Katrina Morse: I wondered if you could just--I’m talking with Jim Fitting, who’s a Cambridge/Boston area musician, harmonica player. I’m wondering if you could introduce yourself and talk a bit about your background--your general background and also more specifically your musical background, in general and here in Cambridge and Boston.
Jim Fitting: Ok. I’m originally from California and I came out here for school. To Yale. I went to Yale with some friends of mine who also became very involved with the music scene here and kind of sucked me into coming out here in the early ‘80s. Paul Kolderie, Sean Slade, and Bill Conway, specifically. Bill Conway ended up being the drummer in Treat Her Right and in Morphine, which are bands from around here. He actually is the one who talked me into coming out here to work for a band he was in. My friends also, Sean and Paul, had another band, they were living in Dorchester. That band, the Sex Execs, with a couple of guys we knew from school and a couple other guys, including Walter Clay, was the lead singer. I moved in with them. There was a studio in the house we started doing in, and that expanded into another studio called Fort Apache, which was pretty involved in a lot of music here. Me personally, I played harmonica for a long time, and I was playing in various bands. I played baritone sax with the Sex Execs. We were kind of doing that, and we founded the studio with this guy from Cambridge. Actually, he’s from East Boston. He’s a pretty interesting character named Joe Harvard. Joseph Incognoli is his real name, but he’s known as Joe Harvard, and in the ‘80s was very much an interesting scene guy. We started a studio, we called in Fort Apache because of the nasty neighborhood in Roxbury where it was. That’s where a lot of stuff was recorded. Paul and Sean later did some stuff with the Pixies. Actually, the Pixies recorded there at one point. Treat Her Right did their first record there. That was probably the first major album that was done there, or album that came out full. A lot of stuff was recorded there. It was a pretty interesting studio. It ended up moving over to Cambridge, and its final spot, where it was for many years, was in the Rounder Building on Kent Street. About the same time that Fort Apache was getting going, Treat Her Right started. I didn’t know Mark Sandman or Dave Champagne at all, but we met through Paul Kolderie, and we started playing music. The thing that, we just wanted to play as much as we could. We had a little different approach. We were trying to write--well, maybe not so different--trying to write songs in the blues style, but in a sort of updated type of songs or more modern type of songs. We tried to take a little less standard approach as far as the instrumentation. Bill Conway played a cocktail drum, which is a tall drum, it has a beater on the bottom in place of the top, it has some percussion stuff. So it didn’t have the regular drum sound of a rock band. Mark played guitar through an [octover?], and didn’t actually play bass but played bass lines on that. We were trying to use Chess Records as our, that kind of lighter sound. We started playing upstairs at The Rat. That was our first regular residency that caught on, and I remember one night there it a big deal because Oedipus was there from BCN. Very Exciting. Things really started to take off, we were playing at the Plough every Thursday night, and that was a real crowded, exciting, fun night. Billy got a buzz going. We played as much as we could over those first couple of years. Anywhere in town that we could play, we played. All these places that are gone now, like Chet’s Last Call in Boston. Of course, the famous story about Jack’s, I saw in the Morphine movie, it was very funny--they interviewed this guy and he was talking about, we were there the night Jack’s burned down, which was a club on Mass Ave. Just about a block north of the Plough. It’s now a high-end apartment building. In the movie, the Cure For Pain movie, this guy’s being interviewed at the Plough, saying that we were on stage when it burned down. That’s not really what happened. It’s actually kind of a funny story in that we did our sound check, and this band called Garr Lange and the Big Rig were playing after us, and so their stuff was there over us. We finished sound check and I was eating at some restaurant that was right down the street, that is no longer there. I saw Micky Bones, who is another Boston character--still around, playing drums--walking by so I came out of the restaurant. I was facing south, towards the Plough, and I said “Micky, what’s going on man? You know, we’re playing up the street tonight,” and he goes “No you aren’t, look! It’s on fire!” Literally. So I turned around. It was after sound check but before any bands had started. It burned down. The fire started at Uncle Bunny’s, the ice cream place, in their basement, and came up. It didn’t literally burn to the ground. It was pretty interesting, when the fire was happening I remember Bill Conway got one of the fireman to go in and rescue his cocktail drum and get that out of the fire, so that was saved from the fire. Our equipment didn’t really get that badly damaged, though I have this weird old harmonica case that I’ve had for years that was made for me, and there’s still a little drop of tar from the roof on it that I lovingly show people if they want. The next day, I’ll never forget seeing the keyboard player from Garr Lange, his keyboard melted in a very fantastic way. Am I digressing?
