Shmushkin
“Total Fucking Bullshit”

Punkin Lovin’*
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I’ll Call Ya* (with Andy Dick & Julia Albert)
Porn Mom*
Sarah Silverman**
Six Pack Belly (with Beer Pressure)
HWC
Anya Marina
Christmas Cunnilingus* (with Anya Marina)
I Hate My Cell Phone Company* (with Lisa Jenio)

All songs written by Andras Jones & Andy Shmushkin
Except “HWC” by Liz Phair

Produced by Andras Jones except
* by Willie Wisely
& ** by Mike Ruekberg

Listen HERE

Andras Jones
“A Curmudgeon For All Seasons”

Another X-Mas Song
Frankenstein Valentine
April 19th
Flashback Barbeque
The Firecracker Kid
Three Day Weekend
Hold Your Nose & Vote
Thwak!

All songs written by Andras Jones
Produced and Engineered by Colin Mahoney & Brian Schey
at z,gwon’th studios in Lawrence, KS

Andras Jones – Vocals & Guitar
Brian Schey – Bass Guitar
Tom Johnson – Hammond Organ & Rhodes Piano
Colin Mahoney – Drums

with
Jeff Jackson – Pedal steel guitar on “Frankenstein Valentine” & “April 19th”
Clay Goldstein – Harmonica on “April 19th”
Mike McFarland – Fender Rhodes on “Firecracker Kid”

From Andras:

There are a lot of good things about this record. The songs. The musicians. The cover. The concept. But I hate it. Sounds like shit to me. Sorry Colin and Brian but that’s the truth.  Like “The Hard Feelings”, it falls way short of my ambition, especially based upon the clarity suggested by the z,gwon’th  tracks from “Religious ‘99”. I’m not blaming them entirely but when you negotiate a producer credit you own the end product.

Here are some good things about “A Curmudgeon For All Seasons”.

– “Democracy Now!” used “Hold Your Nose and Vote” as part of their presidential election coverage in the elections of 2000 and 2004. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. As we Jews say at Passover, “dayenu”, which means, it would have been enough.

– The Boston Globe reviewed the album and called me “wonderfully pretentious”, creating the possibility for me that my pretentiousness could actually be wonderful. It’s the nicest thing anybody ever said about me in Boston, and that’s where my mom lives.

– I got to work with Rickie Lee Jones, and her fledgling indie label, Great Big Island, in the post-production and release of “Curmudgeon”. I think by the end of the process they all hated me and the record, but if all this record got me was the chance to sing Beatles songs with Rickie Lee Jones, while helping her build a goat hutch in the coastal woods of Olympia, Washington in spring, it was worth it. Dayenu.

– It was cool that Lach, the godfather of anti-folk, gave me the dubious honor of comparing me to Phil Ochs for the press kit. I believe the quote was, “Phil Ochs is back and this time he can rock”.

And then there was the tour…

I began the Curmudgeon For All Seasons ANTI-Holiday tour on August 30^th, 2001 in Northampton, Massachusetts at a coffee shop called Fire and Rain. I was in Toronto on September 11^th, doing a mini Canadian tour with Bob Kemmis when the thing happened. We played in Windsor that night with the towers falling down over and over on a big screen TV. Chicken wings and beer on the table like always, but different. I had about 25 shows ahead of me, starting in Cleveland, heading through the America’s heartland from Canton, Ohio to Murfreesboro, Tennessee and, Boy, was I scared, especially after the border guards treated me like a terrorist and only relaxed after they found a marijuana pipe I’d stowed in the seat of the car, because I was just a white stoner crossing the border and not “an enemy of the homeland”. Heidi said I should come home and, just like when the uprisings broke out and I stayed in the studio in downtown LA, I made the stupid and artistically correct choice to continue on what felt like the thinnest of American ice. I recorded a bunch of these shows and what’s interesting is the only place anyone gave me any shit was in Philadelphia (not recorded) where the audience (including my host) shouted “Love it or Leave it” at me.

During this tour I finished writing the songs for what I intended to be my next solo record, tentatively titled “All You Get”. I recorded the demos in Lawrence in early October, near the end of the tour, before I headed to New York where I would record an auspicious and synchronistic show at CB’s Gallery.

Tony Kaye (the movie director) showed up dressed like Osama Bin Laden. He got onstage after my set and tried to do a performance art piece onstage that went only slightly better than my performance of “Done” at the CSW rock concert in ’85. I LOVED it! A perfect way to end the heroically ironic tour I’d been training for all my life.

As much as I hate this record, I hope you can tell, I love it too.

Listen HERE

Andras Jones
“Complicated ’00”

Superlame (Produced by R. Walt Vincent)
Six Million Dollar Ken (Co-written & Produced by Carl Dexter & Kelly Van Camp)
Mystery Behind (Co-written & Produced by Chad Fischer)
Shangri-La LIVE (Written by Ray Davies)
Complicated O (Produced with Chad Fischer & R. Walt Vincent)

All songs written by Andras Jones (except where otherwise noted)

Dedicated to Josh Clayton-Felt

From Andras Jones:

In 1985 at the Cambridge School of Weston rock concert I played a song called “Done”. The chorus went, “I’m done, done, I’m almost done but I’m never really done when I’m with you”. It wasn’t a particularly good song, more of an early experiment with performance boundaries. When I played it I got to the chorus at the end and just kept singing it, and singing it, and singing it. Was it punk rock? Some kind of Andy Kauffman “99 Bottles of Beer” schtick? That’s probably giving me too much credit. Like I said, it was an experiment, and it didn’t work. I went long and ended up making Brian Claflin, who everyone wanted to hear, cut his set short. It’s still one of my more embarrassing moments onstage. I was 16 years old.

Cut to 1998. Josh and I are attempting to rebuild our friendship. After The Boon we stayed in contact and even wrote or played songs together a couple of times but it was a long way from the kind of closeness we’d known when we were best friends in high school or in those first years in LA with The Boon. It was tough with our differing levels of commercial success. I felt like he treated me like his work was somehow more legitimate because of his label backing. He probably felt like I treated him the opposite way; like his record deals delegitimized him. Like I said, it was tough but it was tough because I think we both wanted to just be able to be friends and even play music again without the baggage.

