Who Influences Who

“Flow into motion, there is no remorse at Heaven’s door.” So began a leap through his glass window. In other words, a definite sojourn of Scot’s into the world of surrealism. He had been just been named Composer in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts over in an ex-war zone with a Sausalito address. No kidding. Huge tracts of the Marin headlands area was held by the U.S. military, definitely from WWI, but probably even earlier. There is a Civil War era fort just under the Golden Gate Bridge.

This was 1986, the first year of residencies at the Headlands. Scot had just finished his Masters at San Francisco State University. He had hooked up with David Ireland, a kind of famous installation-type artist, who was the initial visionary brought in to carve out The Headlands Center for the Arts. The center took over several wonderful baricks buildings built at the turn of the 20th century, which were all quite derelict. Scot got the residency for his performance-type improvisational space music, but they gave him access to huge work space, and shortly thereafter, that came to mean paintings too.

This track comes from a Folklore demo. Folklore was the next band morph after Funhouse. Scot had begun to bring a lot more original material to Funhouse, but…things change. He wanted to do some music that had a more complicated lyrical structure. Folklore was a trio, although on this tract we hear Scot lay down a keyboard track. Ultimately, he hoped to bring in a violin player. Notice how string-like this keyboard part is. Ed Bachmann moved over on bass from Funhouse. New to the mix was drummer Johnny Law, a phenomenol drummer. Scot was of course doing vocal. This is when he had that amazing Kay guitar. It's further back in the mix than I'd like, but you get still hear it. Wow!

Folklore was awesome. We left San Francisco shortly after we put this demo together. It was some of the coolest, most sophisticated, kick ass music Scot had ever come up with, and when I took it around to the clubs, no one would give us a gig. People who might have known better, didn’t pay attention.

That was super hard. We felt like were part of THE scene? We had certainly lent our stage to The Bunks and back again. It was hard, but guess what? We ended up here in Bloomington, which has been a good thing. For example, I own my own home, I educated my son in public school and my property tax is under $1,000. Ha!