Rust and Redemption on the Outskirts of Rock City
I’ve been writing and recording since I was a kid, so when Jim Diamond, Eddie Baranek and I undertook this project, there was a lot of stuff to pick from. The songs you hear here are culled from probably 50 or so recorded demos and rough takes that were considered, all part of a far more expansive body of work beckoning from degrading cassettes and yellowing notebooks. The oldest of the tracks on this project was written well over 40 years ago.
As work progressed, the project seemed to pull its own identity out of the process, forging its own center grounded in work life, rock ‘n soul, and snapshot vignettes of east side joy, loss, decay, perseverance and improbable salvation.
It seems like there is a Jefferson Avenue or street in most cities and towns – its almost like everybody’s got one – this record tells the story I know. There has been so much change along the way – and not always good change either – but still, for me, all life’s roads have sooner or later led back to the Avenue by the river. In my youth, the Avenue was a constant that spanned the divide between very different worlds for me personally and for our city. It was there that the news of the riots came over the radio right along with the greatest music ever made, with both the music and the societal divides persisting through decades. It was the route to my first factory job – and a lot of other jobs too – everyplace from the Mt. Elliott plant where I worked summers as a kid, to the downtown work life and the sweet part of the city, to the clubs and pubs that would inform my music life. First beers, invisible walls, last calls, first dates, last chances – for me, they all happened here.
Over a thousand commutes and treks, with everything from workday barricades and broken glass to streetlight streaks guiding the way to the show, they are always hovering there – spirits of legends and lost souls, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. Stories of passage that rise up from the soil and soot if only one hold still for a quiet moment to feel them come forth. The cinematic imagery of that history has often played out in my mind in a dull winter’s black and white; gossamer images in an ether of toxic cinder spewed from factories and lying in chunks in vacant lots. But they mix with the smell of the market, the lovely summer sundown over the ball park, and the life-giving steam of tunnels that have heated the places where dreams, people and music lived and died. A can’t hurry love echo backdrops the Uniroyal lot in a frigid Monday work drive by moment before sunrise. So often such visions, voices and sounds come together in juxtaposition across my Jefferson Avenue.
So, what I hope to bring to the listener here is a moment’s refuge in the nurturing sanctuary of the shake, delivered way of this beautiful lonesome hearted soul of the industrial age. A pathway presaging larger possible energy, much like the anxious tapping of a finger to an all-time hit one hopes to hear yet again – a trail of tears, joy and aspiration that maybe, just maybe, holds promise that our families, our music, our vision and our community may rise yet again.