3.

Butch

I'm getting some pretty interesting texts. I grew up in Colombia (folks were missionaries). It occurred to me a few weeks ago that the people I grew up with are the same people who have done the bulk of translating several tribal languages into Spanish and English. So I emailed them and they are going to compile a bunch of Macu and Piapoco primers, translations of biblical passages, stories, myths, etc.

Jake

Ah, I thought there was some Christian background in you. Same here. My father's a preacher. When they went off to the mission field, in northern Kentucky of all places, I figured it was time to part company. I hope your folks are more open minded, but mine are insane. I don't mean they utter the words "praise Jesus" after every word, they aren't the charismatic type, but very legalistic, chapter and verse folks.

Butch

Did you want to continue with that? A little auto-bio?

Jake

I grew up in a small town in North Alabama, named after an Irishman I assume, by the name of Killen. Parents were devout Church of Christ, taught Sunday school, etc. We never missed a service. I attended a Bible school from third through ninth grades. It was expensive to attend so most of the kids there came from upper middle class families or were church charity cases. I was neither. My parents struggled mightily to keep three boys in school there.

It was very easy to be a bad apple in that environment. I did manage to learn quite a bit about the Old Testament though, and the academic standards were higher than public schools, so I actually had to do homework occasionally. I finally plea bargained my way out of it to attend the local public school in order to play football. About the time I was a junior in high school my dad began schooling to become a preacher. He excelled at it, got his degree and agreed to start a church from nothing in Georgetown, KY. This looked like my way out so when they left I stayed behind. If I hadn't felt so constrained by the church ethics I would have been glad to get out of Florence, but this was a way to get out of church so I jumped.

Spent a few years hanging out in the local studios (big musical history there, the Muscle Shoals sound, equated with Stax in Memphis for great soul and R & B in the 60s and early 70s. The Stones wrote "Wild Horses" here so the story goes, that sort of thing.)

The studios were looking for people who could either write for established artists or play on sessions. I was more interested in writing what came to me and recording it. That was far too risky for them. I watched them break my songs apart only to have me rewrite them the way I wrote them in the first place while they took credit. It's a dirty business. A friend shopped songs around again in the early 80s, same results.

I started writing poems and songs when I was 14. I never made much distinction between the two until I started reading Eliot and other modernists in the 12th grade. My literature teacher that year noticed that two or three of us had some potential so he challenged us a bit. We had a great time.

In 1984 Rolling Stone accepted a poem I'd sent them as a lark just to show someone I could cop the short poem style they were publishing. So I sent them a couple of poems for real and they published those as well. Then I discovered all the small journals, mags and zines being published at the time and began to be able to publish poems about as fast I could write them. That lasted until 1991-92 when the center fell out. It eventually resurfaced online, is still resurfacing. I also met people like Jack, Mike Miskowski, Ivan Agüelles, Neeli Cherkovski, Malok, John Bennett, Michael And, Liz Was, Chris Winkler, Bob Grumman, Geoff Huth, Richard Kostelantez, James Broughton, Michael McClure, Hank Lazer, Karl Young, Amy Trussell, Willie Smith, Al Ackerman, David Crowbar, Vincent Ferrini, and at least a couple of dozen more that became regular correspondents.

Jack and I have as close a friendship as I have ever had with anyone. Even though he lives in the Bay Area and I live in Alabama we've managed to get together every few years and visit in person, have done several performances and readings together. I published a few small mags, some cassette mags and recorded several cassettes of poetry and experimental noise, etc. I continued writing more or less conventional songs all the while. Occasionally I'd get a chance to record something in a studio. Van Eaton had me come up to Bristol VA/TN (it's literally on the state line) and recorded some of his songs and some of mine with a good band. Amy Trussell was one of the people I'd been corresponding with and when she heard the recordings I'd made at home for a set of songs called Shadow Resolve she offered to put up the money to have the recordings duplicated as a CD. To promote the CD I needed to do gigs so Wayne Sides and I formed a duo called Bare Knuckles. He had an inside track to the studio at the local college so we recorded a couple of Bare Knuckles CDs there, inviting friends in to complete the sound as needed. We played coffee houses, lounges, parties, small venues, traveled a bit. It was pretty exhausting. We either played to almost empty rooms and made no money or to full rooms and made no money.

