5) ROBBERY

Me and my kid and one of his highschool sweethearts Marlene Funk on this one. Detroit was a huge influence on the album. He was turning me onto a lot of shit, Kendrick, Tyler, hip hop and contemporary pop. I mean if you bring a kid up and the soundtrack of those beautiful joyous years is Pitbull's 'Time of our Lives ' you will ALWAYS love that song. Right Kimya? 'Every day above ground is a good day.' For those parents that are on a, um, 'budget', that recording will always remain poignant. One of Detroit's girlfriends was big into pussy pop and when I heard Latto and the LYRICS I was sold. 'Fuck me like you just got outta the pen'. 'I ain't athletic but on the dick I do gymnastics'.  All these pussy pop gals wanna sit it on your mouth.  Hysterical. Genius. Fats Waller. Moms Mabley, Louis Prima, Ma Rainey, Richard Pryor, Angela Davis. She does blue. The nightclub late show has finally hit the stadium. ( You can put a drill rap playlist together and Lou Reed holds up nicely with Ice Spice. Lou would have LOVED Ice Spice. ) Marlene was tired that day, she had two classes, one in Peekskill, one in Manhattan, plus two auditions in Brooklyn. I could tell when she showed up at my apartment she was shot. Bless her for showing up. A pro. I asked her to give me something like picking cotten. She nodded and did it. When we release the bonus tracks and B-sides you'll hear a lot more of Marlene. An awesome talent.

Shout out to:
Time Of Our Lives- Pitbull
Timber- ( feat. Keisha) - Pitbull
Wrecking Ball -Miley Cyrus
Gangman Style-rapper Psy
Dynamite -BTS
Uptown Funk(feat. Bruno Mars)-Mark Ronson
Pokerface -Lady Gaga
Black Widow - Iggy Azalea
Firework-Katy Perry

And of course Philip Difranco and iCarly. All of whom make an appearance on this funky little ditty along with Otis Spann and Clifford. I added the mission statement guitar in honor of Blue Cheer.

I love books. I love the smell of them. The feel. I love bookstores. Sometimes when I'm touring opening for a bigger band and I won't mention any names here, and I sense their audience is a little, um...how do I say this...dim, ( Tourettes: fucking idiots!!), but y'know it's a lucrative tour and we all gotta do what we gotta do, bills being what they are (see below), so ya hang tuff, but to combat that gnawing sensation in the back of your brain that if this is a sample of humanity for the love of Christ there's NO FUCKING HOPE, then you run into a bookstore and you see they got, idk, maybe Nick Tosches or Dostoyevsky or Naomi Klein or Jean Rhys and you go 'No. Everything is going to be okay'. I love books. They promise immortality.

Which of course means I love libraries. The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin* and a group of his friends became the first American subscription library. The Library Company, while founded as a membership library, did allow members to borrow books, and so may have been the first truly public library. I think I got my first library card in the third grade. It was cool. Had my name typed on it. I felt official. The worlds that opened up!! A little piece of metal on there with stamped numbers. Like code! Why wouldn't I think this was like a secret agent kinda thing? I felt a little like one of my 3rd grade heroes, Robert Wagner from the TV show 'It Takes A Thief'. Surely Robert Wagner had a library card. After all,  no government agency would hire a stupid person right? That's how he got the gig climbing the sides of buildings,  cracking safes, embracing exotic women and neutralizing terrorists....reading! I think my father may have given me one of his old wallets. The really worn genuine leather one. Are you fucking kidding me? Waiting in line to check out a book I'd wait to the last minute to dig that wallet out of my back pocket. Make a big production out of it. I have a wallet. Real leather. And an official card. Wait...what?? That's Neil Kurtinski from class. Wtf is he doing here? I thought that fucker was illiterate. He still wears idiot mittens, nose is always running. He can fucking read?? All that snot will stick the pages together! Tell me what book he checked out so I don't read that one.

