The afternoon I met Andy Crisp he was stoically bearing up under the burden of a sun-crushing hangover. As a Londoner, he was making the valiant effort, certainly not whining about it. I respect that, to this day.

One day, I apparently mentioned David Bowie and Iggy Pop in the same sentence, which caught Andy's attention.

In any case, we suddenly discovered a shared passion for music, and also that we were both musicians of sorts. Now, the phrase "a shared passion" is a rather weak and pallid term compared to the reality.

I mean, it's simple: when you are a musician, you are pretty much interested in only two things: women and music, and sometimes you can't tell the two apart. So we spoke the same language.

Of course, there are smart musicians, and they care about money also. But there were none of them in evidence, to guide us into the realm of reason, when Andy and I first crossed paths.

We agreed to exchange cds. I had some demos. He had some of his band, 12 Rounds, whom I did not know. I took his home and while I liked the music okay, I was extremely impressed with his drumming ... he has a touch that is extremely rare, quite powerful, but there was air, and man did he hit that sweet spot. He had quite a good run as a studio musician in London, New York, and Los Angeles before landing in Oakland with his lovely wife.

He worked with Barry Adamson for Hugo Boss Perfume ... Barry was the original bass-player for the Stooges and the Bad Seeds. Andy has also worked with Flood, and a number of other top producers. 

He, on the other hand, had a disk of my middle-period electronica, including the extended Sex Party, and had been expecting a cd of Don Henley covers, since he usually saw me in my "work" clothes, sort of business casual in those days. He told me later that he was certain I had given him one of my sons' works - he knew my boys were making music - rather than my own.

Clearly a case of judging a book by its cover. It must have been the long camel-hair coat and Hermes scarf I often wore that threw him off.

The day came when he needed help with a song and we discovered we could work together. Shortly thereafter, he helped turn the instrumental 3 seconds before maia smiled into vocal song. The foundations of our partnership were forming.

By this time we had become friends, of course.

A few months ago, say last June, 2007, Last Unforetold Man came to a stand-still. I had run out of ideas, steam, inspiration, everything. The songs were good, very good, I believed. But I had done everything myself - writing arranging singing programming playing instruments. I felt the songs were flat. I had recorded all new vocals in the studio, but I knew the cd was lacking something and I hadn't a clue what it was.

I called Andy several times and left messages. I told him I needed help. He got back to me after a few days - he is a busy man. I told him what was up. He said, "Send me the cd."

I sent him a copy of the cd as it was. And he started working. In the end, he came up with additional drum parts for five of the songs, a bassline for Pop Down The Years, backing vocal parts for a few of the songs, and ideas for most of the others: what to add, what to take out ... it was amazing. He transformed Last Unforetold Man. The cd took on a life of its own.

For example, he considers djs artists, not businessmen, which they are. It is the position of this site that there are a few djs who qualify as percussionists with their scratching, but overall the artistry involved never goes beyond that of decoupage. Don't get me wrong: I LOVE decoupage: I used to have a picture of the Beatles and the Maharishi in flowery pastel robes decoupaged onto a block of redwood. I gave it to a true hippie in Hawaii.

Shoji did the percussion on Oldman Coldman, transforming the piece. I couldn't come up with what he did in a million years. He also pulled most of the strings I had done out of the piece to open it up.

He has also helped with ideas for a number of the other pieces on Last Unforetold Man.

He has his own group, On Ensemble, for which he composes genre-defying music. If they ever come to your town, see them. They are called an "experimental Taiko" group, but, in truth they transcend classification and what they do onstage is nothing short of magic. Amazing.

He also tours and records with the venerable jazz group, an institution now, Hiroshima.

Charles Stella is an East Bay native who now divides his time between New York City and the Bay Area. An early advocate of computer based music technology, Charles has become well known for his innovative production techniques and rich sonic landscapes. Recent Production / Remixing credits include Norah Jones, Mos Def, Wax Poetic, DJ Logic, Brazilian Girls, Olu Dara, Thievery Corporation, Saul Williams and Jamaican DJ legend U-Roy.

Charles is mixing the cd, Last Unforetold Man, bringing his distinct madness, genius, and golden ears to the project. If you have a cd to mix, I recommend him without qualification.

Visit his site here.