KM: No, that’s great.
JF: It’s funny, because this movie that was just screened, I guess a lot of this stuff came up. The Plow was a real good scene for us, and we filmed our first video there. When we got signed to RCA a year or so later, this filmmaker named Don Kleszy worked closely with Mark and they did this really cool atmospheric black and white movie to go with “I Think She Likes Me.” It was pretty funny, we got signed, and RCA, basically that record had come out--we put it out in tandem with this band, Three Colors, which Dana Colley of Morphine was in, and they had a little label and we put it out once with that, and we got signed to an English label, Demon Records, and that really didn’t do anything. Then that same record was what RCA picked up when we got signed to RCA. We added a couple tracks, but it was basically the same record that we recorded on 8-track at the original Fort Apache, so that was kind of cool. They of course made us go in, because that was the age of MTV, they made us go down to New York and get in debt to them to spend $30,000 to make a video in color with girls and all sorts of dumb stuff. Some place way down in the Lower East Side. Actually it was a really nasty neighborhood. We had Bill’s truck and in the amount of time it took our sound man to park in front of the venue where the video was being shot, the amount of time it took him to go inside and ask where he should go, somebody cut, it was a cab on a Toyota truck, somebody had cut the little screen for the window and gotten in and gotten one of Mark’s guitars. It was like two minutes! So we got a guitar stolen there. Anyway, that reminds me of one of my friends--there are so many better story tellers than me that I know in the music business. Asa Brebner, who was in, I’ll think of the band in a second, but he has this story about playing at Chet’s Last Call. One of the best stories I’ve ever heard. Chet’s was a real den of iniquity, let me put it that way. Lots of drugs. It was upstairs--downstairs was the Penalty Box, and I don’t know what is there now--it’s right across from the Garden, of course the Garden’s gone, and it’s now Fleet Center. They were playing. Asa used to be in Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, which was a pretty famous band. They were playing a gig, and it was snowing, and after the gig everybody was hanging out and there were various illegal substances flying around, drinking. They were about to load out and nobody really wanted to load out, there was this treacherous stairway down the back where you had to load out, it was really a bitch. So some guy who was hanging out with everybody goes “Listen, I’ll go get the car, no problem.” It was semi blizzard conditions. They gave him the keys and he disappeared and never came back! He stole their car! I love that. That’s Asa’s story. He’s a good one to talk to, I would think. Do you have any questions to direct me?
KM: Yeah. This is great. If you have stories that you want to tell feel free to go ahead and tell them, that’s awesome.
JF: That’s my favorite story. Maybe direct me for a minute.
KM: Yeah, I do have some questions. I imagine you’ve toured a bit and played around different cities in the U.S.
JF: Yes.
KM: I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on what makes the Cambridge and Boston area unique as a music city. What sets it apart?
