David and I were living on Peanut Butter Breakfast bars in his Hollywood and Bronson bedsit as I mixed my album on his two-track (like Waits with Bones Howe). My title for it was Shit-Stirring Songs, based on how my music was described by an Australian writer who read my short story ‘Cogs’ (early cyberpunk) in the semi-pro science fiction zine Space and Time (payment: seven dollars). David’s mother in Brooklyn would have none of that, so the title was changed to Stirring Songs. Got good reviews in Op and Flipside and a mean one in MRR. On David’s stereo, we played a lot of Phil Ochs and early Zappa and Tim Buckley, as I learned to work a capo. On suffocating smog-heat evenings, we’d blast songs like this, odes to who we were and what life meant.
Rolling Stones – “Hangfire” by Chris Estey