I also remember in third grade President Kennedy got shot and I started reading Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was cool, it's been a long time but I remember she didn't seem to have any parents, or any rules. She was always getting into adventures. No boring shit for her. Peter Pan like, she was always getting a couple of more conservative kids with the overly strict parents to sneak out and join her in her adventures. That could be me! I gotta revisit that stuff. I think I was a little older when I found the Hardy Boys. Talk about adventures! And their dad was chill too. He didn't seem to mind if they dug up an old skull and placed it on the dinner table. I can't remember how old I was when my father started reading Damon Runyon to me, those comedic tales of Broadway's underbelly in the 1930's. He always got a kick out of good natured hoodlums. Despite his white collar job as head of tool and design at Carrier in Syracuse he liked bars and poolhalls on the weekends. I come from a family of hard drinkers. My father might have had a few gangster friends. A couple women friends 'in the life'. Carrier air conditioning  was booming in the 60's and 70's cuz they had the Pentagon accounts for the war effort, the units in the boats and planes were from Carrier. Part of the old man's job was to purchase parts that weren't cost effective to manufacture internally. You need 100,000 widgets, we can get 'em from a little tool and die mom and pop manufacturer In New England. These were million dollar accounts. Salesmen LOVED my old man. Golf, booze, boat trips, jokes. (I inherited his encyclopedic retaining of jokes.)  This was Mad Men. I was a kid. I was into The Who.  Couldn't have cared less. But I sure loved those Guys and Dolls stories.

I worked in a library for about five years when my marriage broke up. Detroit's mother. About fifteen years ago. I was trying to stick around the house and cut back on touring in a futile effort to keep the marriage afloat. I had put out resumes to bars around Westchester but got no bites. The local diner where I ate were putting a cafe in the basement of the gorgeous Ossining library, with breathtaking views of the Hudson. Views of  Sing Sing prison too of course. Up the river. The Big House. I begged them for a job. Nailed it at a whopping $10 an hour. The Footnote Cafe in the Ossining library. I was disappointed that I didn't get a more lucrative job but in retrospect it was the right fit. It was a good gig for parenting. I could bring my son to work 100% of the time. I could put up a sign, 'back in 10 minutes', run over to the school, five minutes there, five minutes back. Throw him on the couch, he'd do his homework, ( He'd ALWAYS do his homework first. Never had to prod him, he said he couldn't have fun until he got it done. Certainly didn't take after me in that respect), plenty of snacks obviously, juice, soup, sandwiches, cookies, kid was in heaven. The library staff loved him, there was always some kind of activity, film, live reading, even famous people like the guy who wrote Diary of a Wimpy Kid came there. And Art Garfunkel too. A lot. Go figure. Another benefit was a bunch of stuff I didn't have to buy anymore. Like coffee. And bread. And they made you  throw out the sandwiches waaaay too soon. I'd take some, give the rest to the homeless people that hung there. To some extent it was like an older and more sober version of the crack bar I bartended at in Syracuse in the'80's. The disenfranchised looking for family. Also there'd be PLENTY of downtime. Hours to either a) Binge 'Breaking Bad' or b) assemble a Kickstarter program, raise $10,000 and record demos that'll getcha signed to New West Records or c) put all your previous albums on Bandcamp. All of which I did while working there. And I also met one of the greatest men I ever met in my life, Richard Mangiaracina.

Some may know Richard from my song, 'Richard Got a Job'. Ossining was a great place to bring up a kid, the schools were amazing. The teachers were tireless, energetic, progressive, diverse. Ossining is primarily a Ecuadorian  community, as a white student Detroit was a minority. The teachers were teaching Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky as early as the 8th grade. These were not 'special' schools, just typical public schools in Westchester. Ossining was also an ideal location to tour from. Manhattan was 25 minutes away, Philly a couple hours, Boston 2 1/2, even Baltimore and Washington weren't bad despite the fact that I-95 is a fucking failure from New England to Florida. I could book a little tour for Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday night, have him skip school Thursday cuz he was always a straight A student, play four gigs, maybe Philly, Baltimore, Washington and Jersey and have him back in school bright and early Monday morning. Many a time we did math on a cocktail napkin at 3:00am in a diner somewhere. Detroit loved touring together, loved the road, still does now at 21. As a matter of fact he got a C once in 6th grade math. I told him he couldn't do that and continue to tour with me. I couldn't be scrutinized by other parents bringing him out all night, in bars, sleeping in strange places, truck stops, Motel 6's, on stage singing about Ann Coulter's vagina, potty mouthed, anarchistic and he has a C on his report card. But if he got all A's I could tell any judgemental parent, 'Don't judge me, my kid is a straight A student.' It worked. As a matter of fact he recently was accepted into the master's program at NYU for film analysis. He'll probably curse me in the analyst's couch when I'm pushing up dandelions but so far we're best friends. Very proud of my son. So Ossining was good for schools and touring but it sure wasn't good for making friends or dating. But Richard, who I met because he volunteered at the library became one of the dearest friends I've ever had. I miss him all the time.

