Just Desserts – Youngsters
1978-80
Larry and I were at school together. I’d like to say it was high school but it was really a prep school and that’s the only way I, resident of Andover, Mass. would meet this eccentric who came straight out of Fifth Avenue. Larry wore a suit and tie his whole first year at the school (it was ninth grade for him, I was a year older) so he drew attention to himself. And he caught the eye of the ladies.
One of these ladies who was not in contention for his affections, was nonetheless eager to try to help him out when Larry was learning the saxophone. He’d seen New York, New York, and if you’d seen what he did after seeing Jaws as a wee lad, you would know this was no idle fantasy.
I couldn’t really play piano and still can’t. I do my version of playing the piano which is incorrect and a product of being way too impatient to learn to read music. Show me the fucking chords and let’s go!
Larry, as it turned out, couldn’t play in anything but E flat. I was limited but I could figure out how to play the 3 major chords in a different key than C. But it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t pretty. But Larry could riff on those chords and I’d play some version of some song that fit the bill.
I remember playing “I don’t know much about biology…but I do know that one and one is two…” You know the rest. Call it musical bonding or happy accident. No one is writing the script because our fans are ardent and a very rare species. You could say Just Desserts is its own Galapagos Islands, without the extensive wildlife and PR.
And you could say it looks like a desert. And as our friend and one-time bass player said in referencing the band name, “you know it’s actually just deserts”. Lesson learned too late.
But I stray from this compelling origin story. Larry became capable of playing in other keys, and I who was more comfortable with the guitar, played that instead when we got together. Another friend, Mark Ellison, joined in playing either viola or banjo. He later learned guitar and surpassed me in skill in less than six months.
We played in front of people a handful of times but we were legends in our own minds, as only eighteen year olds can be.
1980-81
Neither Larry nor Mark left school with a real diploma. I did, which was shocking.
In my last year of school, intoxicated and crazed, I pushed my parents’ car out of the garage and drove to the school calling Larry on the pay phone telling him to meet me downstairs. Larry and his roommate, Whitney would have been kicked out sooner if they had made the error of descending those stairs.
Instead, I clearly caught the eye of Campus Security and they decided to “pull me over” if you can call it that in their AMC Pacer, lights flashing! I was no Sean Penn. I went deer in the headlights. Any tough/smart/less inebriated dumb ass would have bolted.
But I waited for the Andover Police to come. They promptly learned I had no license, I was drunk and had beers in both my front pockets. Unbeknownst to me, My father had just made a run to New Hampshire and had a whole bunch of booze in the back of the car. They almost thought I had shit going on. In the end, the cop drove me home, woke up my Dad who had to go back and pick up the car.
The reason for the story is upon graduating and after a summer job, I moved down to NYC to an apartment shared with Mark (who despite having no diploma) was going to Columbia University. Thankfully, Larry was eventually expelled in Nov/Dec and lived out his senior year, back on Fifth Avenue (and reconvened the band).
We would play music, guitar, sax and viola or banjo and we would drink a fair amount of beer. Mark and I would cross Central Park from Morningside Heights at night and devour any food Larry would cook for us. One night on our way home, we met up with the proverbial pack of wild dogs in Central Park. Luckily Mark was burly and counseled me that we should “just walk slowly and not run”.
And John Lennon was killed right down the street, if you can say CPW and 72nd Street is close to 125th and Broadway. It’s closer than a lot of places and that was an earth shattering event. We went to the vigil in Central Park. I became a fan of Lennon’s solo records. There was a miraculous rawness and clarity to some of the songs. Simple yet filled with a weird complexity.
I recall we tried to do an open mic at Folk City and it didn’t go very well. And later, we had a disastrous “gig” in New Haven playing at an event Dan Egger set up.
Larry made a super8 film about a writer coming to NYC (Tom becomes an actor) and it was called Face In The Crowd. I was biased, but he’d sync up the projector with the boom box with the soundtrack all timed out like we did in the old days, and it was honestly pretty great. Larry had a very eclectic and soulful taste in music and I could tell this was always there in the back of his mind.
I left NYC in the Spring of 1981 though it felt like I’d been there a long time. It was like eight months. I remember coming back to the “premiere” of the film in his parent’s living room in early summer. It was fun. Everyone acted like it was an event and that was really cool.
