STICKING YOUR NECK OUT

How to Venture Forth as a Guitar Player (If You Happen to Be Me) ~or~ Deceptive Cadences in an Unresolved Progression Through Odd Times

BY TAD LATHROP

t’s really all about one question: What does the future hold I when, upon turning 12, after six years as a boy soprano, then alto, in a very active church choir in Greenwich Village singing Bach, Mozart, Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, Bartók, and Fauré, you're suddenly exposed to a new group of singing and guitar-wielding strangers from Liverpool called the Beatles, singing melody-rich songs like “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me,” and you promptly go head-over-heels nuts, wearing out the grooves on their records and immediately diving into total immersion in '60s pop, rock, and soul, ear pressed to the transistor radio at night soaking up the playlists of Cousin Brucie and Murray the K and Dan Ingram, so excited and inspired that being in one of these guitarry “singing groups” becomes a screaming necessity, even if you don't know how to play guitar, so you have your

mother buy one, damn it — she had rented one for you four years earlier but your hands had been too small — and now you learn how to play the top three strings and before you know it you’re in a band called Thee Wild Oats with musical friend Rick playing tunes of the day by the Everly Brothers (“Cathy’s Clown”), the Animals (“Boom Boom”), the Searchers (“Needles and Pins”), Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”), and, of course the Beatles (“Rain”), while at home at night you hear your mom playing records by Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Charlie Parker, which at the time you don't really like but which lodge somewhere deep in your consciousness, all accumulating into a musical need that explodes one night during high school at a party where you see some classmates switching on Fender amps with cool red lights and holding awesome-looking electric guitars, and then, using the name the Far Reachers, playing rock with a skill that raises your eyebrows and compels renewed pleas to mom to get you a better guitar — which she does, from a pawn shop, acquiring (at your selection) a Japanese-built solid-body slab of wood under the obscure Sorrento label, but no amplifier, requiring you to plug into her fold-out record player and live with the lousy sound, which holds you over, until that fateful day when you receive a call from your friend Rick saying that the Far Reachers have asked him to join as the singer but he told them he’d do it only if they brought you in, too, and the next thing you know, you’re in the basement of a townhouse on

Manhattan’s Upper East Side, amid drum prodigy Reggie, top- hatted guitar hotshot Brad, bassist Steve, and friend Rick singing and playing harmonica, and you’re all called the Hand Grenadiers, and for the next year or two you’re playing gigs at school dances all over Manhattan — and getting paid for it! — on a stylistic scattershot of tunes by the Rolling Stones (“Under My Thumb”), the Byrds (“I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better”), Paul Butterfield Blues Band (“Born in Chicago”), the Yardbirds (“For Your Love”), Otis Redding (“Respect”), and throughout you’re getting doused and versed in the entire range of the era’s best music — broadening rapidly as amazing new bands come into view — Procol Harum, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, the Blues Project — and you take on their songs, too, jamming them, rehearsing them, gigging them — including a date at Hunter College opening for Otis Redding — and then, and then, BANG!, an unexpected turn occurs when one day you hear a record by John Mayall called Bluesbreakers and experience a mind-altering new guitar style and sound, thick, singing, bending, screaming, leading like no other guitar you’d heard before, and it’s being played by a guy named Eric Clapton, and the feeling is akin to that when you first heard the Beatles — knowing instantly that you’ve got to find out how it’s done, so you learn every tune and guitar bit on the record, and you learn it pretty quickly, just as another new guitar innovator, Jimi Hendrix, hits the public airwaves first with “Hey Joe” and then with full-blast guitar bombshells like

“Purple Haze” and “Foxy Lady,” adding hyper urgency to the need to Find Out What They’re Doing, exploring sound effects like distortion boosters and wah-wah pedals, working all of one summer just to earn the money to buy a Real Guitar, culminating in a sojourn to the guitar store at 500 LaGuardia Place run by Dan Armstrong, who alerts you to a 1958 brown Les Paul Special (“previously owned by the Hollies and Eric Clapton!”), which you buy for 500 bucks, unconcerned about the fact that the neck had once broken off and been reattached with glue (by Dan), and you spend the next block of time wallowing in the feel and tone of it, wishing you had been playing it the previous year when in another band with friend Rick, drummer Reggie, bassist Steve, and a new guitarist, Kevin, who managed to get that thick distorted tone as you and the band played bluesy music exclusively, recording it at the high-end A&R Studios in midtown and performing it live, opening for the famed Chambers Brothers (“Time”!), and carrying on until Kevin pulled out to focus on college . . . and now, a year later, your own high school years begin coming to an end, ejecting you to southwestern Ohio and a “progressive” college named Antioch and a mood of regret upon finding that music players there are few and far between compared to the hotbed in New York; but nonetheless, as a freshman, you poke around to see who’s doing what and soon enough discover that another guitarist, a New York country

