Judy Time

It's one of those fun days again, when mrguy and his friend fishfruit were hard at work in the man room making horrible sounds. He's been hoarding sounds for years, and periodically will come over to our house so mrguy can disembowel and then sew them together. One memorable occasion a few years back the components were backwards Joni Mitchell and a coffee maker. Another time it was the sound of his old refrigerator mixed with the sound of fishfruit's infant daughter snoring. He has fans and they eat this stuff up.

While they were doing their thing I was visiting with curly and her baby son. He is completely adorable (for a baby). Curly showed me the best trick: when she puts on the LP Best of Judy Ongg, the baby breaks out smiling. They call it "Judy Time".

When I got back I got to hang out with the boys for a while. Mrguy told a story I'd never heard, about how his old band sent a demo tape to a club in San Francisco. It was returned to them, graded. The club owner had sent them a critique of each of their songs with a letter grade. Speaking of which...

For a few years I had a bandmate whose brother-in-law owned the local free music newspaper. Demo tapes would flood in every week, and the ones that would have been tossed otherwise were offered to us poor musicians to use. We'd record our rehearsals on them, and I'd use some for my answering machine tapes. I'd listen to any I kept.

John Komlenich, if you're out there, I still lament the loss of your demo tape. "Emma" and "No War" were very weird and I loved them dearly.