1982
I realize this may seem like I’m trying to write some New Yorker piece, but however insignificant, one’s history with your friends, lovers, spouses, children, parents and a whole array of others, it is who we are. The past is gone but there is a richness in history, remembrance, a sense of connection and ownership of one’s life. The architecture starts early on. Be this a good thing or a bad thing. I believe it’s a real thing.
My musical interests and tastes have not really changed that much from that of a 17-18 year old. John Prine, Tom Waits, Paul Westerberg/Replacements, The Rolling Stones (especially Keef), The Beatles, Bob Dylan The Clash, Tom Petty, Bruce and Elvis Costello make up most of my musical DNA. How couldn’t it? I was lucky to be growing up in that time and it did fill me with a musical vigor. And if John Prine was my North Star, I think Elvis Costello was Larry’s. You might say, odd bedfellows and you just might be right!
Meanwhile, mid-1982 Tom, who had a job he loved at a horse farm in upstate NY, decided to quit and migrate to the great NYC for the summer of 1982, just prior to starting college. He and Larry were going to make music. Wild oats and all of that.
It was a nightmare of a summer on Avenue B and 4th Street but this began the real JD collaboration and we recorded American Nursing Home on Larry’s boom box. Beginning with Vlad Tepes and ending with Larry’s song Ode to Coney Island it was somewhat harrowing yet compelling to listen to.
The summer was punctuated by a young friend accompanying us to Coney Island, and where the boardwalk turned old and beaten up, he was shot by what appears to have been a pellet gun from somewhere below. He was almost seriously maimed by this bullet that went through his crotch and into his leg. There was a lot of blood and it took the ambulance a while to get to us out there.
However, Sammy survived all intact and we visited him in New York Hospital a few days later. I don’t recall the timeline but I left in mid-August. My dog back at home was dying and I flew to Maine to be there when the vet put her down. It was a fucking shitty summer.
Larry and I reunited a few months later where I was embarking on my college career in Amherst Massachusetts. Larry was attending NYU Film School I think.
Larry, and a whole assorted group of friends showed up and took over the property that actually belonged to a grammar school. I was the crazy lady in the attic, an odd apartment that was on the third floor with limited privacy while school was in session.
The school did have a number of marimbas that were sampled by my drunken guests. And grounds as well. Larry filmed a part of his Be Mee Public Access video broadcast after our crazy early morning escapades that involved a duel, a drum being smacked very loudly, and soon enough, the police.
Just Desserts – Weekenders
1984-85
I think for a time, myself being in a sleepy college town and Larry being in the belly of the beast in NYC, we didn’t see one another much for a spell. I know we traded cassette tapes via USPS, but we did finally convene in the Fall of 1984 and in one weekend recorded our second boom box album called Weekending. We recorded it in a church basement where I’d steal away and play the piano in between classes. I’d written a few songs on piano during the summer and the whole thing came together in two days. Larry termed me the ‘fascist songwriter’ as I strong-armed him into cutting the bridge on his song Bartalk. He would say it was the heart of the song, and he was right. Larry’s deviations from the norm made his music more interesting but required finesse that I may have lacked.
But Larry’s sax playing was amazing in these live takes and it felt like we hit a stride and bounced back from that truly crappy summer two years before.
I also recall getting together in Chatham, Mass sometime later that year, perhaps early winter, and we made a video of Larry’s anti-Reagan song. We also worked on a few songs, two that would appear on our album Lost in Love many years later.
In Fall of 1985, we tempted fate and again reconvened to record Vague Notions in the same church basement. I added an electric guitar to the mix and despite my having some misgivings about it as a final product, songs on this boombox cassette would get onto our first true album, Sentimental War. The seeds had been sown.
1986-87
I don’t remember when we started talking about making a real album in a real recording studio but imagine it began in early 1986. I had left college without a diploma and was working at a lumber yard and living in Roslindale, Mass. I’d gone through some “stuff” and was kind of starting over at twenty-four and Larry was living in the East Village. I remember traveling down to his apartment where he lived with his soon-to-be wife, and we spent much time collaborating, working on songs together, talking on the phone and beginning to choose the music we wanted to record. It may have shifted from being another lo-fi project to a real studio project at some invisible point in time.
Larry generously offered to “produce” it, given my relatively broke ass could not afford much of anything at this point. Both Larry and I’d written a few new songs and we plumbed the Vague Notions and to a lesser degree, Weekending tapes to build the album. Somewhere along the line, I strung together five or six songs from our days back in Morningside Heights and we created a medley that was rooted in a song called Harlem Heights.