blues player named Nick Katzman, is present at Antioch, as are a few other pickers, like Ray Seifert, whose early departure from the Antioch Experience you later recall as he (renamed Ray Benson) forms a group called Asleep at the Wheel, but you stay, you stay, thinking of transferring to Berklee College of Music but talked out of it by a music professor who warns that “it’s for studio musicians” as if that’s a negative, so you stay, you stay, and become a music major (while quite appropriately minoring in psychology), forming music friendships, studying music theory and history and literature and composition, and noting the arrival on campus of jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, a boost to your newfound inclination toward jazz, planted by your mom’s early record collection and energized by later exposure to Kenny Burrell (Midnight Blue), Freddie Hubbard (Red Clay), and Chick Corea (Now He Sings, Now He Sobs) and jazzy rock fueled by the likes of Spirit, Blood Sweat and Tears, and the Electric Flag, and you also find yourself suddenly attracted to the sound of acoustic guitar and songs that wield it, and the folk/country feel invading rock in songs by Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds (still active!), and the new group Crosby, Stills and Nash, and then, somehow, you stumble on a record, 6- and 12-String Guitar, by a fella named Leo Kottke, and you’re blown away by the fullness and power and jangle he achieves — all alone on a guitar — to the extent that you had to Find Out What He’s Doing, and you buy a Guild F-30, get tipped on to a fingerpicking technique called

Travis picking (named after Merle) that involves the thumb keeping the beat on bass strings while other fingers pick melodies and chordal syncopations and — WOW — you pretty quickly learn how to do it, amazing yourself with the wide and sparkling sound, and inspiring you to write songs that employ it, which some Antioch students hear through the dormitory walls, and one of whom spreads the news to another guy on campus, a guy named Don Giller, who is doing similar things with a Martin D-35, and who contacts you to get together, leading you to find that the only thing that sounds cooler than an intricately fingerpicked guitar is TWO intricately fingerpicked guitars — especially when both the guitarists write and sing — making for an instant connection and mutual agreement to collaborate, spawning a partnership that will last at least 35 years but initially centers on writing a repertoire, playing around Antioch, then spending time in New York to incorporate the bass playing of one-time Hand Grenadiers cohort (and now close friend) Steve, auditioning in Manhattan clubs (on one occasion crossing paths at the Bitter End with a pre-fame Bruce Springsteen, himself auditioning solo on acoustic guitar and striking you at the time as similar to Bob Dylan), playing the occasional gig, and then living in San Francisco for more auditions, songwriting, and forming a kind of fusion Latin-rock electric band, all of which is interspersed with your own ventures into other kinds of music — jazz and soul-band gigs around S.F. with a sax player named Jonathan,

hippie rock in an S.F. quartet called Blackfoot Sun, and New York recordings in a Chappell Music-backed outfit called Blue Angel — all occurring while you complete your music degree at Antioch and graduate in 1974, followed by — what? what could possibly be next? . . . a return to New York (of course!), to begin trawling for any musical opportunities that might appear as you start off by working a day job at an ad agency, plodding forward for six months, waiting, waiting, auditioning, and finally getting called down to Electric Lady Studios on 8th Street to meet with a fellow — a singer and Hammond B-3 organist named John — who is checking his recent recording there of a song called “Susquehanna Lady” and seeing if you’re interested in joining his band called Bolt, and you are, since they’re obviously connected to the biz and have a pre-booked string of road-trip performances, to be preceded by three weeks of rehearsal at his family home in Connecticut learning the day’s top-40 hits by the likes of Paul McCartney (“Junior’s Farm”), the Eagles (“Best of My Love”), Edgar Winter (“Free Ride”), Linda Ronstadt (“You’re No Good”), the Stones (“Brown Sugar”), Skylark (“Wildflower”), Deep Purple (“Smoke on the Water”), the Doobie Brothers (“Black Water”), all leading to an initial week on the road to Maryland to play at a Holiday Inn while spending nights on the floor of a friend’s apartment, followed by a return to New York for some regular gigs at a now-storied

