The Fuzz RIP

Dan Jones is my friend. We met in the mid-90s - 1995? - at Oasis fine foods in Eugene. I was a delivery driver, bringing the vegetables in my Carhart shorts and Doc Martin boots. He was working in the kitchen at Oasis deli under the brutal chef Andrew. One day I noticed a goofy guy with a faded Husker Du shirt - is this my kind of person? He gave me some guac and chips and thus began our acquaintance.
A year later he was working alongside me at OGC, receiving trucks in the warehouse, stacking broccoli and apples in the coolers and then training behind the wheel with me as we rode around town in the 1996 International delivery truck. I knew he was writing songs. Daftly, I turned down the opportunity to contribute to his demo he was making at a local studio - it became For Your Radio, a classic blast of literate folk-punk and his calling card into the local songwriter scene. FYR was first a cassette and then re-released as a proper CD. He invited me to play electric guitar with him and Derek Trost on snare and brushes at a gig at Sam Bonds, so I woodshedded on his tunes from the tape and joined his duo without much rehearsal. I went direct into the PA with my trusty Sans Amp while Dan and Derek strummed and brushed away.

"Turn it up in the monitor - I want to hear what Ed's playing!" I remember Derek saying to the sound-person. Of course Dan slipped in some unexpected yet pretty easy cover tunes on the fly - maybe 'Love's gonna live here,' by Buck Owens or a Roger Miller tune or Meat Puppets' Lost on the Freeway, I don 't really recall, but I know it was a bucketful of fun.
Fast forward to the early 2000s -  Dan and I would jam a lot in my garage, collaborating on goofy 4 track songs and trading off on instruments. I remember embryonic versions of his songs Cucumber Gods and Walkin' Blue and many others. I had the riff for The Fuzz but no title. We were already recording and Dan joined in with some cool guitar counterpoint while I stuck to the main, simple arrangement and mid section. It was a steady enough track that I was able to add drums and bass and a vocal after Dan left - voila! A song was born.  No one really asks me what it's about, but 'the Fuzz' is my memory of the sound of Bob Mould's fuzzed out guitar from Husker Du's worst lp, Warehouse: Songs and Stories. It's the most rigid, solid state guitar sound of all time and yet totally unique - it didn't sound like stupid Whitesnake or Motley Crue. It was THE FUZZ and it drilled into my teenage mind like a mosquito buzz that I could never forget.
We had a band called Activator a few years later, with John Laney on bass and Eric Jensen on drums. In 2003 we recorded 10 songs at Jackpot studio in Portland, including the Fuzz, my song Vice Squad and a bunch of Dan songs that he later re-did for some of his own CDs - Hot Pink UFO and Airport City Taxi Limousine among them. I've always loved Dan's wash of sonic guitar on The Fuzz. It sounds like a slow-motion Jackson Pollock painting, globs of sonic paint flying all over he place. Hope you can dig; hope you can Remember the Fuzz.

False Spring

Holy shit, it is a beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest. A glorious break from the rain and mud-splattered commute that normally puts me in a stellar mood right before I get home. Sick of Commute

February is usually a “month of renewal” for Tina and me – we usually take the month off from drinking alcohol and imbibing the ganj. (my wife doesn’t really like weed anyway but I most definitely need a month off, if not an all-out soul cleanse.) The side effects for me are terminal grouchiness, followed by high level of alertness, less appetite, less need for sleep and vivid dreams. I was never meant to be a stoner anyway as it might make me a mellow fellow but I lose that sense of animal urgency that drives me to claw my way through life.  Not to mention my lungs have taken a beating over the years and I have fears of pneumonia every time I get sick since I have that wonderful, leathery Darth Vader gurgle in the chest at night – ugh! I’d prefer to live long rather than be high and numb to the ragged insanity of day-to-day life. Or would I? Come summer we will see if I can still abstain. Praise Jah and pass the dutchee pan.

