Blueberry Union

Pocket Full of Memories

...where is Dean Moriarty?
    New York was full of junkies when I lived there. You could buy heroin on practically any corner of the Lower East Side. There was a recession going on and there were homeless people living everywhere, living in the park, panhandling in the subway, living in abandoned buildings. And yet, it was all very exciting. To a kid who grew up in the suburbs all the great old buildings and the Marathon cabs and the fact that you could still smoke in the movie theaters made me feel like I had gone through a time warp, and all of the people from all over the world, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Haitians, Ukrainians, Italians, Hasidic Jews with their black suits, lots of old world rug peddlers and gypsies. The whole atmosphere was more like a European City than anywhere else I had ever been. There were so many people living so close together in an arrangement that was so close to a state of anarchy that I wouldn't have been able to believe it if I hadn't been there.

    I found a room in a residential hotel and started hustling for work as a cab driver, waiter, bartender, apartment mover and stage hand. I started hanging out at poetry readings, listening to folk musicians and jazz groups. I read books by crazy writers like Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson. I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", "The Razor's Edge", "The Upanishads" and being exposed to that at that time in my life left an impression on my mind that I carry with me yet. That was when I decided to go after music, all the way. Stevie Ray Vaughn was burning up the charts and I heard about that and the shows he was putting on in Austin through letters from friends back home.

    I met a bongo playing artist named Aristotle Paginakis who was working as a waiter at a sidewalk cafe in the East Village and we would go out to the Brooklyn bridge at night to play drums, smoking grass, until the wee hours of the morning. There was a folk music scene that was starting to happen at a club called the Chameleon with, Lach, Roger Manning, Baby Monroe and Tom Clark and one night, Mark Zero, this crazy Jewish cowboy , film maker showed up and played all these country tunes with a voice like Johnny Cash and all these wild film reels projected on to the back of the stage and we immediately struck up a friendship that has lasted until this day. We were the young Turks in those days and we really had the world by the tail. Of course we were constantly, depressed, frantic , desparate and irresponsible, but who wasn't? And, besides, we were making time with chicks. We were perched on the axis that the world revolved around. We had second sight and could clearly see the truth behind the lies that were being sold. That was before things became so much more sad and shabby and all of the eventual harsh realities of life set in.

    Mark had found a flat on the crumbling old Lower East Side in a building that was slowly sinking into the earth. The floor was tilted at about a twenty degree angle but it was very cheap for New York in those days and since it was a two bedroom apartment he was making his bills by renting out the spare room for the full rent and doing artwork, filmwork and playing music for meals, cigarettes and so forth. We spent hours sitting up, playing guitars, telling stories and getting better as musicians.

    Springtime came and I began to get homesick for Texas. New York had opened my eyes but the music I had heard as a teenager growing up in Houston was still some of the best I had ever heard, and it was everywhere in those days, down on Washington Avenue, in the ice houses and the nightclubs, at the old Reddi Room up in the Heights across from Fitzgeralds. Of course there were the punks and the mods but there were a lot of really good rhythm and blues bands playing all over town at places with no cover charge or where you might pay two dollars at the door and there were old guys playing blues in the ward that really had the shit. By summer I was itching to get on the road and see more of the world and eventually return to my old stomping grounds. One of the best drummers I had ever known was back in Texas, a guy I had gone to school with. So, I made up my mind and having little money, after depleting my parent's bank account and running out of work in New York, I hitch hiked back to Texas. meeting up with friends in New Orleans who had driven out across the Atchafalaya river basin on a road trip of their own.
dukejones 2:37 AM - [Link]
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Pocket Full of Memories

Austin, TX
    A lot of the people I had known when I left Texas were living in Austin. Wade Driver was playing drums in a punk band. Mike Freeman had dropped out of engineering and was in art school and Robert Harlan had dropped out of college altogether and was racing motorcycles at Texas World Speedway. I spent a couple of weeks at my folk's house, back in Houston, catching up on things and hearing lectures about finding purpose in life before catching a Greyhound for Austin. What I found once I arrived there is that while most of the students at the university had found places to live in one of the many typical apartment complexes, Robert had gone over to the east side and rented a shack in the ghetto. There he was able to tool around on motorcycles and work on his friend's cars without the neighbors complaining. I was a professional house guest for a period of time, staying with various friends until I could scrape up enough bread to get my own place.

    Robert and I had been friends in high school where he made straight A's in English and took advanced math courses to prepare for an engineering degree. He anchored the baritones in the school choir where he sang like a bullfrog and minced around with a lot of prissy choirboys in the tenor section, but by the time Robert got to Austin he was already getting butch and motorcycle racing was proof enough he was a macho package all the way. He had a wild girlfriend with purple hair and a kid, and he wandered in and out of the house in torn blue jeans, pushing the screen door open with his hands covered in axle grease and washing them off with kerosene at the kitchen sink, all of this while listening to German opera on a kick ass stereo he had taken in trade for a clutch job or something. I got an old pick up truck during this time and Robert helped me fix it up and keep it running. Robert's dad had been a mechanic so he really had started learning all this stuff at a young age.

