The horror, the horror

Amongst the tapes my mom shipped to me was a jam session I did with Randy Pelosi early in 1989, in the months after I returned from doing the Mayakovsky play at Bowdoin College and when I was, shall we say, not at my peak.



So there we were, out at my house in the country, "jamming", first Randy on the stick and me on the bass, and it's quite clear that he was a real musician and I was not. And then we switched and I was playing guitar while he played saxophone, and the distinction between our skill levels became less clear. I had the old classical guitar miked and going through an amp with a reverb petal, and it's clear from listening to me talk that, on the one hand, I thought I was cool, but that, on the other, my confidence level as a musician was not high.

The horror, then, was listening to me talk, late at night, to the relatively spacy Randy, and try to impress him -- and myself -- with my hip verbal stylings. And also to listen to me playing to him the same riffs I had been playing endlessly to myself in my room, looking out the window, at once kind of wanting to be an artist and not really working at it very hard, while at the same time being eminently conscious of my general directionlessness and having not clue one of what to do about it. Not the best time.

But some of the guitar work is at least respectable. And Randy sounds good on the stick.