venue called the Satellite Lounge in Cookstown, New Jersey, close to (and catering to) the Fort Dix Army and McGuire Air Force bases, and known at one time as “the largest bar in New Jersey,” where you play from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., one hour on and one hour off alternating with the Platters, experience an intimidating altercation with the tough-looking owner and his fixer over a “chef salad” that you order that turns out to be merely half a head of lettuce, then endure a post-gig snooze on the frigid floor of the band’s wreck of a school bus (don’t ask about loading and unloading the leader’s half-ton Hammond B-3), and end up back in your Greenwich Village apartment sometime late the next morning, exhausted, and harboring initial gnawing doubts about whether this kind of road work is right for you — just in time to confront growing demands from club owners that the band play a burgeoning new style of dance-club-oriented pop called disco, a style not particularly suited to your singer, John, but that you need to get on top of ASAP if you want to make money in New York–area clubs, and that you do, indeed you do, so you climb on the disco bandwagon, learning songs by the Hues Corporation (“Rock the Boat”), the Ohio Players (“Fire”), Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (“Bad Luck”), BT Express (“Do It Till You’re Satisfied”), Barry White (“Can’t Get Enough of Your Love”), until you’re good to go on the disco stages of Long Island, which you inhabit regularly until … until … until … well, John has other ideas, such as getting signed to a major label, to

which end he has you and the gang learn a couple of his originals in preparation for an audition at RCA Studios — an audition that yields no contract offer and that precipitates the dissolution of this particular performing unit BUT that ignites a collaboration between you and the bass player, Rich, who also plays keyboards, has a home recording studio in Hackensack, and is inclined to work on some original tunes, so you write a few — somewhat-slightly-mildly influenced by that Dylanesque character you’d witnessed audition at the Bitter End a few years earlier who now has two albums out with something called the E Street Band and whom you saw perform at the Schaefer Festival in Central Park very impressively — and you record two of your songs, one of Rich’s, and take them to a Columbia Records producer who listens, says “Bob Dylan can get away with these kinds of lyrics,” and proceeds to play you a demo he’s excited about by someone else that, in truth, strikes you as a bit boring, so you take the remark with a hefty grain of salt and start brainstorming where to peddle your demo next, just as you get a phone call from your longtime bass buddy Steve saying that he’s been in Maine playing with a singer-songwriter named Peter Gallway, he needs a guitarist, there are a lot of gigs, and you should come up and check him out, which, with nothing else immediately lined up, you choose to do because, well, it’s Steve, for god’s sake, with whom you’ve been fast friends since the Hand Grenadiers, the venture with Don, and hundreds of

duo sessions in between, so you know that working with him, at least, would be fun regardless of the surroundings . . . and you therefore get yourself to Portland, Maine, to a woody, tastefully styled large nightclub called the Old Port, and sit in the crowd to watch the quartet (featuring their outgoing guitarist Dave) churn out some interesting renditions of tunes that you like (the Band’s “Life Is a Carnival,” notably) and some of Peter’s originals, all enticing enough to impel a move to the next step, which is to sit in with the group during a rehearsal session and see how it goes, which you do, and enjoy, and find yourself pleased to be on the receiving end of the comment “You’re a hot guitarist” — a quite effective push- button for igniting the next phase: about a year’s worth of near- nightly three-set gigs in clubs and theaters across Maine and New England, playing an enjoyably varied repertoire of swing pop-jazz (“Moondance,” “Take the A Train,” “Swing, Brother, Swing”), country swing (“Chattanooga Choo-Choo”), roadhouse country (“Yakety Yak”) and moving in the night’s later sets to Motown and Brill Building pop (“What’s Goin’ On,” “Come and Get These Memories,” “Monkey Time,” “Lovin’ You Has Made My Heart Sweeter than Ever”), and plain ol’ rock ’n’ soul (Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes,” the Average White Band’s “It’s a Mystery,” Van Morrison’s “Caravan”), and original songs — just two of yours and tons by Peter, who had started out in the Greenwich Village music