Our ambition for side two was in essence to create an Abbey Road-esque medley though the songs here would be complete, although abbreviated. Twenty minutes a side requires discipline! Larry termed this collection “Mockcracy”, our take on the world in our mid-twenties.
Mark Ellison, the friend from the old days, was rediscovered lurking in the construction sites of NYC, and Noah Stein, a friend from the days when we gathered at our apartment on Claremont Avenue, took on the bass. Luckily, we discovered Bob Muller, a talented drummer who provided needed precision for the basic tracks in the studio.
And lest I forget, the studio was Wharton Tiers‘ Fun City, parked in the basement of the building where Wharton also was the super. Wharton had worked with many cool bands including Sonic Youth, The Swans and Pussy Galore and would go onto to work with Dinosaur Jr, Glenn Branca, Teenage Fanclub, Helmet and Yo La Tengo to name a few. Our genre was a bit different, but Wharton was our North Star for over a decade.
Our album, Sentimental War was released in November of 1987.
Just Desserts – In The Belly of the Beast Again
1988-89
At this time (1988), Larry, single handedly promoted the record and got press coverage and even a play on K-Rock. Our famous quote from Robert Cristgau was “I never got tired of the good stuff.” He also called us “two indistinguishable groaners” which felt a tad harsh. But he gave us a ‘B’ and I respect that more than numbers with decimals that Pitchfuckery likes to dole out. In the era that followed quite rapidly after 1988, it became ne’er impossible to promote independent music in this manner. As usual, Larry was a renegade. Or last of his breed.
He coaxed me to move to NYC (once again) and promote the record with live shows. Without that, you really don’t have anything, even though I was ill-prepared to play live or return to NYC. But I did in early Spring 1988 and I believe Just Desserts played their last band gig less than six months later. That’s how it goes, children. It may have been only six or seven shows, the highlight being CBGBs. But after Mark and Noah left the fold, it really was just Larry and I once again.
And Larry was working on his film career. I was urged to be a “solo” artist by him, though this was a bit like trying to grow an orchid in the desert. Desert!!! I tried feebly to do this, however the true joy came in continuing to make music in the aftermath of this fevered rush to make a splash. As filmmaking was Larry’s true “thing”, songwriting had always been my “thing”. Whether you play or don’t play, whether folks listen or don’t listen, continuing to create and record in your own limited way is I think, vital and the most important reality.
Being young, I had expectations, and there is some form of low-level shame when you don’t really clear the bar. I wasn’t a good performer, self-conscious, nervous, ill-at-ease, I might try to fake it, but I knew that was never going to happen.
And a band, or a duo, allows you to borrow some ego and gives you a lift. Post Sentimental War , Larry and I eventually did work on some music for a David Leslie performance art event and later, two songs for Larry’s film ‘Hollow Venus’.
Eventually the lads were back performing as a duo around the East Village. We played at the original Houston Street Knitting Factory multiple times and played in performance art venues like PS 122, LaMama etc, Dixon Place and a place called Gusto House which was basically a house concert venue.
We’d play a club I can’t recall the name of that was booked by Joe Hurley. He was very supportive. And there was Nightingale’s, Tramps, Chameleon Club, Sidewalk Cafe, the Pyramid Club, CBGB’s Canteen.
During this period, we recorded a four track, live six-song cassette called Cold Hearts and Whiskey. The boys were back to semi lo-fi! Though a step or two above boom box, our technical/recording prowess and attention to detail made this recording similar to our primitive offerings of the past. But again, there is a quality to this stuff that evokes a sense of time and place.
1990-91
Though Larry had worked on his films for years, either in Super 8 or video, No Telling was his first true film, based on a script he and Beck Underwood wrote about a scientist who seeks to create an animal version of Frankenstein (bad synopsis). This development had taken much of Larry’s time and was the reason he wasn’t really able to focus on music as much.
Larry entrusted me to attempt to create a “musical” score since there was also a percussive soundscape created by the musician David Van Tiegan. He hired a string quartet and I struggled to notate the music since I was nine cents short of a dime when it came to trying to get the music written down accurately for two violins, a viola and a cello.
I recall that day at Wharton’s studio as one of the most amazing experiences in my musical life, actually getting to hear that music come to life with these excellent players.