So, we made a plan to talk once every two weeks and just begin a regular dialogue about our lives. We could work through anything we needed to work through if that’s what we had to do, or we could just talk baseball and new records we liked. That was the idea. In our third call we got in a big fight.

I few months earlier I’d asked him if I could open a bill he was playing at Largo in LA (back when it was on Fairfax). He said he hadn’t felt comfortable mentioning me to the owner because of “what happened at the Eleni Mandell show”.

What he was referring to was a show I played at Largo when the last version of the Previous was touring with Bob Wiseman and we both opened for Eleni Mandell. After Bob’s set he was chewing me out in the back of the room for playing one more song than he had wanted me to play when we opened for him. (We got an encore. What could I do?) Anyway, Eleni had to ask us to be quiet and, since nobody there knew Bob, it became a story about me talking loudly at Largo during Eleni’s set, when what was really happening was that I was being talked AT loudly. Talking at all during the shows at Largo was forbidden. Talking loudly was an unforgiveable sin. I supported this policy. I was trying to shush Bob when we got shushed from the stage.

When I asked Josh why he didn’t ask me what was up before assuming the worst of me he said something like, “Well, I remembered that time from the CSW rock concert when you kept Brian Claflin from playing”.

I was real hurt and angry and we argued. Everything came out. I was still pissed at him for giving me an ultimatum about taking film work that would conflict with The Boon; an ultimatum that led me to turn down several film roles that ended up being star-making for the guys who took them, and then he jumped at a publishing deal when it was offered to him if he would ditch me and the band. He may have made the smart or the cowardly choice, but I spent most of the rest of my artistic career proving my loyalty to people and ideas by turning deals down or scuttling them, on some level to convince myself that mine was the righteous path, and Josh’s wasn’t. Only he could tell you what his side of that argument was. As in most arguments, we were both more interested in yelling our points at each other than listening to the other person. We hung up and I never spoke to my friend Josh again. I thought I would but…

In late December 1999, while finishing the mixes for what would be his final CD “Spirit Touches Ground” Josh was suffering such bad lower back pain that he went to the doctor who diagnosed him with testicular cancer. By late January he was dead.

These recordings were produced with Walt Vincent, who played with Josh’s band for a while after I recommended him, and Chad Fischer, who was Josh’s other best friend from the east coast, and a great drummer and songwriter. Chad is now a very accomplished composer for TV and film. Chad and Walt agreed to work on these songs with me and I am forever grateful to them for allowing me to grieve soulfully in studios Josh lived and worked in, on instruments he’d played, with talented friends who knew him like I did.

Shangri-La was one of Josh’s favorite songs. He introduced me to it on a mix-tape he made for my 23^rd birthday.

Listen HERE

Andras Jones
“Religious ’99”

Before The Show
with Brian Schey & Colin Mahoney at z,gwon’th Studios in Lawrence, KS
Andras Jones – Bass, Guitar & Vocals
Brad Hoopes – Keys
Colin Mahoney – Drums

April 19th & Flashback Barbecue
Recorded live at Traditions Fair Trade
in Olympia, Washington on May 10, 1998
as part of The Accidental Music Festival
with Dan Bern & Chris Chandler

Religious
with Brian Schey at z,gwon’th in Lawrence, KS
Andras Jones – Vocals
Brian Schey – Guitar, Drums & Vocals
Brad Hoopes – Organ
Tom Johnson – Bass, Piano, Rhodes & Trombone

The Webpage of Dorian Gray
(www.dorian-gray.com)
Recorded and performed by Andras Jones
on a TASCAM 8-track cassette recorder

All songs written by Andras Jones
except “Religious” which was written by Andras Jones & Brian Schey

From Andras Jones:

Millenial fever around the time of Y2K probably accounted for the title of this e.p. I find it interesting that, even though I was unaware of the Crowleyan depiction of the devil at the time, I chose a picture for the cover that bares a striking resemblance to this most un-loved archetype. Which I must admit, adds to my enjoyment of these recording in retrospect.

At this point, my touring was continuous and solo. Based out of Olympia, living with Heidi in a tiny blue house on Tullis, I’d book and join tours with friends like Bob Wiseman, Chris Chandler, Dan Bern, Veda Hille & others. I’d also do some all by myself. Vancouver, Bellingham, Olympia, Portland, Eugene, San Francisco, Arcata, Davis, Sacramento, Chico, San Luis Obispo, LA & San Diego. This was my regular route. Hit it three, maybe four times a year. Once or twice a year I’d head east, cutting through the middle of the country; Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Lawrence, KC, Columbia, St. Louis then shoot to Philadelphia and play my way north to Boston and surrounding cities, visiting family and friends in the area. Sometimes Heidi would fly out and join me but mostly not. I’d head back along the northern part of the country through Buffalo (sometimes hitting Toronto) then Ann Arbor, Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, then a long drive to Missoula and I was basically home. I tried to do this for about six weeks in the fall and six weeks in the spring. Of course, booking and coordinating these tours took most of the year.

I was writing lots of songs but I wasn’t recording much.

Previous drummer, Colin Mahoney, had moved to Lawrence, Kansas with his wife Lisa, who he met in Kansas City on one of our tours. She moved to Olympia and lived in the house with the band for a while and when that ended they settled in Lawrence. We always loved that town. The band did pretty well there and it reminded me of Olympia back when I still liked Olympia. Small. Collegiate. Good music scene. Nice co-op. Vocal Native American population. And William Burroughs.

Brian Schey moved out with them and, continuing the culture of creativity we’d started in Oly, they partnered in a studio they called z,gwon’th.  It was a nice place. Colin had a knack for using his debt in a way I could never understand, but he always had nice things, and he always managed to get bigger and better gigs to cover whatever he owed. Maybe that was just a function of the 90’s or maybe it was part of his particular genius. Whatever it was, I respected the hell out of it.