explosion of the late '60s, later recording solo albums and amassing a long song list, much of it in the New York Soul vein (think a male Laura Nyro) with all the tonal warmth and depth, vocal character, bluesy inflection, 360-degree feeling, and stage personality that the best performing musicians can muster, leaving you, Steve, and the drummer, Tommy, free to concoct high-energy and highly sympatico/empathetic backing, night after night, adding up to a period in which your guitar playing solidifies — over three sets a night, almost every night for nearly a year — into something well-tuned and polished, as part of a quirky, off-center, but tight performing unit that over the year attracts growing crowds and popularity, enough so that when Steve announces he’s leaving to return to New York, and you feel sufficiently averse to enduring another cold Maine winter without him to decide to make a move to San Francisco, specifically to seek out and study with a particular jazz guitar teacher, there is some public pushback — talk of a petition to keep the band together — but the band splinters anyway, sending you on a new venture into the world west . . . and now you’re 26 years old, a few years of professional music under your belt, and you’re seeking … what? escape from the road? an atmosphere different from that of New York and the East Coast? — of this you’re not certain but you’re definitely aiming for a re-set, and you find it in the teaching of Dave Creamer, a much-recommended guitarist who keeps a modest

profile but maintains meticulous, rigorous, and challenging sets of study materials such that you immerse yourself in jazz theory, practice, and performance to the tune of eight hours a day, more or less, for a period of four years, during which, well, during which you also put yourself out there amid the Bay Area music scene, connecting in several different directions, including renewed collaboration with old friend Don, who coincidentally lives only a couple of blocks away, with whom you work out and record arrangements to some of your own songs that 30 years later will wind up on a you-and- Don album but that for now sit on hold while you pursue active performance work . . . the first of which is with one Frank Loverde, a singer and writer of disco-ish, soulful, glitzy music (think Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s “Where Is the Love?” by way of Sylvester and the Cockettes — it’s a gay heyday in the Bay at that time, after all) that positions him as a “performer poised for success,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and with whom you rehearse (for pay) along with keyboard, bass, drums, two backup singers, and a producer, Jimmy Goings, who later achieves fame as the frontman for the disco group Santa Esmeralda on Casablanca Records (scoring a hit with “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” disco-ized), and it all feels ultra-sleek and professional (and slightly mismatched with your more earthy inclinations) — but hey, it sounds good —

and you publically debut with a week at The City, an upscale nightclub in the midst of SF’s North Beach, where you and the band are wearing silk baseball uniforms — it’s not clear why — and are standing atop a shaky scaffolding onstage, looking down on but not fully hearing Frank and the gals singing, and you ask yourself if this is fun or embarrassing (a little of both) as you somehow make it through the week, and count the whole experience as yet another venture into a style far afield from your original aims but one that makes a significant memory mark — especially when you and Frank’s group serve as the backing band for the Miss Black Universe Contest held in a giant Oakland harbor venue, with actor Lou Gossett Jr. as the host, and attendees including jazzman John Handy, whose eyes you watch closely as the band jams on the Stevie Wonder tune “Isn’t She Lovely” while the contestants parade before the crowd (no particular reaction from Handy noted), all taking up several memorable hours and serving as the last public performance of this unit, except for a TV appearance on “The Zany World of Joe Bavaresco,” taped at the Old Waldorf nightclub or the Boarding House (you can’t remember which) and a recording session produced by Jimmy Goings of a disco- ish tune called “Sparkle of Champagne,” no longer findable in the online cloud, BUT … your thoughts remain somewhere else, in the land of jazz guitar, and in the blendings of different kinds of music —

Brazilian and Latin rhythms fused with jazz as heard, for example, in the sounds of Airto Moreira, Pat Metheny, Dom Um Romão, Weather Report — for which you are fortunate to find an outlet in a new band you form with another Steve, a Steve from Antioch College days, with whom you write and arrange original music, work with an ever-changing roster of musicians, and perform at an array of beyond-the-fringe Bay Area clubs — La Peña, the Blue Dolphin, Everybody’s Creative Arts Center — and larger venues on the Embarcadero and in Mission Bay and Berkeley, before recording a demo of three of your tunes and one of Steve’s, a demo that lands in the hands of an EMI Music executive, prompting an invitation to meet with him in New York and talk about the band, during which meeting you may have appeared a bit cocky since the exec’s reply is, “You know, there are a million guys like you out there,” not stopping him from inviting you to send him more material as it occurs, which is an unlikely scenario since you’ve spent a wad of cash to create that demo . . . and speaking of wads of cash, you’ve been giving guitar lessons under the auspices of a Haight Ashbury music store called Chickens Than Sing Music while continuing to study jazz guitar and auditioning around town to hook up with other bands, which you do, again, this time with the musician Rick Nowels, leader at the time of a group called the Revolvers and producer of commercial jingles and his own songs, one titled

