Monthly Archives: January 2025

Edith Frost, In Space

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I’ve Been Looking Forward to this for a long time now. Yes, it’s still in its saran wrap, waiting for a moment when I can sit down & really listen. It’s due for release at the end of February, but I managed to get myself an early copy.

How, you may ask? Well, even if you didn’t here’s how. Back in 2017, I joined Mastodon because hey, everyone was doing it! (It turns out almost no one was doing it) then in 2022 when M*sk began burning Twitter down, people did start moving over in pretty good numbers. I was super-excited to see Thor Harris show up on Masto, as he’s one of Austin’s greatest treasures. If you don’t know about Thor, to put it in his words, “you’re fucked.” Love the guy. We’ve known each other from “around” since our respective bands played some gigs together at the end of the 80’s.

Anyway, although Thor’s presence on Mastodon was short, this lady who was friends with him kept popping up in my feed, so I followed her and we got to taking. She’s from Austin. She knew Phyllis, my favorite waitress from Xalapeño Charlies! where I was a cook in the early 80’s. Dang, I miss you Charlie. She knew Deborah Damm, my old hair stylist who tragically died in a car accident in the late 80s! (What a loss…) She traveled to Mexico a lot! This lady was cool, and we had some great talks. And she was trying to talk herself into playing out live again for the first time in 20 years. She thought I’d be the perfect bass player to help her get it together and get back on stage. I hemmed and hawed a bit.
Then she booked a gig. My entreaties of “I’m retired from working as a gigging bass player” were summarily ignored, and I got drafted. So since she had an album in the works, and a gig coming up, I was lucky enough to get to hear her demos, then some roughs as we were working up a set list for her show at Cheer Up Charlie’s last November. “But we need a drummer,” she said. “Why not ask Thor?” I said. “He’s too busy, he’d never,” she said. Anyway, Thor agreed to play drums & keys (one with each hand – this guy is something else) and we had us a nice trio going! The gig went really well. Right before we played, I walked up to Thor who was chatting with a friend, and he said “This is Steve Shelly. He was in a band called Sonic Youth.” (I plotzed) and it kind of dawned on my the stratosphere I was inhabiting for that one evening.

So I learned to play most of the songs on this album a year before it was released, and now I’m sorta savoring the idea of sitting down and hearing it all on a nice turntable, because these are really, really great songs. I was also overjoyed to see this on the back. Thanks Edith! You’re the best.

The Great Collapse

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I thought this would live on in legend and lore only, until I came across this slide last night quite by chance.
For the past year, I. have been archiving the vast slide collection of my old dear friend Gill Ediger, who for a while, was a part-owner of my old shop Vreeland Graphics. Most of them aren’t online yet – I’ve put a few on Facebook to enlist help ID’ing people, but I am less than 3000 pieces into a maybe 5000 piece project. I will get them all online, probably at Flickr some day relatively soon, in geological time.

So at somewhere around the 2300 mark of slides, I came upon this in a box of uncategorized stuff. Gill was an amazing handyman. He had an electrician’s license, he could weld, he was a carpenter of some repute, he could fly helicopters, and any number of things. He was a thinker- had a head full of ideas. And if you needed something moved — I helped him move a house 10 ft for Christ’s sake — he was your man… most of the time. After we bought our first automatic press, it became clear after not very long that we needed a better dryer, so we went to the bank, got an SBA loan, and lot’s of stuff had to be re-jiggered in our old building to make space for it. We needed to move an ink shelf. I lobbied for taking all the cans off, moving the shelf, and putting them back on. Gill said “No, no, no that’ll take way to long. I’ll handle this.” I sad “Fine, I’ve got to go to home depot.” Gill jacked up that shelf with all the ink on it, put it on the big yellow cart you can see behind me in this photo, and proceeded to roll it across the shop and around a corner to its new home. While rounding the corner, something went wrong.

When I walked back in from home depot, I was greeted by the image of an utterly defeated Gill (A thing that literally never happens) sitting on an upside down 5-gallon bucket with his face in his hands. Surrounded by upended ink cans, and a busted up shelf.

After a brief interlude of “What the fuck?” and “I just don’t know,” we determined there was nothing to do but laugh and get to work. Plastisol tends to move slowly when at rest, and we did salvage about 80 percent of the ink, and slowly wiped up the rest. Not long after we began the cleanup process, Gill managed to recover his sense of humor enough to determine we should at least have a picture of the scene. He filed it away, and we both forgot it had ever been taken, until I found it last night.

I am clearly trying to have the best attitude I can in this pic, and although Felicia, while playing along, looks considerably more nonplussed. Thus ever was our marriage.