JF: You hear that a lot, that people who are here maintain that it is unique, and you wonder if it’s just that chauvinism of “my town’s better than your town.” I have been around a fair amount, and I don’t know what it is, but the music scene here is really good. When I first got out of college I went back home and we had hoped to start a band with the guys that I was in school with there, but it kind of fell apart, partly because a couple of my mentors, friends of mine--I’m the youngest of eleven kids, so I heard a ton of music from my older siblings and was around, they were musicians, and some of their friends, who are my mentors, we started a band together when I got out of college. I was playing with this piano player who was probably my biggest, who taught me the most, because he played harmonica the most--Steve Willis, who was from Flagstaff, Arizona, and Bruce Lopez, who was another brother’s roommate. So we started a band out there. It was more like a blues band, just a piano, bass and harmonica trio most of the time, and then we had drums. The scene there, it always seemed, I was ready to leave when I left because it just didn’t seem to be happening. Maybe I was smoking too much dope. That happens. When I came out here I knew guys in two or three different bands. The house we lived in, there was a band there, and when we started this studio Paul and Sean were like “There’s no good 8-track studios.” This one had just closed down. “There’s all these bands here!” That was like ’85, and there was a lot of music going on. For example, Joe Harvard, who we started the studio with, lived in a house with Russ Gershon, who was in the Sex Execs with us, who’s a saxophone player, and he’s gone on to form this band, the Either/Orchestra, which is a jazz band that’s doing pretty well. Right now I think they’re in Ethiopia because he’s been doing this stuff with Ethiopian singers. I cannot articulate what it is, but now I’ve sort of experienced it again in the last few years, more in the world of Matt Smith in the folk, because of Session Americana, which I’ve been playing, I guess we’ve been together about seven years. That started out very loosely at Toad, and Toad’s a bar that just has music all the time without a cover, it’s very small. There’s a ton of music going on here. I thinks it’s obvious that a lot of places--I have a brother in San Diego, and I would never move to San Diego. I guess there’s a pretty vibrant blues scene there. Somewhere like Florida, I would never move to one of those town, because I know--somewhere like Austin has a pretty serious scene. New York or L.A.--L.A. has a lot of musicians and stuff, but the scene is, I don’t know. L.A.’s just a whole different story because of the physicality of having to drive on the highway or freeway to get anywhere. New York is, I don’t know. It’s just, Boston has something. It just has the tightness of it that makes it work, and there are so many musicians there. The folk scene in crazy. There’s so many singer/songwriter things. Also there’s the whole labels of “what is folk.” Because Session Americana, I guess we call ourselves a folk band, kind of, to get gigs. We play country and blues and originals. Sorry. I got sidetracked again.
KM: It’s all right. When you say the tightness of it, are you referring to geographically?
JF: Physicality--geographically, but then also friend-wise and guys that play in each other’s bands, from guys in Dennis Brennan’s band, or Tim Gearan’s band, or [Chris Neil’s] band. There’s so many good musicians here that have stayed here. Jimmy Ryan, who had the Blood Oranges, is such a character. I’ve known him, I met him the first time in the first year of Fort Apache, he was coming to record. The Blood Oranges and Treat Her Right did gigs together. There was a band that was very short-lived with Ron, the drummer, and Jimmy and Mark and I, Treat Her Orange, we did a couple of gigs. It is tight physically. I’m sure if I had stayed in San Francisco I’d know a ton of those musicians, because that’s not a big area. That’s pretty tight too. But Seattle has kind of an interesting scene there, doesn’t it?
KM: Oh yeah, big music scene in Seattle, for sure.
JF: That’s got to be one of the great music towns in the U.S.
KM: Yeah, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, share a lot of musicians, they go back and forth.
JF: I have three of four nephews and nieces at Reed and so I’ve been to Portland a lot.
KM: Nice. It’s a good town.
JF: Yeah. Yeah, there is something about it here, and I’m not sure what it is. The scene in the ‘80s was different because I was much more in the rock scene and all that. I kind of went away for a while. I was in this band The The for a couple of years, off and on for about four or five years, which was more New York- and Europe-centric, so I went away, and I came back and was trying to find myself. I had this band Coots, which never really clicked, but we played a lot. Once the Session Americana thing started again, we were doing this every Sunday night at Toad, and it started getting really crowded, and we moved to the Lizard Lounge and we’d get a really good crowd. The genius thing, and it wasn’t my idea, I didn’t have anything to do with it, was Session Americana--geniuses--we’ve always involved other musicians and had people coming and sitting in. We’ve been really aggressive about that. We did a lot of residencies, when we started doing the residency about three or four years ago at the Lizard Lounge we were getting other musicians for a night and learning five or six of their songs so we could play, somewhat tightly together, their material, and then play ours. The amount of different musicians we’ve gotten to come in, from Sarah Borges, just tons of musicians. It’s been great. It only works because there’s such a diverse, tight musical community. Probably Matt Smith talked about that a little bit. He’s been great, he’s a big booster of ours and we play at Passim a couple times a year. It’s been great. I think he’s got a good perspective. So, that was my long-winded answer.
