Archive
Here’s one for Bite Size and the “All She Wants To Do Is Dance” Group.
From the Live Album “SHAKE A BUM” by Scott Fagan And The MAAC Island Band lilfish records, St. Thomas Virgin Islands
Scott Fagan And The MAAC Island Band @ Gullifty’s Camp Hill PA.
Here’s a picture taken by our beautiful friend and Producer “Digital Dave” recently at Gullifty’s a great spot in Camp Hill Pa. Just behind and to my right is the great Bass Player “Bobby Fry JR”. It was a Wonderful Gig, I wish you had been there with us. We look forward to seeing you soon!
Scott Fagan and The MAAC Island Band Release New Album “10 Great Songs In Search Of An Audience”
Book 4. Scott Fagan and The MAAC Island Band, Release New Album “10 Great Songs In Search Of An Audience” www.10greatsongsinsearchofanaudience.com
That’s the headline, here’s the story…These songs (and many other songs of mine) have not found their audiences because, after all is said and done, I have not been successful at promoting myself to the point where audiences have heard these songs and accepted or rejected them. Complexly, It’s simply that simple.
For one reason and another I have always been inhibited about promoting myself. At this point that is unlikely to change. I am really relieved for my son Stephin (Merritt) that he has Claudia (Gonson) to help him with that, because if left entirely to the elements for self promotion that he inherited from his dear mudder dear and his fine pater fer’tater, the boy might be raising Chihuahuas. Not unlike his Grand Father the Great Frankie “Tic Tac Toe Trio” Galvin, who couldn’t promote himself either, and wound up in a skeeter riddled rust bucket trailer in “El Swampo De Los Everglades” with little Beau “The Father Abraham of Chihuahuas”, and Beau’s multiple wifeys and Babble barking nations of offspring.
So the point is.. this release, this album, is about the songs and not the dude that yodels ’em. That is why it is titled as it is and why it is a mix of sessions here, there and everywhere. The trick is to get the songs to the people that will love them or leave them alone. Songs are born to have a life (and relationships) of their own, but they have to get out there in order for that to occur. My job (after wrassling the thing out of the ether) is to get the song heard by whatever means possible. I love these songs and have spent many years trying to get them to you. I’m going to try my very best to promote them. I sincerely hope they find you this time. That’s the story Morning Glory.
P.S. Oh yes! Please go and give them a listen, and if you like one or more, then please pass them on www.10greatsongsinsearchofanaudience.com Thank you, Scott Fagan 2012
Book 4. Up Coming Gigs And Book 2. SOON .2
Book 4. Up Coming Gigs And Book 2. SOON .2
We are busy and traveling a fair amount, and of course, it’s all interesting. This Saturday (June 18th) we are in Harrisburg, PA doing MODE Magazine’s Big LUAU on City Island, from 6 – 10 PM then We Travel up to New York City for Tuesday June 21st to participate in the big City Wide “Make Music New York” Festival.
We (Scott Fagan And The MAAC Island Band) will be playing at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on 1st Ave between 46th and 47th Streets (right across from the UN) from4 to 5 PM.
Folks are saying that we were assigned to the UN because I “sing in tongues” but it’s not “tongues” it’s just how we sing (and speak) down in the Virgin Isles. We are looking forward to both gigs; the band and I are rarin’ to go. We will be back in Harrisburg for “Music Fest” on Sunday, July 3rd and in Lebanon, PA. on August 6th for the “Pablo Emilio Memorial Music Festival”.
The band is excited to play in the Islands, and the European Festivals, it’s all in the works…we will do our absolute best, and we shall see.
Book 2. SOON .2 continued…
This whole mem.wa? thing started out in large part as a response to a gent who had contacted me because of his interest in writing a book about the “SOON” Story.
He asked me about it and in the process of emailing back and forth he concluded that perhaps I ought to be the one writing about it. Mostly because (I suspect) he realized what kind of nut he was dealing with (the kind of nut that doesn’t want anybody changing his words) and because not only do I insist on holding on to all of my “old” words but I can (and do) make up perfectly good new ones at the drop of a hat, or skip of a synapse.
In any case he (not unreasonably) hoped that I would get right to it (the SOON part) but instead, I have spent the better part of the last two years writing 240 pages about half of everything under the sun with very little mention of “SOON” There are reasons for that.
First of all. while some folks see SOON as the end all be all of my work and life, I don’t. (However, I see it as an important piece of music. I love Music and I love people who love music and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it go until I know the people who would dig hearing it have heard it).
