1.
A few weeks ago, I was on Long Island for a Joy on Fire recording session at Bill Hafener’s The Silo studio with Bill—of Black River Republic and Finn & His Rustkickers—engineering the session. Chris and I put in two ten-hour days and got a lot of music done on the first three tracks of an album called Red Wave.
When I first started playing thirty years ago, in a band called Tin River Junction, after my bass playing uncle got me a bass, the body shaped like the Star Trek logo, for my 16th birthday, Bill tolerated this instrument, and even let us rehearse at the studio he had at that time (1990 or so) called Mystery Fez. As you can tell by the name, this was a very cool studio, with a bunch of interesting characters hanging around, including Ted Schreiber.
Mystery Fez sign, photo: Bill Hafener
Ted Schreiber was in our rehearsal room the first time TRJ practiced at Mystery Fez. We did not yet really know Bill—maybe we’d had one short phone conversation with him in order to book the room. We did not know Ted. He was just some large man, kneeling on the floor of the studio, searching under the couch, next to the drum set. As my trio walked into the studio, we laughed, as this guy kneeling on the floor, his ass in the air, did not seem to acknowledge our arrival. King Arthur, TRJ’s drummer (I’d nicknamed him that as he was into some of that Medieval-type kitsch like Monty Python and The Holy Grail, Renaissance Festivals and the band Yes) was the most outgoing of us, and he said, “Hey, what’s up? Or should I say what’s d—?”
Before Art got to the punchline, Ted—speaking to us like he’d known us for years—said, “Hey, fellas, what’s happening! Really glad you guys are at the Fez! I mean, really glad you could make it”—he was still on his hands and knees, but at least now his head was turned to us—“maybe I’ll sit in on a few numbers, or, you know, add some harmonies on the second chorus—the second chorus should always have some variation from the first! like that George Harrison song on—or maybe we can set up a little recording, or”—Drew, I think, had already started to set up his gear by the guitar amp, and was only half listening, but I was stuck in the middle of the room, stunned, my bass and amp hanging from my hands, as I was absolutely mesmerized by this guy's flow—“or anyway, how about you guys lift this couch for me?”
TRJ looked at each other, laughed, then did as we were asked—though it cut into our rehearsal time—and then, when we had the couch a few inches off the ground, Ted said, “Now move it over there,” and he pointed to the other side of the room, near the PA.
What he’d been looking for under the couch remains a mystery to me to this day.
Mystery Fez studios, R.I.P.
Anyway, Ted and I quickly became very close friends, and as well as playing in a band called Cowpatch with Bill and Chris—Chris, whom I didn’t know yet—Ted had a weekly radio show on WUSB called The Hoedown From Hell, which meant he’d play anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. (It was on Ted’s show where I was introduced to sax/bass/drum trio Morphine, their Cure For Pain album—so important to the idea that helped form Joy on Fire twenty years later.) I’d join him on his show once a month or so, and he’d let me pick a few songs whenever I joined him on the air—anything from Swervedriver, to Girls Against Boys, to King Crimson, to Philip Glass.
2.
It was around this time when I was introduced to Glass’s music. I was taking a class in Postmodernism with a wonderful philosophy professor at SUNY Stony Brook named Hugh Silverman. It was an accident that I was in this class, as when I’d signed up, I’d failed to read the course description (a failure which led me later to fear I would fail the class) and had assumed that it was simply a class in post-WWII art and literature. Throughout the semester, most of us were confused as to what exactly Postmodernity was—and now, well, here we are—but Professor Silverman guided me in the right direction for my first paper.
He wanted me to write an essay comparing the music of Philip Glass and John Cage. As I didn’t know the music of either, I went to a large record store and bought cassettes by each composer. In a Landscape by John Cage and Glass’s 1971 Ensemble recording Music With Changing Parts.
I was on a bus to Albany on a Friday, and the paper was due Monday, and not only had I written nothing—I’d listened to neither record. Sometimes these bus rides to Albany were spent talking to people I’d never see again, and even drinking heavily in the back of the bus with them. But now, I put Music With Changing Parts into my Walkman.
The parts in the music didn’t seem to be changing much, and, looking out the bus window at the rolling Hudson Valley landscape, I drifted off into—
I was awoken—though I wasn’t certain I’d actually slept, but had been more in a trance—and I had absolutely no idea where I was physically. Startled, I looked at, or maybe felt with half shut eyes, the nonhappening around me. Who were these “people”? Why were they all flying through space, yet sitting still like statues? Who was this nonbeing sitting next to me like a monkey? No “bus.” No “Albany.” No rowdy kids in the back drinking Crazy Horse or St. Ides.
At the 25th minute of Music With Changing Parts, after the ensemble slowly grows louder and beats are subtracted, the majority of the players suddenly drop out to reveal Glass' distinctive Farfisa organs and a reversal of the phrase, and this simply flipped my consciousness upside down. The vitality and propulsion of the organ driven music, paradoxically, considering its mania, is also very relaxing, trance inducing. But that moment on the 1971 recording by The Philip Glass Ensemble is absolutely a jolt from space.
When I arrived at the University of Albany, where I was visiting a friend, I said, “You’ve got to hear this!” and thrust the tape into the player without even waiting for a response. She liked it, though didn’t have the bus experience I’d had—for one thing, we weren’t in a moving vehicle flying down the highway at 90-plus mph—but when I insisted on playing it seventeen more times, with the excuse I had to write a paper about it, she asked me to please not visit her the following weekend.
3.
