This started as a one man show here. I’m Stan, that one man, playing the Les Paul in the photo from about thirty years ago. That’s the fabled John Goggin playing bass (we’d fight over who had to play bass as everyone knew that the guitar players got the chicks, not the bass guy–this was before Victor Wooten proved otherwise). Tracy Warner, now editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Journal Gazette. Barely visible is the elbow and neck of Pretty Danny Walsh.
The name derives from a sudden shift in band names someplace in the distant hills of the 1970’s. I was in a band — one of those garage things that, if you were lucky, might sprout some wings. We were feeling lucky. We called ourselves No Pot. Fucked. Love, Jimmy after a note one of my colleagues found, I was told, in a used history book. I never saw the note, so I have only faith to sustain me on this point. Anyway, the name was joke enough to sustain us through maybe three months in the basement (a standard variation on that garage thing).
We got our first gig. Well, not exactly a gig, with money actually changing hands for services rendered. No. This was called Strawberry Jam on the Ball State campus, a festival kind of thing with free love and acid and everything and hippies reading poetry and I’m kidding, of course, though not much. As we were setting up on the stage, and I’m in front because I sang more songs than the others, so the MC comes over to me and asks the name of the band. I stood up from plugging cables into foot pedals, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “None of your business.” “What’s that?” he says. “Nunna yer bizness,” I said again, more properly hitting the nuance of Hoosier inflection and he said, “Oh. Right. Nunnayerbizness. That Right?”
So the band’s new name was born in a moment of caution. We stayed that way for a couple more gigs then changed the name to Redimix –because it was more concrete, was the joke. It may have worked because we got more gigs. Of course, gigs beget gigs. People will hire a band with even a wispy track record before they will hire one with none at all. And some of our songs had some local popularity — “Disco Deranged” was a hit because the disco dancers could work out even while the movement was being mocked; “Living In Fear,” a bitter little piece about love gone bad had a fan or two.
I always liked NunnaYerBizness, though, and if you look at the web site I use for fooling around–it’s the freebie that Time-Warner hands out with it’s Roadrunner accounts– you’ll see it’s use there. I have it in my mind that, should I put together a gigging band, that’s what it’s going to be called.
Also, in our darkening land where the heavy hand of the growing police state is more visible than ever–we’re going to build a wall down the middle of Brownsville, it seems–it’s an appropriate response to many queries. Nunna yer bizness. Nunna yer fuckin’ bizness.
Write to me at AOL for now. I’ll get mail running here sometime soon, I’m sure.
stan
5 responses so far ↓
1 Gene Novo // May 29, 2008 at 11:16 am
…continuing those never-ending moments, and they come faster and faster as my end nears ….
The man has a Marine cap. I say, “Fomer Marine?”
He leaps at me and growls, stopping short of hitting me, and says, “Never former, never ex, always a Marine!” Shoppers jump back at his growl.
“What war?”
“Three, WW Two, Korea (Pusan) and Vietnam, fighting drugs in the last one? And you, what war?”
I say, “Between Korea and Vietnam. I was lucky.”
“I guess so, and let me tell you, Vietnam was the worst, the drugs making it so.”
He goes down an aisle, I another, my heart still pounding from his leap and growl; he could have falttened me, though 15 years older and a lot shorter and lighter ….
And with my heart slowed, I pedal home, and a motorbike turns in front of me, a redhead hanging on, sideways, to the driver; then I see an object fall to the street, one of her black loafers.
I stop in the middle of street, pick of the loafer – yes, it has a sexual tone – and the motorbike circles back. I hand the redhead her loafer, and think the ” red” is a wig – so what! She then moves from sideways, hangs on from the full rear and the bike goes off, unhelmeted man with grey hair, unhelmeted woman with “red.”
2 pamsiek // Jul 11, 2008 at 10:18 pm
is that Jonnie G with a stash?? omg.
3 Blue Town // Sep 11, 2008 at 1:00 am
In Passing
The middle-aged hurricane hit
She was strong, relentless-and strange
Ages had he known before
Love had he known before
Strong winds he had known
But he had never met her
The middle-aged hurricane
She came suddenly
Not unannounced
Nor unexpected-but suddenly
Her lips seemed enticing
Her curves inviting
Until she arrived
Predetermined catastrophic mayhem
Aligned and waiting
Better afterwards than before
Pictures on rattled-walls
Windows looking out at nowhere
Memories captured in thunders
The middle-aged hurricane would stop
The voyage rendered absolute
Shingles flew
Trees and twigs, too
Clouds gave to skies
Sunshine bleak became
Hissing flood, scattered rain
The middle-aged hurricane
Passing they called her Dolly
History’s hises and hers
Would record her name
Cleanliness would return
More hurricanes would pass
Between begin and end
Until the last drop
Is no drop at all
Blue Town
4 GeneNovo // Sep 11, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Blue Town – You drive me crazy! I always want more of your slants on life …. The hurricane, like much of your work, has several layers ….
Who knows what goes on in your mind …. When you write a piece of it, it’s always interesting ….
Blue Town, the place, is ready to be mined by you, Blue Town …aka Kenneth Trevino ….
Say more. Again, I love the slants the writers and storytellers and singers of Deep South Texas bring to existence – wish I had more to dig such …but I’ll bounce along road until flattened, listening to assosrted beats, and that inculdes yours, Blue Town, and out there on 281, near THAT name, cane bends and trailers pop up and border fences are built and guarded …but in those fields and by the river, there are stories, Blue Town, oh, Blue Town
5 Blue Town // Jan 9, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Thanks Gene. I had never seen this response let alone the poem. It is not in the September poem archives. Rudy Garcia told me he had read the poem and that you had made some praising comments. I searched but did not find. So I stopped looking and started reading about No Pot. Fucked. Love , Jimmy. Lo and behold, at the end, there it is. Few people really understand
Bluetown, the location, like you and that makes you a very special man in my mind. Your beauty lies in the fact that these sentiments are shared by others as well, though perhaps for different, but similar, reasons. Our writing world down here has flourished with your presence. Think about it, five years ago what writing venues did we have? Now look at what we have because of you. Thanks for all you do. Thanks for being Gene Novogradsky, the man. Paz.
Blue Town
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