Our mutual friend, Geoffrey Kidde, helped coach me and arranged one of the pieces I wrote much more artfully than I ever could have. He also corralled and shepherded the players through my occasionally flawed score and had been the one to find them.
We had a couple of full band numbers in the film as well. It wasn’t Just Desserts but it was another Fessenden collaboration I feel fortunate to have been a part of. I recall my whole family came to the theater in the West Village for the premiere of the film as did Larry’s as well. It was a one-off showing then, but it felt very momentous. I bought an art deco tie for the occasion.
I may have my time-frame slightly off here but I believe Larry and I played the Sidewalk Cafe during the CMJ conference in 1990 though I’m not sure how we got on the bill. CMJ was a thing back then that always felt like there was a party for the cool kids going on that you weren’t invited to.
But that night we played, Tom Prendergast from Bar None records heard us play “Almost Shook You Up” and approached us about releasing it as a single.
This came out in 1991 I believe, and was of course a novelty pressing. This track was from our six-song cassette, Cold Hearts and Whiskey, so it tips its hat to our lo-fi roots and is a nice artifact from the past.
I finished a Laverack solo recording around this time called Adolescent Soul that featured future, reluctant JD bassist Mark Lerner, drummer Ben Bearwood, fellow awesome songwriter/performer Michael Kaniecki, and of course, Larry on sax and some vocals.
It accomplished what all self-recorded artifacts accomplish, documenting a time and place and an aspiration to get better at your craft, even if it didn’t all turn out the way you thought it would. Because sometimes it turned out better. Or weirder. 
This had an earlier version of Almost Shook You Up. We’d once again re-record this song for our next full album, Give Up The Ghost. If the artwork is familiar it’s because Larry and Beck designed it and Whitney Blake took the photos. Whitney also took the photo for our single and several of the photographs on this page.
1992-95
During this time, I know Larry was eventually working on his film Habit and I started working on my next cassette “album” called Mercy, Mercy Mr. Percy. I don’t recall how we got on a bill at the Mercury Lounge some time around 1994, but I do recall, being the geniuses we were, we asked Life In A Blender to go on first. I guess it was our bill but this was a sad error in judgement. By the time we hit the stage, Larry had started his own language when he sang and improvised with the timing of a deaf grandfather, and in essence, face-planted in front of this fine audience. And with the Larry engine flaming out, it just became a rocky ride. He’d been over served, goddamn it, waiting to go on after Life In The Blender, who fucking rocked that place with finesse and showmanship and much of what we unfortunately lacked.
Every collaboration has tension and after this gig where honestly, I felt deep humiliation, I experienced some acrimony for my dear pal. I mean, you don’t typically not play a gig in several years and then you get on a bill at the Mercury Lounge in 1994. And you certainly don’t want to go belly up.
Like all happy stories though, a song came out of it, full of my vitriol. And to be honest, I think it bothered Larry until he oddly seemed to absorb it and use it in his next film, Habit. Save You From Yourself became a regular song at our infrequent sets, and Larry’s ultimate embrace of it always seemed a very graceful acceptance. Though the night in question would vanish into the rear view more rapidly than you can imagine, the song became a relic that had new resonance in one of Larry’s most popular films.
I finished Mercy, Mercy, Mr Percy in 1994 and I recall Larry arranging the tracking of Save You and Mystery at a studio (forgot the name) for Habit in 1995. It wasn’t Wharton’s studio because he was experiencing issues, perhaps due to noise complaints. But Mark Lerner and Wharton were there playing bass and drums respectively, Larry playing and singing as well. We finished both songs that night. It was a long but fun session. Different than others given the mission and the tight time frame.
Meanwhile, Just Desserts had been recording new songs at Wharton’s Fun City, but the sessions were typically very sporadic. Larry and I created a sort of promo cassette of five tracks some that would end up on the final album. I guess we thought it could be a sampler, a tasty morsel of the full meal to come. Blood of Jesus was the song that played during the credits of No Telling.
1996 – 1999
After Habit was released, we had the two songs from the film and the remainder of the other tracks recorded and needed to finish the album and get to the finish line. Unlike Sentimental War, these sessions stretched across four or five years and leaned more on my reserve of songs with few or no co-writes and only one Larry original.
Give Up the Ghost was initially completed in 1997 though we didn’t launch a true release until late 1998, early 1999.
