THE UGLY PROLOGUE.In the early summer of 1990 I was in rough shape. I was living in East Boston with my then-girlfriend who I'd met on a methadone clinic. We'd both walked off the clinic without detoxing and thrown ourselves into the chaos that results from such a foolhardy move, saddled with a nasty chemical habit that no amount of organic opiates seemed to satisfy. Every day this Puerto Rican dealer named Edwin would come by my place and drop off a few bags of dope. He took a shine to us and one day asked "do jew like to a-smoke?" Figuring he meant weed I said "sure", and he pulled out a contraption made from a pepsi bottle and began to load it up with rock cocaine. I had avoided that very nasty stuff since attending the tail end of a manic three-day free-base party in Eastie back in the early 80's; watching two of my friends and three strippers burn through twenty grand in insurance money like that, taping the blinds down to the windowsills and becoming so hugely paranoid that one eventually jumped out a 2nd story window because someone knocked at the door [it was his aunt, not Dirty Harry the Enforcer] had given me a healthy fear of the stuff. I didn't even like the shit, and for eight years I'd steered clear of it as it mutated from hard-to-make free-base to McDonald's-of-drugs crack, turning some nicefolks I knew into scheming, lying zombies. But my policy regarding drugs at this particular time was "if it's for free it's for me". So we fired up with Edwin. Soon it was a regular occurrence. Old stinky Edwin pedaling down from the Maverick Projects, hunched over on a tiny little-kid's bike- he was like 45 years old or something -firing up a few rocks and then selling us the dope we needed to come down from it. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

I'd managed a heroin habit [albeit less and less effectively] on and off, for a dozen years by that summer, but the combination of the lengthy after-kick from methadone and the devil's own rock candy was fucking me up with a quickness. By mid-summer I knew that if I couldn't clean up I was going to end up dead. One evening I found myself heading down to the Maverick Projects to cop a twenty of this crap that I didn't even like, knowing there was at least a 1-in5 chance some little bastard would burn me anyway and I'd end with a piece of wax or a bit of a steak bone or something for my troubles. I saw my reflection in a passing store window and barely recognized myself, and I decided at that moment that I would move. Get out of East Boston, definitely. Get out of Boston, yes, and maybe Massachusetts, too; at that point I was ready for a new planet if possible. Anyone who has spent time in recovery will recognize this as a classic case of what twelve-step programs call a "geographic cure", and they never work since when you get where you're going you find you took yourself- and your habit -along for the trip. But I needed some space, some time away from my music business drug connections, some distance between myself and the guys I'd grown up with in Eastie, most of whom were strung out (at least the handful that were still alive, that is). So I looked for a chance to get out of town.

June 27, 1990, with Jonathan Richman...just a few weeks before the momentous tour that culminated in my relocation to the Buckeye State. It'd be a couple of years before I would see Jonathan- or most of my other closest friends -again.

OFF AND RUNNING. The opportunity to try to put some distance between my bad habits and myself came when an Australian band who'd recorded at our studio [Fort Apache] showed up in the States for a two-week tour and found that their label had made no arrangements for their equipment rental or transportation. Toys Went Berserk called from New York City seeking assistance. I liked the three guys and a gal that made up the group. We'd got along well during their time in Cambridge, and it looked to me like the chance I was looking for. I offered to find a U-Haul and a van for them and scout out the equipment they needed. As it turned out the van was prohibitively expensive due to the distance they'd be traveling, so I offered to rent them my Ford Aerostar and go along as the driver. Just the six of us: the band, their road manager/soundman, and moi. They agreed. I made a grim decision: I would cold-kick heroin whilst driving a van full of Australians across the Midwest. I would do so during the hottest weeks of July, and in the process look for a new place to live.