something like “My Tenement” on which you play guitar but soon decide the sound is not quite for you — perhaps an unfortunate decision since Rick goes on to become a highly prolific producer/writer (Belinda Carlisle’s 1987 hit “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” is his) . . . and you retreat to a point of wondering, at age 30, whether you should be sidelining the nightclub scene and focusing on different ways to apply your musical experience, and this question begins to point more and more toward teaching, not just one-to-one guitar lessons, but college-level music, and suggests a move — yes, another move, for God’s sake — back to the East Coast to explore options there, setting up what might be a turning point in your narrative, a fork in the road, a new awakening, a great enlightenment, a rebirth, an expanded vision, a move to “adulthood” perhaps?, but within a short period of being back in New York you find that no — no, no, no, no, no — it’s not different at all (at least not yet): it’s the same old scenario, as you begin digging in to the Village Voice classifieds for “musicians wanted” ads and near instantly score an audition and a position with a would-be '70s art-rock group rehearsing in a grimy warehouse in Manhattan’s fashion district, the kind of zone where at night the only people you pass on the sidewalk are likely armed and dangerous, but you show up anyway because this is what you’ve got to do: you put up with a little danger, a little seediness, the empty beer cans

and stubbed-out cigarettes, the sticky floors and graffiti- covered walls, because you know this is just a temporary stop on the way to greater heights, whereupon you come to understand that this particular group of musicians has a distinct and decidedly ambitious goal in mind: to emulate the massive sounds and mixed meters of progressive art-rock groups like Yes and Genesis; a strict, defined, sharply punctuated approach with aspirations to arena-filling majesty and might, somewhat complicating the application of your more blues-inflected, off-the-cuff guitar style, and indicating that the match between guitarist and band may not in fact prove fruitful — a fact that in the long run will not be a problem, no, not a problem at all, for synth-player Al, whose last name, you see, is Greenwood, a name you’ll someday reencounter in the person of the synth player and keyboardist for mega-star band Foreigner — . . . all of which giving you pause, prompting moments of reflection, and reigniting your inclination to re-emphasize the different (but familiar) musical direction of tending to your own writing, by now an array of styles manifesting the accumulation of your musical interests to date: acoustic-based songs, melodic rock and pop, guitar-driven instrumentals, jazz fusion — why not just settle on one? nope; can’t; like ‘em all — which you invariably put on tape, and which your old friend Don (now in New York with an M.A. in musicology from

Columbia) invariably archives for later dispensation and joins you in frequent musical get-togethers that perpetuate the collaboration begun in 1972, while at the same time you know that the more hard-core jazz that now attracts you (a continuation of the studies begun in S.F. with Dave Creamer) will require a New York–based “consultant” or “mentor” or “teacher,” so that you start hunting around and soon find a guy named Ted; you head up to his apartment weekly, expanding ye olde fretboard topography, sometimes bringing one of your compositions and duetting on them, until one day Ted suggests the two of you start a band — whoa! what? — saying he knows some good musicians, a vibes player, a drummer, and a bassist, and so you form an entity entitled Quintessence with a repertoire that is largely your own, inspired by the era’s world- rhythm-infused modal jazz of Andy Narell, Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Mick Goodrick, Weather Report, and that earns a foot in the door to local nightclubs, ultimately the Blue Note on West 4th Street, a location none too far from clubs you’ve been playing with another band — a rock band called Diamond Dupree — who invited you to audition after their guitarist left to join Cyndi Lauper in Blue Angel, and who had backed Ronnie Spector on recordings of their own songs, and membership in which group providing an outlet for your blues-rock guitar soloing, a capability you had been sidelining while doing jazz and the Don stuff, and that you were now freely expounding on downtown stages at the Lone Star Café,