Interestingly, there are a number of self-important people who have consulted themselves and then had the gall to publicly proclaim that “Scott Fagan peaked early with “South Atlantic Blues” and never did anything meaningful after that.” I certainly don’t think that’s true either.
In an attempt at orderliness I conceptualized the mem.wa? as four sections each encapsulating one chronological segment of the life (if you knew how many different things occur to me almost all at once, almost all the time, you might appreciate the attempt to bring order, however, for lack of better experience or “other” experience, this “blizzardito” of ideas and images, is one of the things that makes it ever interesting to me, to be me.) It may be symptomatic of FAE, but “dems the symptoms I got” and thank God I find them interesting and amusing.
Anyway, or rather, further, I imagined the mem.wa? as (thanks to modern technology) a hybrid of words and music (yes I know that’s what a song is) meaning a book with music (yes I know that’s what a Musical is) a combo platter of lit and music, a book that you could listen to (yes I know..) but or rather, a book that allowed you to hear the music in the muse. A mix of book and blog able to organically include music in the experience, a,a,a, Blook!
Anyway when chronologically It was time to write about the teenage years, I felt as if I would need to tread very lightly to avoid hurting other people, not a one of which needs any more pain in their life and I simply don’t have the time to spend zig zagging between truth and consequences, or turning ragweed to roses and so I slowed down a bit to plex on it.
After plenty of good plexateing (and because of the recent SOON activity), I’ve decided to revisit that stuff later, a quick synopsis will suffice and help to put things in context. Here it is.
“Lots of singing, lots of juicing, lots of trouble with the law, lots of love, lots of jealousy, lots of trouble with the law, homeless, violence, lots of trouble with the law, singing in the dungeon, juicing in the dungeon, lots of ah..difficulty in dealing with authority.
All in all, interesting and unusual (by virtue of the people and the settings, down in the Bongo Isles, the deep South in the early 1960’s) worth revisiting, and without question, a set up scenario for lots of trouble with the music business.
So, as noted elsewhere, as a homeless teenager living on a piece of cardboard, on a hillside (Sara Hill) at the end of the airport runway in St. Thomas, I signed on as crew on a fifty foot ketch called “The Success” she was on the last leg of a round the world cruise and bound for Miami. We sailed out of the harbor at Charlotte Amalie at dawn on July 2nd 1964.
My mission was simple and clear, save my beautiful alcoholic mother from herself and get my younger brothers back from social services’s foster care system, set my sister up, get my Pop an Irish Bar in a good drinking locale, eradicate racial prejudice and social injustice by singing my heart out and making a million dollars. Ah… right away.
And..if at all possible, somehow rescue my own 15-year-old sweetie from the guy she had gotten pregnant for and married and gone away to the states with so she could get out of the house ‘cause (the rumor was) she was being molested.
The content and emotion of those days may have been captured somewhat in my song “South Atlantic Blues” written in 1965.
Here are two recordings of it. The first recorded in 1967, is on the ATCO Album “South Atlantic Blues” and the secondrecording that I’ve posted here, is from the LIVE album ” Shake A Bum” recorded in 2010
” South Atlantic Blues” Scott Fagan
You know the Islands are the perfect place for going away
Life’s so easy there you live from day to day to day to day
The father of missions, he once walked proud and tall
He must had seen too many Christians, cause now he’s very small
The poor man’s got no Gods at all
Not counting alcohol, not counting alcohol
You say that’s dues, I’ve got news for you
It’s South Atlantic Blues, South Atlantic Blues
She lives in the alley, the hope gone from her eyes
Her dress is torn and dirty, loving lips are cracked and dried
She sits and cries, my life’s a lie
Her children think she’s died, her children think she’s died
You say that’s dues, I’ve got news for you
It’s South Atlantic Blues, South Atlantic Blues
She stands by the seaside, my love, she waits for me
And I can’t help her as she wonders, how long will it be
I told her once, we would be free, from Charlotte Amalie
Charlotte Amalie, Charlotte Amalie
You say that’s dues, I’ve got news for you
It’s South Atlantic Blues, South Atlantic Blues
You know the Islands are the perfect place for going away
Life’s so easy there you live from day to day to day to day
day to day to day to day…
After many adventures and poetical ruminations, a month later we arrived in the states, and I got a singing gig at a folk Club on US 1 in Ft.Lauderdale called “The House Of Pegasus”. A month after that I arrived in New York City with 11 cents to my name. I called the only phone number I had which had been given to my Mother by a friend of a friend of a songwriter.
