From ANDRAS JONES: It’s a Radio8Vault week. The time when we pillage our past for inspiration and connections with recent endeavors (and get to re-listen to some of the great R8B Theme Song versions we’ve collected over the years. Today’s is from Chris Price).

We begin with the late great MOSE ALLISON who joined us for an hour of musical divination on February 5, 2009. And who is SUSAN B. JONES? That’s my mom, who turned me onto Mose, bringing several of his records to the family collection I grew up with. In this session she asks a question about my grandfather/her father (who is no longer with us) with Mose (who has also since departed this plain). During the reading, you’ll hear my mom react to Mose’s story of the origin of his song but she doesn’t elaborate so I will. Mose tells us “Your Mind Is On Vacation” was inspired by the people who used to talk through his shows, and this very issue, of talking while someone is playing music for you, has been a source of a fair amount of hurt and acrimony between my mother and I when we were younger. If you’ve ever heard me discuss rude audiences who foul the musician’s medium (silence) with their, as Mose would put it, “yakkin'” you know I have no tolerance for it. Perhaps this is a righteous stance. I believe it is but I also have to admit it’s a righteousness fueled by a child’s rage and this can be a volatile cocktail. Longtime listeners to the show may remember a story I’ve told about the night I played Largo in LA with Bob Wiseman. During that show Bob was chewing me out in the back of the room for playing too long as his opener while another act was playing. I loved Largo as a listening room precisely because they have a zero tolerance policy toward talking during the sets. Thus it was one of those tragic quirks of fate that the club’s owner saw Bob and me getting shushed and, recognizing me and not Bob, thought I was the one yakkin’. I never got invited back to play that venue and when my old best friend and bandmate, Josh Clayton-Felt, told me he’d heard about me talking loud at Largo we fought about it on the phone. That was the last time Josh and I spoke. He died less than a year later, and a year after that I tried to quit songwriting (and almost succeeded).

I had no idea when I started that paragraph it would lead me to one of the worst stories I can tell about my life but that’s where it led.

Mose finishes telling us the story of his song’s origins as a takedown of rude audiences by saying that when people ask him who the song is about he says, “Me”.

I love my mom and Mose Allison and Bob Wiseman and Josh Clayton-Felt and Largo and if I could forgive them more than I already do (for dying too soon or talking too loud or simply misunderstanding me) I would. Sitting here in a hotel room in Vancouver, waiting to record our episode with Sarah Wheeler, the person I find it hardest to forgive is myself which, I suppose, is why I am revealing this to you.

My mind is on vacation and my mouth is working overtime.