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.