    Mike Freeman was at the house about half the time, spouting strange theories about the function of art in society. He had one guy in his class who hung himself from fish hooks, another one would roll in broken glass. Mike had lain up with two girls who spent all night shaving him and the next day when his assignment came due he dropped his pants to show his butt to the class with a rendering of the Mona Lisa painted in lipstick kisses on his ass cheek. The same shade of lipstick the teacher seemed to use. There was a debate over whether he was actually the artist or the canvas and whether or not you can really be considered the artist when you employ other people to do the painting. Someone accused him of using a projector to create the Mona Lisa image. I think that was his last semester before he went back to the engineering department. Later that year though, he built a series of sculptures out of pine lumber that were essentially framed houses, complete with rafters and floor joists and a bunch of art specialists from the Guggenheim came to town and said "Fabulous, fabulous."

    I ran into Wade Driver just west of the campus. Actually, he almost literally ran into me. He was riding a silver Vespa down Speedway and I yelled "Wade" at the top of my lungs and as he careened out of traffic he nearly plowed into me. No one knew where he had been staying or what his phone number was but they had seen him playing somewhere down on sixth street. As it turned out he had been staying at a big old warehouse near the abandoned railroad tracks in East Austin. Wade and this skate punk bass player named Greg had turned the space into a sort of commune, complete with runaway teenage girls and everything. Guys would come over at night and jam in the basement with huge Marshall stacks, cranked all the way up, drenched in sweat and guzzling 40 ounce bottles of malt liquor. The big thing to do at that time was to go pick wild mushrooms in the Austin hill country, just outside of town, and hike up to the Enchanted Rock, a huge volcanic formation that had been sacred to the Indians at the dawn of time.

    That's what Austin was like when I was there. Robert was making a little money on the racetrack by proving himself to be crazier than any of the other racers. He rode this huge god damned Honda CB1100 and he would come out of the hole with his front wheel in the air and the just drop the bike over into the first turn, sparks would be flying up off the tarmac as his rear tire skidded to the outside of the curve. Then, he would be back up in the air, going full throttle all the way. One time I asked him, what was the formula for winning? Was it choosing a line in the turns or positioning yourself on the track in a certain way and he said "You just never let off of the throttle. If you do, you lose."

    That was before his career ended, before he had ever wiped out. We were all pretty fearless in those days. Life had not kicked our ass yet. It was fun but I was not having much luck finding work in Austin, a town full of unemployed college students. I worked for a while as a parts runner for an auto repair garage but it wasn't that great, sitting in traffic all day and the boss was kind of hot tempered and before long I was thinking about heading back to New York. I was playing guitar in two bands, neither of them were making any money, and then I happened to get involved with the bass players girlfriend, strictly a coincidental matter because I didn't know who he was dating at the time, but the whole scene was beginning to wear thin.
dukejones 2:30 AM - [Link]
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Pocket Full of Memories

Road Trip
    I met Brandon Lee through a girl named Jill when I was living in New York. One night all these people came back to my place for some reason, after a poetry reading or something and there were seven or eight people in this tiny hotel room of mine. Brandon was there from Boston on his way to Los Angeles. He had been going to school and now he was heading back to start filming a movie about the TV show, "Kung Fu" and we struck up a conversation and kept in touch for a long time after that. Anyway, the reason I needed to back up and explain things a bit is because I was in Houston again, staying with the family and packing for New York. Over the summer I had been talking to a friend back east and he told me there was construction work, framing houses in Connecticut. The pay was good and he could get me on to one of the crews as a helper. While I was at my folks house in Houston I got a call from Brandon who said he was in New Orleans with his girlfriend and he was flush with money from the film he had made out in Los Angeles and he was having a real good time but, Lisa, his girlfriend had started to bitch for no particular reason that he could discern. So, he was putting her on a plane for Los Angeles and he was planning to go to New York and hang out for a while. This was a guy who had hitch hiked along the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to Seattle when he was in high school all because he loved the open road. I had a 1965 Ford F150 pick up truck, turquoise green, with a bleached cow skull wired on to the hood and Robert and I had gotten it running smoother than a Singer sewing machine when I was in Austin. A road trip was inevitable.

