Bad Habits At Bad Times

Once upon a jam session, I drank too many miniature bottles of Jack Daniels while working a register at a liquor store in Muskegon. I was barely eighteen and having some life issues at the time, such as how to have a life at all. The problem with getting drunk on whiskey at work is that when your parents pop in to say high you're sweating the stuff out of your very pores. But they didn't chastise me there and then. They waited until David Martin, Joseph Scott and I were practicing for the first and last time in the basement of my boyhood home. Only after my friends were there to add the extra pinch of embarrassment did the folks kick Joe and Dave out and tell me I had no business working at a liquor store in the first place. Always game to be a layabout, I now had an excuse to do nothing and I jumped on it. But I've often wondered what might have been had our playing that night not been cut short by yet another of my inappropriate jags. It never does any good to wonder about such things, but if this story proves anything, it is that I have a problem with indulging in bad ideas at bad times, and these thoughts about potential that I sabotaged are only another bad habit I am trying to break. - Dylan

Farther and Closer At Once.

The night was overcast and bitter, though it was only late October as I drove down to Holland to see Sufjan Stevens. I met David Martin there, in that fall of 2003, when the chamber pop star was still small enough to play Lemonjello's, a nook of a cafe downtown. I ordered a loose leaf Yerba Mate, and this cup of tea ended up taking up a bit too much of my attention. The small floor was packed with sitting fans and I kept my focus of not spilling my beverage, only letting it scald the edges of my thumb and forefinger. Still, I was able to catch enough of the solo acoustic performance to know that this guy could write a song. He had the same guitar as my father, a shiny deep Guild with a pale, pale finish. And then came the banjo, and with it the sense that this was a new kind of pop, that half the crowd of hardcore folk fans would be pricing banjos on eBay as soon as they got home, that the future of our genre would be cluttered with imitators who aped this artist or innovators who went beyond him. David and I bought CDs afterward. Sufjan was the opening act but we didn't stay for the star. We were both far from our respective homes and had to get home and stayed together only long enough to smoke a cigarette and eye Mr. Stevens awkwardly from across the tiny parking lot. I often make conversation with bands and artists, but this time I drew a blank and left him alone. Thrilling, the drive home was thrilling, beyond expectations, because I spent it listening to "Michigan." Here was something new and beautiful and I thought, David is having this same experience right now, driving home and listening, and I felt close to him even as we drove farther apart. - Dylan

Trading Worsts

I hit my first burst of songwriting in the summer of 2001. It was a blissful time. I would trade our worst problems then for our worst problems now in half a heartbeat. Two chambers pound. We had no idea how everything would change come September, and girls were all I had to worry about. I was living in Ann Arbor, on a break between semesters and working at a low-end gift shop on Main Street. I wrote a couple dozen songs in the months between when classes ended and when they began again. About half sprung out while I was at a writer's retreat in New England. I will never forget sitting in an Adirondack chair on the porch of the mess hall, smoking cigarettes next to a girl who was smoking a cigar. I turned to her that late afternoon and said, "I should write something that goes, 'If you have sex with me, I'll write a song about you.'" She laughed hard and encouraged me and I penned the words in about forty seconds and have had to live with that song ever since. Life was stable and fun and I was young enough to believe that I had a shot and that I might even hit. It was before the fall of the fall, before I wore out those songs at show after show, and everything was as fresh and ripe as only the summer can be. I am still living there now. - Dylan

The Plates and the Kids

The meeting that launched Jumberlack was rather mundane. Ken and I sat in a booth at Rendezvous in Grand Haven. He wanted a milkshake, which they don't have for some reason. Perhaps it makes things easier on the staff. Anyhow, we discussed Saddle Creek and the Omaha phenomenon of this decade's early portion. This was some three years ago, shortly after I'd returned from New York still full of myself and ambition to really make something happen in Muskegon. I ordered coffee at that diner and probably drank ten or eleven cups while Ken ate a sundae with a disappointed twist to his mouth. Surrounded by chattering teenagers, our market in the flesh, we spoke of making some kind of scene happen in Muskegon or Grand Rapids or both and both of us naively believed we could accomplish such a feat. Though I can't say that we have done as much, I would like to think that, through our quality control and our unerring vision, we have brought out music into light it might otherwise have never seen. Nothing came of our back and forth for a few months, but for that moment, in the clink and clank of the plates and the kids, it was nice to think that we could do the impossible and make money in the music industry these days. - Dylan

