Thursday night we joined up with photographer Stevie Oliver to take shots for Heather’s CD “A Message in the Mess”. This allowed me and her brother a good couple of hours of just flinging paint at our poor Lovely Lloyd. We had a great time and more importantly got amazing results.
Unfortunately, after such a marvelous week – the photoshoot, the steady growth of not only Heather’s new disc, but ilyAIMY’s new disc (AND I’m working on Mosno Al-Moseeki’s new recordings AND the new Honest Mistakes Album) and a fabulous show at Jammin Java (thanks Dan Fisk, for putting together such a cool art / music crossover gig) – it was hard not to come home and come down hard on Sunday night.
Two things – and it frankly does them disservice to put them in the same email, but this is the platform that I have, so please bear with me. I want to talk for a moment about the Trump immigration restrictions and I want to talk about the loss of a member of our Baltimore music community.
(April 8, 1979 – January 29, 2017)
First off – we lost Jack Starr this weekend. Some of you know who this is, plenty of you won’t. He was a massive bear of a man, tattooed and golden. He’s come out to my open mics a couple of times over the years, and before that I went to his. He bartended and booked and he played his fucking hear out. He was a regular face at a couple of Baltimore-area venues where ilyAIMY played, and often made me feel welcome as it became clear that I was too folk for rock and too rock for folk. The last couple of times I saw him play it was clear some other things were going on, all too common in our music community – but there’s a feeling that if you get much into your 30s in our scene, you’ve gotten past the real crucible. Hell, if you make it out of the 27 Club as an artist, there’s a feeling that you’ve got a future. Here’s a touch of The Reverand Jack Starr Band, a good bit of grit for the soul. https://youtu.be/-GNUjBg-NKQ and then, because death ain’t cheap, if you’ve got anything you can give towards his funeral expenses please visit https://www.gofundme.com/funeral-expenses-for-jack-starr and leave a little something.
Meg Banter’s eulogy tipped me over the edge today. It was the drop that overfilled the bucket, I guess.
“Rest in Peace dear friend Jack Starr. You made the Red House Tavern original open mic days fun and friendly. You were the first to congratulate me on hosting there years later when you saw it listed in the paper. Everytime we ran into each other you had a kind word and a shot of Jameson Irish Whiskey. Ya always said ya liked how I played Mazzy Star’s song ‘Fade Into You’ and told me how you would name your daughter Maddy Star one day. I last saw you at 1919 bar on Fleet last year hosting open mic. I’m grateful I got to spend one more night making music with you friend. May you rest in the stars now.“
Second off – I’m pretty centrist, which means I get crap from the left for not being liberal enough and from the right for not being conservative enough. We attended the Women’s March last Saturday and Heather teaches every day, which is it’s own protest against ignorance – but when even Fox News amd the Koch network are saying 45 has gone too far and that it’s the “wrong approach” – well, sometimes you don’t get it from both ends because you’re in the middle but because you’ve gone SO far off the reservation.
I Live with a Muslim immigrant. I have known him for many years and he was very proud when he’d gone from green card holder to naturalized citizen of the United States of America. I’ve had to drop relationships with people who were sure that I was courting disaster, harbouring a terrorist who was just biding his time, ticking down like the bombs he was destined to build. Sunday night at Jammin’ Java, singer/songwriter Ted Garber told a pretty intense story about his deceased wife and her family, proud to have entered America as refugees, and their long, hard path to citizenship. Proud to serve in our military. Frustrated to get sarcasm when asking about military discounts at a zoo because her accent was too thick.
I don’t know that I have anything deeper to say at the moment. I’ve always been proud to tour from one side of this country to the other. We drive through and play in the fly-over states and this summer we’ll be once-again heading over into the Midwest and down south into Texas. And I hope, perhaps pretend – but at some level believe – that our fans and friends see beyond the divisions and come together under the music we create, understanding that we are humans reaching out for one another. The world’s a big, scary place – and it sure is a lot easier when we divide it down into “us vs them”, but I sure think a lot of people are drawing their lines in the wrong place.