We did a radio promotion and re-mixed Save You From Yourself as a “single”. Chad Sonnenberg joined us for a minute, featured on the re-mix, Larry made a video, resurrected here on the video page, and we played some shows at Brownie’s and Mercury Lounge, and eventually did a release party launch and live performance at House of Candles on Stanton Street in the LES.
Larry and I were able to play at a Tom Wait’s tribute show at The Continental Club shortly after, where we played Invitation to the Blues and Better off Without A Wife. Years later, we’d record a version of Better Off on Lost in Love.
Another old friend from “high school”, Dan Egger, urged me to put together an Anthology of all the songs he remembered back to the time when we were at school together up into the present day. He would help curate, produce and make a recording for the ages. It was a wedding present and a generous one at that. I recorded thirty-six songs on my four-track, some with a lack of enthusiasm but goaded on by Dan to resurrect the artifacts. Once mixed and mastered, it was three CDs. The songs ranged in age from written in 1978 to written in 1993. Back then, it seemed like so much time. However it’s only fifteen years though it does span from age 17 to 32. So I suppose like dog years..
Eventually, Dan wisely winnowed this list down to eleven songs that made their rough little way onto an actual release called Out of the Blue. I believe I did radio promo either right before or right after we released Give Up The Ghost. It was my first real album as a loner, however quiet and lo-fi. Of course, I was never truly happy with it, but it was an important beginning, and to Dan’s credit, a show of support for me as a songwriter.
To this day I still wish I could’ve released Mercy, Mercy, Mr. Percy. Though flawed and with its cringe moments, there was something powerful about that time recording, alone in the apartment like a possessed man. I kind of loved it. I loved the studio but you were always more at ease at home. And you could re-record over and over and over until you finally didn’t fuck up the guitar part or the piano part or the vocal. It made music feel a bit more like painting or ceramics. The performance and the repeated moment became an attempt to catch “the spark”, that ever allusive mystery when one tries to record. Yes, it’s manipulated. But so is clay and so is the canvas.
Just Desserts – The New Millennium
2000 – 2003
The short-lived Just Desserts return faded quickly though not without some gracious words of encouragement that meant more than one might imagine. One will make the music anyway, but we’ve always been grateful for our very small audience. I guess when someone else hears and feels and reacts to the music, clearly you feel sort of recognized; “seen” would be the way psychologists might put it. I think the connection isn’t being seen. I think the real connection is feeling alive and sharing whatever that experience is with others and at least getting some response to your call.
If you know Larry’s movies, you’ll know he’s not a typical horror director. The horror that he is interested in is an internal horror that may, or may not be manifested in the material world. The line between the mind and real life are very much the touchstone of his films. We are all living in a horror movie. The problem is, we really don’t want to live in a horror movie, we don’t want to be haunted, chased or assailed by all of these demons. But when much of the world doesn’t even see them, you have a profound problem. You are on your own with wild, dark, relentless forces. Go to sleep, sweet child. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.
While Larry started working on Wendigo, I was recording a new album in Dan Egger’s brother’s tiny apartment. Gideon and I had become friends and Gideon introduced me to Mark Ambrosino who would become my partner in Sojourn Records. Gideon tracked a version of ‘Hold Out’ that Larry used in Wendigo. It almost was a demo. I don’t know where we were in the process of working on the album but perhaps it was early on. In the end, due to the film, that song would get more attention than anything I’d written. Gideon’s final version was much more produced and appeared on the album Gift Horse that was essentially done in 2002 but wasn’t officially released until years later.
In 2001, I put on an event up near The Music Building on 38th Street I think, it being my fortieth birthday. Just Desserts played a set and I played a set with the new band as well. Gideon had collected true pros to play with me as a solo performer and even agreed to pay them for a run of gigs. Mark Ambrosino was on drums, Jeff Langston on bass, Gideon on keyboards and Marc Shulman on guitar. We’d continue to play quite a few shows and this lead me to begin what would become my next album, Cave Drawings at Ambrosino’s The Madhouse Studio in Queens.
2004 – 2007
Near the completion of Cave Drawings, Larry had started work on his next film, The Last Winter. He asked me to write something for the closing credits and that song became Running Out of Road. I ended up adding it to my album that initially came out in 2006. At least I printed 1000 CDs as one did back then, though did little else.
After finishing the album, Mark Ambrosino, who recorded and produced my album, and I started Sojourn Records. Cave Drawings would be one of our first releases.