SNAFU, Ali’s Alley — and soundstages at Record Plant, Atlantic Studios, and A&R Studios to record an album of original songs (that will not hit the public until 37 years later!) . . . all of which filling up whatever time you have left after getting hired at the music licensing organization BMI as a research analyst and studying arts administration and college music teaching at NYU (where note is taken of your writing and you, somewhat prophetically, are offered editorship of a newsletter but are too busy at the time to take on), those studies taking three years to complete, at the end of which, at age 34 with an M.A. in hand, you make a kind of professional pivot, already partially underway via work at BMI, to another, off-the-stage avenue of musicianship, in which you begin writing about and producing music for an educational publication out of Cherry Lane Music Inc., teach a college seminar on guitar at CUNY’s New York City Technical College (who even knew there were college guitar seminars?), and eventually join the editorial staff of the music textbook team at CBS Professional Publishing (Holt Music), where you witness a fascinating example of off- the-mainstream-radar music careering in the person of Buryl Red, a composer-producer-ringleader who has signed on to be the sole new-music provider for an entire K-12 music textbook series involving dozens and dozens of new recordings, produced by him, for which the overall fee had to have been north of a million, so you’re beginning to see that playing

guitar on a stage is only one of many many many options for making a living in music, and you’ve stumbled on to one of those options — publishing — for which there happened to have been precedent in your life pre-and-post-age-12 in the form of home-made comic books, storybooks, magazines, and 8mm movies — such that taking this altered direction feels a bit like completing a circle and adding variety to music involvement; it’s a natural-feeling pivot, picking up speed and energy when you join the staff of a book publishing company that works with Billboard (the music biz magazine) and wants you to build a related line of books, a task that takes you through four years on staff and then 15 more years as an independent creator and maker of books — not only for Billboard but for Simon & Schuster, William Morrow, and, later, Prentice Hall, for whom you co-author a college textbook on jazz, replete with analyses of recordings and instrumental solos and engaging many of your abilities — writing, editing, visual design, project management — that wouldn’t normally be exercised while holding a six-stringed instrument on a creaky platform in a smoky nightclub in the late hours of the night — and yet, and yet, you are in no way abandoning the writing and production of your own music, as is notable when you reel in some of the years, picture yourself back at Billboard Books, and recall that at that time you were still writing articles for that Cherry Lane educational music magazine, and one article in particular was a series in eight parts, each of which

teaching about and demonstrating a style of popular music (rockabilly, blues, R&B, reggae, heavy metal, new wave, funk, and fusion), a project that involved writing music in each style and heading up to the House of Don (yes, that Don) for weekly recording sessions of both the music and narrative voiceovers, all of it played by the self and the Don, with a one-time assist from guitar maestro Andy Aledort (later of membership in the post-Allman Brothers band headed by Dickey Betts), and eating up the better part of a year (weekends only!) to complete; and all the while, and after, you’re still writing your own songs and instrumentals and taking them up to the House of Don for experiments in recording, just two guys with complementary abilities, eventually knocking out a three-song cassette that neither of you sends around to record companies for reasons related to the-fun-is-in-the-music-making-not-the- selling … and the song imagining and recording continues for years nonstop amid the ongoing making of books and the working in publishing, until one year the Don gets antsy and suggests that you and he work together on an album, and you agree, and you start sending him your recordings (as usual, running a stylistic gamut, heavy on melody, worldly rhythms, electric and acoustic guitars, harmony vocals) to which Don applies painstaking edits, production touches, and added instruments (plus one acoustic duet culled from your collaboration in the

early '70s) until you’ve got a finished work, ultimately printed on and wrapped in plastic, and offered to the world as a memento of a 35-year-long (at that time) music partnership, which never really stops, although Don gets caught up in a years-long project archiving and sharing the work of a well- known late-night-TV host, and you separately continue amassing your own music and experimenting with self- production, for years, even as you produce books and expand publishing and begin paving the way for a later act of a life writ weird (but played kinda loud) — a venture that wouldn’t be complete without taking stock of recent-ish music, music mostly created over the decade following the you-and-Don production, and ultimately assembling it into a collection, however rough-hewn, hand-wrought, and (hopefully) fine- tuned, of some tracks of one’s years, sundry odes and ends, incantations and fretted ventures, obsessions and compulsions — that add up to a kind of Return to Whatever for a confirmed guitar Hamlet ever leaning precipitously toward the “to be” part of the famous soliloquy? . . . And the answer, since you asked, remains to be determined.

Note: Some of the names in this chronicle have been changed.