The name with the number was Doc Pomus.
I called him and he set a time for me to come sing for him the next day. I did and Doc was kind enough to sign me on the spot.
What’s this have to do with SOON? It’s what they call “backstory” or setting the context, it was also the beginning of my exposure to the for real and serious music business.
Doc was a very successful song writer, with hits galore. Among them; Lonely Avenue, Young Boy Blues, Teenager In Love, Hushabye, This Magic Moment, His Latest Flame, Little Sister, Return To Sender, Go Jimmy Go, Save The Last Dance For Me, and Viva Las Vegas, we lived at the Forrest Hotel on 49th between Broadway and 8th, the Brill Building was right across the street where Doc’s Music publisher Hill And Range Music had their offices.
I of course thought (and my recent three song audition and instant signing reinforced the idea) that music (and by extension the business around it), was magical and made up of people appropriate to populating the magical musical land. I thought that Doc and his partner Mort Shuman, (and the other professional songwriters in and around the Brill Building) had it made in the shade.
I was very surprised (and unhappy) to hear Doc’s descriptions and characterizations of music publishers and record companies as exploitive and dishonest (my fluffity and flautin’ words not his, Doc was more colorfully direct and to the point).
My initial reactive defense was something like “well that’s too bad for the people who get hurt, they probably did something wrong, and anyway, I’m here to make a million and rescue my family.
I don’t want to or have time to, get caught up in stuff like that”
However, Doc was trying to educate me to the reality of the people and the business that we as artists (writers, singers, musicians) were in and had to deal with.
I really didn’t want to hear that stuff or believe it, I much preferred my own magical thinking. Only weeks before I was “sad glad good bad happy mad dreamy lad” swimming in rum and coke delusions down in the beautiful Virgin Islands and suddenly I was a signed and (at least expected to be) grownup professional recording artist (although I wasn’t old enough to sign my own contracts, my Mudder dear had to come to New York to sign them for me) in what was turning out to be a cut throat snake, scorpion and piranha infested reality.
I had seen all kinds of blood spilled in crazy drunken violence, had come face to face with the deepest kinds of hatred, knew all about suffering, deprivation and sadness, but really nothing at all about manicured men in tailored suits whose ambitions for money (yours, mine and everybody else’s) appeared to supersede every other human value and concern.
Though I knew scads about ‘life’s other side” I knew very little about this one and I honestly had never imagined that such people actually existed. And, I really didn’t want to know.
I was at thrilled and excited to see all of Doc and Morty’s BMIwriter awards along the hall ways at Hill and Range, and the awards to song writers Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley for “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” songs that represented the “liberation theology of Rock And Roll” songs or rather “energy and intention” that inspired and sustained me through a fairly challenging childhood.
Back at the Forrest I said “Doc, I saw all the BMI awards at Hill and Range, I didn’t know that Elvis was a song writer, that he wrote “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” Doc said “Scotty, Elvis didn’t write those songs, Col. Tom Parker said Elvis had to have half of the song or he wouldn’t record them.” I was dumbstruck..I couldn’t believe that Elvis would do something like that, I couldn’t believe that someone would make Otis give away half of what was his.
Doc explained that Elvis had nothing to do with it, it was all Tom Parker, and Tom Parker was all about the money.
Morty took me to a song writers bar on 50th Street just off Broadway and introduced me to a parade of writers (primarily African American) responsible for many of the great Doo Wop hits who had either been cheated out of their royalties or manipulated into actually selling the rights to their songs lock stock and barrel. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
I can’t tell you how much of a true believer I was, music meant the world to me, gave me (and millions of others), hope. Had unified my generation, pulled my sister and me through hell and high water, To discover that slick “business men” had been hurting and cheating and stealing from the people who actually made the music, and that the people, the public didn’t know a thing about it, and therefore no one would do anything to stop it, was soul searing and outrageous to me. And frankly, that was only the beginning.
So there we see part of the genesis of SOON.
This belief/ idea that if “people only knew they would do some thing” was an old one for me.