Needless to say it was not a pretty trip. By the time I picked up the band, the U-Haul and the equipment in Manhattan I was hurting badly. I did my last bag in the bathroom of their record exec- Gerard Cosloy - who had put us up for a night. Before we ever got off the New Jersey Turnpike I was already wrenchingly ill. I didn't sleep at all for most of the entire trip, and if it weren't for a stock of sleeping pills that the band bought over the counter back home in Sydney I would have probably jumped out of the moving van. I planned on keeping my problem secret from the band- why worry them? -but when I almost passed out from exhaustion and ran off the road a few days into the trip I fessed up. They were very cool about it, very compassionate, and advanced my per diem so I could hunt down some weed in Wisconsin- and again in Columbus,Ohio, and again in Detroit. Roaming around, always at least halway sick, seeking chemical relief in a strange city where you know virtually noone, brings out the industriousness in an addict- but it also led to some very hairy situations, and one very close call in Detroit. Still, it was a surprisingly fun tour, despite alternately freezing and then sweating through my clothes, vomiting every twenty minutes and spending half the next twenty in the bathroom.

Somehow the rental company had convinced the band they could only rent the equipment with these enormous flight cases for every piece, guitars included. The heat and weight soon began to take it's toll on the van. We had been push-starting the Aerostar every time we turned it off since day three. The bass player had shaved his head and pierced his nipples in New York, and went shirtless thoughout the tour, and the sight of him leading our little party- all piled behind the dangerously overloaded mini-van and heave ho-ing it out of gas stations before the entire band hopped in through the side door -attracted a fair deal of attention. Stuck in an endless traffic jam, climbing a slight grade just before the exit we needed to take, the van shuddered and was still. The beeping became louder and louder behind us, and after several efforts at restarting, with no room to push and the battery about to drain it's last bit of energy, I swear I coaxed that van into one last restart through sheer concentration and willpower. "Jesus it started, quick everybody back in the van!" I shouted to the band, who were desperately seeking relief from the sweltering interior at the side of the highway. After a scene reminiscent of the clowns piling out of the little car at the circus, only in reverse, we made it up the grade, and cruised the six or seven miles to the limits of Madison, Wisconsin. We sailed into Madison somewhat ignominiously, as the van died for good, gliding along down the last, long hill and pulling into a service station just as the vehicle rolled to a final stop. It was closed. Thankfully, the boss was still there, and after hearing our tale of extreme woe, he agreed to take a look at our ailing chariot. As he peered into the tiny hatch inside the van, just over the transmission, he whistled. "Damn, how in the world did you get this thing to come this far? Your computer is totally fried. It should have been impossible to start this car." Like I said, concentration and willpower- born of desperation.

Myself with former Toys Went Berserk members Coo Bennett and Andy Jarvis, on a spring, 2001 visit to NYC; ever gracious and generous souls, they kept on smiling through the blistering heat and my unscheduled driving detox back in '90. They now live in London, where their new band, Feast, is getting great press for the Honeysuckle Hips LP.

While the philanthropic repairman agreed to keep the vehicle and work on it, we called two Madison cabs, piled the amps and guitars in and headed to the club... most of us, that is. The soundman and I couldn't fit, so we took the bus. It had a large warning on the front instructing passengers how to behave in a tornado. We were not in Kansas anymore, but apparently not too far from there, either. Madison, Wisconsin turned out to be a wonderful little city. While we waited an extra day for the van to be fixed, I met a local gal, hung out and had one of those intimate, marathon conversations that you seem to have best with total strangers, and we walked down to an open air park where a local Grateful Dead clone band was playing. It was good to burn up some energy. And to forget my own situation by listening to the young lady's. She was way cool. Explained how she was about to move, had already sold her meager possessions and quit her job, and had just enough saved she figured to get to the next town, secure an apartment, and eat frugally while she looked for a new job. This, she explained, was the best part of life: the thrill of being on the edge, knowing you have only so long to get settled before you run out of cash, having to re-establish yourself someplace where nobody knows you, and it's just your desire to succeed that stands between you and homelessness, or worse. That conversation helped to galvanize my resolve to do what I needed to do... to chuck a promising career and whatever local celebrity I enjoyed in Boston, and strike out on a new path, a new beginning. That night in Madison saw what was a hazy idea became a game plan I resolved to execute, come hell or high water.