KM: Sure. Sort of related to that, some people have spoken about how, while there’s a really vibrant music scene and musical community in this area, Cambridge and Boston haven’t necessarily made a name for themselves as a music city in the way that other comparably-sized music cities have. Not New York and L.A., that are music industry cities, but Austin, or Seattle, Portland, Nashville. Boston isn’t necessarily known as a mecca of music, even thought there’s this really vibrant musical community here. Do you agree with that, or do you have any thoughts on that or why that is?
JF: Yeah, it does seem to be second-tier, but I have no idea why. I think it’s got to be right up there--Austin is more famous, especially with the South by Southwest thing. Seattle’s more famous just because of the whole grunge thing and the explosion of certain bands in the ‘90s that came out of there. So there hasn’t been a single, it seems like it’s more disjointed and less focused, so it doesn’t quite get the attention. But I don’t know.
KM: Do you identify yourself as a Boston musician, when you travel or tour?
JF: Yeah. Cambridge/Somerville. Yeah, I’ve lived here for, I moved here in the early ‘80s, so I’ve been here thirty years. So yeah, absolutely. It’s not something that’s the first thing I talk about, but it’s definitely there and it is a big part of who I am. The music scene has been what’s kept me here I guess as much as anything. I was just thinking about the vibrancy of the scene. When the studio was really going, there were so many bands coming out of the various versions of Fort Apache. It later became Camp Street, towards the end. Because of the change of the way music is recorded now, it is so easy now to make your own record, Paul closed the Camp Street Studios just January first. That’s the first time he hasn’t had a studio in town for twenty five years. It’s kind of crazy how things change. Q Division started shortly after and they’re doing great guns over in Davis Square. Those guys are pretty interesting. The name comes from, it’s a play on James Bond. Q Division is where they make all the fancy, all the good technical gear. The place is right in Davis Square. They’re doing great.
KM: Being really known for your skill with a harmonica, do you think that that’s something that you could have developed and been supported anywhere? Do you feel like that kind of talent is especially nurtured in Cambridge, with the folk scene here?
JF: That kind of opens up a whole other can of worms in that harmonicas--well, every instrument is different and has its own set of issues--harmonica is such a blues instrument, and I’ve never really worked the blues scene. It’s not a strength. In the harmonica world I’m kind of off to the side because I’m not at that level of technical virtuosity, and I’m not in blues. The blues community is pretty tight, in itself. That said, I think that because I’m here I’m able to--and because of the history of Treat Her Right and stuff like that--I’ve gotten a lot of support for what I do that I wouldn’t get somewhere else because I’m here in Boston. The whole blues harmonica thing is fun.
KM: It sounds great, I listened to some of it.
JM: The Session Americana stuff? Yeah, it’s fun.
KM: It’s amazing.
JM: It’s cool. It’s been really fun. We’re actually mixing a live record right now. Tonight we’re going to be finalizing it. That’s kind of interesting. It’s good to be playing. I’m always happy when I have a gig. That’s part of my raison d’être, or whatever, is to be able to play live music. Any other questions?
KM: You have to go, yes?
JF: No--oh, yes, I should. I mean, how much more were you thinking about talking? Because I have a quarter--
KM: I’ve got a handful more.
JF: I’ve got a quarter, I could go throw it in and come back. Do you have any quarters?
