“Auoog copy” -- This flyer is for the second show I’d booked at Eagles. Keeping with the theme of including inspo in the image, Yasuaki Shimizu is printed at the top. As you can see, tho, we’re getting to the point of abandoning “the details” (which I will always maintain are still, if only [!] spiritually, definitely all there) … as there are no bands listed on this flyer, lol. But do you really need to know that? You know where you gotta be and when, lol. The titles in the list are a handful of songs / files I was intending to play // some things from my grocery shopping list // a game I played with the kids // human feelings I figured were informing the show. I played this set in a tent in the middle of the room with the stick and the Mesa-Boogie bass cabinet/Cerwin Vega head set up on-stage, with a vertical stack of about 30 CDs in between them. On top of the CD stack was a small Japanese plate I had found in the free pile of a building I lived in in Seattle years ago. It’s just a white plate with a beautiful purple rim. On top of the plate was a pile of potting soil from my then-recently repotted fern plant (of 3+ years.) I think Micky, who had attended the show and played in it as part of Living Room, said, “at certain points during the set, I really did begin to feel like the dirt was what was playing the music.” The show was Free Music; my friend Noah, from Oakland/KC, as Fraydee Cat; and Living Room, an early avenue for exploring the idea of how little a band could play and still be music. (The premise was, could we create a band where it was unclear if they were soundchecking or not?) I think, for this show, the Living Room lineup was: me on sampler; Micky (Alfano) on electric bass (he’d played upright at the first Living Room show); Taylor Harrison on guitar and vocals (she played one of the car insurance jingles maybe twice through and made no other sounds; perfect playing); Jordan Bleau (on percussion, I would guess? He’d played coke bottle, cowbell, and a few drums at the first one); and Will Fraser on saxophone who had ordered a pizza in the bar and didn’t show up until probably 20 minutes into the set / like 5 minutes before it ended, with the pizza. Incredible. After the show, Noah and homie John Marston (who was in town) and I ate chips with canned corn and canned peas and tahini on the floor of my apartment, lol. I remember doing this often alone but Noah humorously remarking “corn and corn, huh?” As for the design, I feel like the “$5, $5, or $5e” took a few drafts to reach but felt extremely liberating to have found and settled on something that, while theoretically “non-sensical,” was, like, exactly what had been missing.