I haven’t written much about Colin but he may have been the most interesting member of our band. On the surface, he looked like a Beach Boy (not one of the cool ones) and talked like a Republican (which he wasn’t). At Dartmouth, with John Nason & Deb Pasternak, he was a philosophy major, and his playing was anything but conservative. Like Keith Moon, his style of play dominated the band’s sound. Unlike Moon, Colin wasn’t a basher. He was more likely to simmer and boil than explode. I loved him most for his ability to play tight and quiet when it was called for, and because he really knew how to sync with me. He said he’d play to my right leg which meant he’d watch my right leg for cues and together we’d take The Previous all over the place without ever getting lost. What Colin was doing in a band like The Previous was always something of a mystery but he fit and he knew it and we knew it and, oh yeah,  he was the best drummer most of us had ever played with.

I recorded “Before The Show” and “Religious” at z,gwon’th  with Colin and Brian and Brad Hoopes, another Dartmouth boy who did one tour with The Previous after Marshall left the band. “Before The Show” was written about my old buddy Dan Bern in the style of my not-as-old buddy Jeff Stern’s band El Serioso and produced like Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”. I love playing bass so that was a blast and, in general, this unassuming little track paints a nice picture of where the Previous might have gone sonically had we continued. I probably asked Colin to try and “not fill up the groove so much” so this is his version of playing simple but, even with this directive, you can hear him doing clever little stick work that would have been fun to explore. Maybe we will one day.

The next two songs “April 19th” & “Flashback Barbecue” were recorded live at an epic show I produced in Olympia at Traditions Fair Trade with Chris Chandler & Dan Bern when Dan was dating and touring with Martha Wainwright. These songs will form the foundation of my next big recording project, “A Curmudgeon For All Seasons”. I like these versions better than the ones that wound up on the record but I’ll get into that later.

“Religious” was a lot of fun to work on with Brian Schey who wrote the music and brought in the ultra-talented Tom Johnson to play trombone and a bunch of other instruments on the track. Some may be offended but it made us laugh. I have since learned that some of my religious references in the song are contradictory to the point of inaccuracy. If I were to play this song live now I would probably introduce it as a Jew’s view of Christianity.

“The Webpage of Dorian-Gray” was one of my favorite songs for a long time. This was the beginning of the internet and I think I was pretty spot-on in terms of connecting Oscar Wilde’s modern myth to the even more modern reality of the isolating and illusory aspects of the web we were building together. I recorded the song on my little 8-track Tascam in the Tullis house and originally released it as an MP3 (on a floppy disc at shows). One of my computer nerd buddies told me it was “the format of the future”. It’s nice to be an artistic visionary. Nicer to get paid for it, but it does offer some comfort to look back and know that even if you weren’t effective at getting it out there, you were still onto something. Makes one wonder if maybe, one still is.

’98 was the year I created Radio8Ball.

Listen HERE.

Andras Jones
“Cold ’98”

Pretty Good Judge
Kindling Girl
Hurri-Kane*
What Happened
Let Go Slowly**

All songs written, performed and produced by Andras Jones except:

*Produced by John Nason who plays all of the instruments on this track.
** Recorded by Carl Dexter

From Andras Jones;

The Previous ended in 1996. I’m not exactly sure how.

Me and John Nason and a new drummer, Chad Austinson, toured for about a year after the release of “UnPop…” but it was different. It felt more like a solo act by then. Maybe I even wanted that.

The end probably began for the band when Marshall had his awesome rock and roll meltdown at the big NACA (National Association of College Activities) showcase in ‘95. Threw down his mike and just stopped playing his keyboard right in the middle of the set we’d worked and schmoozed for over a year to get. The rest of the band was furious. I thought it was cool in a poetic kinda way. We still booked a bunch of college gigs and started barely making money for the first time in our career, right before we broke up. But then, when Marshall  took a swing at me in Brian Schey’s parent’s kitchen, I could tell he needed some space. He was about to start making babies anyway, with a gal he met and brought on the road with us for a while, so the timing was probably right for him.

Brian Schey (who I always kind of saw as Marshall’s buddy) joined the band and traveled with us for about two and half years after Walt quit the second time. I first met Brian when he was in Randy Kaplan’s band “i” back in LA in the early 90’s. We were playing shows together at places like The Central (later The Viper Room) and the old Highland Grounds. Brian was a fan of the band, and joined The Previous right around the time I was in LA for the Fair City Shows/Hard Feelings recording when my dad died in early ’95.

Brian was one of those big cuddly acid bears you occasionally meet, who enjoys life and appears to be enjoyed by it. He was definitely one of the funnest people I’ve ever played with. A gifted musician who knows his instrument inside and out, he’s really more of a composer/arranger than a bass player. Still, there was nothing he couldn’t do on his axe. He visibly loved playing with The Previous, and that made the rest of us, who had been doing it for a lot longer, enjoy it more. Brian didn’t really sing much, but he’d groove real hard, with a big smile on his face, and shout rhythmically in the background at the perfect times. In this way, he made the gigs feel a little more urgent…in a good way, like a sporting event, a psychedelic trip, or sex. (Oh, baby!)

Actually, now that I think of it, Brian falling out of love with the band is probably what ended it for our drummer, Colin, and with him gone, there went whatever we were as a live band, as far as being Previous.  John stuck around in Olympia, moving to bass guitar, and then to other choices entirely. He still lives here, though I never see him, which is weird. There’s a story there but I’m not gonna tell it. Not sure I even fully understand it.

John Nason was kind of the wizard of the band. He wasn’t obviously impressive. In fact, there was nothing obvious about him but he had a strange charisma. The most impressive people we worked with always seemed to gravitate to John and whether they were big stars or sound guys, John had a way of recognizing them. He also had this weird knack of simply being good at anything he tried. Guitar. Saxophone. Yoga. Frisbee. Whatever it was, if he did it, he was going to get good at it, and yet he never looked particularly good doing it.

John was the master of the just-out-of-earshot aside and, in a way, that’s how he played. I mean, he was sneaky smart. Definitely a big old wanker, like a lot of the folks who were attracted to my songs at the time but he was also one of those rare guitarists so deeply integrated with his instrument that he could bend it to his communication, literally and on a subconscious level. Although, you could never be too sure what was literal and what was sub-literal with John. That was part of his charm. You had to be inside to get him.