The day after the session at Silo a few weeks ago, I drove from Bill’s in Shirley forty minutes west to my dad’s in Smithtown, where I spent the day, mostly on the back deck thinking about what had to be done next on Red Wave—and how this version of the group was a result of Ted, five years ago, recommending Chris when we needed a drummer for a NYC show, and how this changed the band and led me back to Bill, with Mystery Fez gone and now at The Silo. I also spent the day reading Words Without Music, Philip Glass’s 2016 memoir, which Anna had bought for me as a present—occasionally taking a break to pour a beer or mess with the cats. There are three or four of them—there used to be more—I can’t keep track. One of them isn’t allowed out of the basement, then there are the two fat ones which look exactly the same—same colors, same fat heads—and one is named Cody and one is named Cory and it is this kind of repetition I am less interested in. Anyway, after a full day of reading, and a couple of glasses of beer—evening was settling in—I felt it was a good time to stop reading about music and listen to some. Before closing the book, I had just gotten to the part where Glass tells the well-known anecdote about getting hired to produce a film score that Ravi Shankar would be composing and performing along with a small ensemble of Western musicians. At the time of getting hired, by a young American filmmaker, living in Paris like Glass was at the time (1965), Glass had never heard Ravi Shankar’s or any Indian music. “When I found out I would be working with Ravi Shankar,” says Glass, “I simply went out and bought a record of his—easy to find in Paris.”
It is here where a very specific memory of buying Music With Changing Parts, thirty years ago, arises: I was at Borders books and music near SUNY Stony Brook, and Professor Silverman had not instructed me specifically on which piece to write on; I remember looking through the vast Glass catalog, intrigued by the covers, like the Warhol-esque cover of The Photographer; but it was the cover—and title—of Music With Changing Parts which made the choice for me; on it, Glass is standing near a window, several pages of the score in his hands, one of them quite crumpled and on which he making a pencil edit, cigarette hanging from his mouth. Though Glass’s music was in the classical section in a store like this, aspects of the cover—the cigarette, the hair, the urgency of his note making—are very rock’n’roll.
A good place to close the book, and listen to his music. In the basement at my dad’s house, there is a small boom box, and some CDs I have left behind. Though one of these isn’t Music With Changing Parts, 1982’s Glassworks—composed to be compatible with the invention of the Walkman, says Glass—is. A beautiful record, and each of the five short pieces has a distinct mood and, within Glass parameters, sense of motion. The only thing that interrupted my listening experience is one of the cats—this one is called Popsicle, can you believe that shit? Popsicle! because it’s orange and white (not because it freezing cold, for better or worse)—jumps on the bed and steps on my face during “Closing,” the last track. I throw the cat off the bed, and look for the next CD.
I step on your face.
Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, thinking about how for me—via several conversations with artist friends in Manhattan years ago that resulted in a gift—Glass led to Reich. There was a period in my life that every night that I went to sleep at home, I put on Music for 18 Musicians—and experienced it different ways…as background music, listening intently as it transitioned pulse to pulse, falling asleep then waking up startled as the last notes faded away…but the way I experienced it this time was with Popsicle stepping on my face twice during Section IX. I picked the cat up, walked to the furthest corner of the room, and placed it there. “Don’t move!” I said.
I wanted to listen to one more album before hitting the road back home to Princeton, where Anna is a music composition PhD, but I wasn’t sure what. I looked through my CD rack, and was about to put on Lifeforms by Future Sounds of London, when I saw that I had Terry Riley’s original 1967 recording of In C, recorded with students at The University of Buffalo. Three of the Big Four so-called Minimalists! (They all reject the stupid academic term.) It’s, of course, a common way of looking at music via genre: Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax—the big four speed-metal bands! My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush, Slowdive—the big four shoegaze bands! Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk—the big four 50s-60s jazz innovators! Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones—the big four rock gods who died at age 27! A stupid way to look at music, maybe, but, well, there it is. And there it was, that cat, walking back across the room, toward my face. The big four kitty cats at my dad’s house—Cody! Cory! Popsicle! and…and I forget the fourth one’s name. Maybe there’s only three. I don’t know.
Anyway, I put in In C, and it had been a while since I’d heard it. I remembered this being the most joyous of the three albums—almost imagining Dr. Seuss characters banging away at the instruments. And, after a few minutes, I generally felt that way about it again. The opening pulse on this version is a little unsteady—not as tight as the pulse that begins Music for 18 Musicians, and the tuning on some of the wind instruments involved in this particular recording is a little wonky. But at minute twenty-one, the individual cells come together in a way—everything’s cycling and grooving and forming shades and colors!—that made me yell out with joy—!
And then the music was gone. Here, I had an opposite experience to that of the bus to Albany and Music With Changing Parts: I was very aware of the room. Which included Popsicle the Cat, stepping on the top of the CD player, popping open the tray, causing the music to cease as the disc wobbly spun to a stop. “God damnit, what are you doing!” I said to the cat. “I’ll beat you!” It was purring. “Now I have to listen to the wanky wobbly opening again!” I explained to the cat. “That was the good part you just ruined!” The cat, still purring, jumped onto the bed. “I’m going to press play again, and you’re not going to fuck shit up this time!”
As per my lecture, the cat ran under the bed, and then, continuing to run around frantically, hit the cord behind the bed and unplugged the radio.
As I found myself on my hands and knees, trying to plug the radio back into an elusive outlet, I thought of Ted, all those years ago at Mystery Fez, but I realized, maybe there was no connection.
—John Paul Carillo
Pieces range in style and texture from epic (“The Complete Book of Bonsai, Part Two”) to punk (“Kung-Fu Tea Party”) to jazz (