[cuts out]
JF: I just wanted to talk about Hi-N-Dry a little bit too, which was the studio that--Mark Sandman had this loft. It actually was a really cool building. It’s down right by the DPW yard down in Cambridge. It used to be full of artists, that building, and the guy slowly weeded them out because there’s a couple of artists there--Russ Gershon had his practice space there for Either/Orchestra, and Mark was on one side then he moved to the other side. It was a beautiful sixth floor. It had a great view, it was just this big, open loft. After he died they hung onto it and it turned into a studio which Session Americana recorded an album at, with Rose Polenzani. We did two albums at the same time with everybody playing. It was a great feeling of a community that they tried to foster, “they” being the remnants of Morphine, Bill Conway and Dana Colley, and some other people--Laurie Sargent and Andrew Mizzoni. They tried to really create this community. Community center is not the right word, but it was a studio loft that was like a magnet for stuff to happen. It really was going great for a while, but it was hard to keep going, and then they had a falling-out with the landlord. Now they’re in the Armory building in the basement and they’re done a beautiful job putting the studio in there and trying to get stuff going. The studio business is tough and it’s not quite the same in the basement of the Armory building as they were on the sixth floor of the loft, so. Not to emphasize the lack of stuff going on in the basement place now, but the original Hi-N-Dry was really cool. It was really neat, there was really a sense of community that was happening there for a short time, three or four years. But anyway, I digress. When I was walking I was thinking of Hi-N-Dry. It’s funny because my perception, recording studios were such a focus for me, even though I was an engineer for a while at first, but I’m not a computer person so it’s surpassed me, or passed me by in a sense. I’ve always wanted to play more than be behind the desk, so to speak. My musical life and life here in Cambridge has been so oriented toward recording studios, so it feels like that has been a real source of community for me, where things happen and musicians come and go. The clubs and the studios, that’s what I want to talk about. You know, “What about Johnny D’s, what a wacky old club!” Treat Her Right used to play there like crazy, it was a great club for us.
KM: Why was it wacky?
JF: The outsized personality of Tina, the owner, Carla’s mother. Carla Delise, who owns it now. It’s a family-run place in Davis Square that has been owned by the family, Tina’s husband owned it, I guess that was Johnny D. But Tina, she was the iron fist of the club owner, it was always something with Tina. Some disagreement over a minor detail that wasn’t important. She and Mark would just go at it about what kind of beer we could drink, things like that. Just ridiculous stuff. Johnny D’s was a great, it’s still there, so I gotta hand it to them. I hadn’t mentioned Johnny D’s either, so I just threw that out there. You must have a couple more questions.
KM: Yeah. You were talking about the sense of community. A lot of other people have mentioned that. It seems like a really close-knit musical community, in Cambridge specifically.
JF: Yeah, absolutely.
KM: I’m interested in that, and also does that extend, do you think, across musical genres? Do you feel like each genre is insular? Are any overshadowed? Does rock overshadow the rest of the genres, or is there a lot of collaboration and communication?
JF: Good question. I say that because it’s hard to answer. I think some genres are a little bit more insular. The blues scene is kind of a separate thing. Here, there isn’t a big blues scene like there is in some places, at least as far as I perceive. Once again, I think it comes to the idea that things get a label, and for a lot of musicians they’re just playing music, so it transcends whether it’s rock or country or blues. I’ve mentioned Dennis Brennan and Jimmy Ryan and Tim Gearan and these guys that are playing this music that is across the lines. Blues and soul and country all mixed in. It’s obviously not the rock scene, which is separate and younger. The bands that are playing The Middle East and TT’s--we don’t really play those venues very much, so it’s a little bit delineated by venue again. Atwood’s and Toad and The Lizard Lounge are more the kind of roots-y stuff that I, bands that I feel a strong community with. There’s a bunch of younger guys in rock bands, I don’t even know the bands. The BCN Rumble is something that’s been around, and they just resurrected. The guy that won, John Powhida, has played with us a bunch. He’s not so young, but he’s totally rock and roll, but he transcends genre. The Rumble, for example, was something that had a real sense of community. I was in it a couple times with the Sex Execs. We went to the finals and lost until Tuesday in the finals. Treat Her Right was in it and lost in the second-to-last round. When that was going on, you’d have these nights where you were doing this weird thing where bands are competing