Sometimes, as we drove into some new midwestern town on one of our many heroically pointless tours, he would roll down the window of one of our many ludicrous vehicles and shout “Religion!!” at random people. I think that’s hilarious but I can’t tell if anyone else would think so, and that’s John. He created a seductive trickster mystique that made him kind of the emotional power broker of the band or, as a said, the wizard.

 John produced “Hurri-Kane” from the Cold ’98 e.p. between tours sometime in 96/97, when he was playing bass with me in something we were calling The Previous. I wrote the song for the film “Hurricane Festival” and John played all the instruments. The movie didn’t use the song but they paid for “UnPop..” , so it’s all good and I’m almost grateful.

“Pretty Good Judge” was written for and about Mary Lou Lord. I had a massive artist-crush on her when she was living in Olympia. We met at an open mike at Evergreen in ’94 and started hanging out a little. One day I went over to her place to “maybe write a song together or something” and when I showed up she said she couldn’t write because a friend of hers had just died. It turned out he killed himself. It turned out she was talking about Kurt Cobain.

“Kindling Girl” is going to be a hit for somebody someday. I wrote it while living in the Noses house on Franklin Street in Olympia, when the heater wasn’t working but inspiration was.

“What Happened” was produced on acid in the very same house as “Kindling Girl”, after The Noses moved out and Heidi and The Previous moved in, bringing all that good-intentioned 1990’s vegan energy with them. It was my birthday.  August 12th, 1994. A Who box set Heidi gave me was on the desk in my studio as I lay these tracks down on the Tascam 8-track Josh Clayton-Felt recommended to me. The band was still together. My marriage was still together. Josh was still alive. My dad was still alive, though nearly gone. Things were mostly good with a chance of bad that day. Years later, when those “events” happened in NYC on September 11^th, this song made a lot more sense to me.

“Let Go Slowly” was recorded by Carl Dexter at his Dream Kitchen studios. He was a trippy dude. It’s a trippy song. He and I will work together far less than I would have liked, considering the time invested and the aggravation achieved, but whenever he and I did work together…we struck gold.

The series of recordings that are Cold ’98, Religious ’99 and Complicated ’00 will document my collaborations with some (though not nearly all) of my favorite musicians.

Listen HERE

The Previous
“UnPop…”

Get Normal
Corduroy
For Dennis Bland
Home is…
Sister, if
A Nerd’s Night In
He’s In Love
Bland’s Last Stand
I’m In Pain
Funny

All songs written by Andras Jones
Produced by The Previous

Andras Jones – Guitar & Vocals
John Nason – Lead Guitar & Vocals
Marshall Thompson – Keyboards & Vocals
Brian Schey – Bass Guitar & Vocals
Colin Mahoney – Drums

Recorded at Stepping Stone Studios in Seattle with Kevin Suggs
Additional tracking with Earle Mankey & Tom Weir in LA
Mixed at Jon & Stu’s in Seattle with Kevin Suggs
Except “Bland’s Last Stand” which was recorded
& “Corduroy” which was recorded and mixed
at Pure Sound in Bothell, WA with John Russell
Mastered by Ken Lee at Rocket Lab in San Francisco

From the liner notes:

FOR DENNIS BLAND

Dennis Bland dreams a corduroy fantasy which goes horribly awry. He becomes the butt of cruel jokes and the target of many a vicious prank. Being labeled an outcast for his fashion faux pas does nothing to help his already overwhelming shyness around girls. To combat this he immerses himself in sexual fantasies involving any female he can get his mind on. Adolescent ejaculations aside, there is one girl who occupies a special place in his thoughts, a neighbor, a few years older, whose younger brother is one of Dennis’ chief tormentors. One day she shows Dennis a certain kindness to which he responds by confessing his true feelings for her. Not only does she respond less than passionately to Dennis’ stammering proclamation of love but she goes and blabs about it to everyone, including her boyfriend, who is very large for his age. Dennis knows a storm is brewing and that he is going to be the one getting rained on. His plan is simple. Hide forever. On his way to do just this he slinks past an open window where someone is watching TV. Dennis loves TV and he knows this episode. It is about a kid in the same sort of situation as Dennis is in. Dennis remembers that on the show the kid stands up to the bully and when the bully backs down the kid wins his respect and the respect of the other kids. Inspired, Dennis rushes back and challenges the bully to a fight. Unfortunately for Dennis this is rock and roll, not TV, and he gets his ass kicked. Amidst the blows and the laughter Dennis resolves that one day vengeance will be his…

Dennis’ story will be continued in the sequel tentatively titled: “UnPop…2: The Truth According To Martin Way”. Look for it when we sell enough of this one so that we can afford to record it.

Listen HERE

Mr. Jones & The Hard Feelings

The Hard Feelings/Make You Strong
Too Nice
Never Tell
Time To Go
Ring From My Finger
Election Day
Ugly Inside
Why Must You Be So Mean?
No More Fighting
It’s Been A Long, Long Time
So Easy
Beautiful

All songs written by Andras Jones

Andras Jones – Vocal & Acoustic Guitar
Marshall Thompson – Keyboards & Vocals
John Nason – Electric Guitar, Mandolin & Vocals
R. Walt Vincent – Bass
Colin Mahoney – Drums
With:
Clay Goldstein – Harmonica
Lili Haydn – Violin
James Lee Harris – Vocals
Lilly Gobeil – Vocals
Cindy Wassreman – Vocals

Recorded at Q Division in Boston, MA with Mike Deneen & John Lupfer
Additional tracking at Kommotion in San Francisco, CA with Fred Cirillo
Mixed and Mastered by John Nason & Earle Mankey in Thousand Oaks, CA
Execpt tracks 5, 6, 7 & 8 by John Nason & Colin Mahoney  at Zacudo Audio in Santa Monica, CA

Additional engineering by:
Colin Mahoney, John Nason & R. Walt Vincent

From Andras Jones:

I don’t like this record.