In 1954 my step father Howard and my Mother, fleeing bills in St. Thomas, moved us into an apartment at Parada 25 and Aveneda Fernandez Juncos, in Santurce, Puerto Rico, next to what was at that time considered the largest and worst shanty slum in all of Latin America, “El Fangito”. When I first saw naked little children, feeding themselves out of garbage cans, I said to my self “If the people in America knew about this they would do something about it” and I decided that “I’m going to learn to write songs and tell im’ cause if they knew about it, they would surely do something about it”
This was an earlier element in the Genesis of “SOON”
I still believe. The only difference now is the realization that writing the song and even singing it at the top of your lungs is no guarantee that anyone will hear it, or that the information will get to the people, or if in fact the song is heard, that the people who hear it will care enough or can afford to care enough to do something. Things simply aren’t as simple as they once seemed. However if one cares, then you’ve got to keep trying.
Continues…
Book 4. Two More From the “LIVE album ” Shake A Bum” Here come…Soon and Where My Lover Has Gone
Book 4. Two More From the “LIVE album ” Shake A Bum”. Here are Soon and Where My Lover Has Gone.
Here are two more from the LIVE album “Shake A Bum”
“Soon” is the theme from my Rock Opera “SOON”. This may be one of my very favorite recordings of the song because of the “harp” or harmonica intro. Let’s see what you think.
Soon Scott Fagan/Joe Kookoolis
Soon everyone will see, everyone will know, the long, long night is over We will look and we will find we’ve left the past behind, it’s over
Soon all the world will say look we made it all the way, tho no child was ever blinder it will be a very special sun, that shines on what we’ve done, oh listen
I want you to listen..
Soon there will come a day, our love will show the way, and all men will be brothers
And I will see that day or die, with all my life I’ll try, with every breath I’ll talk it and shout it and sing all about it
Soon maybe not today, maybe not tonight maybe not tomorrow But I, won’t let a chance go by, I’ll really really try, don’t you ever doubt it
Soon there will come a day, our love will show the way, and all men will be brothers And I will see that day or die, with all my life I’ll try, with every breath I’ll talk it and shout it and sing all about it
Soon maybe not today, maybe not tonight maybe not tomorrow But I, won’t let a chance go by, It’s a case of do or die, won’t live with out it
Soon, Soon, Soon, Oh I know it’s coming soon…
“Where My Lover Has Gone” is a crowd favorite on gigs and online, let me know what you think.
Where My Lover Has Gone Scott Fagan
Morning comes down very heavy on me
Nothing at all like a new day should be
This morning saves it’s glory, for someone in another story
Somewhere a song, where my lover has gone
There’s no glad surprise for these sad eyes to see
No trace of the grace that her face had for me
These grey skies have no rainbow, cause rainbows are where ever she goes
Somewhere a song where my lover has gone
Somewhere the sun is shining, good old time silver lining
Somewhere a song, where my lover has gone
Morning comes down very heavy on me
Nothing at all like a new day should be
This morning saves it’s glory, for someone in another story
Somewhere a song, where my lover has gone
Where my lover has gone, where my lover has gone…where my lover has gone… where my lover has gone.
We are still hard at work on the “Shake A Bum” video…that’s coming soon.
Book 4. “LIVE” Captain Creole, With Mighty Whitey Dedication
Book 4. “LIVE” Captain Creole, With Mighty Whitey Dedication…
I’ve loved Nicky ever since he showed up as an eager, inquisitive, freckle faced kid in an Anglican school uniform, some time in the early sixties. He had a great spirit and a great big heart even then. Nicky, aka Mighty Whitey, offered me the sincerest sort of complement through the years by doing many of my original songs, including La Biega Carousel/Tutsie, Lord Cherrigo Sad, Archipelago Man, and Captain Creole.
I will always miss his laughing eyes and his sense of adventure, but most of all, his camaraderie. We were comrades in a very select fraternity.
The dedication verse is now part of Captain Creole, and touches me with the kind of hopeful joy that Nicky embodied, each and every time I sing the song. My wish that it may have a similar effect on those of you that feel the way I do, about our friend “The Mighty Whitey” Nicky Russel.
