LOST LEADERS

I
USED TO HAVE a  steady  Monday night jazz gig on Mercer
street in Soho. Organ trio.
It was the kind of place where
Wall Street types came for a dose
of “good for you” music before
throwing 35 cents in the tip jar and
running home to check their daily winnings. The place was owned
by a depressive Israeli guy who
looked like he was gonna hang
himself at any moment; Hopefully
he never did.
Occasionally I’d use a bass player
when the organ player couldn’t
make it and so Byron & I have
been making music for a long time.
But Jazz wasn’t for me. I had much
to prove & little to say which is
boring as hell to anyone listening.
So we started writing our own music. We played together as much as
we could. Sounded great. Even had
a pop/rock group so badly named
I shan’t repeat it here. But our
other musical endeavors kept our
collaboration against the boards.
Byron started Ollabelle with some
great musicians in the East Village.
T-Bone  Burnett  signed  them  to
Columbia Records and they were
off on the road with Ryan Adams
and Diana Krall and god knows
who else. Great ride.
As soon as they had some breaks
in their schedule my band signed
on with a BMG distributed label.
It was owned by a guy who made
his money liquidating companies
(in  acid). We  used  to  meet  him
in  his  $1600/per  night  suite  at
The Plaza so he could tell us how
tight the budget was to promote
our record. He was eventually
sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison
for money laundering.
We did some very strange tours.
One opening for Dave Davies
from The  Kinks  (a  real  hero  but
a truly weird guy. Aliens. That’s all
I’m gonna say) and one sponsored
by a rum company from Barbados.
(Alcohol  sponsored  tour  -  say  no
more.) We got lots of T.V. licensing
though. Had four songs on Dawson’s Creek and more on MTV’s
Road Rules, Real World, The Young
and the Restless, E!  Wild  On  Hollywood etc etc etc. There are new
shows I’ve never even heard of using some of those songs.
Eventually Byron and I got to
make a record called Lowdowners
in Stereo(still unreleased) in a studio located directly below Sonic
Youth’s rehearsal room. If you solo
the drum overhead mics on some
of the songs you can hear them
howling. Someday that record will
be worth something. The singer
from my band split and moved to
California and bought the amazing
Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown
Palace. Lucinda Williams played
her opening night show.
By this point Byron was playing
bass with Levon Helm and was
around for those truly inspiring
last years. He even wrote a song
on the Dirt Farmer record. It won
a Grammy. He also played on the
follow up record Electric Dirt and
it  won  a  Grammy  (sense  a  pattern?)  By  this  point  we  also  had
new  songs  that  justifi ed  pushing
other things aside for our collaboration. Get it off the boards. Byron
brought the ethereal beauty “The
LIne The Lie”, the barroom stomp
“Keeping Busy Feeling Fine” and
the psychedelic majesty “Miracle
Mile”. I came up with the cynically
folky “I’m Gonna Win”, the hooky
rocker “Thin Walls” (which sounds
like Squeeze to me but I don’t
know  why)  and  the  darkly  optimistic “Never Too Late”. These
were songs worth working for.
We  made  a  new  record.  A  new
band. A new point of view. A new
layer of skin. Lots of folks from
the Levon camp helped out. Justin
Guip played drums, engineered
it  &  helped  us  produce  it,  Brian Mitchell played some organ,
Clark Gayton and Jay Collins
gave us some badass horns. Larry
Campbell even gave it his blessing
(“Byron, you & Peter got some Everly Brothers shit going on...”). We
recorded it at Levon’s which is a
church of sorts. You get the same
feeling  you  get  in  any  cathedral. We played The Midnight
Ramble with Levon the summer
before he died. The record will
come out this year (2014). All of
this tale is in there. We named
our new project Lost Leaders. It
just seemed appropriate.
Now you know why.