I know what it was and what it could have been, and even had I achieved my sonic aspirations, I probably still wouldn’t like it. It’s about a volatile love relationship that I was long over before we got to recording it the first time. We tried at least two times, maybe three, before we got to the tracking that ended up on the final release, recorded in Boston, San Francisco, Olympia, Santa Monica & Thousand Oaks. With no label backing, that meant it was all paid for by the band, and by me personally, during tours. Like one of those awful Orson Welles films that could have been great if only he’d sold out.

My dad died during the lead up to the release while I was in LA. He was in a home in Gig Harbor that I’d put him in when his private caregivers robbed him and abandoned him in a junkie flophouse. It’s a sad and ugly tale recounted in my book “Accidental Initiations”. I played a gig with the band at Fair City in Santa Monica the day I was informed of his death and only told them afterwards what was going on, to explain why the show was so raw. I think I recorded the vocals for “No More Figthting” & “It’s Been A Long, Long Time” that day. My dad had been suffering years of alzheimers-y decline, which is what brought me and Heidi, and eventually the rest of the band, to Olympia once we started touring in earnest. At the time I probably needed an intense project like this to pour my grief into but I don’t particularly want to go back there.

That said, I think some of it sounds really good, and I get a lot of e-mails from people who love it, so I’m not going to sit here and tell you what I think is wrong with the record. Here’s what’s cool about it.

We were touring like mad in the year leading up to this recording. Heidi and I had moved into a house on Franklin Street in Olympia that The Noses (a great indigenous local band) had just moved out of. I kept going down to LA to play shows and audition for acting roles, often staying on friend’s couches or in their guest houses for weeks, even months, at a time. This was around when Dan Bern’s career was really taking off, and that was fun (and aggravating) to watch. Only aggravating because we wanted to be riding alongside him, instead of behind. That’s the only drag about your friends getting successful. If it doesn’t happen to you too at the same time? You don’t get to see as much of each other for a while. Dan played his first big out of town shows with us in Richmond & Danville, Virginia. Our big shot Hollywood producer friend/fan/benefactor Jerry Meadors set these shows up for us in his home towns. We’d been, and would continue, playing with Dan for years. Colin and Brian Schey will eventually join Dan’s band on his “New American Language” CD after The Previous fold. But that’s well in the future of this re-telling.

We had several bass players during this period. Holly Montgomery, who we borrowed from Bill White Acre and Dan Bern, was a very impressive performer, but also very busy. She wanted to actually make money and couldn’t run off on some indie tour with a band of hopeful monsters like us. Glen Cathan, on the other hand, was more than willing, but he was a little bit over his head musically. Colin and John and Marshall brought a level of musical excellence to the band that I had come to rely on. They could also be incredibly passive aggressive, which probably held us together but not comfortably. Glen was super sweet and fully engaged in what we were doing. They loved him and were frustrated with his playing. I think I ended up just kinda being a dick to him. (Sorry Glen) He did several tours with us but when we were planning the tour that would lead to Boston where we planned to lay down the basic tracks for The Hard Feelings at Q Division Studios with Mike Deneen, I fired Glen and hired Walt. Walt would probably scoff at the idea that I “hired” him so let’s say he agreed to tour with us the way he came to Vienna. We covered his costs, and he had an adventure.

We played The Hard Feelings a lot during that tour. Got some pretty nice live recordings. I’m particularly fond of one from Gotham City, a little coffeehouse in Ferndale, Michigan. I don’t remember getting along particularly well with anyone. It was late fall and it was cold. Everyone had colds. I felt like a pretentious jerk. Walt has always had the ability to make me question myself, and that tour, the answers I was arriving at weren’t good. Still, when we played the music, I remember liking that.

Deb Pasternak turned us onto Mike Deneen, which proved fortuitous, not just because he’s a great guy with a good ear who helped us capture our attempted masterpiece in all the regal old school studio glory of Q Division, for a price we could afford…. What it was I don’t remember but it was probably around $1500 a day. Can that be right? I can’t imagine spending that on studio time now. Oh well, gas was cheap, and we were getting paid to play…sometimes. None of us had cell phone bills.

The especially cool thing about Q Division, the month we were there, is that’s when Mike Deneen, along with Jon Brion and Aimee Mann, were finishing up tracks for her breakthrough album “I’m With Stupid”. Jon Brion would end up being a big influence on me in the future but at the time I didn’t meet him. Mike did play me an early mix of “That’s Just What You Are” and told me a story about Jon, who played on Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk”, when I sited that album as an influence on “The Hard Feelings”. He said Jon hated working on it because all the parts were just “impressions of Queen and George Harrison”.

That’s what I liked about it.

After the Boston sessions, which sounded rich and potent, we wanted to record the vocals at Kommotion Studios in San Francisco. The idea was that we could afford more time to fine tune the vocals at $300 a day or whatever we were paying at Kommotion, plus James Lee Harris & Lilly Gobeil (of the band Patchwork) lived in the bay area and I wanted to get their voices on this record. While they sounded great, something about this process necessitated bouncing some of the original tracks down to digital tape and losing the warmth we had paid so much for at Q Division. My memory is not very clear on the production details, and maybe the bouncing happened later at Zacudo Audio in Santa Monica or with Earle Mankey in Thousand Oaks. I just know that we tinkered for quite some time before eventually releasing the record, like a turd that none of us cared that much about by the time it was done. And with us not caring, The Hard Feelings simply joined the other CD’s on our merch table and, even as ambivalent as I feel about it now, it probably deserved a better and more enthusiastic release.

The truth is, by the time it was done, I was already fully focused on what would become my favorite of our CD’s, “UnPop…” I will say this about The Hard Feelings, though, I love the opening 3 minutes.