We were fortunate in seeking out and begging George Howard to help provide guidance in these early days, and the true fun/excitement/challenge of the label was the two-plus years we spent in development, without financial backing and signing artists that didn’t have a ton of options so did not demand any money upfront.
Larry was the only person who did in fact contribute funds to our effort, and in the years ahead, we’d try to throw all we could into making a third Just Desserts album.
2008 – 2011
If you are growing weary, you can only imagine how I feel, lonely scribe telling a history precious few care to read about. But why have a website? Why breathe your little breath? You take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. Or at least you pretend to.
During this epoch, I started traveling a bit with the advent of Sojourn and due to one artist in particular who was able to book fairly large and lucrative shows albeit in a very niche market. But we’d invested a ton of time and money in her career, Mark recording and producing her newest album with a Gospel Choir from the Bronx that we paid for. We did some big shows in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Tucson, Dallas, St. Louis, Boulder, Washington D.C., Nashville, Fort Lauderdale, Charlotte, Ithaca, Rochester, Harrisburg and Allentown. We played Symphony Space and a ton of shows in NYC at venues I can’t recall. We did shows in Toronto and Montreal, Amsterdam and Israel. Mark was the Music Director and played drums. I manned the merch table which became a little storefront. At our height, we were selling twenty CD titles, jewelry, scarves, bags, what have you.
But there was so much money going out the door and a merch table helped but it also was a ton of travel, time, money and inconvenience for a guy who had a family and a full-time job elsewhere.
I eventually got a divorce (big surprise) and then the above artist went rouge. Enough said. But before that we did record Just Desserts’ third album, Lost in Love.
2012 – Present
Lost in Love was a water shed moment where we tapped back into a production style that was both precise and very loose given the two primary performers. However, Mark Ambrosino had a way of making everything sound great and part of that magic came from him on drums, Dave Richards on bass and David Morgan on keyboards. What Gideon had impressed on me years ago, and what I tried to do with Cave Drawings, was to embrace the fact that playing with great musicians made everything so much better. As Popeye says, “I yam what I yam” but you can strive to be better than you think you are and that’s what these great players instilled in me.
So Just Desserts remained the same but did grow a little bit with this album. And unlike Give Up The Ghost, Lost in Love was much more of a collaboration with a mixture of co-writes and more Fessenden originals. We resurrected multiple songs from the old days, including Lost in Love, Tired of Killing Myself, Eva, Harder To Be Alone, Just Like it, Final Hour, Never Draw The Line, Elbow Room and Dog’s Life. We had two new songs that Larry and I wrote together, Anything and Once in a Blue Moon. And as a first, a cover song of Tom Waits’ Better Off without a Wife which was apropos given my new status as a divorced fifty-year old.
Larry produced a video for Tired of Killing Myself and colleagues of his did an amazing production that was filmed at Jalopy in Brooklyn. I have much affection for this venue having played there a few times and also having purchased a 1966 Gibson Southern Jumbo for $850, one night I was playing there priced quite low given it was a tad fucked up. I’m not sure this continued, but initially Jalopy sold used instruments and had music classes as well as functioning as a music venue.
It had a great vibe and I remember I played a set with an old fashioned mic that captured the vocal and guitar at a slight distance much like it might have been in days past on the radio. And it was really cool. Amplification but with a lot of air/space like it was actually an organic thing.
And then quite a bit of time passed. Life got increasingly complicated for me, having overextended myself financially with Sojourn, and now also being a single, divorced Dad with a young daughter. I know Larry was throwing himself more into producing films and mentoring up and coming filmmakers and acting in a ton of films.
Our mutual friend, Whitney Blake, died in 2017 and this was a shock though I had lost touch with Whitney over the years. But he was very close with Larry especially growing up, and became a comrade of mine as well. I remember a lost weekend where Whitney came and visited me in Montague, Mass where I lived far from the Amherst campus. We played Swordfish Trombones by the maestro, Tom Waits, for the entire weekend and decided we would send him a trophy via USPS for creating a masterpiece.
Whitney was very attuned to music and in many ways it was a focal point for him. He played me Unsatisfied by The Replacements when I didn’t know them at all. I had him play it five or six times. Sometimes you don’t know what you want until it smacks you in the face, and Paul Westerberg became one of my favorite songwriters.
Whitney was a photographer with a keen eye, but he also was complex and pretty closed off. I don’t know if we all suffered from the same “isolation of affect” waspism, where we could only truly feel and be alive with the aid of music, film, art. But that’s where maybe we all felt we could connect.
