by Rob Garner
Cover photo by Geof Kern.
Featured image provided with permission by Bluesman Vintage.
From 1998 to 2003, I played electric bass in the Josh Alan Band. It was Josh’s only real foray into full-on electric music across his 50-plus year, six-album career, a brief and loud detour in a life otherwise defined by his work as a solo acoustic guitarist and performer.
We worked steadily across Austin and North Texas, then once toured up the East Coast – through Baltimore, to New York City. As we talked in the interview, seemingly disparate references to our past travels and experiences came up. Talk drifted from guitar and musical luminaries one moment, to our encounters with Lorne Michaels and other SNL staff in another. And then – about our accidental visit at the 911 World Trade Center site in 2001 as it was still burning underground.
For me – my first out of over 50 mostly uneventful trips I would later make to NYC – connecting those encounters still seems surreal.
One early December morning in 2001, a scheduled 2:00 a.m. Josh Alan Band radio interview at New York’s WBAI placed us all into lower Manhattan, just a couple of blocks from the still-smoldering World Trade Center site. The smoke was billowing many stories above – as high as one could see in the lit up work area of the early morning.
The area was devoid of any fresh air or clean oxygen, and it looked and smelled like exactly what one might expect: cloudy, and hazily putrid. And it contained unseen elements – defeat, grief, overwhelming shock, but most importantly, resiliency. New Yorkers and the country were committed to rebuilding, and this was – and still is – Ground Zero for a modern way of “moving forward”, both physically and metaphorically speaking.
As we passed the site entry, we saw couriers’ bicycles still chained to lamp posts, the riders lost somewhere in the remaining physical debris. Firefighters walked past us slowly, shoulders caved in, helmets thickly caked and dusted in gray.
I am still not able to process all of it, and I don’t think Josh has either. We wondered aloud about the fate of who we saw. These were real heroes in action, many of whom gave up their lives and suffered slow and painful deaths from the prolonged toxic exposure, and whose stories have all but fallen silent.
On the same tour just two days later, we found ourselves backstage at Saturday Night Live, weaving through hallways where Tina Fey, Natalie Portman, Lorne Michaels, and then NYC Mayor Giuliani were just part of the fast moving scene. Earlier in the week, we’d run into former SNL bandleader G.E. Smith at an East Village guitar shop, and met Bob Dylan biographer and one-time SNL writer Ratso Sloman over lunch in the East Village. This is discussed in more detail in the interview.
24 years later, I still pause when thinking about the juxtaposition of these events.
I first became aware of Josh back in the late 80’s, years before I joined the Josh Alan Band around 1998. He was already a fixture in the Dallas Deep Ellum music scene, and had brought an entirely original form of acoustic guitar playing and songwriting to the mix.
It fit right in with the local eclecticism and stylistic cross-pollination of that time. Top jazz players, white funk bands, storytelling guitar singer-songwriters, neo-hippie jam bands, grungy punk bands, and high-caliber musicians would all co-mingle. Though he mostly performed solo, this mix lead to a collaboration with Sara Hickman, and performances with virtuoso players like bassist Buddy Mohmed and drummer Earl Harvin, among many others.
Through coverage in The Dallas Observer, I learned about his other vocation – underground comic writer – in partnership with his brother Drew Friedman. Josh’s scorched writing style matched the often horrifying pointillistic ink portrayals of their subjects.
I remember somehow getting ahold of a copy of “Warts and All” back in the mid-90s, and reading it cover to cover. I have always been a huge fan of good satire, whether it came from MAD Magazine, or Kurt Vonnegut, and these works represented a different level of fearlessness in covering their subjects.
The Friedman Brothers comics were first published in satirist/artist Harvey Kurtzman’s (original MAD Magazine artist) student publication at The School of Arts, and also in High Times and National Lampoon. One strip even landed them a lawsuit with NYC TV host Joe Franklin, though they later became friends.
As a bassist who by that time had collected every single issue of Bass Player magazine, I was struck by Josh’s profiles of many bass players that I had admired, as compared to the typical musician-mag fare. His articles appeared in The Dallas Observer in the 1990s, and even in Buddy Magazine from time to time. Josh credits having a champion in then-DO editor Robert Wilonsky for getting those pieces published.
Josh comes from a different school when writing about musicians. In effect, this style does not allow the reader to take their music at face value, instead providing a new portrait of the artist at hand. In other words, he often highlighted that thing within that drives an artist to produce great art, or is a part of the composition of their personality.
And the kicker, that same “thing” that makes their music tick might not be what the reader is expecting. If you are to accept the artistic accomplishments of the subject, as a reader you are forced to confront the other elements as a whole. This was a much different approach than that of the musician mags I was reading at the time, in that he went beyond the usual what-gear-did-you-use and what-did-you-have-for-breakfast type pieces. This type of profiling process is core to other areas of journalism, but it certainly was not in the guitar and bass world at the time.