CAPTAIN CREOLE
(Words And Music, Scott Fagan, ASCAP)
The word spread through The Virgins, the Old Creole was dead He died in the night of the full moon light, in a sword fight, in his bed, Some say he was crazy, he had a rum dream in his head But I will tell you, in his words, what Captain Creole said…
He said “Old Pirates never die dry your eyes we don’t ever die, Old Pirates never die, they just sail away”
The Dancing Senoritas, the Ghosts of Buried Gold, The German and The African,that battled in his soul,The Jolly Jolly Rodger, The Treasure Ships of Spain, Called out to him and bid him come… back to The Spanish Main
Because “Old Pirates never die, dry your eyes they don’t ever die, Old Pirates never die, they just sail away”
The word spread through The Virgins, Like the ringing of an old ships bell, The Preacher turned to Heaven, but most folks bet on Hell. The Old Creole was sinking, the Old Creole was gone, And we cried in the light of the full moon night, Whispering his song
He said “Old Pirates never die, dry your eyes they don’t ever die, Old Pirates never die, they just sail away”
RECITATION: THIS ONE IS DEDICATED NOT ONLY TO CAPTAIN CREOLE HIMSELF, THE LATE GREAT CALWIN MARTIN MOOLINAR, BUT TO OUR BEAUTIFUL FRIEND THE MIGHTY WHITEY, NICKY RUSSEL, WHO SANG THIS SONG SOO WELL AND CALLED IT HIS FAVORITE OF THEM ALL. GOOD WINDS, GOOD FRIENDS, AND GOD SPEED …FOREVER MORE”
Old Pirates never die, dry your eyes we don’t ever die, Old Pirates never die, they just sail awayyyyyy”
The recording is from the current “Scott Fagan and The MAAC Island Band” LIVE CD “Shake a Bum” found through the link below. www.thecollectedworksofscottfagan.com
Book 1.MORE The Blessed Virgins. and Book 4. LIVE Continued
Book 1.MORE The Blessed Virgins. and Book 4. LIVE Continued
The time between 1958 (when we returned to the Islands) and 1964 when I sailed away to “fame and fortune” in the music business was very eventful or full of “stuff” some of which I have already touched on in earlier entrys,(see 11 through 16) but much of which remains to be seen or said, writ and read.
We were young teenagers straddling multiple (many multiple) worlds, and because pool is undeniably the perfect allegory for life (in some quarkatronic parallel dimension), you will comprende when I say, it seems like one day everything is racked up tight n’ right and the next your worlds are rocketing away in the slam crack! echo-math of a resoundingly good breaksplosion.
Further with the poolagory,after rocketing apart, by God they hit the bumpers and come ricocheting back towards one another (or not) often colliding to make even more mayhem, and so and so on until finally all is calm and quiet again except that everything is where it wasn’t before and what wasn’t before now is, and on top of that there is a fair possibility that one or more balls (worlds) are gone and of course, no sooner do you adjust to that, when slam bang crackola mam, everything changes again.On second thought, Maybe war is a better allegory, but what would we call it? Warality, or perhaps reality?
Anyway, I am very relieved to have finally discovered or received, resisted, and finally accepted that change is the only real constant (now don’t think that I think that I’m making a statement of ultimate wisdom,e fact or universal truth ‘cause I know as well as the next psychedelic casuality that things ain’t always what they seem, and even ultimate truths are subject to their context or the shifting physics of sub atomic worlds and quantum dimensionality,( man it’s like one has to be a Zen master Psycho Scientist to step out of the door and hold your ever-changing own with the question of “what the heck’s goin’ on?’) anyway, I didn’t know this stuff then and so I often hoped, hoped with all my heart that nothing would ever change, that every thing would stay just the way it is this minute this hour this day forever…
Those were the times of course in which the world was as sweet and slow as golden honey (ah yes…against the blue blue of the countless shades of blue sea)
Rather than the times of violent chaotic change, or the happy/tragic occasion of a friends family (like the family of the The Girl With the Golden Skin) moving away from our “low cost housing community” to their own beautiful new home on a hill with the Million dollar views and the cool Island breeze…)
There were many golden days of the greatest camaraderie Cont…
PS Here’s a whimsical little piece on perhaps a Quantumized here after..
“Dead As Dust”. .
(Dust To Dust I’ve heard them say but..)
I’ve been told someday wemust
all wake up dead as dust
dead as dust.. what could that mean?
organic stuff with rocks between?
Have you ever looked at dust?
It’s alive!!! (except for rust)
A universe of universes there,
(between the bread crumbs and the doggie-hair)
and the mites (lil bugs big as elephants
with faces like mosquitos eating peppermints)
but if the dusts a little wet,
that doubles the universes that you’ll get
Great googamooga could it be
that that is what becomes of me?
We (I’ll) turn into the space between
the color blue and the color green
and fly in thirty different directions
all at once in thirty sections?