On my way back to the apartment of some very nice Lesbian punks we'd met, and who had invited us to crash at their pad, I saw an absolutely amazing street performer. His name if I recall correctly was Art Paul Schloesser. Istill have his tape, hand colored with crayons- I'll dig it out soon and post a bit of a song or two. My new friend explained that Madison was full of guys like this, as the Wisconsin Home for the Criminally Insane or something was just across Lake Winona, along with a facility for non-violent persons with mental or emotional issues. As they were released many of the former inmates became homeless wanderers. This guy- please don't get me wrong, I don't know for sure he was one of that group -was performing songs he'd written, playing a beat up folk guitar. The songs were child-like, but satraight from the heart. I watched for a long time while he played "My Cat Was Taking a Bath", "A Flower Died (Jesus Wept)", and other compositions in his own unique style. He reminded of Danny Mydlak, the ironically funny performance artist and musician I'd done some work with in Boston (as of this writing- summer, 2001 -I believe he's in California; I recently saw him on PBS' arts program Egg performing at the Burning Man Festival in the desert). But this guy was all heart, no irony whatsoever. "My Cat Was Taking A Bath" became a constant feature of my car cassette deck for the next year, much to the chagrin of certain friends who seemed to think I may have swum across that lake from the institution. Arriving back at the apartment, mulling over how odd it was to feel so bad but still be taken with the thrill of meeting new people on the road, I was restless. The heat was so intense, and it hadn't let up since New York. I felt like I was trapped in a room with the air slowly being sucked out of it. For days now I couldn't get comfortable, couldn't relax enough to even try to catch a few z's. I felt like my skin was on fire. After moving from the porch floor to the porch swing to the sofa to the living room floor to the kitchen counter, all in a desperate quest to find a cool place that didn't make my skin crawl or make the profound pain in the pit of my back worse, I finally found some brief, blessed relief and managed to doze off in the oversized sink in the kitchen. Our punkette hostess came into the kitchen in the middle of the night to find me scrunched against the cool stainless of the sink, my head tucked under the faucet, enjoying a restive half-sleep; she reached over me to fill her glass, and left the darkened kitchen without a word.

Our mechanic-savior managed to get us on the road again, and there were some highlights of the following weeks. We stopped in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I wandered off on foot to find the Gibson Guitar Factory. It had recently closed, bought out by Heritage Guitars, but I located it by honing in on the huge smokestack that still had "Gibson" spelled out in white fire-bricks down it's length. A few kind-hearted passers-by asked what a white boy was doing in this neighborhood, and as I'd already been warned that it was a pretty rough, all-black area now it came as no surprise. In a ritual I would soon repeat when we arrived in Chicago, I found the factory, wandered around a bit and then took a piece of brick home for my desk. All the while I was marveling at how these beat-up railroad tracks by the side of the factory had seen the start of countless freight journeys that carried thousands of Les Pauls, SG's, and other guitars on a journey across the country, and eventually across the world, where they would profoundly influence the sound and style of rock music. Maybe Les Paul, or William Gibson himself had stood on this very spot, watching the workers load the crates onto the trains, their restless steam and diesel engines now long-silent. Later, after talking to some of the Heritage workers, I located a luthier who had bought out a lot of the former Gibson parts inventory, Pete Martinez I think his name was. He was in the 'burbs outside town, but I found his house and hung out with him for a few hours, sharing his guitar stories and looking at his stock of rare and unusual Gibson parts. He told me how a guy had wandered in with an 'reissue' Flying V, a late sixties version one of the very rarest of the Gibson guitars from the fifties. It had been brush-painted purple, was misisng most hardware, and the guy offered to sell it to him for a few hundred bucks. After a quick inspection, Pete broke the news: it was no reissue, it was an original 1958 Flying V. He stripped it, refinished and replaced the parts from his original, factory-made Gibson inventory, and the guy was immediately offered $12,000 for it. Right now, it's probably worth $50,000. I left a '67 Telecaster neck that belonged to my late friend Phil Russo, an alder body that Doug Allan of Steven Comics fame had drawn original Steven characters all over, and a pair of 60's-era Fender pickups with Pete, and a month later he shipped me back a newly assembled, re-fretted beauty of a guitar. It was stolen from my apartment on Summit Street in Columbus three years later, along with a gorgeous, white 1964 Fender Precision bass (the best sounding bass I've ever played, we'd used it on a slew of Fort Apache records), and I never recovered it; anyone out there seen either of them? There's a standing reward for their recovery.