Whitney wrote the melody of a song we call Days of Loneliness. As I recall he only wrote the initial refrain. I remember trying to come up with a second verse with him but think I had to close the loop on it since Whitney didn’t really seem that interested. Probably the worst words of the song.
Larry and I played the song at Whitney’s service though I did preface it by saying, “If Whitney were here, he’d say ‘Oh no Thomas, what are you doing?'” But later in the year we’d gather at Ambrosino’s studio and record a version of the song. Mark did the session for free. He wouldn’t take any money. I sent the final version to Whitney’s sisters. I think Larry plays one of the most emotive sax solos I’ve ever heard him perform. It was live and the love and sadness is there. The whole story. I think we might both feel we abandoned Whitney in his later years – family stuff got messy and he was a lost soul. But so are we all. Mark Ellison played amazing lap steel that brought another element to the song.
Around this time when Larry and I would sporadically do a session at Euphoria, we started playing a song I started called Didn’t Want That written about Whitney. We also played a song I considered a “throw away” called Change Your Mind however Larry always took a shine to this song despite my misgivings. We played Larry’s song Tender and started writing what would become Nothing You’d Ever Want. We were working on a song Ain’t Seen The End of You and Larry being obsessive about recording our takes captured an improvised bridge that I really liked. And yes, he gets a co-write for that, man or machine.
In 2018, we recorded Wind for Larry’s new film Depraved. There was a quality to this session that wasn’t to my liking. It was a very personal song, written about my daughter. Larry had become imprinted with an early version that I no longer felt served the song and at this point, I was long past wishing I’d made another Laverack album. So the frustration may have been this. And Wind was one of those songs that felt a tad sacred. I was of course very happy that he would want to use it in the film. But I’d become pretty clear that I only wanted to record something when it was what I’d envisioned and was done really well. No one gives a shit, so what is the point in creating something that’s half-baked?
Water under the bridge. I don’t think I saw Larry again until after Covid, maybe in 2021 or 2022. It probably was when we went to record Evergreen for his newest film, Blackout. I didn’t know anything about the film but I recall reading an article about it that somehow gave me a flavor of what Larry was going for. We did talk about doing a song and I wrote Evergreen in the spirit of what I imagined the film was about. I sent Larry the demo which was I think completely off the cuff and he really liked it.
I think I learned a lesson about aligning with what the goal really was and we worked with the raw song and morphed it to fit into the sequence Larry had envisioned. And that was really great and fun. And hopefully successful in how it ended up working. We recorded a few more songs that same day, thinking we might want to try and work on a new album. Larry’s son, Jack played bass and old pal Mark Ellison played some banjo, guitar and whatever else. But the drought was over. A new album was in the works.
I don’t know whether it is time or a slight erosion of the lofty aspirations that allowed me to see that collaboration creates something special, out weighing the angst and discomfort of slightly colliding visions. In the end, if you realize that what you’ve got is a life long musical partnership, maybe that helps in the pursuit of really doing something that is in your bones and lends itself to connection with a greater disinterest in what anyone thinks. Other than us. If we like it, that’s good enough and it would be wonderful if someone else liked it too. But I’m too old to hand wring about this and I no longer care about monetizing anything other than my paltry retirement portfolio.
Enter Curtains. Yes, we are finally there, the end of this experimental chronology that could drive someone to drink.
The newest music you make is always your favorite music but Curtains represents something more than that, especially since it has been so long since Just Desserts or myself have recorded anything. Larry did make a record during COVID in his barn upstate with his son, Jack. He called it Mad 4 Ever by Still Rusty, an homage to Larry’s hero, Elvis Costello.
Since I’ve moved into the near or actual present, I hesitate to say anything more. I think the recording says it all. And as I wrote elsewhere, despite the title, Curtains isn’t focused so much on death as it is the mystery of what happens to you in this life. I think we’ve all experienced joy and horror and malaise and anxiety and wonderful romantic love and than many other forms of love that happen during a lifetime. And yes, it is tender. One’s heartbreaks but that means one’s heart is open.
I wish I could wake each day like I remember my dog waking up, alive and meeting the day with an enthusiasm that may be helped by sweet dog amnesia. But it’s infectious and pulls you into the moments where you aren’t fretting about anything. Instead, you are running or playing or just sleeping in the sunlight on your bed.
Oh, to be alive!