Josh is also known for covering taboo topics that no other journalist or musician had dared to touch.Years ago at the book release dinner for his autobiographical novel, Black Cracker in Dallas around 2011, about 20 people were seated, talking about some of Josh’s past writing work. A small group were discussing his Tales of Times Square, a book that is considered to be the only in-depth journalistic and historical document of the seedy side of New York City in the swinging 70s and 80s.
A concurring epiphany was that each reader was so stunned by what they read, that we could all remember where we were the first time we read it, whether it had been a few or fifteen years before.
One of the unexpected privileges of being in the band was hearing stories firsthand during the long drives: his dinner with Groucho Marx, after-hours poker games with Terry Southern, his father Bruce Jay Friedman mentoring Mario Puzo while The Godfather was being written, and his father also hanging with the top of the big shot lit club at Elaine’s in New York.
Then there were the stories that sit heavier. Josh has written about his childhood in his autobiographical novel Black Cracker, but hearing him describe being nearly lynched as a kid – literally hung by the neck from a tree and barely surviving – was painful to hear. But it also brought extreme clarity for the reasons and subjects of his unique creative output.
In 2002, the Josh Alan Band released Strike a Match on Topcat Records. The core lineup featured our late friend Derek Rougeot on drums, Bill Eden on sax, Josh on electric guitar and vocals, and me on bass. The record pulled in a slate of appearances by some heavy hitters: Ray Charles saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman and keyboardist Bernard Wright (Miles Davis, Snarky Puppy, Marcus Miller) joined us on “Her City,” an urban blues-noir that remains one of my favorite tracks. Jeffrey Barnes contributed clarinet on another track, and Buddy Magazine Texas Tornado Bobby Baranowski played drums on the title track.
That title track, “Strike a Match,” has its own backstory. Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in the 1950s for Elvis, it never made it to Presley’s song list and remained in the vault for decades. Eventually, Leiber gave Josh the first shot at recording it with our band.
As a band, we also played a lot of dives, festivals, and motorcycle club events. The MC events were particularly memorable, because they were by far the best hosts to our band. It may seem like an unlikely place to feel “at home”, but the truth is that they went above and beyond for their featured bands and artists. If I had to say where they ranked overall against clubs, private parties, and concerts and the like, those MCs were definitely in the top 1%, in every sense.
Onstage, Josh was 100% electric. Acoustic and electric are church-and-state with Josh, and never once did he cross that line. Over time, a revolving cast of guests sat-in – Bugs Henderson, Lucky Peterson, among many others.
We once opened for Kinky Friedman at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas, and Kinky invited us up to play “Asshole From El Paso,” and a few more. My part was nothing special other than the fact that I was trying to be ready for whatever song Kinky might call.
I was swarmed afterward by several Kinky Friedman fans asking me to autograph one of his books or other items. I offered four or five reasons why they didn’t want or need my autograph, but I recollect one or two of them insisting that since I played onstage with him, it warranted a signature.
So I obliged a few times, thus significantly reducing the future collectible value of those particular signed Kinky Friedman novels. The thought of someone finding one of those autographed copies at a future estate sale and wondering, “who the hell is that,” appeals to me for odd reasons that I am unable to explain. I expect Kinky would approve.
After the show, with all of the Greenville Ave. restaurants closed, we went across the street to Taco Cabana. Imagine walking into that place at 2AM and seeing Kinky at one of the tables near the salsa bar, chomping on a cigar. That was the scene, and there were many double-takes.
During the Buddy Magazine interview with Josh, I had jokingly mentioned that our conversation was a form of “embedded journalism” due to my being in the trenches with him for a time. But calling it that would be a disservice to actual war time journalists who had risked their lives in the name of getting the story.
And then I remembered a gig we played at The Winedale Tavern around 2002.
The Winedale was in an old storefront on Lower Greenville Ave. It was known as much for being a blues dive, as it was for opening at 7 AM in the morning to water the downtown Dallas workers – those who liked to start their work day with a few beers and whiskey shots.
While playing on the front stage in the window near the street, we encountered a gentleman who we later heard was freshly-sprung from Lew Sterrett, and enjoying his first alcoholic beverage in what may have been many weeks, or months. We had just finished “Georgia On My Mind,” in a 4-piece version with saxophone that was more evocative of Willie than Ray.
Sitting at the back of the bar, he shouted out his song request.
“If you don’t play some Skynyrd, I’m gonna bash all of your heads in with a baseball bat!”
The club went silent. We didn’t play any Skynyrd (though they are still one of my favorite bands), and a couple of songs later he stumbled his way out the back door of the Winedale. Fortunately this wasn’t a typical scene.
This, yet another odd story amongst many other odd or improbable occurrences during my time with the band. The smoke over lower Manhattan, Tina Fey flashing me a grin, the band performing in a rundown 1700s-era pirate bar in Baltimore, the biker clubhouse parties, Leiber & Stoller demos and Groucho Marx stories – a haze of seemingly improbable events.
But it wasn’t. It was just life in the Josh Alan Band for a few years.
—