In Detroit we opened for the Selektor, the English Ska band who had a few hits like "On My Radio". They were doing a reunion tour, and it was cool to hang out with their manager, who chatted with me about the UK's punk-era ska scene, which had been nurtured primarily in his [and the Selektor's] sleepy, small home town of Coventry. On my way back to the club, after strolling around to hunt for weed, I passed a long line of people waiting to get into a theater to see a band I hadn't seen, though I did recognize their NIN logo, which I'd often seen on bumper stickers stuck onto cars outside bars in Boston. They were called Nine Inch Nails. I was surprised at how popular they were, judging by the length of the line, which stretched right down the street and around the block. I hung out outside, and the band was so loud I had no trouble enjoying five or six songs from their set.

The best day of the entire tour was when we arrived in Columbus, Ohio. It was early in the afternoon and we stopped at Monkeys Retreat, an amazing comic/book/magazine and metaphysical mind-candy store run by two genius brothers, ex-New Yorkers Darryl and Rosie. Darryl and Rosie also held free Tai Chi classes in their vast back room, which doubled as the rehearsal space for the hard-touring Royal Crescent Mob. It was in fact the sound of the Mob's music, which I followed- like some tasty cooking smell -down the street, through a back alley and into the rear of the store, which led to my first meeting with the brothers [and another friendly East Coast emigree, Joanne, who was working the counter that day]. They were really nice guys, among the original founders of the super-cool Comfest [Columbus Community Festival] [more on this later] and we found we had mutual friends like the DB's manager Jimmy Ford, an amazing rock scene veteran and beautiful cat from New Orleans. Next door to Monkeys was Staches which was where the band was playing. It'd been a violent year in Columbus and the club's owner Dan Dugan was presiding over a lottery in which patrons bet on the day that the record-setting 100th murder of the year would occur (later the Haynes Boys would immortalize the lottery in a great song: "Murder, Murder"). I met three people who'd later become really good friends [two of whom I'd play with]- Tim Scharf, Dangerous Jane and Paul Brown. Tim was working for a contract archaeology firm that he said was hiring- a possible job right up my alley! Paul had been voted one of the three best unsigned guitarists in the nation by Guitar Player magazine ( we would play in a band together eventually). The bartender Kathy was a sweetheart, and turned out to a pal of my good friend Jonathan Richman- she let us crash at her house that night. The place was peaceful on a mild summer day, full of cute little houses and friendly, interesting people. After an hour in town I said first to myself, then out load "I could live here". That became a private mantra for me for the rest of the tour, and when we reached Boston I began to make plans to move to Ohio. I had no job lined up, knew only the few folks I'd talked to at the bar, and had no place to live. What I had were two cats, a van full of furniture, clothes, guitars and amps, a girlfriend who shared a gorilla dope habit, and three hundred eighty bucks in my pocket.

It took a while to get set up in Ohio. I worked at a dry cleaner's for a few weeks, then got a job as a pizza delivery person at Freakin' Pizza, a campus eatery popular with the music crowd. After six or seven months I convinced Dan Dugan to let me be the janitor at Stache's. Soon I was working a few odd door slots here and there when Dan needed a warm body to cover a show. From there Dan began to throw me a sound job now and again, and in six months I became the house sound man. I'd come to Ohio to escape dope and get out of the music business. The archaeology job never did come through despite numerous calls and a mess of reminder resumes, and I ended up as a sound man- a generally thankless job I'd avoided like the plague back at home! In retrospect I'm grateful to Dan Dugan for that gig- besides saving my ass financially, doing all those shows made me twice the engineer I'd been before I left Boston. I worked with just about every band in town over the next year and a half- and there are a lot of great musicians and excellent groups that hail from Columbus: Scrawl, Greenhorn, the Haynes Boys, Science Gravy Orchestra, Men of Leisure, New Bomb Turks- just to name a few. I had a regular gig with Joe Brown's eleven piece latin jazz group and on a given night I mixed straight-ahead rock, trad jazz, grunge, speed metal, funk, xydeco, raggae, country, hip-hop and pretty much everything in between.