Mr. Jones & The Fascists
“In Search of the Hundredth Monkey”

Shout
Cigarette Street
Who Am I Today?
Wind Forever
Hometown Boy
You Better Love Me
The Sun
Who’s Gonna Make It Rain?
Ain’t I A Woman?
The Man
Mercury, NV
Drug War

All songs written by Andras Jones
Recorded live in Los Angeles between April 29 and May 8th, 1992
Engineered by Colin Mahoney & John Nason
Except tracks #3, 7, 10 & 12 by Marshall Thompson

Andras Jones – Vocal & Guitar
Clay Goldstein – Harmonica & Vocals
Marshall Thompson – Keyboards & Vocals
John Nason – Guitar
Brian Mastalski – Bass
Colin Mahoney – Drums
with…
Josh Clayton-Felt – Vocals & Open-Tuned Guitar (The Sun)
Julie Christensen – Vocals on Who’s Gonna Make It Rain? & “Ain’t I A Woman”
Randy Kaplan – Vocals on “Wind Forever”
Steve Taylor – Banjo on “Ain’t I A Woman”

From Andras Jones:

The follow-up to “Porch Music” was supposed to be “The Hard Feelings”, a song cycle written about my tumultuous relationship with Tuesday Knight with whom I acted in  Nightmare 4. The band had been playing the tunes live and they sounded good but I had a very ambitious recording plan and this project would end up taking another 4 years to complete.

After we finished “Porch Music” I went to Vienna to film “Averill’s Arrival”. I told the band that if any of them wanted to come to Vienna they could crash in the apartment the production was renting for me. Only Walt took me up on this offer. My brother Gabriel, who just so happened to be living as a transient busker in Vienna at the time, also joined us at Schlösselgasse 13, along with several of his ragamuffin chums. When I was shooting they’d go out and play music on the streets. When I came home we’d smoke hash and check out the Viennese nightlife. The first pressings of “Porch Music” were sent to us in Vienna and we’d give a copy to any bar or cafe where they’d agree to put it on the stereo. People seemed to like it, and even if they didn’t, we did.

“Hometown Boy Made Bad” was written about Viennese homeboy Hitler, and “Wind Forever” is about a mushroom trip (my first) with my brother and Walt and a bunch of circus performers in Bremen after the film wrapped and we were traveling around Europe.

I arrived back in the states in September. Landed in Boston where I bought a van from my brother that promptly broke down and stranded me there for almost a month. That van would cause all kinds of mischief for me over the next year. I drove it to LA the week U2’s “Achtung Baby” was released and I remember them playing “Mysterious Ways” constantly on the radio. It was probably the first U2 song I genuinely liked the first time I heard it. About a year later our new manager, Ty Braswell, will get us backstage to The Zoo Tour with The Sugarcubes & The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy when we were playing a show in Columbia, Missouri and they were playing in Kansas City.

Back in LA, I just kept getting hippier and hippier. I was already a practicing Buddhist and now I found myself getting drawn into more political protest activity.  The band was regularly playing hemp rallies organized by Craig X at the federal building in Westwood (“Drug War”), and I was swiftly expanding my education in left wing politics from KPFK (“Cigarette Street”), particularly their late night programming. I also attended my first and only rainbow gathering around this time when my brother visited the states (“The Sun”). All  this ultimately led to my attending The Hundredth Monkey protest at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site in Mercury, Nevada where I wrote “The Man” & “Mercury, NV” while marching the 60 miles from Vegas to mercury over 4 days. I write extensively about this experience in “Accidental Initiations”.

I had already written the song “Shout” with the opening line, “I fell in love at a rally” and it came true in Mercury where I met Heidi Love who would become my wife, and a major asset to the band as a graphic designer, office manager, booker, promoter, and a visionary in her own right who informed what we became as a band on the road. There weren’t a lot of indie vegan rock bands touring the country handing out Hundredth Monkey books in those days. Probably still aren’t. That was all her.

Back in LA, falling in love with Heidi, I got the idea to record all of these activist songs as one record, and do it live in the studio. I’d recently purchased a DAT recorder and was very pleased with the sound I was able to get when recording the band at shows. With John Nason and Colin Mahoney, I came up with a plan to lock out a rehearsal studio in downtown LA for 10 days, move in with the band and record as much as we could. The studio was Mary’s Danish’s rehearsal space and they rented it to me while they were on tour.

The Previous had morphed slightly since”Porch Music”. Deb had left the band, as had Walt. For these sessions he was replaced by a local cat named Brian Mastalski who played his parts, and then moved on. The main addition to the band at this time was Marshall Thompson on keyboards.

Marshall was and remains an unassuming fellow with deep and contradictory roots in the Ozarks of Missouri and the streets of south central Los Angeles. His knack for coming up with subtle and impressive hooks that perfectly compliment my songs is unparallelled, and he serves this up big time on the 100th Monkey record. The studio came with a Fender Rhodes that supposedly once belonged to The Doors and was played on “Riders On The Storm”. Listen and marvel as Marshall puts the illustrious beast through its paces on this recording right from the git-go.

We were joined by some excellent guests in the studio for these sessions. Julie Christensen, who is best known as Leonard Cohen’s favorite back-up singer, came down to sing on “Who’s Gonna Make It Rain?” and “Ain’t I A Woman”, a song she would eventually cover. Josh Clayton-Felt dropped in for an afternoon to record “The Sun” with me and Clay and Marshall, with Marshall taking over the engineer duties. Dan Bern came down and sang on a song called “Sweet Wine” that didn’t ultimately make the record. We also had Randy Kaplan in to sing vocals on “Wind Forever” and Steve Taylor of the band The Uninvited on banjo on “Merucry, NV”. Danny Peck was supposed to come down for a session but he had a friend who was arrested the day he was supposed to come in and had to cancel so he could go bail them out.

The particularly interesting thing about these sessions is, during our first day of recording, the officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted and the city erupted in protest. Our studio, being in downtown LA, was right in the middle of it all. At the very end of the recording of the opening track, “Shout”, you can hear the studio phone ring. That’s Ty Braswell calling to tell us to get the hell out of there before things get out of hand. The band made the smart decision and left and I made the dumb but artistic choice to stay and keep tape rolling on this historic night, watching the city burn and wondering how the hell we were going to finish this record.

It would take three (strange?) days before we could get back into the studio, putting the kybosh on my plan to also try and record “The Hard Feelings” songs. Despite this setback, once we got everyone back in the room, the tracks came together easily and I was happy to document the Previous exactly as we sounded, with no overdubs or studio trickery.

