Author: st37blog

Our new record is finished and now in the mastering stages. We’re looking for a bigger label than (blue circle) to put it out – heh. Any ideas? DM us for a link to it and the liner notes, credits, etc.

Also – we just booked a buncha shows. Head on over to the shows page to see ’em.

The short lived 6 piece lineup, circa 1993.

Back: Lance Farley, Carlton, Joel

Front: Shane Shelton, Craig Johnson, Scott

Continuing on from Pt. 9 and Payne St…So Bob, in his infinite wisdom, or perhaps just to get me the hell off his couch, found me a place to live with his Thanatopsis Throne bandmate Jonathan Torn,who needed a roommate. This was pre-ST 37. I was still an Elegant Doormat with Leigh Newsom and John Foxworth. 

Jon-Leon Torn is the son of Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, two of the finest actors of the 20th century. Jon’s twin brother Tony still acts regularly in various NYC productions. Jon and I hit it off right away. He was the first person I knew with an actual 4-track cassette recorder, a Tascam Porta One. Magnificent machine! We started collaborating and recording various things on it. Jon had a keyboard and a bass.

     Jon had a second floor two bedroom apartment in West Campus in a dingy little building called the DeLerma Apartments, at 1907 Robbins Place. Well, the name has changed, but little else had.

   The ride was pretty uneventful. I took my usual route through the park and up Lavaca to MLK. It was a pleasure to sit in the shady courtyard and reminisce. Bob Schneider lived in a ground floor apartment on the opposite side of the building and was always bugging us for weed and wanting to record stuff with us on the four track. It seems a little bizarre today, but back then having a home recording rig like the Tascam was a Holy Grail for musicians. And they were not cheap!

Here’s one of the later things we did on Jon’s 4-track that actually turned out pretty good. Turkey Larceny, Thanksgiving 1987:

https://themorayeeels.bandcamp.com/track/the-occasional-cripple

That’s my ex June on the hysterical vocal bits. Not bad! So, eventually our sojourn on Robbins Place came to an end as Jon wanted to return to the Torn family townhouse in NYC for summer 1988. Off I went to lean on another bandmate for shelter.

In an incredible last minute surprise announcement AMT have added an Austin club show as an afterparty for the Austin Psych Fest and we are opening. We start at 11.15 after the fest ends. This of course is a prelude to the last half of the tour proper, which we’ll be doing as well:

But you knew that already. See you out there!

cheers

yr pals at

ST 37

     So, yeah, onward to Payne.

     After we all decided to quit Chouquette St., I knew I had nowhere to go, really, and it seemed like I’d be up against the wall for a while. So, as I mentioned in the last post, I arranged with my good buddy/part-time paramour Lisa Yates to house most of my belongings in her garage apartment storage space there at 47^th and G, (pics last blog entry) and began to hunt around for somewhere to live. Unfortunately, I soon managed to lose my job at the Diamond Shamrock at 38^th and Guadalupe because the owner was so bored he would spend entire evenings spying via binoculars on his employees from the convenience store parking lot across the street and one night observed me lifting some Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers from the fridge and drinking them (gasp!) ON THE JOB. So, the next time I showed up to work 15 minutes late…he brought that inconvenient fact up and fired me. Oh, the ignominy!

      Leaning on my good friend, former roommate, former (and now current) bandmate Bob Bechtol, I somehow managed to not only cajole him into hiring me at the Subway shop he was then managing on Burnet Rd., but to let me crash on his couch for a month or two until I got my shit together.

     I am so eternally grateful to Bob, because, now, (July 2022) at the ripe old age of 60 and gazing back upon my earthly existence, I regard this as the lowest point in my life. Broken up with Betti, my belongings in storage, no job, no car (I believe this is around the time that my white 77 Pontiac Impala that I got from my parents’ transmission finally quit) he took me in, employed me, and gave me, in the immortal words of the Fall, room to live.

     In fact, I was almost homeless at this point, and, one night, in a slightly inebriated state, wrote one of my better solo songs “Stone’s Throw from the Street” on Bob’s porch on his acoustic guitar. I soon recorded this song on Jon Torn’s (more about him soon) 4-track and put it on my first solo cassette (later CDR) “The Moray Eels”. Oh look! Here it is, still available on Bandcamp:

https://themorayeeels.bandcamp.com/track/stones-throw-from-the-street

     Very Nikki Sudden/Swell Maps influenced, I still like this song a lot, and as I am even now reading Jowe Head’s remarkable Swell Maps memoir, still pretty durn relevant.