We got talking about music initially I'm sure. I could tell we had similar tastes, he was a few years older than me and had been a Manhattan kid in the 60's which means he witnessed Hendrix, The Rascals, The Ronettes, Leslie West, even Monk and Mingus in clubs, at tables 6 feet away. He eventually was working on Wall Street making serious scratch but hating every minute of it, drinking during the day, lunches at Billy's Topless, hanging with the strippers. Everyone always loved him. He was beautiful and generous, kind and really really smart. His parents got sick and he gave up his job and moved back to Ossining to care for them. Eventually they died and he lost the house. With $50,000 in credit card debt he lived in a one room, bathroom down the hall rental for the prison families by Sing Sing. Bleak, but he always had a smile, a positive spin. He said ripping up his American Express bill was the best day of the month. 'It's an unsecured loan. They can't do nothing.' I actually had a picture of him tearing up a bill on my phone. They eventually gave up. He didn't hear from them for years. I remember one day he was reading and his phone rang and he picked up. I figured it was probably important cuz he bought minutes and was always running out. It was Anthony from American Express. 'Hi Richard. It's been awhile. I thought maybe we could chat and try to come up with a plan to pay this balance'. Sure, Richard said, lemme grab a cup of coffee and we'll talk. Richard told Anthony his story, the parents and the costly operations, the lengthy cancer, the foreclosure, his eviction, his current dwellings. After awhile Richard heard only silence at the other end. Anthony couldn't take it! He hung up! Too big a sob story. 'I'm insulted ' said Richard.

Richard was a voracious reader. His obituary said he would have been a Jeopardy champ. It's true. We talked literature, music and film for hours. He was not a fan of violence. His hero was St. Francis Assisi. Richard would stop and drop water on worms crossing a hot sidewalk. He mocked my infatuation with Quentin Tarantino. One time he walked in the library, threw a paperback copy of Shakespeare's Richard the Third at me and yelled, 'Here. You'll love it. Everyone dies' and climbed the stairs to work. Richard came to every party at our place. We had a ton. For Detroit's friends. But the parents could come and they often did. I made this punch from the store brand Hawaiian Punch and the store brand Ginger Ale that the kids went nuts for. For under $5 you could combat thirst for a weekend. We'd have as many as 30 kids in a one bedroom apartment. We'd get pizza, I made wings, did that almost every weekend we weren't touring. Sometimes neighbors would wander in. Raphael from the fourth floor. Richard and I would just jam on guitars, old standards, the American Songbook. He was a jazz cat now. He got a good job that he loved at the storage place and got Section 8 and got a gorgeous apartment for dirt cheap. He did great again for a few years. He died of heart failure while I was out on tour. I hadn't heard from him in a month or so, word on the street, ( The 'Mugs' he called them, his homeless cronies) was that he was sick. I had heard he passed from Cathy, she had left a message on my phone. She was a library regular who had done seven years in prison for having murdered her abusive boyfriend when she was blacked out drunk. She was sober now and working ringing the bell for the Salvation Army. She was a murderer which kinda made her hot, bucket lists being what they are. Anyway I knew cuz of her that Richard had passed. I do so wish we had caught up at the end. It was weird, I had just got back from tour and I was walking to the post office which was a rarity, walking, and then I took a different route and sure enough a bunch of his pals were hanging at the bus stop. They signaled me over. Told me about his beautiful obituary in the local paper. I grabbed a couple right then and there. I have a haiku that Richard wrote for me on a receipt from the Footnote framed on my wall here in Austin.

My friend Ed Hamell
Serves coffee and cookies and
genius songs to go.

They asked Ice T one time, 'What would you do if you were President?'  He said, 'The first thing I would do is make teaching one of the highest paid professions. Cuz where I grew up the teachers were driving beat up Oldsmobiles and the drug dealers were sporting a Lexus. Who the kids gonna listen to?' Probably why the Vatican is so opulent. 'Look! We're successful! Come listen to us.' Anyway I think I was looking around at those divisive times and thinking I wished people would be a little more educated. Read more. Otherwise you could get bamboozled if ya ain't careful.

Again from the 'Thank God For Stuff That Takes Our Mind Off Terrorizing Reality ' Dept: Shout out to Clifford Lee Sargent and his Better Than Food YouTube channel. That boy reads! Turned me on to a lot of really great stuff. Highly recommended book reviews.

*A footnote from the Footnote. Don't worry I won't get all Infinite Jest on your ass. Ben Franklin went to France to try and secure their alliance in the Revolutionary War. They hated him. He tried to bed every woman he met including the King's wife and daughter. It was customary for nations to present diplomats with a parting gift. They gave him a bedpan with his picture engraved on it.