Oh I hope and pray there’ll be
some of me left of me
so I can dig this dance electric
from my dusty new prospectric
I wouldn’t miss the streets of gold
patrolled by strict prophets of old
declaiming ‘bout the days of Heaven
like nutty buckets outside a seven eleven.
I’d rather be singing with my dead dust band,
with my new name “dead as dust dude man”
everything that is, I’ll be..
part of it… all part of me
Great googa mooga I mean, really?
part of it… all part of me?
going up while going down
left and right and round and round
out in the country, while in town?
In silence AND rip-roaring sound?
Dead as dust might be exciting
(though the dyings not so inviting)
Although some folks go from here to there
rocking in their rocking chair,
Other people wake up dead
Intheir jammies in theirbed
I guess dead as dusts a kind of blender
that takes our mollycules and sends..er
friends them every wich-a-way
from Sapphire beach to Botney bay.
Me in the sea me in the air
me in all things everywhere
instead of like a dull vacation,
life’s (er..deaths) an exclamation!
Wow! wow! did you see that?
I’m a doggie AND a cat
I’m seeing through my ears AND eyes,
Hey!, Wot th heck? time really flies!
Dead as dust don’t sound so bad,
not the worst trip I’ve ever had
but for now if you don’t mind,
I think I’d rather stay behind…….
I think I’d rather live some more
and dance around the ballroom floor
but with every little mote alive
I give my word that I will strive
to live much more considerately
of every little dust ball that I see
Book 4. “LIVE” Continues
I have decided that I would like to have some Background singers on the “Shake A Bum” album, so I have found two good candidates ladyfairs, and we will do our first recording session this Thursday at 10 AM.
It happens that female background singers are just about my favorite musical instrument of all time, I simply love them, and everything about them..and perhaps most of all, their attitude. Yes yes I know, sounds mighty fishy but, they are an instrument with attitude, attitude that can, that must be able to shift and change at the drop of a hat or chord and change with absolute confidence. They are an instrument that is aware of it’s own iridescent beauty. A thing transformed, from the very first breath, the reality in and all around them changes to something extraordinary and grand.
Something extraordinary grande and wonderful like a full concert grand.
They are sublime..so, I may have let slip that I am fond of back ground chicks, having said all that I do hope the chicks can sing.
I’ve listened carefully, I think they can, but we shall see. You just never know until we are all singing together. Then it becomes like a game of give and take of musical tag a vocal dance of mutual inspiration and communication. I wish everyone could know the joy of creating a joyful groove and singing your heart out. When you are through you are often depleted in quite a physically and psychologically healthy way. If they can sing we will finish this album as quickly as possible and get out on the road to promote the heck out of it. It’s goint to be a great release literally and figuratively and I will be hoping to see folks I’ve been missing all over the world. For example, did you know that I have a serious coterie of fans in Prague Czechoslovakia? From as far back as South Atlantic Blues,along with a following in Asia? And Scandinavia? I can’t wait and the band is raring to go.. we shall see.
BOOK 1 The Blessed Virgins, and “LIVE” Continued…
BOOK 1 The Blessed Virgins, and “LIVE” Continued…
So it is a gray and raining morning in 1958 and I (known for convenience and contrivance in this piece as I, Me, He, The Boy, The White Boy, the Artist and other convenient phrases (mebbe even) Scott Fagan) am standing on the edge of a road with no name other than “De Road… Doun De Road” (which was and is) he main road from town (Charlotte Amalia or Charlotte Amalie, for odd linguistic reason (mostly charitable I suspect) both are (like CariBEEan and CaRIBBYan) considered to be correct) to all points west. Brewers Bay, Bordeaux, Flamingo Pond, Fortuna, Botney Bay, Santa Maria Bay, Pull Or Be Damned, and other romantic piratical places. I am wearing my New York City black leather Jacket while breathing deeply of and thus absorbing at a molecular level the reality of rainy season in the beautiful, but don’t doubt it, strange, Mambo Bongo Isles.
The observant observer might notice and remark that “this white boy wearing a leather jacket by the side of the road”appears to be neither here nor there” in truth of fact or fact of matter, the observant observer need not have been any more perceptive and insightful than a lizard, even the most casual, disinterested passerby, in fact, any living thing (including mule, cow, goat and braying jackass) seeing him would likely register immediately that “this boy is somewhere and something else” thereby triggering an automatic and immediate “note to self” the universal trans-species translation of which would be something like “I’d better keep an eye on this guy”
What they were less likely to notice was that the odd duck out in the rain was awash with intense impressions, which were self organizing into the foundation of an interesting combination or integration of cultural (and musical) rhythms and realities.