    I left Houston in the afternoon and was in the French Quarter drinking scotch and dancing with Lisa before the bars closed. I drove that old truck out across the swamp that night and let it run wide open, navigating by starlight and the green glow from the dashboard. The speedometer had broken long ago so I have no idea how fast I was going. When I got to New Orleans they were not at the hotel and I had to track them down in the bars. He told me to look for him at Pat O'Brien's and that's where he was. I left the truck parked out on the street with all my earthly possessions under a tarp in the back end. I guess it was some kind of miracle that nobody bothered it. Brandon started in immediately by saying "Yes,yes,... now Duke, we really must go back to the hotel room so that we can discuss the plan etc., and find an excellent route to our destination but first, we must have drinks and celebrate because this is the last night before Lisa is leaving and we have made up now and everything is as it should be and there is no more fussing and we are all the best of friends."

    The next morning, while I lay in bed, bleary eyed, Lisa woke up, went in the bathroom and started running water and steaming up the room. After a while she came out smelling like a girl and went downstairs and caught a cab and left. Later on Brandon checked out and we drove to a truck stop on the edge of town and ate chili and eggs, looking at maps and drinking black coffee. It was October now and the weather was nice in New Orleans but there was a cold front headed in our direction. Brandon was wanting to go through Memphis because he wanted to see Graceland and I was trying to figure out how to get on to the Blue Ridge Skyway. We headed north to Memphis and that night we were standing out on Elvis Presley Blvd. reading the thousands and thousands of names and messages that have been written on the stone wall in front of the Presley house. The next day we took the tour. Brandon insisted on wearing a cloak. There we were, with a bevy of blue haired old ladies and Brandon wearing this grey hooded cloak like some kind of druid or hobgoblin. I just tagged along. It was all pretty interesting. That night we were back on the road and we were going to try to drive straight through to New York, taking turns at the wheel.

    Apparently Brandon was not as flush with money as I had originally believed. There was something about the money, that it was on the way but that it hadn't actually arrived yet and when Lisa left she accidentally took all the credit cards. I had already spent practically everything I had on drinks in New Orleans and tickets to Graceland. What was left was barely enough for gas to get us there and a few meals. Twenty four hours later we were somewhere in North Carolina and it seemed like we had been there for a long time and we weren't making any progress. The names of the towns we were coming to seemed to indicate that we were only advancing about twenty or thirty miles per hour. We were way out in the middle of nowhere, going up the side of the mountain and down the side of the mountain, zig zagging back and forth the whole way. It was beautiful as hell and very picturesque with little farms and villages here and there but we were running out of gas, it was getting dark and I really didn't know where we were. It was getting cold outside and Brandon was beginning to snore with his head leaned up against the window. I finally had to stop at a wide spot in the road and pull over to the side.

    I think we both woke up because we were freezing. I knew Brandon was awake because he said, "Duke, you know you're having an adventure when your strongest wish is for nothing more than to be home safe in bed." There were rays of sunlight streaming down on to the valley below us. We were near the top of an ancient mountain. The bright colors of autumn leaves and evergreens stretched forth before us for hundreds of miles, with the morning mist rising into the sky and the smoke from little wood fired chimneys curling up in the distance. Brandon said, "Hey man, I can drive. Let's go get some coffee." and we were on our way. I think I went back to sleep again for a while. When I woke up we were outside of Nick's Diner somewhere in Appalachia, a rounded art deco building that was slowly weathering and covered with hand painted slogans; Everyday is Christmas at Nick's, Don't Starve , Stop and Hillbilly Chicken - Danger,so good you might eat your finger. We went inside and drank hot black coffee to thaw out and ate pancakes and eggs and studied the map. We weren't going to have enough money left to get to New York unless we could get out of the mountains. At this point we were looking for towns that might be big enough to have a Western Union office.

    Brandon said he thought that if he could get Lisa to send him some money he would spring for a motel room at some point. We were both getting pretty ragged. So, Brandon called Lisa from a pay phone and arranged for us to pick up a money gram in Danville Virginia. We drove most all of the next day, taking turns at the wheel and finally found a room somewhere between Maryland and Pennsylvania. I slept like a rock. We barely made check out and off we went in motorcycle jackets, like two gypsies of the road. We rolled into New York like that, in a truck as old as we were that performed well for the entire trip, at least until we got to the South Bronx, where the transmission went out. Cars that were left on the side of the road in the South Bronx at that time were usually stripped down to the chassis before the owners could get to a pay phone to call a tow truck. The skeletons of abandoned cars littered the turnpike along with the graffiti that was sprayed on practically everything. The sun was setting and the neighborhood was beginning to come alive and we realized it was Saturday night. All of my belongings were in the back of the pick up - stereo, guitar amps, tools, etc.