Doing the Business of Heroes

I am sometimes struck by a band. Recluse hit me between the eyes last summer. I knew the guys from my years in the city, or at least I knew two-thirds of them. A few days into my trip back to New York, I sat on the sidewalk outside Don Hill's, a dodgy venue known to be rough around the edges, the kind of place where mediocrity or worse is almost a requirement to play and where the only people in the crowd are friends of the band playing and are likely to leave as soon as their friend's set ends. There, on that sidewalk, several red bulls deep into a wicked caffeine crash, I sat with laptop on my knees. The trusty little thing was blasting "Highway 61 Revisted" as loud as a twelve-inch Powerbook can blast anything, and I was hoping the music would keep me from nodding out on the sidewalk and awakening with my wallet pocketed by some inconsiderate and poor musician. I made it, with a little help from the true Dylan, made it to listen to the set of the three piece and was blown to the back corners of the crowd, where I furiously and successfully figured out how to record those rock heroes with the tinny microphone in my laptop and make the thing sound okay. So I wandered from corner to corner, computer yawning at the sticky ceiling, until I found the spot to get them, the best acoustics, which happened to be in the door to the men's bathroom. There I stood for the rest of the set, and I only had to move once to let a man do his business as I stood there doing mine. - Dylan

Friends of the Sea

Just off the boat from a six day tour of Lake Michigan, I can report that the walls are still swimming from rough seas as we disembarked from Manitowac, Wisconsin. Also, the captain of the fine vessel that carried me about liked the Recluse and White Pines CDs I played for him a great deal. We listened to them under sail, running down from Sturgeon Bay, at the foot of Door County. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and hopefully making some new ones at our upcoming barbecued house show. And I hope that many of you check out a new friend of Jumberlack, Manwolf, whose website we will be designing. You can check out his music on his MySpace page. I am too off-kilter from my time adrift and will write more soon. Until then, this is your First Mate signing off. - Dylan

Summerlack

We are planning a house show for this summer. It will be similar to our annual house show in the spring except it will probably be outside and involve a BBQ and more bands participating. So far we have White Pines/TH!TTG!/Dylan James Brock confirmed and working on getting more bands added to the lineup.

White Pines is hitting the road this summer and you can check his myspace out for more details. More dates will also be announced real soon.

That is all for now, I am on my way to see Bottomless Pit at Schubas. - Ken

Another Voice From the Manor

Hello,

I've been promising Dylan that I would jump into the Jumber blog-o-sphere for a while now and with him heading out to sea I have to fill the Internet with my ramblings. Although they may not be as a eloquently written as other, I hope they are entertaining at the very least. There is much going in the Jumberworld with the recent releases of Recluse and White Pines EP's and we are now planning the first Summerlack Festival at the Manor. We hope to build on the momentum of our annual spring house and bring more exciting musical acts to the west side of the mitten. Stay tuned for more details, but you can be expecting a cookout and great music. - Ken

The Business of Breaking Hearts.

There is a brilliance to the darkness in the music of That's Him! That's the Guy! We musicians often find ourselves in the business of breaking hearts. We look for the cracks and wedge them open. Sometimes this is done in one song, but with "An Army Life" David Martin and Joseph Scott plan heartbreak like a beach storming campaign. There are phases of kindness and beauty needed to establish a point from which the listener can descend into beautiful disappointment. The loveliness of their arrangements and harmonies coat the poison in sweetness. It goes down smooth and takes you down from the depths of your chest. I think of sitting a cafe in Montpelier, Vermont, where I broke down in tears listening to the pain in their concept album. Tears in public. I didn't gulp and gasp and sob, but there they were, those chills and that heart within mine, soothing me with the realism that only sad music ever finds, illuminating and casting relief at once, shadows and highlights whose truth sets its witness free. I am listening still. - Dylan

Freedom in a Parking Lot.