     At any rate, so, even though I only lived at Bob’s place on Payne St. 60 days at the most, I still regard this as a pivotal moment in my life.

     Jeesh, this is turning autobiographical.

     So the key memory is the porch. I remember deeply that it was elevated above the surrounding landscape, had a railing on it, and may have even had some kind of hanging porch swing on it.

     But, for the life of us, neither Bob nor I can remember the exact address of the house! At first I was sure it was 505, 509 or 905 Payne Ave. So when I got on the bike, and programmed the address into my phone, that’s what I entered. WRONG! Payne Ave. only encompasses addresses from 900 to 2108, and 905 definitely was not it.

       Because, you see, I had many distinct memories of my walk home from the Subway on Burnet that Bob managed to his house, and I knew that it was not that close to 905 which is almost butt up against Lamar.

     Ironically, Bob’s boss, the owner of this Subway, a man called M.D. Fix, had similar surveillance habits to my former boss at the Diamond Shamrock. What is it with these guys that have nothing better to do than spy on their employees?

Anyway, Mr. Fix kept asking Bob why I needed to have my backpack with me at work. He may have even asked me personally at one point, I foget. At any rate, being on the verge of homelessness, my entire life was in that backpack! My notebook, the books I was reading, mty Walkman, whatever I was listening to at the time, my belongings, etc etc…

     Mr. Fix was convinced that I was stealing whole sides of pastrami and stashing them in my backpack to eat later.

As a result of this completely erroneous belief, several times when I was walking home late at night (I think we closed at 11?), MD Fix found it necessary to buzz close by me in his car, shining his headlights on me, I guess to discern the telltale hints of the bulge of a whole side of pastrami sticking out of my backpack. Oh dear. Unlike the Bartles and Jaymes incident, I actually never took anything from the Subway – Bob was the manager, after all!

     That Subway is no longer there. It has been replaced by a juice bar, good riddance. This neighborhood was much less recognizable than the northern Hyde Park area where Betti and I had spent so much time. The bike ride went off without a hitch, but it was so hot I needed to pit stop at the Crown AND the Corner Bar on Lamar by my house. Whew!

Come see us! The Lost Well is cool! The other bands are wonderful! Buy some merch, we need to go into the studio soon!

Stop #8, June 2022, 47th and Ave. G, Austin TX 78751

So, to be fair (to be faiiirrr….) this shouldn’t be a stop at all, as my name was never on the lease or anything, but my name was never on the lease in our next stop, #9, on Payne Ave. (Ha! How prophetic) either, so there. Nonetheless, rrrreeeallly, this should have been inserted earlier, as, during most of my time on Jefferson St. and on Chouquette Ave. (as covered in the last two blog entries), I was actually spending most of my time here, at 47th and G, in my then girlfriend Betti Powell’s house.

Funnily enough, as soon as I got here and started taking pics last week, a dude came out of the house and asked me if he could help me. I giggled and shrugged. “Nah, I used to live here. I’m just on a ridiculous quest to document all the places I used to live in this town. That seemed to satisfy him, and he left me alone.

So neither Jefferson nor Chouquette were bad places to live, really (except for Leigh and his ever-flooding bedroom on Jefferson, but when I had the incredible attraction of Betti, my super hot and ultra hip gf at the time….how could I refuse? I spent as little time at Jeff and Chouq as I could, preferring to chill with Betti, who was truly fabulous.

Across the street were our landlords, an old white couple that tried to ignore us for the most part and did so pretty well until Betti made me bother them at 2 in the morning for various semi-imaginary issues…

During much of this time I was working at Sound Warehouse Records and Video at the corner of 49th and Burnet, which now looks like this:

One of my coworkers here, briefly, was Alejandro Escovedo, but he was quickly moved to the new store at 10th and Lamar (Pretty sure REI is there now) and then got a job at Waterloo. I actually liked my manager there, Pete Salinas, pretty well, but Pete finally fired me for “poor personal hygiene” because I kept showing up late to work dressed in Betti’s clothes, which of course did not fit me, having not had time to go home to Jefferson or Chouquette to get some of my actual clothes. LOL.

Funnily enough, very recently I just ran into someone I hadn’t seen since these days (we’re talking 1986 here – I can always remember that we all watched the Challenger disaster on live TV (about 15 of them) in the Sound Warehouse video department. I still have a bunch of cassettes I made there by taking LPs out of the record store and bringing them back to the video store, where I could tape them on one of the display stereos. Much easier and less risky than shoplifting records. Har.