Not long after I'd arrived I auditioned for Hank McCoy and the Dead Ringers, a group of exremely talented locals playing country and hillbilly material. I had run into Jack and Kristi- who shared vocals and led the band -at Stache's one night when they were doing a set as a duet. After they played I mentioned I'd played the same sort of material in Boston with the Jolly Ranchers and Country Cousins and I was looking for a gig. Numbers were exchanged, later calls were made. So it was that I arrived in the Germantown neighborhood of Columbus for a Dead Ringers practice one evening. After making and delivering pizza all day I was rarin' to go, but it all went horribly wrong. To begin with, I hadn't brought a tuner, and it was one of those nights that I just could not get it together. To make things worse, I had brought a Vincent Bell [of Coral Sitar fame] Coral Bellzuki- a twelve string highly resemblant of an old Danelectro, and an instrument that's not exactly renowned for it's ability to get or stay in tune. On a night when I couldn't get 6 strings tuned I was struggling with twelve. I believe I may also have brought a Vox AC-30 along, way more amp than was needed for a quiet, living room rehearsal. It also turned out that the guy playing bass, Jeff Passifiume, played guitar for a tune or two, and it was clearly obvious that the guy had way better country chops than I ever did. I seem to recall asking "Uh, why isn't Jeff playing guitar?" Jack said they needed a bass player, Jeff said he wasn't really a lead player, which was what I - in theory -was auditioning as. I had to swallow my guitarist gunslinger pride and admit that particularly in my present state [rusty, half-sick] Jeff sure beat hell out of me. I saw those guys a few times in the years that followed. Jeff was often playing lead, and they always sounded great. Jeff ran across the site recently, and had this to say:

"Happy to see you are still alive & kicking. If you sift through your memory banks, you may remember hanging out/auditioning with/for Hank McCoy and the Dead Ringers during your stay in Columbus, Ohio. I do remember you taking forever to tune the Bellzouki 12-string at a rehearsal! I think I was playing bass at the time. Drop me a line if you have a moment. "

I'm hoping to hear from him soon, to get some more details on the background of the first really excellent band I saw in Columbus. There would be many more, and I still think of Columbus fondly, as a town full of some very cool people, way-talented musicians and terrific bands.

Downstairs at the Middle East in Cambridge, Ma., Marcy from the awesome Columbus band Scrawl relaxes pre-gig and shares a beverage with writer Brett Milano.

Before long I had put together a band, one of three I'd eventually go through while I was there. The first incarnation of the Joe Harvard All Stars featured Eric Armstrong on bass, Paul "Hat Boy" Brown on lap steel guitar, Anna "Pow! Howyalikemenow" Paulucci sharing vocals, Jim "Twisto" Casto on drums, and yours truly. Jim and Paul were both Columbus veterans, amazing musicians who could play anything and do it well. Eric was a former casual guitarist that switched to bass under my gentle but firm tuttelage, and Anna was a vivacious, lovely Italian-American with a powerful set of pipes. I had met Anna one night when I was passing a downtown bar, heard this great voice from within, and went in to investigate- just as the gal who'd been sitting in on vocals finished and climbed off stage; I couldn't see her face through the crowd and smoke. Later, I was having a drink and trying to hit on a wholesome-looking, long-haired beauty who was shutting me down, but doing it in a playful, mischievously funny way. It turned out to be the owner of the voice that had drawn me into the bar in the first place. So Anna and I started jamming. Jim Casto, who'd been in Ronald Kohl's nationally known band the Billionaires in the late 70's and 80's, was a local legend. A beautiful cat and a world-class drummer, he was playing everywhere, and soon he was playing with me as well. Unfortunately, his duties with Men of Leisure and other acts proved to be too much for our scheduling needs. He was replaced by John Coleman, an extremely able drummer from the area, who coincidentally had also replaced Jim in Ronald Kohl's band some years before.