In an early version of crowdsourcing, we raised the money to press the CD (including a 32 page CD booklet complete with an original comic strip by SLC artist, Joseph Briggs) by taking pre-orders from our fans. Within a couple of months, me and Marshall and Heidi would be hitting the road with a band of Northen California activists called Clan Dyken on Wavy Gravy’s “Nobody For Pesident” tour ’92, officially ending our days as a local LA band, and beginning an era of touring that would last for most of the next decade.

Mr. Jones & The Previous
“Porch Music”

Rip It Away
Don’t Feed the Animals
What’s Wrong With the Mirror
Nothing’s Real ‘Til It Bites You
Listen With Your Heart
I Think They Want Me
Hold Your Breath
Message For The Moon
Three Cheers For The Band
My Baby Left Me For A Spider
Stick Around

All songs written by Andras Jones
Produced with R. Walt Vincent & Earl Mankey

Andras Jones – Vocal & Guitar
Clay Goldstein – Harmonica & Jaw Harp
R. Walt Vincent – Bass
Deb Pasternak – Vocals
John Nason – Guitar
Colin Mahoney – Drums
with…
Lili Haydn – Violin on “What’s Wrong With The Mirror”
Dan Clark – Vocals on “Three Cheers For The Band”
Steve Isaacs – Vocals on “Three Cheers For The Band”
Jesse Richardson – Vocals on “Three Cheers For The Band”

From Andras Jones:

I haven’t listened to this record in a long time. It’s pretty good. We were only the second band I knew to put out our own CD, which was kind of impressive at the time.

I got the money to make it from Steve Shainberg after I played the lead role in “The Prom” for free. I was honored to do it, which is probably why he gave me three grand at the end of shooting to “make your fucking record and stop whining about it” as he put it.

We brought in a real producer, Earle Mankey, who everyone told us had produced Concrete Blonde, but we knew him from his work with The Beach Boys, and Sparks and the Runaways. He loved our band, and I’m told he shed a tear when I played “Listen With Your Heart”.

If only Marshall Thompson were on this record, it would be the most perfect line-up of the band, but even without him, it’s a serious crew of cats.

We’ve got Clay Goldstein back on the harp but this time he’s not working in the more obvious medium of “blues” for his instrument. Now it’s a serious rock band and I don’t know if there’s a better example of rock harmonica than what he delivers here. Not just the solos. I love his rhythm playing on these tracks.

The other huge influence on this record is Walt Vincent. Before he reclaimed his R.and started producing artists like Liz Phair, Pete Yorn & Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Long ago, Walt moved into the house on the cover of the CD  (7565 Curson) the place where The Boon was born and died. Walt was playing with a new crew of talented young folk who moved in after we moved out, and I met him because I heard music coming out of my old place one day when I was walking by so I decided to introduce myself as a previous tenant. That was a good move.

When Walt joined the band it got much more musically serious. Which I liked and, I think, Clay thought was a little pretentious. Walt was definitely my co-producer (with Earle) on this record. Which might be why his 5-string fretless bass is allowed to dominate some of the tracks? All I remember is, it was great having Walt there on the drives to Thousand Oaks, turning me on to Jellyfish and totally immersing himself in the vision I was creating. Probably the closest I got to the same kind of aesthetic bond I’d had with Josh, but we were Previous, which meant we were mercenaries. This was my band and Walt was in it, and I think we both liked it that way. We still play together. And that says something.

The other big influence on this record is Deb Pasternak.

I met Deb when she played on the same bill with us at Highland Grounds, around the time Eleni Mandell started working there as the surliest barista you can imagine. It was one of Steve Isaac’s events, back when he called himself Spooky, before he was an MTV VJ. I fell in art-love with Deb’s righteous babeness (pre-Righteous Babe) and she must have fallen for me similarly because, despite the fact that I don’t think we liked each other much, we hung together the way talented young people do. And then I stole her band.

Deb went to college at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. The story was, she’d gone out with Trey from Phish. She also played in a college band (named “Moonrocks”) with John Nason & Colin Mahoney. Colin and John moved out to LA, along with Deb, and found jobs as recording engineers while playing in her band, and when she joined The Previous, so did they. John and Colin would form the foundation of the touring and recording unit that was Mr. Jones & The Previous for the next half a decade.

“Porch Music” features a few other cool drop-ins. The aforementioned Steve Isaacs, and Dan Clarke of the band Duke Daniels joining us in the fucking up of “Three Cheers For The Band”, and then there’s Lili Haydn.

Lili was one of my first real friends in LA. Khrystyne Haje introduced us when I was working as a bus boy at The Hard Rock Cafe. Khrystyne was on “Head Of The Class” and Lili was The New Gidget’s nerdy best friend. Khrystyne told me she wanted to introduce me to Lili because I told her I was “into Lao Tse” while I was clearing burgers off her table.

The day we recorded Lili’s violin part on “What’s Wrong With the Mirror” we captured a perfect synchronicity. That ring at the end of her opening solo is the studio phone going off, in perfect tune and rhythm with the song. Telephones going off will be a theme in my recording sessions going forward and this was the most perfect one.

Walt and Clay and Lili will stay in LA when the band hits the road. Deb will follow her own path as a singer-songwriter, eventually moving back east and covering “Message For The Moon” on her album ELEVEN. But John Nason and Colin Mahoney will fully commit to all things Previous and, for most people who saw us live, that’s who we were.

PARTING IMAGE: The last track, “Stick Around”, was originally recorded as a big Floydian dirge a la “Future’s A Killer” from The Boon Demos but at the last minute one night we decided to simply record it acoustically and live. When I say we, I mean Earle Mankey, after working with us ten hours a day for at least four days in a row in his home studio, started channeling the “Brian Is Back” days of The Beach Boys, miking the whole band acoustically, in a circle, and by God/Goddess we delivered! Everyone really sounds so purely themselves. Deb. Clay. Walt. Even me.

None of us stuck around, but here we are.

I think I like this record.