Anyway, I just saw our duplex neighbor in the back of the house, Abbe Wenger, out at a show and we chatted awhile and reminisced. Unlike me, she is still with her girlfriend from that time, Claudia, but they don’t live there anymore. Here’s the back duplex:

Betti and I socialized with Abbe and Claudia some, but we spent a lot of time with the garage apartment dweller and one of Betti’s best friends Lisa Yates, who now runs a smoke shop in the Houston area. Here’s the garage apt:

More importantly, the stairs up to the garage apartment:

Pretty hard to see, eh? So much foliage! Anyway, one evening, Lisa tried to seduce me on these stairs, so I shall never forget them. I was a good lad and remained faithful to Betti, though I was sorely tempted…that’s another story…

Believe it or not, this is all leading up to a point, which is here:

See that door with the padlock on it? Well, I guess the downstairs of the garage apartment used to be an actual garage, but it has long since deteriorated into an unairconditioned, unheated storage space with a dirt floor for the garage apartment denizens. Lisa (who I did manage to get together with briefly after Betti and I eventually broke up) allowed me to store basically all of my possessions down here for several months while I lived with Bob Bechtol on Payne Ave. (oh, the name is so apropos!)

Bob saved my ass after I lost the Sound Warehouse job and broke up with Betti by getting me a job at the Subway shop he managed and let me live with him for a coupla months while I got my shit together. We had to move out of Chouquette because Leigh wanted to move out, Ray went off somewhere, hell, I can’t really remember, it was 36 years ago…we couldn’t live there anymore.

So, onward to Payne. Ha. I was amazed at how 47th and G and the area around it looked almost exactly the same as when Betti and I lived there, in vivid contrast to the virtually unrecognizable area around Payne Ave, coming up next.

Here’s the obligatory destination selfie:

Really pleased to announce that the bass player has finally come up with a decent arrangement for “Concentration City”, the final piece in the “Ballardesque” puzzle. It has probably been influenced by our attempt to cover “Bombing Nightclubs” by Nikki Texas and Erika Thrasher, aka Indian Jewelry aka Studded Left aka Pleasure 2 (Favorite bands, absolutely essential):

That, and the simple fact that Wendy and I have played “Suffragette City” about a thousand times –

to rehearse for this David Bowie/Elvis Presley hoot night that Jason Morris/Hotel Vegas did during Free Week on Jan. 8. We also played Rebel Rebel, Moonage Daydream…and…wait for it…the song I was by far the most enthused about playing, one of my favorite Bowie songs ever as well as Robert Smith’s, all the way from 1971’s “Hunky Dory”…”Quicksand”. Yes, Virginia, there are other songs that namecheck Crowley, Churchill and Himmler, albeit separately, but none reach the heights of this sublimely depressing yet somehow uplifting 12-string goth fest. When you consider that basically the only even slightly positive statement in the lyric is “Knowledge comes with death’s relief”, it casts a new light on David’s immortal question “Should I kiss the viper’s fang, or herald loud the death of man…?”

I dunno about you, but kissing the viper’s fang seems like a pretty bad idea to me. Wendy and I (um, the bass player) wish to express our supreme adoration for our compadres Taylor, Aric, Jesse and Michael for helping us to rock out and whip the crowd into a reasonable facsimile of a frenzy. Even if you didn’t write ’em, there is nothing quite like seeing the crowd all singing along with the words of the song you are playing. There was even some above-the-head hype-person type hand-clapping from Wen and I during Rebel Rebel, a wonderful song which enabled us to do this type of difficult crowd-encouraging audience participation by the simple virtue of basically consisting of only two notes, D and E.

You wanna hear the demo of EITHER Concentration City or our one and only attempt to record “Bombing Nightclubs? Respond to this post and ask, and I’ll post them somewhere.

Oh! And almost everything is back in stock in the store, and we have a show at Yeast By Sweet Beast on March 12th. Hopefully things will be a little bit more “normal” then.

Justin Waters, aka God, at the AMT US online Shopzone has also started carrying some ST 37 and My Education and other ATX related materials at the official US Acid Mothers Temple mail order website in preparation for the 2023 tour, which will feature ST 37 and My Education splitting opening duties for AMT at different cities on the tour. We are thinking and hoping that Detroit could be the city where all 3 bands will play together for one night only. Look out Motor City!!!! Please buy some stuff here so we can go to camp: https://www.acidmotherstemple.com/

Then again, 2023 sure is a long way off, eh? There may be a fish in the percolator, and we all know the owls are not what they seen. It could occur. Stranger things have happened. We’ll see you in the sycamore trees.

cheers

yr pals at

ST 37