We played out for several months, some great shows, and then I took the whole crew for a somewhat disastrous road trip to record at Fort Apache. Musically it was fine, but my van got towed and I had to re-register the van in Massachusetts to get it out. It was very stressful. I'd lent the van to Paul so he could play on a session that Tim O'Heir was producing at the Fort. As I'd been up 25 hours working on our stuff I went to the hotel and crashed. Paul had apparently not heard my warnings about only parking in the underground hotel garage and left it on the street when he returned from the all-night session. This put us at odds with each other and the tension ruined what would otherwise have been a very cool trip. Paul and Anna decided to fly home- the reasons are still unclear -but they then acted like I should buy their tickets. Since we actually managed to get home on schedule (I borrowed over a thousand dollars to get the van out and register it), I didn't see the point. Ancient history, but typical band mayhem. I suspect Paul was more upset that he found out I'd been using dope than about the actual incident- he never had to pay the tickets he was given. Jim Casto had driven down with us to play on a song and hang out and he was very helpful in diffusing a potentially explosive situation. That trip was the effective end of that band, however.

Joe Harvard's All-Stars at Fort Apache. Here I'm cutting tracks for "Meig's County Weed", a fave of our live set.

John, Eric and I continued to do some shows. Then Eric and I split to find a young drummer who had the sort of enthusiasm we felt we needed to get things moving. We found him in a terrific 17 year old who'd never been in a band before. Ryan [wearing Zildjian shirt in photo at left - Eric's on his right, under the flag hat, toking a bird] had never been in a band before, but he could hit as hard as most veterans I know, and was immediately receptive to the two concepts most important to me in a drummer: one, that of playing songs- not drums; two, making a commitment to a beat, the way that great drummers from Stax/Volt and Motown through to the best British Invasion groups would. Those guys would lock into a part, and it always served the song, providing personality and a foundation that the vocalist and soloists could depend on. Ryan picked this up very quickly, and the band- christened Blunt because we liked the sound of the word, smoked a lot of pot (Eric and I, that is), and wanted to present something without artifice, simple, direct; in a word, blunt. Before long Catherine Boone, one of the good friends I'd made in Columbus (before we became an item), made the jump from being a waitress legend at the Blue Danube diner to singing for Blunt. Her tenure in the band was unfortunately brief, despite a naturally soulful voice and great stage presence. The problem was she had no formal schooling and had never played in a band, and though she could absolutely sing her ass off when she could hear herself- such as at rehearsals and during recording sessions -when she couldn't hear herself her voice strayed all over the map. As most musicians who've gigged out will know, the last thing you can ever depend on is that the stage monitors will be working, or if they are that the soundman will know how to get enough vocal level into them for the singers to hear themselves on stage . Frustrated after four or five shows worth of not being able to hear what she was singing, Catherine retired. Fortunately, she has left a few wonderful performances on tape, one of which- her harmonies on a live, rehearsal version of the song "Boston (It's A Long Way Back)" - can be heard in the Audio Jukebox section. That's a pic of Blunt above right- l-r: Ryan, Eric, Catherine and myself.

The foursome version of Blunt (Ryan not shown) made a big- if brief -splash on the Columbus circuit. This photo is from a full-page article in the city's main daily paper, the Columbus Dispatch. You can read the entire article in the Press section.

