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 23rd birthday.
Listen HERE