Mr. Jones & The Previous
“The Wrong Side of Town”

Hole In the Bottom*
Down, Down, Down
The Wrong Side Of Town
I Think They Want Me
To & Fro
Put Him Up*
Some More Time
You Won’t
Fine
Take Off Your Clothes
The Flavor Is Gone*

All songs written by Andras Jones except…
* by Andras Jones & Billy Lincoln

Produced by Billy Lincoln

Andras Jones – Vocals, Guitar & Trumpet
Clay Goldstein – Harmonica
Billy Lincoln – Lead Guitar
John K. Hench – Bass
Michael G. Silvester – Drums

From Andras Jones:

After The Boon broke-up I felt pretty burned. For lots of reasons, not least of which because all the songs I’d been performing in The Boon were pure collaborations with Josh and it just didn’t feel right performing any of them on my own. I decided, going forward, I would only have bands that wouldn’t have to break up if one of the other members left.

At the time, I was hanging around with the band Mary’s Danish. They were part of the scene that included Thelonious Monster and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and were a little sensation in LA at the time. Their lead guitarist, David King, introduced me to Billy Lincoln, another talented hanger-on in their scene, and we started playing together.

I’d been playing at an open mike in a tiny dive underneath The Coconut Teazer called The 8121 Club (8121 Sunset Blvd). They had a neat little blues scene brewing down there, which is where I met Clay Goldstein. I asked him to play harp on one of my songs, and I think we were both blown away.

Clay was a total character. The best harmonica player I’ve ever met, by far. He had this real east coast swagger. Like Springsteen. Very positive and earthy. He was the mascot for the Baltimore Orioles for two years, including 1983 when they won the World Series, and he had the air of someone who had been to “the show”. Like an old champ. As one cat who used to play shows with us once said of Clay, “He could French kiss a radiator and make it sound like Vivaldi”.

I decided to book a gig for “my band” to play at The 8121 before I actually had a band. I’d already asked Clay and Billy to play with me, and I had a name I liked. I figured that, with 6 weeks and a real gig to get ready for, I could probably build a blue’s band. I REALLY liked the name.

Mr. Jones & The Previous.

At the time, to me, it sounded old and new. Now I don’t know what it sounds like. I guess it sounds like me.

Billy Lincoln invited John Hench to join us, and that worked well. Hench had an easy going attitude and an unpretentious style on bass that supported the modern blues explorations of that first incarnation of the band. Billy was a great producer. His guitar playing was firmly grounded in the So. Cal Eddie Van school, but it was wonderfully devoid of the machismo that afflicts many devotees of this style. Ultimately, he was a rhythm guitarist who was constantly soloing, and his tone? Very clean. He put a lot into the band, in terms of time and energy, but somehow I got the sense he wasn’t really that invested, which I didn’t mind. I think we both had our eye on bigger things. I don’t ever remember us fighting about creative differences (although this may be selective on my part). He supported my vision, and I trusted his choices. The record still sounds pretty good. Some of it sounds great. And we did end up collaborating on three songs that I wouldn’t try playing without him.

We recorded these songs as demos on an old 8-track reel-to-reel in a shed in Billy’s backyard over the course of one week, maybe less. They weren’t intended to be released but since we did an album’s worth, once the band started releasing CD’s, the fans wanted to hear it, and now it really does feel like the first Previous record. Our managers, Rusty Andrews of Electric Landlady Management and Billy James (of Doors & Dylan fame), sent it around as a cassette with a case that simply read: Mr. Jones & The Previous – 10 Songs. (Can you believe we left “The Flavor Is Gone” off the demo?!? What were we thinking?) The response from their label contacts led Rusty to tell me on the phone one day that, “the world isn’t waiting for another blues band”, a line that would make it onto our next record.

Most of these songs vanished from my set within a year or two but the song “The Wrong Side of Town” would become a staple of our live show and I think it still kinda holds up.

The Boon

That’s Life
Sick & Tired
Pick You Up
Making Enemies
Love or Just An Allergy
The Future’s A Killer
Nothing Better To Do

All songs by Andras Jones & Josh Clayton-Felt

Andras Jones: Vocals & Guitars
Josh Clayton-Felt: Guitar & Vocals
Dan Carlson: Bass
Dennis Muth: Drums

Andras Jones and Josh Clayton-Felt met in high school at The Cambridge School of Weston in Massachusetts. After their graduation in 1986, Andras moved to LA where he started getting acting work, while Josh attended college at Brown University. In the fall of 1987 Josh joined Andras in LA where they formed the band The Boon.

The first two tracks of this demo (“That’s Life” & “Sick & Tired”) were recorded mostly on a Tascam 4-track in the room they shared in Hollywood, with some overdubs recorded at studios around LA. This demo led to a “spec deal” with Gary Goetzman’s Entourage Studios that led to the remaining tracks. Here’s how Dan Carlson, the bass player on these sessions, remembers it.

Living in LA, in the late 80s, I was lucky to be introduced (by someone I never met, oddly enough) to Andras Jones and Josh Clayton-Felt, two recently transplanted Boston-ites (that can’t be right) who were starting a band. Josh and Andras were writing really great pop songs and we immediately got along – as friends and musicians, a rare thing. As I remember, we practiced and practiced at their house in Hollywood, all the while searching for a drummer. After a couple of non-fits, we met Dennis Muth, a lovely guy and wonderful player.

Somehow – no idea how – we got the attention of Gary Goetzman, who offered us time at his studio to put some demos together. The four of us, along with a great engineer named Nick Carr, spent time – a week maybe? – at Entourage, getting it all together. My first serious time in a serious studio, I remember feeling like I finally was in control of my playing and how it came across on record. Truly exciting.

There were two large rooms at Entourage, and whichever one we weren’t using was being used by David Byrne for some project or other. Never saw him there, but I remember Josh temporarily “liberating” his very old and beautiful Fender Stratocaster from a gig bag in the corner to do most of the guitar overdubs.

Tragically, Josh died of testicular cancer right around 2000. He’d had a successful – although far too brief – career as a musician, both with his band School of Fish and as a solo artist. He made wonderful records.

After all these years, Andras has decided to put all the tracks we all made together up on Bandcamp. I listened yesterday for the first time in years, and it was like stepping back in time. My days with Andras, Josh, and Dennis were brief, but wonderful and I’m so glad to have this as a memento. It was a thrilling time.

Listen HERE