    Fortunately, It was only a minor problem. I crawled under the truck and in the fading light I could see that a small clip had come off of the shift linkage and there, laying in the gutter, was a pop top of the appropriate shape and size. I squeezed it on there with a pair of pliers and we were back on the road , over the Tri-borough bridge and into Manhattan. (The pop top worked well and remained on the truck until the day I sold it.) We rendevoused with Kris Enos who had an apartment on East 2nd St. at that time. We unloaded our gear and had a few beers and after catching up on things for a bit, we were thankful to stretch out on the magnificent floor of Kris' apartment after being folded into the cab of a pick up for 2,000 miles.
dukejones 2:23 AM - [Link]
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Pocket Full of Memories

New York
    I don't know how anyone can live in New York City without a pick up truck. You can bump cabs with it, you can move your apartment around in the back end of it and it's about the only type of vehicle, besides a Jeep, that can hold up to the F.D.R. Drive. Brandon stayed in New York for a few days and then caught a plane to Boston. I spent the winter working with Kris, getting up before daylight and driving out into the country to work on these big fancy houses. It would have been all right if the guys I was working with didn't have icicles hanging off of their beards and if the ground hadn't been frozen, but we went out as much as we could until they started having snow and ice storms and a lot of the work slowed down. Kris was taking film classes on the side and he had bankrolled some of his money so he spent a lot of time editing film on a flatbed in the film lab. I found more carpentry work in the neighborhood at a cabinet shop - a heated cabinet shop in the city. I started working there full time and I kept that job for over a year. I sold the truck for the deposit on an apartment and moved into my own place. It was a regular apartment in a nice old building, right on 7th St. in the East Village. I got a key to the basement from the superintendent and I was able to practice down there with other musicians. The Chameleon still had folk music going on, six nights a week, and there were blues clubs over on 3rd Ave. and jazz in The Village.

    I started hearing that a lot of the musicians were on dope. It was everywhere in the neighborhood and one night a buddy brought up a bag for me to try. We just sniffed it. It was pure China heroin. If you had never done it before you didn't need to shoot up to get high. I remember throwing up after my body reacted to the poison and then a kind of nice feeling set in. It was way different from smoking weed. Sometimes guys would get a little cocaine to keep from getting sleepy. The only problem was that it started to get expensive if you used it very much and you would find yourself in some pretty dangerous neighborhoods at times. I knew a bass player who was using it and a few other musicians and I wondered what that was all about but I was worried about getting strung out. I tried to stay on the outside of that scene.

    The homeless problem started to get so bad in the city that the police were rounding up the vagrants and they started shutting down the parks at night to keep the homeless people out. Tompkins Sq. park became the only place where you could lay down on a park bench without getting thrown in jail. To add to the tension the city owned hundreds of abandoned buildings that they were holding on to for delinquent taxes. A lot of these were full of squatters and the real estate developers were moving into the neighborhood and trying to make it fashionable. The price of real estate was going up. Rent controlled buildings were torched and the tenants thrown into the street. The newly renovated apartments would go for twice as much as they had before. All of this came to a head over the summer when a curfew was declared on Tompkins Sq. park. Before the W.T.O. protesters and before Seattle there was a riot in New York City. It started out as a peaceful protest but there were 500 police in full riot gear with helicopters and tear gas and paddy wagons. It brought the people of the neighborhood together. The Lower East Side had been a poor and working class area and now all that was changing. The people didn't want to move but they couldn't afford to stay there. A series of concerts was held in the park band shell and I was invited to play there. In the long run it didn't do any good. The city eventually tore the band shell down, but for a few weekends that summer there was some real good music in the park and a lot of people were there.

    I put out ads for musicians. I started booking studio time. I kept my job at the cabinet shop and made some of my own furniture. I dated a girl for a while who was a keyboard player and for a few weeks I almost felt like I wasn't going crazy, but one morning I came in to work and there was a phone call from my sister. She called to tell me my father had passed away from a heart attack. I clocked out, went home, packed a bag and I was at the airport later that day. The kitchen was full of food when I got to the house. I asked the Jamaican cab driver, who brought me home, if she knew where I could get a mojo hand. She said possibly at Elgin and Dowling. The funeral was several days later. Relatives came from Arkansas. The death had taken everyone by surprise. I went back to New York long enough to pack. I figured I would come back to Texas and help my mom and sister. I got the deposit back from my apartment and stopped in Austin long enough to buy an old Volkswagon bus from Robert. Robert had wiped out racing. The bike was a twisted heap. He was living in a pole shed on East 6th St. and sleeping in a camper van. Mike Freeman had married a woman who kept him on a leash and made him bark like a dog. No one knew what had happened to Wade Driver, the warehouse was empty.

