Trigger Warning Content Advisory : Lil’ Mike Tracked Down By “Jams For Man”
So a funny thing happened one evening after work, I get this phone call…it’s a guy from L.A., that I’ve never met…but he wants to ask me some questions…
He says he’s “not a cop”, so I agree to talk… boy, was that his mistake for asking. Apparently, he’s a “podcast host” who delves into suburban garage band lore from Reston VA with his 50 something episode audio archive of interviews called “Jams For Man“.
Next thing you know, I’ve spun off in a tongue waggin’ wagontrain of thought on a 35 year easily derailed hell ride down memory lane…
Much of it concerns a few years I spent living in the beastly banal ‘burbs of the bourgeois beltway outside Washington DC in the mid 1980’s. I was an awkward angry teenage sh/t disturber defiantly runnin’ with an overall pretty polite posse of pubescent punkers, seein’ all the all ages shows I could of seminal early 80’s DC hardcore & out there visiting indie acts of the age like Death Piggy, Eugene Chadbourne, Crippled Pilgrims, 9353, Void, Husker Du, Big Black, Sun City Girls, Trouble Funk, Psychodrama, 45 Grave, Marginal Man, Reagan Youth, Meatmen and even Frankie Valli.
This host feller amazingly does the detective work and even pulls up a few audio clips of some of my loopy long forgotten and banned early NoVA high school bands. If only I had been Dave Grohl, who played the same suburban Battle of the Bands circuit, turns out that these tapes would actually be of historical note or even worth something!
Then at some point, after getting expelled from Fairfax County schools, we take a Greyhound and head over the Rockies to the wily west coast where I recant too many “It All Seems So Silly In The Long Run” stories of California rock n roll abandon. There are possibly true tales from the road and serendipitous sidetracks about setting up oft illegal gigs in the early 90’s for then relatively unknown bands like NOFX, Sublime, Rancid, Green Day, Fred Armisen’s Trenchmouth etc…
Anyhow, I ranted, I raved, I regaled and rambled and never shut up for a full hour, which is far more than I, or anyone I know sober, can even put up with me.
This poor fella, the saintly Andy Keiler, originally from Reston VA, now a musician, school teacher and father in Los Angeles, is a patient soul and held the phone away from his aching ear while I blithely blared. He warily winced, even politely laughed at a couple jokes I thought were way funnier, but he got it all down on what we used to call “tape”. He adroitly edited, spliced, tried to make nice, and compressed and squeezed in snippets of vintage music.
Somehow he tracked down a Reagan era cassette recording I had made with my first teen band, the long forgotten Toolin’ For Bovines. He also found an early 4 track demo from the late 80’s from my 100 something gig run with The Bedlam Rovers, an excerpt from a 924 Gilman St recording I played guitar on with pre-tween screamo sensations The Rolling Scabs, a 1994 16 track live recording I helped produce by Sublime at Komotion in SF, as well as just for fun of it, some influential early 80’s jams from a band with Reston roots called the Alter-Natives who were on SST. Andy even threw in some of my more recent playlist faves from El Vez and new material by The Rubinoos, two bands I just happened to be editing videos for the week he called. There are also some rarely, if ever seen too young to shave photos of me from deep in the dregs of the wistful wayback machine…
I know you can find more Jams For Man podcast interviews with people from the Northern Virginia music scene via Podomatic, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, iTunes or perhaps where ever you prefer to do your Podcast listening. Some of the other characters interviewed you can hear in depth conversations with include multi media popsmith Spookey Ruben, Ron Winters of Branch Manager, bassist Jerry Barrett who played in HR from Bad Brains’ solo band amongst many others. There’s recent episode uploads featuring my talented ol’ pal Davis White of groups like Lorelei, and Media Disease, and talks with some of the past members of Avail, as well as prolific NYC based opera & orchestral composer James Barry, and the Zelig like Mike Davis who recorded with plenty of his own bands like The Blood Bats and Foundation and also served as a staff engineer at Don Zientara’s seminal Inner Ear Studios facility. Andy also posts excerpts of music from some of the artists & bands he interviews that participated but aren’t particularly well documented such as Transilience , early Avail etc at a Jams For Man Music Sound Cloud page found here