It was love at first site. She had beautiful, long blond hair and an incandescent smile and I hadn't heard Judy's warning about singers yet—to check for a belly-button before proceeding, since most singers create themselves out of the etheric universal.

And then I heard her sing.

I have seen Angie transport an audience ... when she takes flight and goes to the Angie-place and brings everybody along with her ... nothing like it, truly.

Needless to say, I was very happy when she agreed to help me out with backing vocals. She did an amazing job, came up with her own parts for Take Me Down, transforming the song.

She's been a wonderful friend. We've worked on plenty of stuff together.

But she had to go marry the drummer in her other band. 

Greg Jones, Composer, Songwriter

Greg's beautiful ballad, "I'll Be In The Mirror" is, to us, the emotional center of the cd, Last Unforetold Man. Not quite sure how that happened. It wasn't intentional, but it just became apparent at some point.

Greg wrote the song and asked me to sing it about two years before he died. He sent me a demo. After listening to it, awed by the weird beauty of the song, I told him he didn't need anyone else to sing it - his vocal was perfect. He insisted, and I loved the song anyway, so I learned it and we recorded it several times over the next couple of years.

Greg was not just an extremely talented composer and songwriter, he was a friend, the kind of best friend a man can have ... you know the old saying "A good friend will help you move. A best friend will help you move a body" ... Greg was that kind of friend. We met in the early eighties after he ran an ad for "Synthesizer Studio For Rent" in the SF Bay Guardian. $10/hr. he charged ... I never hired him for studio time, but we became fast friends starting then. He was just married. I was a new father myself. Within a few years we would both have two children and his son and my sons were good friends.

So long ago. Some good times.

Greg was, I believe, the first person to use Alan Lomax's field recordings of black folk, blues, and gospel music mixed in with modern instrumentation. You can hear five of his early songs on the movie, "The General's Daughter" soundtrack ... the backwards banjo which is the first thing you hear in the movie, from the song "Sea Lion Song," was a suggestion from yours truly, mostly because I can't stand banjos. Greg played the song for me. It had a regular banjo part. I said,"Turn the banjo backwards." He flipped the file in the music program he was using. Backwards banjo instantamento ... it was perfect ... we happily agreed that backwards always works, except when it doesn't.

The suggestion, and the fact that he used it, remains the crowning achievement of my life so far. That and a pop-fly I caught in little league one year.

Anyway, Greg went on to do some other film music, but the kind of success achieved by Moby, who was emulating the use of the Lomax field recordings a couple years later on "Play," eluded Greg. He was all art, no self-promotional skills. 

We would bitch and moan about Moby, of course, but after a while we both had to admit how good Moby was/is.

About five years ago, Greg asked if I wanted to sing "I'll Be In The Mirror." I was more than flattered, so in awe I had always been of his talent. He emailed me an mp3 and faxed the lyric sheet with the chords ... of course it was in some weird key like F-sharp minor and was a bastard to sing and play ... but I learned it as best i could. When I got down to LA a few months later, one of the first things we did together was record the song in his studio.

My voice coach heard anger in the song and wanted me to find a personalization that would bring that emotion to the fore ... you know, sing to some girlfriend that had dumped me or something.

But Greg wanted me to sing it as softly and as tenderly as I could. I didn't understand, and I found it hard to shift emotional gears ... like I think great actors and singers can do ... but i tried.

We recorded it a couple times over the next year trying to get it right.

I thought he did a great vocal for it, but he was quite insecure about his voice. (You can hear him sing "Oh please don't go" in the first verse of the song.)

Greg had battled depression for many years. And I knew he would go into some very dark places at times, but the past few years, his [personal] music had lightened up, the lyrics weren't so dark, and I thought he was out of the woods. He would get stressed out at times, but that's just part of life.

I went to Spiderman 2 with him back in July of 2004 and he was acting kind of odd. He was worried about money. After the movie, I wanted to go eat, but he wanted to get home. So I drove him to his house in Silverlake and said goodnight.

I don't remember if we spoke again. I called the house about a week later to tell him some news and his girlfriend informed me that he had hung himself that morning.

My dear friend, my brother, Greg Jones was dead.

In the months that followed, as the shock and pain wore off, I would sing his song "I'll Be In The Mirror," and the lyrics took on new meaning over time.