    I went back to Houston and tried to find work. I ended up working and living in a nightclub. Any type of vice that you can imagine was generally available 24 hours a day; women, drugs, gambling, you name it. I did get to play music in the club, and we started a Wednesday night coffee house jam session that was reminiscent of the anti-folk scene in New York. Mostly though, it was a loud noisy rock club with a lot of thrash and grunge bands on the weekend, and everyone that got involved with that scene ended up with brain damage. I barely escaped alive. I was so strung out after I had been there for about six months that I couldn't remember my own telephone number. The van threw a rod and I sold everything I had for a bus ticket back to New York. I took a guitar and a bag of clothes.

    New York City is a different kind of place when you're flat broke. It's not a very nice place at all. I called Kris Enos from the Port Authority at 11:00 at night. Since I had left, he shacked up with an ex-girlfriend of mine and she was pregnant. He said that it was okay to stay at his place for a few days but I could tell the situation was basically uncool. One morning I awoke to the sound of Kathy screaming at me in a shrill voice, saying, "I don't know what you think you're doing but you can't stay here any longer. You need to go somewhere else." I stayed with a guy I barely knew out in Brooklyn for a few days. He was another musician. I stayed at the YMCA but that was expensive. I slept out on the sidewalk under a cardboard box and one night when I was walking through the 14th St. subway tunnel I heard the coolest guitar ever. This old grey bearded black man was sitting on a milk crate playing something that sounded like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Muddy Waters on an ivory Stratocaster and he said, "Hey boy, what's you got in that bag? Can you play that guitar or do you just like to carry it around? ...Look a here, I don't have time to fool with you but I'll tell you what, if you're able to hit a lick on that box and you listen to what I say, I'll split the money with you. I bet we can make enough for a bottle of wine." I heard him laughing and joking with a woman who was standing there and he was telling her that later on he was going back uptown in his Delta 88.

    I unpacked my stuff and asked him what to do. He said, "Just play this simple bass line and pat your feet in time with what I'm doing." It seemed easy enough but he kept correcting me and giving instructions like a drill sargent. Never the less we did get together on one number and a crowd of people gathered around and filled the box we had in front of us with money. We went up to the liquor store and got a bottle of Thunderbird and came back downstairs and played for the rest of the night. We had thirty or forty dollars a piece and after the station emptied out and J.J. got through counting the money I asked about that Delta 88. He said he didn't know what I was talking about. He said he was fixing to catch the subway before it stopped running. I asked if I could stay at his place overnight. I felt foolish but he said all right. I didn't have any idea what I was getting into. We rode the N-line up to 116th St. and cut over to his block between Lennox Ave. and Malcom X Blvd. where he lived in the basement of a lonely tennement on a block of burned out brownstones and pre-war apartment buildings. He explained that the buildings had all been burned during the riots of the 60's. There were piles of bricks in the vacant lots where trash had been dumped for years.
dukejones 2:15 AM - [Link]
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Pocket Full of Memories

The Blues
    We went down the steps to the basement and into the boiler room. There was snow on the ground and it felt good to be out of the cold. The basement was not like I imagined it. It wasn't much like an apartment at all. There was a dirt floor and everything was covered with soot. J.J. lit a spliff the size of your forefinger and sat down on the hard edge of an old black and white television set from about 1962 and took his guitar and played "Hoochie Coochie Man", the Muddy Waters tune and I swear to you that everything about that song down to the slightest nuance was absolutely perfect. If the living spirit of Muddy Waters had come back from the grave and chosen a body to inhabit it was J.J. and he was possessed. So there I was, 2,000 miles from home, in the middle of Harlem with some kind of crazy genius and no one knew where I was. J.J. helped me fix a crude pallet to sleep on. He had a cot but he said, "No hard legs in the bed. You get your hairy legs over there." So I layed down and set my little travel alarm clock because I had a job interview in the morning.

    At six o'clock my alarm went off. I woke up and gathered up my things and was about to head out to find the subway when J.J. started getting up. He said, "Hey boy, where is it that you got to go?" I told him I had to go to work. He said, "That's right, we got to go to work. Wait for me, I'll be ready in a minute." I guess that moment was like the crossroads they talk about, because I really did have a chance to start my old job back at the cabinet shop but here was this other opportunity. I had studied blues licks and had guitar lessons before but this was so far beyond anything else and yet we were like tramps. There was nothing glamorous about it, but maybe that's the way it really is. So, I waited for him to get ready. We went out and found a spot on the subway platform and played for the morning rush hour. We made enough for breakfast. We went upstairs and had a real nice breakfast in a restaurant and we went back downstairs and played for the next eight hours. That afternoon we went back up to Harlem, had dinner at a soul food joint on 125th St. and went back to the crib and cleaned up a little.

    We did that everyday, five days a week, sometimes at night, and usually made enough money that we could take a few days off from time to time. We worked on a few more numbers and J.J. usually had some particular thing that he wanted me to work on but the big secret that he was trying to get across had to do with the rhythm and it worked. When I started to get it, I really could hear the difference in the sound and I could see the difference in the amount of money we were making.