against each other, but everybody knew each other. It was absolutely a feeling of community, even thought it was this weird artificial competition, because it’s so subjective, who wins, though obviously some bands connect more and have far more interesting, rock harder or whatever. When I was younger and more in rock bands, because Treat Her Right and Sex Execs were more rock bands, there was a real community, and you’d see each other in the clubs, and it was like “us agains them,” us against the world and the club owners, and trying to make a buck and find another gig. It’s similar today, except it’s a different group of guys and it’s not that rock world, it’s more that roots-y world that Dennis Brennan and Tim Gearan, kind of the same names, Kevin Barry and Duke Levine, two stellar guitar players that play with these guys. We’re all brothers and sisters on a certain level. We’re trying to make music, we love music, and we’re trying to help each other out. It’s not “You’re playing tonight and we’re playing too,” sometimes you joke where you both have a gig on the same night and “We’re gonna kick your ass! You’re gonna have a crappy night because we’re playing! They’re all gonna be at our show!” But it’s that way because we love each other. I’m getting all mushy now. But it is fun. It’s not a huge scene, but there’s a lot of musicians and a lot of bands, there’s so many good bands, and some that float through, like the David Wax Museum that’s been around here for a little while and they sat in with us a couple of times. They’re so fantastic and cool and they’re starting to take off and you’re just sitting around, like “best of luck to you.” Who knows what will happen with them, but they’re got the ball rolling in a really good way. I don’t know if you’re heard their stuff or anything.
KM: When you play around here, who’s coming to see your shows? What’s the audience like?
JF: Most of it is people coming back to see us again who’ve seen us before, at least lately it’s been that way. With Session Americana we haven’t been doing a lot of free shows, we’ve been doing stuff that has a pretty big cover, so you don’t get a lot of loose people coming in. Professionals, music lovers; it’s a pretty wide range of folks, and there’s a lot of word of mouth, so friends of friends. A lot of artists and other musicians, but professionals too. That’s kind of hard to answer. When there’s a ten to twelve to fifteen dollar cover it tends to be people who know the band, not new people, whereas when you’re doing a free residency it’s word of mouth and all sorts of different people coming in you never can expect. The age range is pretty good too, people up to their fifties and sixties to people who are just starting to go out to bars.
KM: I was wondering if you’ve noticed any major changes or trends through the years in the music scene here. Has anything really changed since you started playing music in this area?
JF: That’s hard to say. Obviously a lot of things have changed. Weirdly enough, one of the things is, it has become a lot harder for clubs to have live music because of one specific thing: the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island, eight years ago, where all those people were killed. The fire departments, within two years that was the first cut. Within a year or two all these clubs stopped having music because the insurance changed, the fire insurance tripled. Those things are still happening. Because I work with Bill Beard, the drummer who books The Lizard Lounge and Toad, starting June 1st there’s a very dramatic change in the law. Any clubs that have over a one hundred person capacity have to have a dedicated person who is like a fire marshall for the club for the night, who signs off and is personally responsible for anything that happens fire related, which is pretty harsh. As someone said, that is basically what the fire department used to have to do. They are putting it on the clubs. I forget how many years it’s been, eight years, since Station, but it has made it harder and harder on clubs, so that the clubs that still do it, you’ve got to hand it to them. They’ve got to love music to keep doing it, because it’s not getting any easier to make money, have bands come in. I think it’s thinned out the clubs a little bit. It’s not as easy to have a music venue anymore, so I think there’s a little less variety. There’s still clubs--Atwood’s hasn’t been around that long, I guess five years. They just had their fifth anniversary. To do that in this climate is pretty impressive. It’s hard to say what else, how things have changed. They clearly have, but part of it is getting older, so I’m much less aware of what’s going on in the rock world, but it seems like the blues and country scenes were a lot more delineated and lively twenty years ago, and now, especially country, has been much more assimilated by this roots thing. There’s still hard-core country and bluegrass--country and blues, they don’t have nearly as strong a scene. Bluegrass is strong but it’s kind of part of the folk scene. Folk and roots, it’s become a bigger pot. It’s much less delineated into separate things, it’s a bigger pot.