The arrangement I've posted is music he made, pitch-shifted, processed somewhat by me, with a couple sound FX thrown in. But I hope I am getting close to the tenderness he wanted for the song in my singing.

I sing it to him now.

Is it my imagination, or was this song an intentional goodbye note written almost two years before he left us? You may read the lyrics below and decide.

I'll Be In The Mirror

Well, you didn't see it coming
So how were you to know
That there would be a situation
(Oh please don't go)

How could you turn your face away?
Study some picture on the wall?
Trying to find your way back
Back to the way it was before

I'll be home some day
You won't be on your own
I'll be in the mirror
You won't be alone

Down the center of the railway
And you're singing in your sleep
Driving down the sidewalk
Strolling on the 405
Down the center of the railway
Singing in your sleep

Trying to find your way back
Back to the way it was before

And when the moon arises
You park high upon the hill
And the city spreads beneath you
Like a carpet made of pearls
And you don't want to know the reason
You just want it to go on and on
on and on on and on

you don't want to know the reason
You just want it to go on and on
on and on on and on
you don't want to know the reason
You just want it to go

on and on

on and on

on and on

Copyright 2002 by Greg Hale Jones

Gustavo Lanzas, looking pretty

Every band has "the cute one." In Sun Pop Blue, that would be Gus, of course.

Here is a report I posted on the venerable mailing list Analogue Heaven describing my first meeting of Gus ... so long ago.

Date: Sun, 30 Apr 1995 15:30:47 -0700
From: Bulbous and Flapping < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it >
To: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Subject: Spanking the TB-303

Robot, Gus, LxRudis, &  Void all came over to my place in Oakland yesterday ...

We hooked up Robot's 808 (master clock) to the 303 and Void's Korg MS20 & Lx's mini-moog and my serge (NOTE: NO COMPUTERS-NO MIDI - all pulse based clocking) and ran everything thru whatever echo, reverb I have laying around ... sent a voltage control from the 303 sequencer into an oscillator on the serge for pitch ... that made for some weird noise ... those serge osc's are _soooo_ fat ... it took about 4 hours to put everything together

And, with Robin Whittle's ghost hovering and smiling nearby, we then cranked everything up to the edge and delivered the necessary punishment for almost 2 solid hours ... Spanked those modules! ... which screamed for
mercy and begged for more ..

I live in crack city -- people were hovering around on either side of my apartment (they usually hang one block in either direction) last night ... listening to the demented robot spawn of electron apocalypse cascading from
the upstairs window over the sidewalk ... it was wierd ...

About half way thru I asked Robot if we were doing acid or trance or what and he said, "We are doing fucked-UP music ..." and indeed we were ...

So attn: all techno/acid/rave gods & goddesses out there: FUCKED UP music is the next big thing! Brought to you lovingly from the humble crew in Bagdahd by the Bay ...

By controlling the voltages, we control the frequencies, by controlling the frequencies, we can control the human mind. .... but God knows the machines took over our brains last night ... who is controlled and who is controlling?

 *****************

So that was my first meeting with Gus. I remember about half-way through the "jam session" he started do some really cool stuff on the ms-20. It took me a while to figure out where it was coming from, with all those guys in the room - And Lx & Void got really drunk really fast and were making a caca-cacaphonous racket. But I was very impressed with what Gus was doing, cutting through the mix, and that was the beginning of our friendship and on-and-off collaboration over the years.

Gus plays lots of live shows to this day, booking shows as AudioElectronic. He played all over the Bay Area and up and down the west coast for years, occasionally playing Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, NYC, and other cities.

We've assisted each other on a number of pieces over the years, cowriting Ubi Mel IbI Apes (you can see the video in the video section). Gus is currently working on a remix of Hey Little Earthgirl. Gus has been an invaluable source of musical inspiration and, truth be told, competition over the years, as well as knowledge of technique and technology in the ever-evolving realms of electronic music.

Gus is a primarily a drummer, a fantastic drum programmer. So is Andy. So is Shoji.

But I hate drummers. Drummers are the natural enemy of singers. This is the first law of music.

Do you see a pattern here? I am surrounded by drummers and divas! 

Come to think of it, Gus is both.