    J.J. was born on the Mississippi Delta, grew up listening to Sonny Boy Williamson and worked picking cotton in the field. He taught himself to play harmonica and one day at the end of the week he went up to the gin, where everybody was getting their pay and he blew that harmonica for all he was worth. The people that stopped to listen all gave him a little something and by the end of the day he decided he wasn't going to work in the field any more. Eventually he went up to Chicago and got a job fixing washers and dryers for a department store. He studied the guitar and he got a job playing guitar in Little Walter's band and he played with Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters as well as playing harmonica with his own band. I don't know how steady any of these gigs were or what they paid or if he has any recording credits. I know that at some point he married a woman and she had a baby and eventually she threw him out or he left. I don't even really know what his real name was, other than J.J. - either John James or James Johnson, I think. This is not as uncommon in Harlem as it may sound. A lot of people are wanted by the police. At some point J.J. had been to prison for stealing a car in Galveston, Texas and he spent time in the Ramsey unit at Huntsville until he broke out. From there he found his way to New York, on a freight train I guess. He had been shot, stabbed and burned in his lifetime and he had the scars to prove it.

    He was an incredible guitar player and I could sit and listen to him for hours but there was another side to J.J. as well. We got involved in all kinds of things up in Harlem. At night in Harlem there were all kind of things to get involved in, besides drinking raw Thunderbird and bringing fun girls down into the basement and playing the numbers. J.J. would get mean when he was drinking and there were more than a few times down on the subway platform when he cursed me out in front of a crowd of people for missing a note or letting the timing drag, because he said that's the way he learned it. He said they beat it into him. He said that Sonny Boy Williamson would stop the show and curse him out on the bandstand and fine his pay if he messed up and that's how he learned. I think that some of that may be true but it didn't make it any easier to take and I don't do like that with other players, but Jay could play the crap out of a guitar and I would have crawled over hot coals to learn what he knew.

    I had my own problems though and I had tried to run away from them in Texas and they had followed me up to Harlem and here I was. I had lost contact with everyone I used to know and I was beginning to get mixed up with some bad situations. I realized that if I didn't get my shit straightened out I was gonna die in the dirt alone and far from home in less than a few short years. I started trying to do the right thing. I stopped messing with any hard drugs and I tried to put some faith in God. This was causing trouble between me and Jay. I started trying to save some money and J.J. could always find a way to spend all the money we had no matter how much we made. So, one Sunday morning I woke up flat broke and I was hungry. I didn't even have enough money for a jumbo - that was a little peanut brittle you could get in the bodega for five cents. After church let out I went up to 125th St. and set up across from the Apollo Theater and I intended to make a few dollars so I could eat. J.J. was not interested in coming with me. It was a nice day. People were outside. There were a couple of young hip hoppers with a boom box, in fly sweats, Kangol hats and gold, leaning up against a car, but it was the best place I could find. I tuned up and played for a long time before anyone threw me a dime. After about an hour a big boned church lady in a bright red dress came by and dropped a dollar in my box, waving it in the air a few times before letting it fall. The fellows with the boom box turned it down and said, "Hey, check him out." I had been playing with J.J. everyday now for the last three or four months and simply spending that much time with a guitar in your hands tightens up everything that you know. So there I was, and I was just starting to get over when J.J. comes walking down the street with a bottle of wine in his hand and says, "Hey Brutus, stop what you're doing, let me get tuned up." So, I stopped and J.J. started to tune, but he was just making a lot of noise and the people who had stopped to listen were starting to leave so I started on another number and J.J. started to give me the third degree. He said, "Brutus, you are nothing but an ill footed white boy. You are ill footed and ill informed and you aint ever going to get it because your people can't play this music." At which point one of the hip hoppers said, "Hey, step off, old man. It sound all right to me." And J.J. started to get really mad and he just kept saying, "Stop playing, stop playing that guitar." and I thought to myself, I'm not going to let anyone tell me to stop playing guitar and at that moment everything went dark and I felt my head strike something hard and when I opened my eyes J.J. was standing over me with a Stratocaster raised in the air. He had hit me in the head with his guitar. When I tried to get up he pulled a fillet knife out of his coat pocket and said, "Brutus, don't take another step. I'm an old man. I'll cut you." He said, "Look a here boy, I taught you all that know, this is where we part company. You need to do this on your own for a while. I"m through teaching you." So, I took my guitar and my little battery powered amp. and the few dollars that I had made and boarded the downtown subway.
dukejones 2:07 AM - [Link]
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Pocket Full of Memories