KM: So there’s less focus and specificity? Things are more generalized?
JF: Yeah. There used to be country music clubs in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There was the Blue Star, and there was a place right in Central Square, and those places were country clubs. There’s still people playing country, like Girls, Guns, and Glory, is this great young band, Wade is the singer from that, and a couple of guys from it have sat in with us. They’re a country band, but it’s the new, younger, it’s all part of the bigger scene, it’s not separate. It’s gotten more all-inclusive, but it’s hard to generalize. It’s not really making any sense. There are still bands that are doing the hard country thing and they’re playing good venues, but there aren’t the country venues--Johnny D’s still has a lot of country music.
KM: Do you feel like it’s gotten a little watered down? More mainstream?
JF: I just think that it’s become part of the roots thing more than a separate thing. That rockabilly and country are just roots, so the rockabilly bands and the country bands, the hard edges have softened, so they’re more like each other. They’re more just roots.
KM: Is there anything that you’d like to see in the music scene, the musical community here? Any changes you’d like to see?
JF: I don’t know. I’m not a big visionary. It’d be cool to have more of a focus that everybody gets together, because things seem a little spaced out or spread out right now. Camp Street closing, for me, was a big deal, because that was a place that was like a clubhouse. Hi-N-Dry going away, too. It was like a clubhouse where anybody could walk in the door because they were doing a mix. I knew the people there at either of those places well enough where I could just walk in and not feel like I was intruding, and I can’t do that at Q Division. At those other places I knew everybody well enough. To have that kind of clubhouse is something that I miss. It’s still there in the clubs a little bit. Matt Smith is so welcoming at Passim, or I play so much at The Lizard Lounge or Toad, or Atwood’s, I can walk into those places and it’s kind of like that. Having that kind of clubhouse that Hi-N-Dry was or Camp Street was. I guess that’s more my personal, rather than something for the whole scene. Anyway, I feel like I’m digressing and not contributing. Unless you have any other good questions. No, I meant, what I was thinking, “How much time have I killed?”
KM: Is there anything you want to pass on to musicians that are starting out here, that you’d like to convey?
JF: It’s a great town for music. There’s a lot of great musicians here. So just, welcome. I was just thinking, I’m not a very good storyteller, but there’s a lot of good storytellers out there, guys and girls who’ve been in the music scene. I feel sort of inadequate at telling good stories, because there’s many out there. Anyway, I digress. I hope this was helpful and interesting.
KM: Definitely, yeah. Is there anything else that you think I should know, or anything else that you want to talk about?
JF: I feel like I got sidetracked there a little bit, so I don’t know, not really. The studios and the clubs and the musicians, those are the three things that have been it for me, that have made this place great. There’s been some really great musical venues, like The Plough was so much a part of what we were doing. Jack’s was a great place that burned down. Today, things like Toad or The Lizard Lounge are where I live musically, and it’s all these great musicians, but it’s also having great venues, great clubs, and then the studios, having these great studios that I was involved with and playing and recording and having music come out from the recording. You fear that that’s lost. It’s hard to explain about studios. It has changed so much in the last few years about how people can, so much recording is done at home, files are sent, and you can record at one place and send the file over and overdub it somewhere else, whereas when there’s a studio where everybody went it was this great sense of a place, a clubhouse, a community that existed that’s going away. Q Division is still there, but it costs money. Not like anybody was doing it for free. Hi-N-Dry was sort of just like a clubhouse. There wasn’t money, they didn’t make money. Anyway, I don’t like to talk about the financial aspects of things. It’s not my place. It’s sort of interesting: the studio, the club, and the musicians. The tripod on which the scene was built. I feel like I’m kind of blathering on now, so maybe I should stop.
KM: Well, thank you very much for your time, it was really nice speaking with you.
JF: Sure. Thanks. What’s the website? |