Somewhere along the way I had a breakdown. Still working on climbing out of that and several similar breakdowns following. Between the mid-80s and now I've run across enough generous people who were also publishers that wanted to publish my books, so I've managed to get several volumes out. I'm not sure how many are still in print. I think the first chapbooks I did with Mike Miskowski's Bomb Shelter Props may still be available. And the books I did with Bob Grumman's Runaway Spoon Press can still be bought. Also the Pantograph Press books. As for CDs, I've put out six solo, three with Bare Knuckles, four with The Ascension Brothers (ambient and noise), and just last year a new collaboration effort with the Finnish composer, poet, visual artist Jukka-Pekka Kervinen under the name Catachthonia. We have one CD, The Blood Paradox Variations available and another CD ready to go. Out this summer sometime I hope. Still playing gigs with the Ascension Brothers once or twice a month. We should be recording a new CD soon.

Butch

You mentioned the floor fell out or something to that effect in the mid-80s. As far as zines, being published, etc. What happened?

Jake

What I meant was the collapse of things in the early 90s underground: There was a magazine edited by Mike Gunderloy, in MA I believe, called Factsheet Five (I think it may still be around in some form, in the Bay area, run by another person entirely -- no longer the same zine). Factsheet covered the underground like a blanket. Everyone sent a copy of everything they published to him and he reviewed it all. Eventually he had to add a few people to help write some reviews. There were literally thousands of publications and everyone read Factsheet to keep up with what was happening. As you can imagine, after a decade or so Mike was exhausted. So about 6 months after Factsheet gets an article in USA Today he sells the mag to a guy named Luce who more or less killed it. At this point the underground broke into various factions. There was an experimental review called Taproot Review. I was a contributing editor for that one for a while. It reviewed all things experimental. I think some parts of this may be available online. And there was a mag called Gajoob that reviewed the audio underground, at that time only cassettes because CD duplication was held up in the courts. Other mags like Mike Miskowski's MaLLife published reviews too. I wrote for that one as well. But after Factsheet went it all really fell apart. The guy who eventually picked up Factsheet started doing things like republishing reviews we wrote for Taproot without crediting either the mag or the reviewers.

The resurfacing is taking place in websites, e-mail mags, and blogs. We're doing now what we were doing back in the mid-80s, creating a cognitive map of creativity that falls outside the increasingly narrow mainstream. Bob Grumman named it "otherstream."

There's no one who can take on the enormous task of documenting it all in one place, though some have tried. The thing about the internet is that is eschews centralization. Its nature is to move out in all directions exponentially. You could spend a week following one or two tracks and miss dozens of developments in another direction. This kind of thing is happening everywhere. When I was in high school if you knew what was in the Top 40 and read Rolling Stone you knew what was happening in rock, folk, pop, country, all the popular forms. And jazz and classical were just as easy to trace. But CDs are so much cheaper to manufacture and the recording technology is cheaper and cleaner (if not actually better) that CDs are coming from everywhere at once. To make matters even more complicated CDs are vanishing in the direction of digital downloads which require only recordings. There's no way to trace it all. August Highland tried, still is trying I think, with his Muse Apprentice Guild to at least capture some essence of what is happening, but his website has become so extensive that it is impossible to even begin to read or see it all. I wrote some reviews for him early on. I was prepared to write a dozen reviews every couple of months, but it quickly became obvious that I would have to write at least four times that many reviews to keep up with what was coming in. Probably the best we can do at the moment is just participate where we can, absorb as much of it as we can and hope that it all means something in some way in the long run.

 

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