Going Home
    I went back to our old spot in the 14th St. subway tunnel and played for a while until I ran into Brother Ali. He was one of the regulars down in the tunnel and a friend of Jay's. I told him all about what had happened because I was confused as hell and he said, "Listen Duke, don't be too hard on J.J. That old man thinks the world of you. You know he carries your picture around in his pocket. One that someone took while you all were playing. It's just his way. Look, J.J. has his own problems. His best days are behind him now and he knows that. He's loosing his eyesight and he drinks too much. You're a young man. You have your whole life ahead of you. He doesn't want to see you mess that up. He knows that where you are going he can't help you. Don't you understand? When he bumped you on the head he was trying to knight you, Sir Brutus. Anyone from Harlem would understand that. If he had really hit you with that guitar you wouldn't be standing here talking. He just tapped you and it startled you so much you fell off your seat. I think he was serious. I think he really did teach you everything he knew. The rest is going to be up to you. Whatever you decide to do with it. I think that he considers you a musician now. Give it some time, Duke. I wouldn't be surprised if I don't see you all together , playing again, but you've got your own work to do."

    So, I kicked around New York, by myself, for the rest of the year, playing in the subway and as a street musician in the summertime.I had some regular spots where I played. I got on public access TV. At first when I left Harlem I stayed in a squat over on East 11th St. with some crazy hippies and then I ran into Mark Zero again, on the street, and I stayed at his place for a while. I picked up some side work with a construction company and I rented my own place on Ludlow St. One night I was going out to play at my old spot in the tunnel and way down at the other end I could see a man with a guitar and it was J.J. When he recognized me he yelled, "Brutus...!" And ran toward me with his arms out and we grabbed each other in a bear hug. He said, "Boy, I was really worried about you. It's good to see you again." and I was glad to see him. We teamed up and played together off and on over the next few months and I generally made more money playing with him than I was able to get on my own. He came and stayed at my place, cooked fried chicken in my percolator, and I went up and stayed in Harlem for a few days at a time, and we always got along great after that.

    That's how that last trip to New York ended up. I was able to make 400 dollars a month rent, playing music in the subway and I had my own place. I even got on TV, but I was having trouble moving ahead. I wanted to get some more equipment and a truck to move it around, so I could play inside, in the nightclubs, and start a band. It was really hard to do that in New York because the cost of living was so high. I really didn't make that much as a street performer. After I left Harlem I called everyone I knew to let them know I was all right. I called my mother and found out that my sister was getting married and if I didn't come back to Houston for the wedding she never wanted to speak to me again. When I was staying at Mark's I had met this temperamental woman who was his room mate at the time and she seemed to take a liking to me but I knew that it was time to move on, so after another year and a half in New York I got on a Greyhound bus and headed home to Texas, for good.
dukejones 2:00 AM - [Link]
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Future Shock

    From the modern way of thinking about the world we see ourselves as the result of historical progress and how advanced we are. Mankind has created superhuman technology, advances in science, machinery, electronics, chemicals, medicine, etc. in only the last few generations but I ask the question, how has this affected the basic quality of life? Have people advanced as far socially as they have with technology? With all of this technology have we been liberated? Are jobs more rewarding? Are our lives really better? Does the average person have better medical care than they did a generation ago? Have people learned to get along with one another? Has the government given us any more freedom or liberty? And, what kind of art, music, and literature will be left behind for other generations to remember us by?

    I could go off on this subject but I will try to stick to the point, technology as it is used in the science of warfare and the economy, fueled by the ability to continually present a new product as the old products become obsolete and more and more things are made to be disposable. Are people any happier than they were a generation ago? Are they more satisfied with their lives? Is the world a safer place? What is it that people really want out of life, and how do you create a society where all kinds of people can live together in peace?      I think that some of the answers to these questions were found by our ancestors and have been forgotten across the span of time. I think that people in previous times may have been more advanced, socially, than what we have today. I don't mean to overlook the civil rights movement, women's rights etc., but those things are history that came out of another generation. In general, I think that we are walking in the footprints of giants, patting ourselves on the back for all our great acheivments and rushing blindly ahead into the future without any real idea of where we're trying to go.
dukejones 9:26 PM - [Link]
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Here's how you adjust the points on an old Ford 302

    First, open the hood or remove the engine cover on the van. Hunker down, so that your face is right over the distributor. Unsnap the two little clips on either side. You might want to use a flat blade screwdriver for this. Try to remove the distributor cap without unplugging the spark plug wires. Remove the rotor by pulling straight up and put it in a safe place unless you are planning to replace it. At this point you are going to need a medium flat blade screwdriver, and a 0.021" feeler gauge. There are two machine screws that go on the foot of the breaker point assembly. These should be tightened down medium tight. Loosen the screw closest to the contact points until it just starts to trap the foot of the breaker point assembly.

