I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: CHRIS FORSYTH WITH GARCIA PEOPLES-Peoples Motel Band (2020).

This is a fantastic document of a band an an artist who are totally in sync with each other, making forty minutes of amazing jamming music.  I saw this combination of artists in New York City on New Year’s Eve and the set was spectacular.

I absolutely could have (should have) gone to this show.  It was recorded on September 14, 2019 at Johnny Brenda’s in Philly, a place I have been to many times.  I can’t recall why I didn’t go to this one.  But this document (while obviously shorter than the real set) is a great recording of the night.

Recorded September 14, 2019 before a packed and enthusiastic hometown crowd at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia, Peoples Motel Band catches Chris Forsyth with Garcia Peoples (plus ubiquitous drummer Ryan Jewell) re-imagining songs from Forsyth’s last couple studio albums with improvisatory flair.

As is often the case with Forsyth shows, the gloves come off quickly and the players attack the material – much of it so well-manicured and cleanly produced in the studio – like a bunch of racoons let loose in a Philadelphia pretzel factory.

Recorded and mixed with clarity by Forsyth’s longtime studio collaborator, engineer/producer Jeff Zeigler, the record puts the listener right in the sweaty club, highlighted by an incredible side-long take of the chooglin’ title track from 2017’s Dreaming in The Non-Dream LP (note multiple climaxes eliciting wild shouts and ecstatic screams from the assembled).

The disc opens with “The Past Ain’t Passed” a kind of noodling warm-up with three guitarists all taking various solo pieces and it segues into the catchy riff of “Tomorrow Might as Well Be Today.”  It’s a bright instrumental with a series of jamming solos all around a terrific riff.

Up next is “Mystic Mountain,” the only track with vocals.  It has a classic rock vibe and Forsyth’s detached voice.  The highlights of this nine-minute song are the riff and the soling.

The best part of the disc is the 20 minute epic “Dreaming in the Non-Dream.”  The studio version of this song is terrific with Forsyth playing some stellar riffs as both lead and rhythm lines.  But here with three lead guitarists Forsyth, Tom Malach and Danny Arakaki) the experimentation is phenomenal.  But it’s Forsyth’s wailing solo at 18 minutes, when he is squeezing every noise he can out of his guitar, that is the peak of the song and the set.

Also playing: Peter Kerlin: bass guitar; Pat Gubler: organ/synthesizer and two drummers: Cesar Arakaki and Ryan Jewell.

This is a great release and I’m pretty happy to have gotten the vinyl of it..

[READ: September 1, 2020] “Serenade”

I started reading this and thought it was a short story (the title where it says “Personal History” was blocked).  It seemed to be oddly written.  Then when I got to the paragraph where he talks about writing Love in the Time of Cholera, I realized it was non-fiction.

He says that Love is based around his parents’ own love story.  He had heard it so many times from both his mother and his father and he seemed to remember it in different ways, so that by the time he wrote the book he no longer knew what was the actual truth.

And what a fascinating and tangled story of love they shared.

According to his mother, Luisa Santiaga, they met at a wake for a child.  Although his father, Gabriel Eligio García, had seen her the previous Sunday at eight o’clock mass.  He inquired about her and found out that she was the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez.  She soon learned that he was charming as charismatic with a gift of talking smoothly.  He was adept at seduction, but Luisa believed that he was interested in her friend and was just using her to get to the other girl.  She was tormented by this and, of course, everyone knew it.

They encountered each other several more times and he was fairly clear about his intentions, but she was not happy with him.  It wasn’t until she learned that her family disapproved of him that she considered him.

Indeed her whole family had opinions of her suitor–some positive, many negative.  People viewed her as the precious jewel of a rich and powerful family and that he was a poor interloper after money and self-interest.

His father had many strikes against him.  He was the love child of an unmarried woman (she was 14 when she gave birth to him).   She then had six more children by three different fathers. He had followed in her footsteps, bedding five virgin lovers and having children with two of them (what was going on in Colombia?)  He had a son when he was eighteen.  Two years later he had a daughter whom he never seen.  He had intended to marry the girl’s mother until he met Luisa.

Of course, Luisa’s father had no right to say anything.  He had three official children with his wife and nine more by different mothers, (Seriously what was going on Colombia) both before and after his marriage.  His wife accepted in all of the children.

But more importantly, Gabriel was a Conservative and Luisa’ father had actively fought against them in the war.  Gabriel was actually apolitical but was raised as a Conservative.

Nevertheless, the lovers met on the sly.  But then she informed him that her family was moving her away–to cure her of her feelings for him.

He told her that she should go–as long as she would marry him when she returned. The trip lasted a year.  They managed to talk through the telegraph system because Gabriel worked for national telegraph service.  When her mother happened upon the telegraphs that Luisa had been saving, her rage was so great that she managed to express only one of her celebrated insults: “God forgives everything except disobedience.”

She immediately whisked Luisa away to stay with her Uncle Juan, assuming that this would keep the lovers apart. But nothing could be further from the truth.  Without her parents around, Gabriel had pretty much freedom to do as he liked.  Soon enough, Uncle Juan and his wife accepted the lovers.  It was in this village where they asked the local priest if he would marry them without her parents’ permission.   He wrote to her parents and said that nothing would keep the two apart.  So they gave their blessing but do not come for the wedding!

Two month after the wedding, Luisa was pregnant with the author, the first of seven girls and four boys.  He should have been named Olegario, the saint of the day, but no one had a saints calendar at hand so they named him after his father.  (It cracks me up that they are so religious that they would name their child after the saint of the day, but in this family alone there were over a dozen children born out of wedlock).

There is a lot more detail and intrigue to this story (which was translated by Edith Grossman), so much so that it seems far more like a novel than reality..