I first heard Freer in the parking lot outside an events hall in Muskegon, MI. It was August of 2006 and Jumberlack was a fresh idea and we had no idea where that idea would go. Nick Adams, who became their drummer, played me a burned CD of their fledgling recordings on the CD player in my little brother's blue Corolla. I heard the first bounces of a catchy melody and then the voice of Jeremy Freer and followed the song in my head to its conclusion. He asked me what I thought of them, in part because he thought that this was more my type of music than his. Freer had a show at the Magic Stick in a few weeks and were starting to go somewhere. Nick told me he was probably going to join them and I told him I thought that could be very good for him. Then we went on to the beach bar around a bend from that events hall. I never heard that CD again, nor did I have anything to do with getting Freer to collaborate with us, but I remember being there early enough to see it all coming. The whole drive to the beach bar we listened to the CD, and we had hopes that great things would follow that first listen. - Dylan

Echoes of the City's Edge.

I am sitting here thinking about music. I am remembering the first time I really listened to "Help Me, I'm On Fire." I was living in Manhattan at the time, in the strange unnamed region between Peter Cooper Village and Bellevue Hospital, an area that is only a gray blob on the maps seen in the back of Taxis. I had to walk five Avenue blocks from FDR to Madison Avenue to get to the one train that stopped near there, the six, and so I would make these long mixes to cover the length of my commute. I started putting some of David Martin's songs in with the other Pitchfork darlings and vintage gems I would stack the lists with. And I remember being struck, and struck hard, by how well "For the Learned" and "February" stood up in comparison to the Mountain Goats and the Boy Least Likely To and the other weird almost-folk I was listening to back then. It was the fall of 2005 and I still thought I would be in New York forever; Michigan was this strange dream of origin that I couldn't escape and couldn't forget, my own sort of colony after the fall of the American empire. So what began as a gesture toward how much I missed my musician friends in Michigan became a dance in celebration of them. I knew then that in my home there were people who were making real, beautiful art and that what was happening in the three boroughs where the indie kids are willing to live was no better and in most cases far, far worse than what my colleagues were doing in a part of the country some of the capital C City snobs couldn't even locate with their right palm facing them. So when I went broke and cashed out of the New York gambling table, I looked forward to reuniting with the artistic communities clinging to life, but living still, and living vibrantly, in the corners where the music we have made may yet echo still. - Dylan

Performances, in House and in the Studio.

Another day, another update from our hometown of Muskegon. More White Pines videos have been posted on the Jumberlack You Tube page. There are now a total of three videos there, of a solo performance by Joseph Patrick Scott. Right now the songs to be seen and heard, "Wolves Will Shiver", "Speak With The Dad", and "Our Things In The Street". Check them out, and look for three more uploads from this same performance at Jumberlack Manor back in late February. Also, check out the lyrics for two of my forthcoming songs on my MySpace blog. These songs, Tennessee Redhead and The Stomp, were recorded with Rick Johnson of Mustard Plug in his Cold War Studios in Grand Rapids. I am very pleased with how the performances came out and am looking forward to sharing the results with you all very soon. Until then, expect a stream of information from your source on the artists we love. - Dylan

Welcome to the Jumberworld.

Somehow or another, Jumberlack was not taken as a name for a blog. So I grabbed it. Expect a whole lot of updates to this little thing. For now, let's start with this video of Jumberlack artist Joseph Patrick Scott of White Pines playing a song of their debut EP, "A Face Made of Wood" available for order only physicially for now at their Jumberstore or on their artist page on the same site. The EP can be listened to in its entirety on our home page as well. And in case that wasn't enough for you, check out this video of the song "Wolves Will Shiver". That's enough out of this jumber for the day. Signing off, with promise of much more to come. - Dylan