'93 Joe Harvard Band Summer Schedule

Winter Tour

Blunt followed the lead of the previous Joe Harvard All Stars in playing in the invitational Comfest. Comfest was an annual tradition begun in the 70's, with Monkee's Retreat brothers Darryl and Rosie playing a significant organizational role since it's inception. A three-day event dedicated to music, arts, crafts, information and food, the festival was run entirely by volunteers, with cultural, commercial and community groups all participating in a multi-culti cornucopeia of offerings. With dozens of merchant booths and food stands filling an enormous location (which changed every several years), the festival drew thousands of revellers. Music was performed on the main stage nearly around the clock, from before noon to after midnight, and in later years additional stages had been added for folk / low volume and theatrical acts. Slots on the main stage were highly sought after, and with all the great bands in town those slots filled up very, very quickly. Being a new band, and a recent arrival in Columbus, I was lucky to snag a slot for my band for two years running; the first year we were certainly helped out by the presence in the band of local music celebs Paul Brown and Jim Casto, and without Hat Boy and Twisto in the band I doubt we would have got even the opening, noontime slot that we did. Kurt Scheifert, the popular rock journalist and mixmaster from the Columbus Brewery -well-known regionally for their fantastic Columbus Nut Brown and Pale Ale products -also gave us a big boost with a short but well-timed blurb in the local arts weekly entitled "Hello Columbus....Goodbye Boston" (I wonder if he took the pun full circle when I moved by writing a "Goodbye Columbus" follow-up). The second year we played Comfest we did so more on the merits of the band itself- we even managed to move up to a 3:30 pm set! Who known, perhaps if I'd stayed on in Columbus one of those years we'd have actually gotten to go onstage when it was dark outside! Ironically, Blunt's Comfest show was one of our best perfomances ever, and probably the single best gig with Catherine in the band.

Catherine driving the Plymouth Horizon that kissed a Columbus, Ohio fire hydrant- during rush hour -when the long-suffering brakes finally threw in the towel;

Catherine at age 22, the year we met

Another shot at age 22

Once I had settled into Columbus, and despite the mess I was in chemically speaking, I set up the equipment I had bought back from Fort Apache when I'd sold my controlling interest, and created Little Big Horn Recording Studio. The studio was run out of the Summit Street house I shared with audio engineer and Cracker stage-tech Chip Carter and guitarist Greg Pack. Drums and loud amps would be set up downstairs in the kitchen, living room or even in the basement, while the second floor living room just outside my bedroom served as the control room. Later, when Catherine and I moved out of the house and into a smaller apartment of our own without any downstairs, I set up the control room in our second bedroom, and used the wee bit of a living room and our tiny kitchen as the studio. This made it possible to record our instruments at rehearsals, and later clean up mistakes or overdub vocals. The song "Boston" was done this way , with an entirely live performance including the lead vocal, and then later we added the harmony and a pedal steel guitar part (my first, incidentally, and my last... I lost the instrument in pawn just as I was starting to figure the complicated beast out). I still have half a dozen other 8-track basics done that way, and rough mixes of "She's My Buddy", "Telephone", "All Day, Every Day" and "Roll On" sound surprisingly good for the quick-and-dirty setups that they were. Ryan played drums for all of those tunes, but "Boston" was done at the new apartment... with a new drummer.

Eventually, just before I moved from Columbus back to Boston, Ryan went off to college; losing a third drummer was a serious blow to the band. Good stickhandlers are rare, so we were really fortunate in finding a new drummer amost immediately- thought there was one small snag: Harold was an excellent drummer, but he no longer owned a drum kit. Fortunately I had a small Gretsch kit I had bought from Richie "Cunningham" Madallo, the drummer in my old Boston outfit, the bones, and Ryan was nice enough to leave his kit at my house for a while so we had a rehearsal set. We had recorded a drum track for "Boston" during our visit to Fort Apache the previous summer to record "Meig's County Weed", and while Jon Coleman was our drummer for "Meig's..." we'd used Jim Casto on that 24-track recording of "Boston"; the track was left unfinished when we ran out of time, and then the band imploded as previously described. We hadn't managed to get the correct lilting feel for the song during our rehearsals with Ryan- who was a lot more comfortable hitting hard than playing ballads -and it was only at one of the last recorded practices in Ohio that Harold locked it down -so he's the drummer on the existing version of "Boston". That's a self-portarait, digi-cam-captured photo of his smiling face at left, from a recent email that he sent. He has a kit now.

Visit these other sites for links to the Joe Harvard family tree:
the Bones... Middle East...