For example, the sights and smells of that grey and rainy morning in 1958 would be lifted whole cloth to become the song “Hidaway” in 1967, which he would be screeching and yowling (singing) in a big time music publishers office in Rockefeller Center one morning in 1968 and seized on immediately by his writing partner Joe (AKA Jose Silvio Martinez) Kookoolis to convince the professional staff that the song was an integral and representative part of an “Opera” ah..a “Rock Opera” that he and the neither here nor there boy, were just about finished writing and that “of course” this entire brand new and mighty fine score would be thrown in as part of our song catalog, for the publishing agreement that we were at that very moment, there to discuss and negotiate.
The smell of my leather jacket was always a thing of wonder to me and no less so that morning. It filled my head with a secret satisfaction, a confident security likely well-known to the well armored since time began.
In my head is music, specifically or essentially the liberation theology of rock and roll but shot through, tinted and tinged with related genre upon genre and sub genre upon sub genre and reshaped by the crisscrossing cultural realities that it would be tasked to represent.
In my eyes, the most fantastic green and blues filtered through and bordered or framed by low hanging silver clouds that make the sky no more than 300 feet high.
In my sniffer, a soggy sweet perfumed mix of rain, cow dung, salty sea and the fruit salad scent of wild tropical flora, and ah…in my heart the first deep stirrings of love for “The Girl with The Golden Skin” It’s a fine case of time and place all over the place. And a good example of how it is/was to be me then and now, or perhaps more accurately now and then, meaning sometimes…
In that moment however, the white boy is acutely aware that he is the “poorest” white boy that he has ever known or even ever seen, his sense of self is unfortunately now somewhat negatively impacted by shame related to this, and the knowledge that his pitifully alcoholic step father (yes the Mother dear has for reasons best know to God and those few of his angels who fully comprehend the effects of paternal suicide on a nine-year old daughter, rape at 16 as a first sexual experience, in an alley in Washington DC, the befogglement of early mid-stage alcoholism and the mind-boggling conflicting mis-information (coming from in side and outside the mind) related to so-called co-dependency, hooked up with Howard again) who as mentioned before, is an extremely public and universally disrespected drunkard and laughing-stock of the community.
What’s the community? Well as we all know (both here and there) they are many and varied.
he community of most immediate concern to the boy at that time, would have been the 8 to 10 older “native” boys (known as “Dem Boy) in his immediate section of the Island” The Dem Boy community in number and position is mirrored and repeated all across the land (the I land) “Dem Boy” are the seemingly magically omnipresent absolutely judgemental shapers of values, morality and behaviors for any younger boy subject to their pressures. “Dem Boy” are the gatekeepers of conditional acceptance (it would be interesting to know which society where in the world this “Dem Boy” social structure developed) or eternal dis-approval and damnation in young man land. Rather, “local young tough guy man landl” meaning the young man land of the economically disadvantaged, as opposed to young men of privilege land (color or cash) who are contemptuously dismissed by “Dem Boy” (in the short form) as “Auntie-men” or in the long form as “schupid auntie-man muddah skunts”
All of that to suggest and illustrate that the young “neither here nor there white boy” felt very strongly that he had much to prove and consequently was (by circumstance, environment and temperament) on his way to becoming “something else” or more specifically, an “other than ordinary recording artist”, whose interesting integration of cultures and music, would someday prove uniquely unusual and confusing to major labels, record bin organizers, and music writers, (most recently one self-aggrandizing and insulting “know it all know nothing” from Toronto, Canada).
So, the boy by the side of the road with no name, turned out to be a white artist from the predominately black West Indies whose integration of his own cultural and musical influences, continues to present it’s self in most interesting and amusing ways. entertaining even as in the “LIVE “currently in production” “Shake A Bum” album by Scott Fagan and The MAAC Island Band,
Yes indeed, It is interesting, to say the least, to see and understand so clearly how things express and work themselves out.
As further illustration of the potential for joy inherent in the great cultural combo platter of life described, here is a rough mix (pre back ground vocals) of the “neither here nor there boy by the side of the road’s” composition and current recording of his somewhat tantric and liberating mantra “Shake A Bum”
Scott Fagan's Mem.wa? 