the car, the guitar was still on the roof, stuck with ‘cohesion’ in the humidity that had condensed on the roof from the fog in the air in Santa Cruz (it’s by the coast).  That Monterey Bay fog had saved my axe.

And that’s just the kind of lucky I feel like I am right now.  I’ve had some damn crazy odds stacked up against me, and here the fuck I still am.

So anyways, my old band mates and Mike will always be my bros.  They really stuck it out for as long as possibly reasonable trying to keep how’syerdey moving, but we all knew eventually that it was time to move on.

Zoltan headed back to the Chicago area where he grew up and his family lived, and Timothy headed on down the coast to Santa Barbara before long to study music.  He eventually ended getting his master’s degree from the University of Santa Barbara, and he’s the one out of us all that has since made his way in music.  I have so much respect for him, both as a friend and as a music wizard that I’ve been so fortunate to know.  Lately, he’s some made super tunes using his artist name A\D|S/R (pluggin’ for ya buddy!).

Around when Zoltan left, Mike and me had a talk.  See, how’syerdey had agreed to record two albums with quilted fish records, and Mike figured I could do the second one ‘solo’ and we’d just call it all-good.  Mike knew that I’d learned to play a number of instruments over the years and that I’d be able do most of the parts on the album, and we had plenty of great music friends that we could possibly recruit to help with the project as well.

So, in late spring of ’99 I started recording my first solo album with quilted fish records.  My bro Bryan and I had moved down to Aptos, about a forty minute drive away from Mike’s place in Bonny Doon, and we had our new pad set up to where I was able to rock out and we could be loud and host jams  and have some new adventures.  Having that place helped me write and practice for the album.  I did most of the instrument tracks, and Timothy was able to come up from Santa Barbara and do about half of the drum tracks and some vocals too.  Our Patchwork Apple pals Pete and Dianne were still around, and dropped in on backing vocals which really helped finish the album up swell.

Once that project was mixed and ready, I was damn proud of it.  Still am.  Only thing was, I had promised myself that I would not release it without having a live band together to support it–and that ended up being much easier said than done.

For one thing, it was right after finishing that album that I got that first ambulance ride to the Dominican Hospital ER, and we all found out I had some kind of seizure-disorder.  When Bryan first called Mike from the ER, Mike had dropped whatever he was doing to rush over to the hospital.

I know that first and foremost, Mike cared about me, as his friend, who he knew was now dealing with some level of heavy medical news, but I’d also suspect that he likely very soon also had some (very understandable) concern about what was going to happen with the album, now that he had done so much to make it with me.  Indeed, some concern in that area would have been very valid. 

After all, it did end up taking me seven years to eventually release that album–seven damn blue years.