    Next, you need to figure out how to slowly turn the engine over. A 15/16ths socket should fit the bolt in the center of the crankshaft pulley. Use a medium extension and watch out for the fan blades. They may get in the way of what you're trying to do. Get into position so that you have a good view of the breaker point assembly while you slowly turn the engine. When the rubbing block on the little spring loaded arm of the breaker point assembly rests on the peak of the distributor cam lobe. Insert your .017" feeler gauge between the breaker points. There should be a slot on the bottom plate of the distributor just big enough for a small screwdriver. You can carefully pry the points open and closed by moving the foot of the breaker point assembly under the screw that is lightly holding it and pivoting on the rear screw which is tightened down more snugly.

    Take a deep breath and look around. If you are patient and have a little coordination you should be able to do this with two hands. Adjust the points so that the feeler gauge slips in between the points with just a bit of resistance. Be careful because if there is too much resistance the feeler gauge may actually be moving the spring loaded arm. Once you are comfortable with the point gap, tighten down both screws on the foot of the breaker point assembly, medium snug. Be careful that the point gap doesn't change when you do this. Push the rotor back down on to the distributor cam. Line up the notch on the bottom. Put the distributor cap back on. Line up the notch on the bottom.

    Snap down the clips on either side. Now you're ready to start the engine. If you want to get crazy you can attach a dwell meter to the negative side of the ignition coil and repeat the whole process two or three more times, adjusting to the precise angle of dwell you prefer. I will cover this part in greater detail later on.
dukejones 5:26 PM - [Link]
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Tribute to Hunter

...stuck here in this cabin, layed up with a broken ankle, waiting for Spring to come.

     Now I have reached the age that I am more alone than I ever have been. I think I need to move. I think I need to do something. The kind of friendships I had when I was younger no longer exist. I am a hunted man. The bill collectors and the law and the sharpness of hunger are driving me forward, to my death.

     It was exactly on a day such as this, in the early Springtime, the sky was grey and it was cold and raining slowly, that it all started, these thoughts I have. All the pages of my life have burned up like paper in fire. Even the hope I once had no longer sustains me. It is the year 2005. I never thought that I would live this long and now that I have, there are no further plans. I thought that I would be done with all this by now.

     "The world was young and the night was a jewel tent around us..." and we were in love, with each other and with our ideas. The world was changing every day and things were getting better. Hopefulness and opportunuty were all around us, even if it wasn't always obvious. As I get older I wonder why life seems to begin so well and end up being such a drag. The distance between a dream imagined and the fullfillment of that dream, though it often seems to be a logical progression, can be of such a magnitude as to approach the impossible. I suppose it all depends on the magnitude of the dream. I have come to believe that it is better to have small dreams, for if you dream of great things there will surely be a price to be paid.

     I had not counted on the wolves or the psychic vampires that prey upon the human soul and reduce the value of a life to a numeric figure that can be calculated into a sum of coins. The predatory nature of the human animal is such that it often preys upon it's own, if that is the easiest thing to do.

     Mankind, having created the machine of industry, is compelled to feed it human blood. When a corporation, which is a legal fiction, is awarded the rights and priveledges of the individual citizen but without any natural lifespan, you are fooling with disaster.

     I don't think that people listen to music the same way they used to. I don't think it means the same thing. Now days, with everyone on the computer, and with the majority of music being distributed by a handfull of huge entertainment companies, music is something to listen to while you're doing something else. When I was coming up, the music you listened to was a reflection of who you were. Rock and Roll was a powerful revolutionary statement in a way that's hard to imagine today and for the most part it was a positive force. It wasn't the kind of sell out it has become.

    I can't completely explain what it was like to stand on an athletic feild in P.E. class and hear the sound of Jimi Hendrix blasting out the window of a Camaro, or the first time I heard Bob Dylan. I was sitting at the Dairy Queen and the song was "Like a Rolling Stone." I stopped what I was doing to hear the words of that song. People don't stop what they're doing to listen to music anymore. Music isn't that important to them anymore, because most of the music, today, doesn't mean anything to them anymore.

    The world that we inherited was a place where people punched the clock and gave their forty hours plus for a reward that never was equally distributed. Often calculated to be at a level that could not quite sustain existence, with greater rewards going to those who were willing or able to conform to various standards, academically approved, politically motivated, often designed to maintain a person at the subsistence level that was demanded by a position in a certain rank and class

    In the world of grey suited grafters, corporate stooges, rich investors and the simple working man, we were on an assembly line, we were being molded into productive citizens, hearded into the universities and the training seminars. Some quit the team, dropped out, or simply chose another set of rules for governing their lives and those that did paid a heavy price.

    The new world that we were waiting for never arrived. The victory went to the empire. The machine that has been created can not be stopped. There you have it. Now we must run with the hunted.

    my tribute to Hunter S, Thompson, the father of Gonzo Journalism.
dukejones 4:30 AM - [Link]
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