I fucking hate political discussions but succumbed to one over the dinner table when some family was over last night – lost my cool like the liberal shill that I am. Why is it so hard to accept other people’s points of view? I wish I could be cool and collected and just listen to other folk’s arguments and not take things personally but I tend to make an ass of myself. Sorry, world. The discussion touched on Bloomberg entering the race – buying his way in – versus Bernie and Eliz Warren and the potential drawbacks of any of them going up against Trump. In my mind, Bloomberg is a bad choice since he lacks legitimacy in the Dem base due to his past tenure as a Republican and his stop and frisk policies while mayor of NYC. On the other hand, Bernie is old and tends to repeat the same talking points over and over, older voters are scared of the word ‘socialist’ and many moderates accuse him of being just another populist but he has the strongest grassroots support of any of the candidates. I like Elizabeth since she is economically savvy and has solid policy ideas but I fear she is tanking and media is already making her seem invisible, even though her polling is better than many of the other moderate dems. I would take any of the current potential candidates over Trump but in all likelihood, it will end up being a vomitous race of hell and either be extremely close or Trump will win again. Fuck politics and fuck me for even caring when I really should be working on my survival bunker and hoarding Neuman-Os, olive oil and good vintage wines and a car-battery-powered record player and probably a shit-ton of weed and ibuprofen. We’re fucked no matter who gets in and I’m not sure any change in our political system will change shit. Love you, brothers and sisters of humanity!

I work hard most days on doing something, ANYTHING creative, even if it’s just hashing out song lyrics while watching tv with the family. I’m finally getting some lift on my soundcloud tracks. 32 tracks since January 1^st, baby! Only a few of those are old; everything else written very quickly and posted sporadically. I’ve given up caring about the idea of releasing things ‘properly’ but I probably will make a tape this year with some of the better tracks. This song has gotten the most plays - Always Stay  – maybe I should clone it and hope they pick it for the next season of Peaky Blinders so I can get $$$.

Happy Hump day!

2 am Blues

This is the rare night of no sleep. I've been sick all week and only consuming minimal coffee. Today, I felt better, ran errands - depositing money in the bank, running to Portland to get my Tascam portastudio 4 track back from the repair guy, running out to Beaverton to buy some TDK SA 90 tapes from some guy off of craigslist and so on. I had coffee at about 5 o clock - it was Valentine's day after all - so now I'm totally wired can't ya see and my thoughts have been racing all night as I lie in the dark.


I started watching a great William S Burroughs documentary on Amazon streaming. Holy shit, what genius that man was. His influence runs far and wide. I can't wait to finish it. I relate to every single bit of it so far and have a big appreciation for crazy ol Bill and his cadre of colorful beatnik and alt-culture geniuses.

One strange thought pattern that was running through my mind tonight was a clip of James Baldwin being interviewed on tv in the 1960s, how his rage was barely contained and yet utterly articulated in his response to the hosts or the panel or whoever. It reminded me somehow of the Nina Simone song, Mississippi Goddamn, and I realized that Baldwin, Simone and every non-white intellectual in the history of the USA must feel the PTSD of living in a traumatic society of inferior intellects who gawk at them and treat them like animal curiosities when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The immense frustration of being the wrong color of genius.

Can't Always Rock It

I've been laying low and making tunes in Vancouver, land of the perpetual suburbs. During January I made a point of writing and posting one song per day on Soundcloud just as an exercise in writing. Some tracks came out better than others. I'm still making songs this way but can't realistically keep a pace of a song a day. Here's my latest: Can't Always Rock It kind of inspired by Dan Jones and his various 4 track recordings of the early 2000s.

Trouble Cuts is still blazing along. We have shows upcoming in Seattle, Eugene and Portland during March. Very much looking forward (to Death!) to getting out of town and doing some keen rock sets with our friends. Here's the schedule:

March 19 - Darrell's Tavern, Shoreline, Wa (w/Dan Jones & Squids, VooDoo Gearshift)
March 20 - Sam Bond's, Eugene, Or (w/Dan Jones & Squids, VooDoo Gearshift)
March 21 - Alberta St Pub, Portland, Or (w/Dan Jones & Squids, VooDoo Gearshift)

Hope to see some familiar faces show up! I'm not kidding myself - I'll be happy if 5 people show up at any of these (well, Eugene will be great, that I know.) I'll try to keep blogging here for the near future.

Did you see any of that great footage of Mr. Bungle's reunion shows on youtube? This one is pretty fucking great: