Jim Basnight started recording in the late 70’s and led a pre-grunge original rock and roll scene in his native Seattle, before relocating to NYC in 1980.

The former Moberlys front man is a very hard working musician releasing countless albums in his prolific career.

Your career started with The Moberlys. How did the band get together?

Jim Basnight: At 19, after spending six months in NYC from April-September 1977, where I was able to see a lot of great acts at CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City and other venues, I returned to Seattle where I grew up. The first thing I did was to record a single with some guys I knew, including the late Bill Rieflin (Ministry, King Crimson, REM) on piano. That single, ‘Live In the Sun’ / ‘She Got Fucked’, got me a good local buzz there, as well as some nice attention in magazines like Trouser Press and NY Rocker.

From that attention, I was able to put together a very cool band, with bassist Steve Grindle, guitarist Ernie Sapiro and drummer Bill Walters. Our 2nd gig was at the famed Paramount Theater, opening for Greg Kihn and that version of the band was able to open for among others the Police, Dwight Twilley, Ray Campi and the Rockabilly Rebels, Blue Cheer and Jules and the Polar Bears. We also spearheaded a local original rock and roll scene, which laid a lot of the groundwork for much greater success in that town for original rock and roll.

We played gigs up until early 1980, when after a couple of local managers were unable to get us a record deal in LA, the band moved on. I stuck with it, releasing ‘The Moberlys’ LP posthumously of some of our best tracks, which later became the #3 “Underground Record” in Trouser Press in 1980 and was reviewed in among others, Rolling Stone, NY Rocker and Billboard. In early 1980 I joined a band of former Doug Kershaw sidemen, who had opened for the Rolling Stones in New Orleans, called the Pins and made enough money playing bars to move to NYC again in October 1980.

You’re originally from Seattle but moved to NYC in 1980. What led to this decision?

I was born in Philadelphia PA, but we moved to NYC, when I was an infant. We moved to Seattle when I was very young, but I remember NY. We lived in Corona, Queens, where my dad was teaching. My mom had a job, so I stayed with a neighbor family, who were first generation Italian immigrants. That was where I first heard rock and roll, because some of the older kids had some 45s. My mom bought some 45s in that time frame, stuff like ‘The Watusi’, ‘Bobby’s Girl’, ‘The Twist’, ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘Put Your Head On My Shoulder’. I was fascinated by music from a young age.

After we moved to Seattle, my parents got more records, like Pete Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Lenny Bruce and Roger Miller. My dad had a guitar, which he really didn’t play. I picked it up at age six or seven (1963-64). My dad had a guitar chord book with some protest songs like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. I learned that song first, by looking at the chord charts, which included fingerings. We went back to visit my grandma and my mom’s family in the Bronx and New Jersey when I was 10-11 in 1968.

I had gotten a transistor radio in early 1966 and was really into the top-40 by then, especially the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Raiders, the Buckinghams, the Rascals and all that kind of stuff. I was fascinated by a news stand near where we were staying in the Bronx at the Grand Concourse Hotel in the Bronx. It had a lot of rock and roll teen mags that I had not seen in Seattle on the newsstands at supermarkets and drug stores.

It seemed like everyone was very excited about the Who, who I loved from their song ‘I Can See For Miles’ and others. After we get back to Seattle, I formed a band and lucked into a huge stack of 45s, by trading cherry bombs for them with a local boy who had gotten them from his older brother. That stack of 45s included a lot of NW teen dance circuit acts like the Sonics, Wailers, Ventures and Dynamics. But I was more interested in school when I was a pre-teen.

I played guitar for fun and collected records, but was more into school, playing basketball, chess, et cetera. That changed in 1971, when I started really getting into glam rock, via Alice Cooper, T-Rex and later David Bowie. Through Bowie I naturally got into Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges, Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, Slade and all the other glam rock acts. I put together a glam rock band, doing covers of those acts with a high school chum Paul Hood and a couple of kids from another high school who we met at concerts.

That band played a gig at my high school in 1975 (my senior year), at the school talent show and made quite a splash. We split up, but Paul and I joined up with another school mate Lee Lumsden and my then girlfriend Jenny Skirvin (Brott) to form my first all original music band the Meyce in late ’75. The Meyce played their first gig with two groundbreaking Seattle bands the Tupperwares and the Telepaths on May 1st 1976, in what was the first DIY “Punk Rock” show on the West Coast and a week before the first such show in London.

New York was where the Punk “Scene” was centered and had been percolating, going back to 1970 when Suicide first used the term “Punk” in music in 1970. The Meyce played a number of other legendary shows in Seattle over the next 10 months, playing their last date opening for the Ramones on their first Seattle show on March 6th 1977. It was the first Seattle show by a national touring “Punk” act too. After that, I was so encouraged by the reaction from the Ramones and disillusioned with Seattle at the time, that I moved to NYC within a month at 19.

In NY I saw a lot of great shows and met many important people, but by late summer I was heading back to Seattle. I already told you that story, but when I moved back to NY in 1980, I had already had quite a lot of history with the place. I decided to go back, because I was getting good press there from my single and album and I felt it was a good time to give it another go. Plus I loved the place and the music tradition there.

So I moved there in October of 1980 and started looking for musicians to form a band, as well as possibly solo gigs or gigs backing other folks. I put ads in the Village Voice and started putting records in stores and sending promos to publications. The rest is history.

Tell us about the making of The Moberlys debut album.

The band got together, after I tried out a series of situations, with various friends and musical acquaintances in 1978. My single (‘Live In The Sun’ / ‘She Got Fucked’) created a lane for me to interest quite a few players, but I did only one gig with any of those groups of folks. That was the Mentors, who were high school friends. I did a cameo in one of their sets, performing ‘She Got Fucked’ and ‘Make A Baby’, at the Bird, Seattle’s first “Punk” club in early ’78.

Jim Basnight promo picture for his first single, ‘Live In The Sun’ / ‘She Got Fucked’

I learned a whole set with a group, which included former Meyce drummer Lee Lumsden, which we tentatively called Jim Basnight and the Pop Tarts and had a scheduled date at the Bird, but the club closed and the show never happened. Finally, I decided to go with bassist Steve Grindle, who was in Jax, a working cover band at the time with guitarist Richard McGrath who went on to True West and guitarist Jack Johnson, who went on to the Flamin’ Groovies, SVT (with Jack Cassidy of Jefferson Airplane) and the Yanks.

Steve knew drummer Bill Walters, who had been in a local band called Tyson Riff, with Steve Pearson who went on to be in the Heats, a huge local band in the 80’s. I knew guitarist Jeff Cerar, who went on to be in the other biggest local early 80’s Seattle band the Cowboys and the four of us cut a five song demo in the summer of 1978 at a local studio, owned by local musician Mick Flynn. Grindle didn’t think Jeff was right, so we brought in Bill’s former bandmate Pearson, with whom we did one gig opening for the Mentors in the fall of 1978 on the University of Washington campus.

That would be the only date that we’d do with Pearson, as Grindle was once again not enthused. We then started rehearsing with another friend of Grindle and Walters, Don Short for a few rehearsals in Bill’s parent’s suburban home’s basement. Don owned a PA and wanted to work clubs to pay it off, so he decided against the Moberlys and instead formed the Heats (originally Heaters, but they changed their name because of the LA based three-piece all-girl power pop band who put out two albums on Ariola and Columbia in 1978 and 1980 respectively).

We then tried out Ben Rabinowitz, who was good, but in his mid-late teens at the time. Ben and I had been good friends and stayed involved musically together until he tragically passed on in 2001 from cancer. Rabinowitz and I went on to write ‘Summertime Again’ and ‘Hello Mary Jane’, two consistent standards of my performing career. We also wrote a song, which I re-wrote as ‘Middle of the Night’ in the mid-90’s, with the help of my bandmates in the Rockinghams (my current band then).

Ben needed to be picked up and taken home, couldn’t drive and had to go to high school, so Steve decided that he wasn’t suitable for those reasons and because Ben was a little too cocky. I trusted Steve’s judgement as he was seven years my senior and much more experienced in the world of rock and roll. After all of these great guitarist candidates, we finally landed on Ernie Sapiro, who had gone to my high school and also played with Uncle Cookie, a band who had shared bills with the Meyce.

Ernie fit extremely well and the band was set. We rehearsed hard before playing a gig, making sure we were really tight before going up in front of audiences. We did one trial gig as an opener for a local band in an out of the way tavern, then debuted at the Paramount Theater opening for Greg Kihn. The Paramount was the premier concert venue in Seattle, below the level of major arenas. We followed that up with opening slots with a number of other touring acts (which I detailed earlier) and soon were able to get in Pacific West studio, financed by Brian Fox. a friend who I met through us both working at record stores.

We recorded four songs there, one of which ‘Blow Your Life Away’, ended up on ‘The Moberlys’ LP. We also started playing some club dates at the Rainbow Tavern, as the club’s owner Steve Hudziak was helping us with our business. We were also working with John Strawn, who worked for a management and production company called Beaux Arts, who had promoted some great shows like Lou Reed in 1976 at the Paramount and the New York Dolls at the Moore Theater in 1974.

Strawn had gotten us the Greg Kihn gig, as well as some other opening gigs for national acts. I got us an opening slot for Jules (Shear) and the Polar Bears at the University of Washington, through my contacts there and Hudziak got us a few cool opening gigs for touring acts at the Rainbow, including Blue Cheer and Ray Campi and the Rockabilly Rebels. We weren’t making much money, but we were a big deal in town, getting lots of press locally.

I had to keep a day job at Tower Records to make ends meet, but lost it, because I was putting so much energy into the band. I had no income to speak of, but was living with my girlfriend. We got a gig opening for ‘The Last Waltz’ at a Seattle movie theater, from one of the top FM rock radio stations for one of their promotions through Strawn and through that got a job opening for rock and roll movies in the suburban hardtop, the Edmonds Theater.

We opened for The Girl Can’t Help It and others, while the Cowboys and the Heats, as well as other acts we were associated with and by our recommendation were booked there as well. The local papers started promoting this heavily, as at the time there wasn’t any club scene available to original rock and roll acts in Seattle, except the Rainbow which was more often blues, bluegrass and outlaw country. The Heats and the Cowboys went on to launch huge success locally in clubs as all the nightclubs which had been for cover bands only opened up to these “New Wave” bands, which in their case were 50% original.

We decided to not play covers or dance tunes and enter the club sweepstakes that we essentially created a springboard for. So I was still broke, as were the other Moberlys who struggled to support themselves. Strawn introduced me to Ned Neltner, who fronted a huge local band for the older crowd (around 5-10 years older than us) called Junior Cadillac. Ned offered to produce the Moberlys and got us a spec deal (the studio time fronted on the promise of a payout if the band gets signed) at Holden, Hamilton and Roberts Studios, co-owned by Paul Revere and (‘Angel of the Morning’) Merrilee’s ex-husband Neil Rush.

It was there we recorded the rest of the studio tracks on ‘The Moberlys’ LP. The station (KZOK-FM) which booked us with ‘The Last Waltz’ booked us to do a live in the studio performance with a packed audience which they gave away tickets on the radio at Triangle Studios. The tapes came out great and the five live songs on ‘The Moberlys’ came from that 90-minute performance. Strawn took the Neltner tapes to LA in an attempt to get us a major label record deal.

He got some response from Planet Records, who at that time signed the Plimsouls and some others, but was unable to get a deal on the first go ’round with the band. Strawn got us a gig opening for the Police at the Paramount and a lawyer from Portland named Jay Isaac who was at the gig approached me. He said he would like to do more recordings of the band in Portland at a studio he was involved in and that our tracks were good, but could be done better by a friend of his.

The dialog continued and he offered to buy me a train ticket to Portland to hang out with him and see the studio, which I accepted. I liked the idea, because in my mind, I felt that getting recordings done was expensive, I had no money and if we got something better that might help us get signed. The band reacted differently, that we should remain loyal to Ned. I loved Ned (still do) and thought he did a great job, but we had plenty of great songs and my thought was that one of the unrecorded songs might be the thing that helped us break through.

I was overruled and we did a few more shows, but we were all broke and in my case I had been doubling down on something happening to allow me to avoid getting a day job, so I could focus all my energy on the band and the songs. Drummer Bill left the band, because he was too broke and couldn’t afford to drive to rehearsals and Steve, Ernie and I got our friend (the late) Bill Rieflin (later of Ministry, REM and King Crimson) to fill in on drums until we found a permanent member.

Bill was another friend from my high school like Ernie and Rabinowitz, in fact I had met Bill through Ben and his brother Dan. Bill played with us on a big gig at the Seattle Center for KZOK with the Cowboys and the Girls, another group of our friends (some of them from my high school). It was a fantastic show and it was recorded by the folks at Triangle, who had recently merged with a guy named Bill Stuber who had a mobile recording studio in a truck.

Sadly, they wanted $200 for the master tapes which were on two 2-inch reels. I put them off for as long as I could, but finally they decided to use them for another project because I could not afford to pay and neither Steve nor Ernie had the money either. I did get a cassette they ran live as they were cutting the show live to 2″ with everything on stage miked up for a potential radio broadcast, which I don’t believe ever happened.

Shortly after that, Ernie decided he wanted to join an R&B cover band, with one of the owners of the Edmonds Theater, which worked occasionally on weekends close to his home, so it was easier for him to maintain his day job in a restaurant. So it was Steve and I. We decided to try to put together a working band, to get in on the burgeoning scene that the Cowboys and Heats had been mining for decent dough, but Steve’s heart was more into rockabilly, so after a couple of gigs with a couple of drummers, including former Dynamic Ron Woods under the name the Locomotives, Grindle joined the rootsy Magnetics.

The Magnetics had gigs, which was great for Steve, but I was not sure what my next move was. After a couple of gigs with the Dinks, a band who played frat gigs at the University of Washington, I joined the Pins, who had recently been Doug Kershaw’s backing band (as I mentioned earlier). Brian Fox had approached me about releasing an album of the best of the Moberlys recordings and I worked with Bill Stuber to compile the tapes for the record pressing company in LA, Rainbo Records, who also mastered it.

A friend of Steve’s Cindy Crandall took a photo of us at the Rainbow taken by Bob Kondrak and made a black and white painting of it, which served as the cover art and we used another photo by Curt Ruthruff for the back photo art. We all signed the artwork at a local record store, so it looked like the album was autographed and that was the cover. Brian threw a record release party when the record hit the stores in January 1980, where Steve, Bill, Ernie and I played a great show, but the band would not return.

It was a great band, but we all moved on to other things, other than me. I used the album as a showcase for my songs moving forward and a starting point for a 2nd version of the band. When it was reviewed favorably in some national rags, I took records I had from the first pressing with me to NYC and got them in all the cool stores in Manhattan. After they sold through, I repressed the album, with the name “Jim Basnight and” preceding “The Moberlys” on the cover and sold that entire pressing through independent distributors and at NYC, as well as NW record stores, on trips back to visit.

At that point I was based in NYC and had put together a new version of the Moberlys there for NYC players, using the album as a calling card to get local gigs. The album did me a lot of good. It could have been a lot better, had we done that recording session with Jay Isaac, but he also wanted to change the name of the band to James and the Names, which I didn’t like. He also wasn’t that big on a lot of what I thought was cool about the band, wanting us to sound more polished and modern.

I remember going through his record collection when I visited Portland to see him. I saw all the big rock albums of the day (1979), but instead of putting any of those on his turntable I put an old Monkees album he had. He thought that was weird and that the band needed to sound modern and not like the 60’s. I didn’t agree. Ned liked the 60’s sound and played me the Kinks and the Sonics, as what he thought we should go for as a band sound.

It may not have worked out all that great, but I thought it was worth doing. It would have been hard to make that band sound “Modern”. If we didn’t get a big record deal, having more tracks to pick from might have made “The Moberlys” album even better than it was. Gaining possession of the 2″ reels from when we played with Rieflin would have been interesting too. That could have possibly been a nice project to mix those multi tracks to make some really cool live tracks.

All in all, I did the best I could to do good work and leave the best album I could to document the band and that period of my music.

How would you describe the scene in Seattle back then? Where did you play and what are some of the bands you shared stages with?

Seattle had a very bad attitude toward original music in the 1970’s. The 60’s had yielded so much promise. So many important acts and innovations had come from the NW. That, I could talk about for a long time, but what happened in the era of the San Francisco Scene (1966-67) was that original acts were encouraged to go there instead of make it out of Seattle. Bands like the Sonics became lounge acts, to survive, because the prevailing attitude was that their music was passe and unhip, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Jimi Hendrix was a huge figure in American Music history and his being from Seattle and having to go away to make it, accented the notion that Seattle was run by a bunch of squares with very little vision and rather unhip, where the facts were there were a lot of very hip people from the NW. But it was very true that as time moved from the 60’s teen dance circuit into the club scene of the 70’s, a very conservative approach to music promotion in the NW became the norm.

Bands were discouraged from doing original music and encouraged to play danceable music for club goers, with an acute focus on commercialism. Seattle was run by some of the same folks who came up through the vibrant teen dance circuit in the 60’s, but for some reason became much more conservative and outright square when they got older. They did not encourage young artists to write songs and make records.

They rewarded those who would do covers and drive all over WA, OR, MT, ID, WY, UT and BC doing covers, to make money covering the rock stars of the classic rock era. The few acts who did sustain to get signed to major labels were very derivative, most notably Heart who were only unique in that they were fronted by two sisters, otherwise a Led Zeppelin copy act. Others covered blues, much like British acts like Foghat, Savoy Brown, Humble Pie and of course bigger names like Fleetwood Mac, The Faces and the Stones, but there was superficiality.

It was like they were driving in sports cars, with huge PA’s, lighting systems and road crews, just to be camp followers of the rock stars who dominated the local FM radio airwaves. They were rewarded for this, but not much, other than Heart broke through with an original tune or more importantly a sound. Heart was certainly the best and I’m not trying to put them down as not a great band with good songs, but what they did was not new territory.

They were all big stars locally and rejected any notion that what they were doing was a dead end. My bands and others in our crowd of folks, who hung around record stores in the U-District, had dreams of being cutting edge original pop and rock bands (or anti-rock and anti-pop, if you will) with unique sounds and not at all a camp followers of the arena rock world. My band the Meyce, the Telepaths and the Tupperwares came out of this scene and put on the first DIY “Punk” show on the west coast, as I’ve mentioned on May 1st 1976.

The Meyce stayed together, but replaced my girlfriend Jenny (then Skirvin) Brott with Tupperwares guitarist Pam Lillig. Tupperwares drummer Eldon Hoke formed the Mentors. Ben Rabinowitz, who I mentioned earlier, stuck with school and went off to college, though he later did a stint in the Moberlys in 1983, when I was still back and forth from NYC and appeared in the studio when we recorded in Vancouver BC at Mushroom Studios that year.

Two songs from those sessions were released as a single, which I ran around NYC with in late ’83 and got more excellent coverage from among numerous others the Village Voice, Trouser Press and Billboard. Ben also played in my last band I put together in LA, which went out as the Jim Basnight Band and also the Skyscrapers in 1991-92, after the Moberlys had split. Ben and I were really close and he and I wrote well together.

Rabinowitz stayed on in LA and played with a number of folks, including Maria McKee, as well as pursued a career as a rock journalist, which he also excelled at. Sadly Ben passed away in 2001 from cancer, but he left me some great memories in songs that we worked on together, as I’ve mentioned prior. The other Tupperwares, Tomata du Plenty, Melba Toast and Rio de Janeiro (all stage names), were older boys. Ben, Pam and Eldon were all school mates of mine at Roosevelt High School in Seattle.

The other three Tupperwares had been involved in an underground Seattle Band which had done some performances in Seattle, mostly with the LGBTQ culture in the early 70’s and had performed opening for legendary “Glitter Rock” or “Glam” shows which made it to Seattle, like Alice Cooper in the early 70’s, before his arena career and the New York Dolls in 1974. Those three older Tupperwares moved to Los Angeles, shortly after the May 1st ’77 show.

Rio left the act and Tomata and Melba (who changed his name to Tommy Gear), joined with a couple of LA musicians and became the Screamers, who are widely credited as LA “Punk” pioneers and scene innovators. Geoff Cade, who had been in the Loverboys with Paul and I and Dean Helgeson from Geoff’s High School Rainier Beach, left the Telepaths by ’77 to form the Feelings with a variety of friends of ours including singer Greg Ragan and Pam’s sister Diana Lillig.

Soon Helgeson was back on drums with fellow Rainier Beach grad Jack Hanan on bass, Geoff switching to guitar. The Feelings were a potent, very good rock and roll band, while the Telepaths drifted further in an avant-garde art rock direction. Curt and Erich Werner were joined by Rieflin, Homer Spence (an older cat, around Tomata’s age) and a couple of bassists Alan McNabb and Mike Davidson. Singer Gregor Gayden left the Telepaths and later formed a punk band in 1977-78 called the Look.

Geoff and Greg feuded a lot and Greg’s early 70’s Iggy like volatility, as well as Geoff’s eccentricity and moodiness, plus perhaps a little drug use, led to the two of them splitting up and the band sustaining with Geoff, Dean, Jack, while replacing Greg with Ian Fisher and adding Reid Vance to create a bigger rock sound with a rhythm guitarist to support Geoff’s Stonesy, Dollsy, 70’s glammish guitar style. Meanwhile the Mentors were gigging around doing their hilarious “Rape Rock” show in black hoods and with staged moments involving various “Whipping Women.”

There was also another former associate and older boy named Satz, who had worked with the older Tupperwares in that early Seattle “Glitter Rock” act, Ze Whiz Kidz. He formed a great “Punk Rock” act called the Lewd, who were financed and backed by another schoolmate of ours from Roosevelt, Robert Bennett. Bennett had also helped promote the Ramones, the first time they played in Seattle, which was the first time a touring “Punk” band of national status had played in Seattle.

Jim Basnight at the Roosevelt High School Talent Show in 1975

The Meyce opened for the Ramones on that show on March 6th 1977, which was our last show, as I mentioned earlier. There was also another band, which played the cover circuit doing early “New Wave,” as well as current commercial rock called Uncle Cookie. They also put out an early single at around the same time as my first 45 and another band which never played live much called the S’Nots. The S’Nots was made up of some guys who had been associated with Satz before he formed the Lewd in a band called Satz and the 16 Year-Old Virgins.

They had gotten their photo in Rock Scene Magazine in a monthly column titled More New Bands, which featured glam acts from around the country, mostly in NY and Hollywood, but some from the provinces. But because Seattle had literally no platform for this music, they had never gigged, other than some rumored private events. Reiflin also played in the S’nots, who was basically a recording project and most of who played on my single came from guys involved with them.

Sax player Mark Bowen also performed on my 45. He had been in the Satz and the 16 Year-Old Virgins band, but was not in the S’nots to my knowledge. Mark was close friends with them. Drummer Drake Eubanks seemed to be the ring leader and he played drums on my 45, as well as on the S’nots 45, which came out about the same time as mine. The bass player was a very young kid from Bellevue named Sheldon Gomberg, who I believe had been engaged somehow when they backed Satz.

Sheldon played bass on my single. Rieflin played guitar on the S’nots record, but played piano on one side of my single. I played all the guitars and sang lead vocals alone on one side of my 45. On the other side I brought in a chorus of boys to sing backing vocals. I don’t remember all of them, but one was Phil Bradford, a kid I made friends with in the U-District. Another was Art Champion, a friend of mine from the neighborhood where I grew up called Greenlake.

That might have been everyone, though I might have forgotten someone. Uncle Cookie’s guitarist was Ernie, who I mentioned. He later joined the Moberlys. The bassist was Conrad Uno, who later played a key role in the Seattle Scene of the late 80’s and 90’s with his label Popllama Records and his Recording Studio Egg Productions. Another member of Uncle Cookie was Mark Sargent, who went on to have a great pop band in the early 80’s in Seattle called Mondo Vita.

Their drummer was named Max Campbell. They were well represented in their poster art by a cool artist named Carl Smool and a great soundman named Mark Wheaton, who moved to LA and had a nice career there as a journalist, photographer and art director. Mark and his brother Brock were also in an early Seattle punk, art rock band called Chinas Comidas (common NY “barrio” signage for Chinese Food, food from Chinese immigrants from the Caribbean) with a female singer named Cynthia Genser (Chinas), along with Dag Midtskog.

There was also another group of older guys, led in spirit by a promoter and impresario named Ed Shepard. He had a venue called the Funhole in Seattle, which was basically an art studio. The Mentors practiced there quite a bit, as did a band of Seattle veteran rockers Roland Rock. One member of Roland Rock was bassist Marty Frazu, who went on to lead the Frazz, a sixties rock cover band in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

The Frazz formed with former Lewd Drummer John Nay and a couple former Chinas Comidas members (I don’t remember their names, but they were male and female and had long hair), after Brock and Mark moved to LA, I believe with Chinas and the band’s guitarist and her boyfriend Rich Riggins. Another art rock band, on the funky side, kind of like Captain Beefheart emerged called Red Dress, with Gary Minkler as lead singer and future Pin Bill Shaw on drums.

But before these bands were around, The Meyce and Uncle Cookie played a few shows together. in late 1976. The most memorable of those shows was at the Neptune Theater. A promoter, connected with KZAM FM Radio in Seattle, built a stage in this U-District Theater, with the intention of doing original bands for all age audiences after the scheduled movies. As far as I know that show was the only one. I’m not sure why, but that stage stayed in place for many years and sometime in the late 90’s or early 2000’s major shows started playing the Neptune, which became largely a concert venue in the last 20 or so years.

We were desperate to create a platform for our rock and roll creativity. At that Neptune show, a number of musicians came to see us. Guys who had been working in cover bands, playing the mid-70’s Seattle working rockstar game. One of them was Steve Pearson. Another was Bruce Hazen. Both of those guys later became important people in my life. Steve played in the early Moberlys as I mentioned and went on to be in a really great original band from Seattle, who should have made it big called the Heats.

Bruce and I have been kindred spirits ever since and Hazen has played with me a lot over the years, on stage and in the studio, most recently with a new version of the Moberlys with Jack Hanan and drummer Zeppy Zittle. Ian Fisher, along with Jack and early Moberlys guitarist formed the Cowboys, after they split off from Geoff and Reid with Dean, Cade re-uniting with Greg and guitarist Rob Vasquez. The Feelings never somehow made it out of the garage, but the Cowboys were a huge success, similar to the Heats.

Somehow the Cowboys never got the big deal either, despite being huge in Seattle, probably bigger than the Heats at times; kind of neck and neck. Pam Lillig after the Meyce went on to form the Girls with singer songwriter Rick Smith and fellow Roosevelt High musicians Marty Waychoff and Brent Pennington.The Girls were an all original act that didn’t quite make it as big as the Cowboys, but were really good. They had a bass player named Tim Leahy.

By the early 80’s the Girls split up into the Lonesome City Kings and the Deans. In the Lonesome City Kings, Ernie joined up with Rick, along with Mark Guenther, a drummer who had played in Mark Sargent’s post Uncle Cookie band the Features and keyboardist Paul Brownlow. In the Deans it was Pam and bassist Al Bloch (from the high school just north or Roosevelt, Nathan Hale), along with drummer Criss Crass, another Roosevelt High school school mate.

Al’s brother Kurt and he had a band in 1978-79 called the Cheaters, with two other Nathan Hale boys, singer Scott Dittmon and Dave Shumate. After I had been in NY for a while I asked Al to come out there to play with me and he did. Kurt meanwhile joined with two girls from Nathan Hale, who I knew from the glam era, Kim Warnick and Lulu Gargiulo, to form the Fastbacks with a teenage drummer from Roosevelt Duff McKagan.

By the early 80’s there were other mostly original Seattle bands, like the Visible Targets, who moved to Seattle from Yakima and were eventually produced by Mick Ronson. There was Next Exit, who moved to Seattle from Spokane. There were the Allies, who came out of the cover band scene, but wrote great rock and roll tunes and became very popular, along the lines of the Heats and the Cowboys in the bars by the early 80’s.

There was the Pudz, which featured singer Rob Morgan, another early glam kid who I knew from the U-District and early glam rock concerts in Seattle. The Pudz drummer was Dave Drewry, who later also joined me in NYC in the early 80’s. Dave and I went way back to when I took a bus all the way to Bellevue to meet him in 1975. Dave was also in the Girls, the Lewd and many other bands including Clone. Clone featured Chuck Gera, who had many stage names and also put out an early Seattle punk 45.

Sheldon was a friend of Dave’s from Bellevue and he also played in Clone, post S’nots. There were so many more bands back then. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of them, but one more I’ll mention was the Dynette Set. That was a band that became a big hit in the bars, when the Heats, Cowboys, Allies, Hi Fi (with Hazen and former Matthews Southern Comfort front man Ian Matthew and former Pavlov’s Dog front man David Surkamp), Visible Targets and Portland’s Billy Rancher were all major nightclub hits.

Drewry was in the Dynette Set, along with future REM member Scott McCaughey, Pennington, guitarist Bill Larsen and three women front singers, Riki Mafune, Shelly Stockstill (who replaced Leslie Swanson) and Scott’s wife Christy McWilson. They did almost all cover songs. They were hip though, in that they all either worked at record stores and/or were big record collectors. Kind of like Manhattan Transfer were to the 40’s, they were to the 60’s girl group sound and some Motown and R+B selections like ‘What’d I Say’.

The Moberlys reformed in 1984 with Drewry and two members, who were friends of his from Bellevue, Glenn Oyabe and Toby Keil. We attempted to make it in this club scene, while holding tight to our original music ambitions. It was not the easiest thing to do, as the powers that be in Seattle weren’t all that thrilled about us horning in on their market share. So we had to start our own little niche, which we did at a downtown club called the Central.

In 1985 we moved to LA, the Heats had broken up and Pearson had joined with the Pins to become the Rangehoods. The Lonesome City Kings and the Cowboys had merged into the Cowboys. The Seattle Scene, none of whom had gotten a break from the majors, was grinding to a close. Young bands like the Fartz, U-Men, the Fags, Mr Epp, Malfunkshun, the Bondage Boys and the Trids were doing cool original glam/punkish music, some with more metal influence than the mainstream Seattle acts, but it was not showcased too aggressively in the top clubs which were packing out for the Heats, Cowboys, et cetera,

They had to create their own scene and a lot of them gravitated to the Central after we left, as well as the Metropolis and a former gay bar called Wrex, later the Vogue. We created a scene at the Central that was open to Garage Rock, with a little late 70’s Punk Rock and early 70’s Glam Rock mixed in and a lot of those bands fit comfortably into that scenery. We were in Hollywood, seeking fame and fortune, but mostly writing and recording up a storm, while gigging around town there, again trying to carve out our niche.

It was 1986 and the Cowboys had broken up. That scene was all but gone, but a new one was just about to take off. Some of us who had worked to build up the original scene in the late 70’s and enjoyed some work locally in it in the early 80’s were included, some of us moved on and some of us were deliberately excluded. That was the “Grunge” scene, which finally broke punk big and was the center of the rock and roll world by the early 90’s.

You reformed the band once again later on and recorded ‘Sexteen’.

While I was in NYC I found it hard to find players who got my sound, so I tried to get some Seattle guys to come out to form the core of a band with the guitar player I was working with in NY, Jeremy Bar-Illan. I thought Jeremy was a good fit for my stuff and he and I fit well together.

When I first got to NYC I auditioned for a few bands and auditioned a few musicians, including Thomas Giordano from Manster, who were a band on the “Live at CBGBs” album in 1976. Giordano was good friends with Genya Ravan and he gave her the Moberlys album, which she reportedly liked.

But he was unreliable and always showed up stoned. Finally I found a drummer named Michael Trullinger, who knew me from Seattle, having seen the Moberlys. We auditioned bass players and settled on Adny Shernoff of the Dictators, but he decided not to do it after a few rehearsals.

After that I found Charlie Gregory (Gregory Morongell) in a want-ad, who seemed serious and appeared to be professional, or at least aspiring to be. Trullinger said he found a guitar player at his day job, who was cool and had some good contacts and that was Jeremy.

Charlie, Michael and I did a couple of gigs before Jeremy, including a Christmas (1980) party for a bunch of folks who worked at Rolling Stone. Then we added Jeremy and did a few more gigs and a demo at a studio owned by a band on Atlantic called 3-D.

As I mentioned, I didn’t like the sound. While I was home visiting my family in early 1981, I did some pickup gigs with Dave Drewry and former Moberlys drummer Bill Walters and bassist Al Bloch, which sounded a lot better.

I convinced Dave to come out to NY first and he rehearsed with Jeremy and Charlie and did a gig there. So Charlie, Jeremy, our manager Mark Ross and I flew out to Seattle to play a run of dates with Dave on drums.

The Seattle dates went well and we all had a good time. We returned to NY and did a few great gigs with that lineup, including a huge gig opening for the Romantics at the Savoy, but it was hard to get Dave to commit to getting a day job in NY.

So he ran out of money and returned to Seattle and we replaced him with Doug Kelly, a drummer from Maryland, who I found in a want ad. Charlie, Doug, Jeremy and I started doing some gigs together and got some interest from an A+R guy at Elektra Records named Victor Sherrel, who worked under Maxanne Sartori, a former Seattle DJ at KOL-FM.

Maxanne moved to Boston to take a job at a big Boston FM rock station in the early 70’s, where she more or less discovered Aerosmith. Victor liked us and Ross was well connected, as his dad was the Chairman of the Board of Warner Communications and he knew everyone of major importance in the record business at all of the WEA labels.

I was not thrilled by the sound that Doug and Charlie were producing though. We played a huge party at the Savoy for Mark’s sister Tony’s birthday and everyone from David Geffen to Frank Sinatra was there, I was told.

I kept going back to the gut feeling in my heart that the pickup gigs on trips to Seattle with bassist Al Bloch and Drewry sounded a lot better. So, I convinced Bloch to move out to NYC, which he did and we replaced Charlie.

Charlie was mad and I think it ticked off Mark, as they were friends, but we sounded better. Doug though was still hard to play with, as he tended to rush a lot of my stuff. I think Charlie actually kept him under control better than Al, who was not thrilled.

Dave had a much better handle on it, so I convinced Dave to give NY another chance. As this was happening, Mark decided to go to college instead of managing a rock and roll band. I don’t know if his dad made him or what the deal was, but he was no longer there to help us out, though still a friend.

But Victor was still interested, as were a few other of Mark’s connections, including Jason Flom, another young A+R guy from Atlantic and Earl McGrath from Rolling Stones Records. We played a bunch of great gigs, including Johnny Thunders 30th birthday, where Johnny got up with the other band and did a cameo set and we did one of his songs in tribute.

Sherrel was there and really liked us. Sartori had seen Doug, Al, Jeremy and I at a showcase gig and not been convinced, though she was willing to check us out again. Victor was going to get her to come see us ASAP.

We played a bunch of cool gigs in Connecticut and a few in New Jersey, as well as a number in Manhattan. We cut some tracks at Skyline Studios in Manhattan with my friend Roger Moutenot and did a cool photo shoot with a top photographer.

We were living in Brooklyn. Dave was still unwilling to get a job, but Al got one and I found a really cheap place for the three of us to live in a summer (1982) sublet in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. One Sunday, we decided to take a walk down to downtown Brooklyn.

I had never had any problem, but I had also learned how to act on the streets of NY a bit more defensively perhaps than a couple of new kids from Seattle. Bad idea, as we got jumped by some rough kids, who decided that Al would be fun to mess with, because he was the biggest one of us and I couldn’t de-escalate the situation.

They beat him up really badly. After that, Al decided to move back to Seattle and Dave did too, mainly because he was broke (probably scared) and didn’t want to get a job. So, the whole idea of getting a band with these guys and Jeremy fell through and Victor seemed to lose interest as well, when he found that out.

All the personnel changes may have rubbed him or Elektra the wrong way. Jeremy and I picked up a rhythm section in Bill and Lou (from a band called the Locals), who I had been working with, in Anne Deon’s band (who I knew first as Alan Vega’s girlfriend, but at that time she was also dating David Johansen).

By then Jeremy was also going to college, at Columbia. Mark started at Tufts and by then had transferred to UCLA, where he was also given a position at Atlantic Records. We did a few good gigs, including a cool show at a Columbia frat party.

But I was growing weary of how hard it was to pursue music in NYC, while needing to find a place to live and keep a steady income. I was living in a crummy hotel with a lot of cockroaches and working hard jobs, while trying to keep the band together, book gigs and make contacts.

Genya Ravan got back to me and offered to produce a two song demo with me, just after Bill and Lou quit, because I was having too many problems just getting anything together. Jeremy then quit, stating that it was my entire fault that things had gone the way they had for the band (we were always called the Moberlys).

That if I would have just stuck with the program with Mark and Charlie we would have gotten signed, rather than involve these guys from Seattle who weren’t equipped or motivated to make a go of it in NY. He was probably right, but I went with my gut on that for musical reasons.

As it turns out, I was right, as Drewry and I got a great sound together eventually back in Seattle and LA in the next couple of years and the tracks we cut at Skyline were also the best thing I did in NYC studios. A guy from Connecticut named Brad Morrison offered to manage me and offered me a place to live in Connecticut while I got it together to do the demo with Genya.

He had booked us some dates in Connecticut with a band called the Stratford Survivors. I really liked them, especially the drummer Mike Czekaj. So I moved to Connecticut, which was about an hour or so from Manhattan on the train. Brad put me together with the Stratford Survivors and booked us a couple of gigs, with me fronting them.

We did a lot of punk and glam rock covers, as well as some 60’s standards, including some Sonics tunes; that and as many of my tunes as I could get them to learn. We did the session with Genya and cut a new song of mine then, ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ and a cover that Johnny Thunders told me he really liked of ours, ‘Treat Her Right’.

Johnny ended up doing it on his 1988 album ‘Copy Cats’, but I have no idea if my version was an inspiration. I’d like to think it was. I also filled in on bass for Johnny in the summer of 1982 and jammed with him on acoustic guitars when we lived in the same building together on 30th and 8th Avenue (when I was crashing at Anne’s in between places to stay.

The Genya session went poorly, as she didn’t like the bass player and brought in a session guy. She also brought in a violin player to play a rock guitar sounding solo on ‘Treat Her Right’. I thought it sounded cool, but she was disappointed that my band wasn’t together at that time. Since then she has become more of a fan of my work.

I was also playing a lot with Anne Deon, doing a lot of cool gigs, including opening up for Billy Idol at Danceteria. I got to know Billy a little through Vega (who he idolized). His guitar player Steve Stevens was rather nice to me, stating to Anne that I was really good and always being friendly.

I also used to see Madonna a lot at Danceteria, which I used to frequent, because I had friends who would let me in there. I tried to get Mike to join up with me and start another NY Moberlys, but he decided to stick with his guys in Connecticut.

Strangely enough, it was the Sonics tune, ‘The Witch’, which he learned from playing with me and that the Stratford Survivors started playing regularly after playing with me, that impressed Rudi Protrudi, when Mike auditioned for the Fuzztones a year or so later.

I liked the bass player in the Stratford Survivors, but Genya didn’t, so that was that. I felt the tape was cool, but again there was no band. Meanwhile, I was having a very hard time making it in Connecticut. It was very cold and I was living in a very tough neighborhood in Bridgeport, not known as a glamorous place among Connecticut folk.

It was really about as tough as downtown Brooklyn and it was really cold outside. I didn’t have any money and got in over my head in debt to Brad and his friend who he set me up with a place to live. So I left my record collection with Brad and headed to Seattle in early 1983, to try to figure something out.

Dave was interested in playing with me on the side, when the Dynette Set wasn’t working, because he was making pretty good bread with them, while living at home. So I took him up on it and we started working as a three piece with a guy who had subbed for his earlier band the Pudz named Mark Sczerba on bass.

Al had already started a band called the Bombadiers and was happy doing that. I needed a break from NYC anyway and Alan Vega wanted me to play guitar in his band. Vega said he would fly me back to NY soon, so I just worked on new songs and played a few gigs around the Dynette Set’s schedule with Dave and Mark for a few months, waiting to see what would happen next.

We went to Vancouver to open for the Dynette Set and ended up getting a gig with the Modernettes, who I really liked. I’d seen them in 1978, when I brought my single up to Vancouver record stores and again in 1980, when I brought up ‘The Moberlys’ LP.

They came down and did a gig with The Queen Annes and us, some friends of Dave’s from Bellevue, at a rented hall in Seattle. Ben Rabinowitz then joined the band and we started sounding better as a three piece.

Plus Ben and I started writing a few tunes, including ‘Summertime Again’ and we did a song of Ben’s called ‘Rock and Roll Was Made For Outlaws’, which was really fun. I reconnected with Ed Shepard, who was my sister’s boyfriend at the time.

Ed had some financial backing from Scott Gaines and had the idea to cut some tracks in Vancouver BC. Dave and I decided that we needed a new bass player, as Mark wasn’t working out, partially because he started going out with one of my ex-girlfriends.

Duff McKagan and his friend Paul Solger (who were still under age at the time) wanted Dave and I to join them and do a band like the Heartbreakers. Duff had opened for me in his band the Living for a few of my Seattle pickup gigs, when I was visiting from NY.

We actually did an all Heartbreaker’s tunes gig (Al, Dave and I) in 1982, opening for the Living at a Seattle club, under the name the Jeeros (a takeoff on Heartbreaker Walter Lure’s NYC club the Heroes), which was reviewed in the Seattle rock mag the Rocket.

But Dave and I decided to hire Toby Keil (of The Queen Annes), and take him and Ben up to Vancouver with Shepard, Gaines and co-producer Ron Woods. Woods was a veteran drummer, who had played in Pacific Gas and Electric (PG and E) in the late 60’s and early 70’s, as well as in the Seattle teen dance band the Dynamics in the mid-60’s.

PG and E had a hit single in 1970 ‘Are You Ready’. The Dynamics were a tremendous band, who were well known for many tunes, most well known of which was probably ‘Leaving Here’, which became a NW club standard.

But Ron was not in good shape that weekend and Ed wasn’t so much a musician as he was a concept guy and promoter, so I had to do a lot of the production work on the session. Ed and Ben got in a fight, because Ben didn’t like the way he was being recorded or something.

So after we cut most of the tracks, Toby, Dave, Ron and Ben headed back to Seattle, while I finished all the rest of the overdubs with Ed and Scott. Ben had cut solos on ‘I Wanna Be Yours’, ‘I Need Your Love’, ‘Wherever You Take Me’ and some nice parts on ‘Summertime Again’ and I used some of them, as well as cut my own parts to fill the tracks out, plus added lead and some backing vocals.

The other track we cut was a cover of ‘Cinderella’ by the Sonics, which I did everything on, except bass and drums and a rhythm guitar track that Ben cut, but I decided should be way back in the mix. So the plan was to release a single.

Scott and his assistant Hugh Grew worked with me, providing a demo studio, which I used to work on tunes at his house, of some of the songs I was writing. We pressed up ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ and ‘Cinderella’ and Scott, Ed and I headed for NYC.

I was able to stay at Anne Deon’s loft, while we were there, because she was on tour in Europe with Alan (playing keyboards in his band). Anne and I did a gig opening for Alan at the Peppermint Lounge, with a couple of players we had worked with.

Alan seemed like he was on to other things and so was I, so the idea of me playing in his band wasn’t a major issue. So I worked the single on the east coast and scoped the NY scene for musicians to get a band going back there again.

I auditioned a bunch of guitar players, including Hugh Gower, but all in all I couldn’t find the motivation, “To make a brand new start of it in old NY” again. The single got some nice reviews in the Village Voice, Creem, Billboard and elsewhere and Ed and Scott wanted to release a four song 12″ EP (including everything from the sessions except ‘Summertime Again’), but center themselves back in Seattle.

I also did some work with Ed, up in Montreal and Toronto, on some Burning Spear shows he managed, as well as some other Reggae acts, which was fun. But by that time, the Dynette Set was winding down, with Scott focusing on the Young Fresh Fellows and Dave focusing on the Moberlys, as Toby was joined by new guitarist Glenn Oyabe.

I liked the new band a lot and decided that focusing my efforts in Seattle was a good idea. So by 1984 I had moved all of my stuff back to Seattle, except my record collection which Brad Morrison still had. Morrison said he would mail it to me, but never did.

He kept it, stating that I owed him something for all his work as a manager and that I had committed to letting him release my stuff on his label, or something to that effect. I thought that was pretty rotten, but it wasn’t long until the new band, Jim Basnight and the Moberlys, was a going concern in Seattle.

With the single and the EP releases, great reviews in Trouser Press Guide To New Wave Records, Who’s Who in Rock Music, Rolling Stone Record Guide, Who’s New Wave In Music and other books, plus the support of Ed, Scott and Hugh, we built a nice presence in Seattle, Vancouver, Portland and a few places in between.

They promoted The Band in Seattle and we opened the show, while we developed a great club to center our following at the Central in Seattle. Randall Wixen contacted me about licensing my stuff in France on Lotlita Records.

It was his idea to release the old stuff, like the first single and LP, plus the track from the ‘Seattle Syndrome’ comp, tracks from the EP and some of the new demos that we cut in Vancouver with Oyabe. We went down to LA and SF and played a bunch of gigs, including a big show with the Fleshtones, who Vega introduced me to and persuaded them to get us on the bill.

That led to the ‘Sexteen’ album, which Wixen released on Lolita in December 1984, though we didn’t get any copies until February 1985. By that time we were already planning to move to LA, which we did in May 1985, but since Ed and Scott had split ways, we decided to work with another management team in Hollywood.

That was Mark Roberts and Mark Schneiderman, who also provided us with a place to stay in Hollywood, though we all had to find incomes to support ourselves (including modest rent). “Mark and Mark” were friends of a friend of Glenn.

They were managing an R+B band on Warner Brothers at the time and supposedly had great contacts with WB. I figured that since I knew Mark Ross, this would work out, but it really didn’t do us much good. Wixen got us a few gigs, like opening for the Lyres at Club Lingerie and paid for us to cut an album, to follow up ‘Sexteen’ on Lolita, if we couldn’t get a record deal.

We cut a bunch of tracks at EMI Studios with Harlan Hollander producing, a friend of the Fleshtones who we met there. The tracks were great and we cut pretty much a whole album. We were trying to get a major label deal and also turned down an offer from Kim Fowley, to do a deal with Rhino to cut an album with him for real low dough (because he was going to put most of the budget in his pocket).

We had a bad feeling about Fowley and were trying to get Richard Gotterher to produce our album. He was interested and came out and saw us, but was really busy. Mark Roberts was really busy working for some wealthy Saudis and Schniederman was just not motivated and really more into the R+B scene.

So we found a manager named Deb Flanagan, who brought with her a guy named John Sutton-Smith, who had been working for the LA Weekly and managing a few local bands like the Rave Ups and Kommunity FK.

We turned down Randall’s offer to release another Lolita album with the new stuff he paid for and he wasn’t happy. We wanted a record deal with a major, but Gotterher was always busy. Back in Seattle in the summer of 1985, we had run into Peter Buck from REM, who was playing there at the Paramount that night.

Buck got up on stage with us and played a few songs with us at the Central, such as ‘Sunday Morning’ by the Velvet Underground and ‘Louie Louie’. He also picked up the ‘Sexteen’ album in town, while he was there and we exchanged numbers.

We corresponded and spoke on the phone over the next year or so and finally decided that he should produce us, when Sutton-Smith convinced EMI-America A+R Man John Guarnieri to sign us to a demo deal, with Buck as producer.

Guarnieri had worked with REM at his previous job at IRS Records. We cut three songs with Buck in early 1987 at El Dorado Studios in Hollywood and appeared with him at shows in LA a few times. Things were going well with the relationship with Buck and EMI, so we cut five more songs in June 1987 at Studio Two in Culver City CA.

Roger Moutenot was staying with me, while working in LA with Fernando Saunders, so he took us into EMI-America Studios and cut two more tunes. Shortly after that, EMI-America merged with Manhattan Records and decided to change direction.

They dropped a number of young, rootsy rock and roll bands, including us. The decision was that dance music was the way to go. They really only kept the Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Bowie and Brian Setzer, of all the stuff that I’d consider rock or close to it.

They had Richard Marx, but that was more pop. Guarnieri also got fired, so we were looking for a record deal with a bunch of stuff recorded, which we didn’t own. Buck introduced us to a friend of his, his college roommate, who worked at H.K. Management, who had just changed their name from Frontline Management.

Frontline/H.K. was a huge Hollywood rock and roll management company, started by Irving Azoff, who had just become CEO of MCA Records. The guys at EMI liked us so much they let us cut lots of live demos in their studio and a ton of them sounded really good, to go with the multi-track stuff we did at EMI for Wixen and the stuff with Buck and Moutenot.

The guy at H.K. who was working with us was Denny Rosencrantz, who promised me he would get us a great deal and if he didn’t he could definitely get us a deal with MCA through Azoff. He failed to do so on both accounts, blaming us that we had a “Stigma, since we had already been dropped by EMI.”

That didn’t stop us though. We met a guy named Joey Alkes and he and I started writing songs together, along with Czekaj, who was in the Fuzztones in LA at that time and a few other writers. Joey was working with John Sutton-Smith (who had pushed Flanagan out of the way by then) to market us and book us LA gigs.

We were drawing great crowds in LA from 1986-89, and that was extended when Joey started working with us. Joey was a publicist, as well as a noted songwriter, who wrote among other successes, ‘Million Miles Away’ for the Plimsouls.

I also met Dan Driscoll, who wanted to cut a video for us, whom we did for one of the songs Buck and engineer co-producer Ian Gardiner produced, ‘Stop the Words’. It was a big break, as it looked cool and we could send it out as a demo.

Joey and I, along with Czekai and the guys in the band, wrote a lot of cool new tunes and we added keyboard player Roger Burg, who I’d worked with at Tower Records on Sunset when we first moved down there.

Roger was a good looking guy who had a nice high harmony voice and played spare keyboards, which added some nice poppish touches. I met some young investment brokers at a gig at Club Lingerie, who gave us the money to record another demo, this time with Geoff Eyrich, who produced the Plimsouls, including that record.

We cut three songs with Geoff in the summer of 1988. In the meantime, I needed a job, since the record deal went away and the investment guys thought I’d be good at selling investments, with a little training. So I started cold calling for them, which was hard work, but it paid well, compared to the minimum wage record store jobs I was used to.

We cut another video with a guy who had worked on the video with Driscoll, Trevor Vetkos for one of the Eyrich songs ‘One Night Away’, so we had two videos to showcase the band, as well as lots of demos. Since Sutton-Smith had been tossed aside for Rosencranz, with all of his promises, then Rosencranz had dumped us basically, we had no management.

Drewry and I set about trying to find a manager and we found Gerry Tolman, who was Steven Stills longtime manager and also worked with CSNY. But Tolman was unable to get us anything. We’d also been working with lawyer Richard Lehrer, who my cousin Wendy Riche set us up with through a family member, but he was no longer in the picture.

We started also working with Barry Simons, along with Tolman. Though Tolman was unable to help us get signed, I stayed working with Simons and stayed friends and a client to this day. The band was getting discouraged.

We’d done so much good work and weren’t being recognized. Anne had moved in with me in the fall of 1988, from NYC and we were an item. She convinced me that the problem with the band was the drummer and I was also fed up with Dave in a lot of ways.

He was never willing to get a job in NYC, which frankly ruined my well laid plans there. When we all had to get jobs in LA, he wouldn’t and did things which I’d rather not discuss to support himself, out of respect for his legacy (Dave sadly passed away in 2016, after he and I made up and decided to reform the band).

I decided we should fire Dave in spring ’89 and hire Mike Czekaj, which was a great idea, except Mike wouldn’t stick with us, with the Fuzztones touring Europe and such. He played with us, but wanted us to change our name, which we did to Twist of Fate.

There was another band with that name, which threatened to sue us, but by that time, the Fuzztones had a European tour booked and he was gone anyway. So we went back to the Moberlys and hired a friend of Gardiner’s, former Burton Cummings drummer Marv Kanarek.

We did a series of gigs, including a west coast tour, including Seattle, Portland and San Francisco in the late summer of 1989. Right when we got back from the tour, Anne and I got married and Toby, Roger and Glenn told me they were quitting the Moberlys to form their own band.

Anne had also bad-rapped Toby too. I should have seen it coming that she was going to disrupt my life, but I was in love and had always had a crush on her since I met her through Vega in 1980. So I was on my own, but I was able to get EMI to give us all the tapes we did with them, when it became public that we had broken up.

So that was the Moberlys. I never used that name again until 2015, when Dave, Glenn, Toby and I did a reunion gig in Seattle. We had plans to do another one and Dave and I wanted to get something serious together again, but Toby and Glenn were not willing or able to spend the money again to come up to Seattle.

I think they were disappointed by the reunion show, as they expected it to be like the 80’s, which of course had long since come and gone. It was a great show though and a lot of people enjoyed it thoroughly. It didn’t make sense for me to do it in LA, where they all lived.

I was too tied down in Seattle making a living as a musician and my research work on “Sonny Boy”, not to mention raising a kid, to do anything down there. I had booked a series of gigs in Seattle a year later in the summer of 2016.

I was able to fill Glenn’s chair with Bruce Hazen and Toby’s with Jack Hanan, which Dave and I planned to call the Mobettes (based on the post Thunders/Nolan Dolls nickname, “The Dollettes”). Soon Dave tragically started feeling ill and had to cancel the trip, but we got Dave Warburton to fill in on two of the gigs.

The other two were cancelled. Unfortunately Drewry never felt better again and passed away from cancer in November 2016. I got Glenn and Toby to let us use the name Moberlys and Warburton, Hanan, Hazen and I started playing shows in the Seattle area, around my Jim Basnight Band schedule and “Sonny Boy” research, as well as Jack, Bruce and Dave’s day jobs.

That turned out to be fun, but just around town. Dave soon became not very available, cancelling on a show he had committed to, so we replaced him with Zeppy Zittle and did a few more shows, until COVID hit. Since that time, there have been no Moberlys shows, though we cut two songs for inclusion on my “Jokers, Idols and Misfits” CD album, both of which made the LP.

Those tracks were ‘Good Thing’ and ‘This Is Where I Belong’ (which was also released as one side of my 2nd Big Stir Records single, along with ‘Big Bang’ from my 2019 CD album ‘Not Changing’, which featured Warburton on every track and Bruce on that track and four others).

COVID appears to have toppled the Moberlys for the time being, but not the Jim Basnight Band, who are planning a European trip for this summer and are playing regularly in the NW US currently on a weekly basis, along with consistent solo shows in the area.

Tell us about your collaboration with different musicians and producers.

1. The first musicians I played with were Joey Rees on snare drum and cymbal and John Hellsvig on the bottom four strings of an electric guitar playing bass. We played at my 5th and 6th grade show and tell. Songs performed included ‘Gloria’, ‘Dirty Water’, ‘Suzie Q’, ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Wild Thing’.

2. The second group was in junior year of high school, with Dennis Hanzeli on guitar, Dave Gulickson on drums, Terry Belvin on guitar and Glen (forgot his last name) on bass. We played Catholic Junior High School dances in North Seattle. We performed Chicago, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Beatles, Stones and Santana songs.

3. The third group was the Loverboys in Senior year of high school with Paul Hood on guitar, Geoff Cade on bass and Dean Helgeson on drums.

We played covers of Alice Cooper’s ‘Eighteen’, David Bowie’s ‘Hang On To Yourself’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Moonage Daydream’, New York Dolls ‘Personality Crisis’, Iggy and the Stooges ‘Raw Power’, ‘Search and Destroy’, ‘No Fun’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, The Faces ‘Stay With Me’ and T-Rex ‘Jeepster’ and ‘Bang a Gong’.

We played a show at my high school talent show and made a huge splash. I covered my upper body in silver paint from the drama class and wrote a huge black X across my chest. The jocks wanted to beat me up and finally did about a month or so later, but next year there was a huge event with 5-6 bands.

It definitely caused a stir and controversy.

4. The fourth band was The Meyce, who formed in the fall of ’75 with Lee Lumsden on drums, Paul Hood on bass and Jenny (Skirvin) Brott on backing vocals, some leads (like the Velvet Underground) and tambourine.

We did all original songs written by Paul, Lee and myself and only two cover songs, ‘Bobby’s Girl’, by Marcie Blane and ‘Buick McKane’ by T-Rex. We played our first gig on May 1st, 1976 with the Telepaths and the Tupperwares at Seattle’s Oddfellows Hall off Broadway, which was the first D.I.Y. “Punk Rock” show on the west coast and a week before the first one in the UK.

We played a variety of gigs at private homes and rented halls, plus a theater show, a high school dance and our last gig on March 6th, 1977 opening for the Ramones at the Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle. We did three recording sessions.

After the summer of 1976, the four of us moved into a house together in Seattle and shortly afterward Jenny moved back in with her parents and we split up. We went on as a three-piece. The band recorded two songs with an engineer I don’t remember in late ’76 and around 5-6 songs at Sea West Studios with Steve Adamek engineering and around ten tunes at Neville Pearsall’s home studio in early ’77.

Pam Lillig joined us on guitar and we did a few gigs with her, including the Ramones gig, before we split up and I moved to NYC in April 1977.

5. The 5th band was the Moberlys. I did try a few lineups, guest appearances and band names, but that was the next band to do a gig. Before the band got together I recorded and released a single with ‘Live In The Sun’ / ‘She Got Fucked’, which I produced at Rain Studios in Seattle.

Drake Ewbanks was the drummer on the single, Sheldon Gomberg was the bass player, Bill Rieflin played piano, Mark Bowen played sax, Phil Bradford and Art Champion sang backups. None of those guys were in the Moberlys, except Rieflin who played one gig in 1979 filling in.

Rieflin also played on a couple of tracks I recorded in late ’79 too. As far as the Moberlys, Steve Grindle was the bass player, Ernie Sapiro was the other guitar player and Bill Walters was the drummer. Before Ernie the first guitarist was Jeff Cerar, who didn’t play a gig, but did play on our first self produced recording session at Mick Flynn’s home studio in Seattle, cutting five tunes.

Jeff was replaced by Steve Pearson, who played with us once, on our first gig, opening for the Mentors at the Ethnic Cultural Center in Seattle. After a couple of other guitarists who didn’t work, we hired Ernie. We self produced a four song demo at Pacific West Studios in Redmond WA, funded by Brian Fox.

After that, we cut a live concert recording in Triangle Studios in Seattle for KZOK-FM, cutting around 20 tracks. After that we went into the studio with producer Ned Neltner to cut seven songs at Holden, Hamilton and Roberts Studio in Seattle.

Finally, as the band was splitting up we cut two self-produced tunes with sub-drummer and pianist Bill Rieflin, percussionist Ataa-Adjiri and guitarist Ben Rabinowitz. We played a lot of gigs, opening for national acts like the Police, Greg Kihn, Dwight Twilley, Blue Cheer, Ray Campi and the Rockabilly Rebels and Jules and the Polar Bears.

We also played a lot of gigs in rented halls, theaters, private events, all-ages clubs, dances and nightclubs. Fox paid for us to release ‘The Moberlys’ LP in January 1980, which I re-issued as ‘Jim Basnight and The Moberys’ in early 1981.

6. The 6th band was the Pins, who I played with for around 6-8 months in 1980, after that first main version of the Moberlys played their last gig on March 16th, 1980. We recorded four of my songs at guitarist Pat Hewitt’s home studio in Seattle.

The other band members were Bill Shaw on drums and Bruce Hewes on bass. I played guitar on around 7-8 songs of theirs too. We played a mix of originals and covers in clubs exclusively, except for one college gig, but it was the first band I could actually support myself from.

Our song list included NW rock like the Sonics, the Dynamics and the Raiders, plus Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Hendrix, Mitch Ryder, Johnny Thunders, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Animals, Roy Head and other 60’s acts.

7. The 7th band was the Moberlys in NYC. The band included Jeremy Bar-Illan on guitar for most of the time I was back east. The first bassist I gigged with was Charlie Gregory (Greg Morongell), the 2nd was Al Bloch and the 3rd was Bill (last name unknown, from a New Jersey band called the Locals).

The first drummer was Michael Trullinger, replaced by Dave Drewry, then Doug Kelly, back to Drewry, then Lou (of the Locals), After the Jeremy left the band, I played a few gigs with the Stratford Survivors in Connecticut backing me, including a two song studio session with producer Genya Ravan.

We were managed for much of the time I was there (late 1980- early 1984) by Jeremy’s friend Mark Ross, who put us in the studio for a demo at a studio owned by Atlantic Records band 3D, that was followed by a song at Soundworks, under Studio 54 with Charlie’s cousin Mike Morongell engineering.

I wasn’t there, but Mark brought the tracks we cut at Soundworks and did a mix at Electric Lady Studios in NYC, which I don’t have a copy of. The last recording I did with Jeremy was at Skyline Studios, Roger Moutenot producing, with Drewry on drums and Bloch on bass.

Moutenot played organ on one track. We cut two of my tunes and a cover of the Wailers ‘It’s You Alone’, plus a song by Jeremy and I and a song by Al. The Stratford Survivors were Mike Czekaj on drums, Tom Andrukevich on bass and Dave Conor on guitar.

I did a lot of NYC area club gigs, including dates with the Romantics, the Smithereens, Suzanne Vega, Steve Forbert, Johnny Thunders, Alan Vega, Billy Idol and many more. I played quite a few solo gigs with acoustic guitar and vocals.

I played most of the top clubs in Manhattan and a few places in the suburbs.

8. The 8th band was Jim Basnight and the Moberlys, with Glenn Oyabe on guitar, Toby Keil on bass and Dave Drewry on drums. Dave and I played with Mark Sczerba and Ben Rabinowitz for quite a few dates in 1983 (including opening for the Violent Femmes), while I was visiting from NYC, around Dave’s schedule with the Dynette Set.

Dave, Toby, Ben and I cut four originals and a cover in Vancouver’s Mushroom studio in summer ’83, with producers Ron Woods, and Lindsay Kidd, but a lot of it was self-produced. I then headed back to the east coast and played a few gigs with Anne Deon, while promoting a 45 single from the Mushroom session.

We then decided to release a 4-song 12″ EP and for me to return to Seattle to reform the band with Keil, Oyabe and Drewry. We did that and then did another four-song session at Mushroom. After doing a few gigs in Seattle and Vancouver, we did a west coast tour of dates in SF and LA, including a gig at the Music Machine in West LA with the Fleshtones.

We came back to the NW and played a number of club gigs, parties and concerts in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Tacoma, Olympia, Bellingham and Bellevue. We did a three-song session with Garey Shelton at his home studio in Mercer Island WA. After another trip to LA to do dates and some song demos with a producer friend (forgot his name) of a prospective manager, we moved to LA in May 1985.

In LA we went into EMI Studios in Hollywood with Harlan Hollander producing to cut 11 songs in the summer of ’85. After that we cut song demos at EMI on three different occasions, cutting dozens of tracks with house engineer J.B. Bauerlein. We then cut a three song demo at Dean Chamberlain’s Dominion Studio, where we rehearsed for much of 1985-87.

We were signed to EMI-America Records to do a demo deal in early 1987 with Peter Buck producing in El Dorado Studios in Hollywood, which we did immediately after the Dominion session, which was more or less a warm up. We followed that up with a five song session with Buck at Studio Two in Culver City CDA and a two song session with Roger Moutenot back at EMI Studios in the summer and early fall of 1987.

We cut more tracks at B-1 Recording with Ian Gardiner, who engineered and co-produced the 2nd Buck session, in North Hollywood in late ’87. We also worked with Edwin Deshazo at Paramount Studios in Hollywood CA twice in ’88, and then cut three tracks with producer Geoff Eyrich at Skyline Recording in Topanga Canyon CA in ’88.

We cut more song demos in early ’89 at Paramount, then fired Dave Drewry and replaced him with Mike Czekaj, changing the name to Twist of Fate and cutting another set of demos at Paramount. We then cut three basic tracks at a studio in North Hollywood. Shortly after that Mike left to play in Europe with the Fuzztones and we did our last set of gigs in Hollywood with Marv Kanarek on drums.

We then did a west coast tour with Marv, after which time, the band split up in the fall of ’89. Jim Basnight and The Moberlys in California mostly played club gigs in LA and around Southern California, but we did a few private shows and a gig with the Bo Deans at the Roxy, plus a lot of shows with touring lower end national names and major label acts at Club Lingerie, the Palamino, the Music Machine, White Trash and other clubs.

9. The 9th band was a number of names, but mostly the Skyscrapers. After the Moberlys I started focusing a lot on writing and auditioning musicians to start a new band. I did a number of song demos, but all on cassette at home or at songwriting sessions elsewhere on other folks’ home recording machines.

I found a guitar player I liked in Kelly Wheeler, who had been playing with Perry Farrell’s band just prior to Jane’s Addiction. Kelly knew Danny Carey, a drummer who went on to make it big with Tool. I found a bass player from my high school Ken Chalupnik, who was eager to play and the four of us started rehearsing at Danny’s place.

Ken was flakey about learning the tunes, so when Al Bloch left Concrete Blonde, I asked him to join us, which he did. We did a showcase for a couple of labels, but no one was nibbling. Mike Czekaj got back from one of his trips to Europe and expressed interest in playing with us.

I felt that Mike was a better fit than Danny, because he and I had played together a lot, so we moved on with him, which was fine with Danny because he was really busy with Green Jello at the time. So it was Mike, Al, Kelly and I, but I wanted a female backup singer, so we hired a gal named Heidi, after Kelly and I auditioned a few women.

We did a west coast tour with the five of us, but after that we decided to cut Heidi. Up to that point we were called the Jim Basnight Band, but after Heidi we changed the name to Crank, at Al’s suggestion. After doing a few gigs as Crank, we did a recording session with producer Rand Bishop. We then changed the name to the Skyscrapers.

We played a few gigs as the Skyscrapers and then started recording a bunch more tunes with Rand producing at Two Guys from the Valley in North Hollywood CA. Al left the band to join Wool and Mike went back to the Fuzztones to do another European tour.

So Kelly and I continued to work with Rand in the studio, finishing up the tracks and working with other ones, along with a variety of musicians including Carla Olson on backing vocals, Rand’s brother Ted on piano, percussionist Arno Lucas, keyboardist Fred Mandel and Rand on vocals and guitar.

We also finished up two of the three basic tracks I had cut with Toby, Glen and Mike at the Moberlys last session and also did some overdubs and remixed a few of the tracks that the Moberlys cut with Eyrich. A lot of those tracks were done at A+M Studios, with Charlie Gregory’s cousin Mike Morongell engineering and co-producing, who at that time was chief engineer at A+M.

Most of the Skyscrapers and Crank tracks were recorded at Two Guys From the Valley, but we also worked at Pasha and a couple other spots with Rand. I played a lot of solo guitar gigs after the Moberlys broke up, quite a few actually while they were together in Hollywood.

In fact I hosted the ‘Hoot Night’ at the Sound Check, a Hollywood bar which drew a lot of rock and roll musicians to jam on weekdays and had a nice residency at the Buzz Café in Silver Lake. The Skyscrapers, Crank and the Jim Basnight Band played mostly club shows at clubs like Club Lingerie, Coconut Teaser and other Hollywood clubs.

After a while Kelly and I split ways, as he didn’t like the way Rand’s mixes came out. I brought in Ben Rabinowitz and formed a band with Ben Rand on keys and harmony vocals, a Seattle bassist named Eddie Fish and an LA drummer, Victor Migenes I found in a want ad, calling it the Skyscrapers.

We did a few gigs during the last part of the years I lived in LA in late 1991 and early ’92. After dealing with a number of very rough personal issues, including my divorce with Anne, I decided to move back to Seattle, at least for a while in the spring of 1992.

It was in fact the last time I lived anywhere besides the NW, where I then settled and I’ll probably stay for the rest of my life. I’ll probably travel to do gigs all over the world if possible, but my home is going to be here in Indianola WA from now on.

10. The tenth band I played with was the Rockinghams. When I arrived in Seattle, my intention was to visit with my dad, until he passed on (he was projected to pass away in a few months, but lasted around 18 months), plus release an album of all the best tracks I’d recorded with the Skyscrapers and a few strong tracks done with the Moberlys in their last few years.

That album was titled ‘Pop Top’, which I mastered in Seattle and released on cassette only in the fall of 1992. During this time I started doing solo guitar and vocal shows and formed a band with my old friend Jack Hanan, who had been in the Cowboys with Cerar and played in the Feelings with Cade and Helgeson.

Jack knew guitarist Sean Denton and drummer Richard Stuverud and we started rehearsing and playing gigs under the name Sway. We did two recording sessions, one when Rand was in town on his way to Vancouver BC, where we cut one tune and three songs at a studio owned by the brother of the owner of a coffee house where I did an acoustic solo residency, Todd Pierson.

We did a number of club gigs, including one nice gig with former Patti Smith guitarist Ivan Kral in Seattle, as well as dates in Vancouver BC and Tacoma WA. Stuverud was also in War Babies, who were signed to Columbia at the time, so we worked around his schedule and Jack and Sean’s day jobs. I worked as much as I could solo, to make ends meet, but struggled to cover my nut.

When Criss Crass, who played in the Living, Duff McKagan’s early band I played gigs with in ’82 (and another school mate of mine), left the Muffs in Hollywood in late ’93 and moved to Seattle, I asked him to join us and we went forward without Stuverud as the Rockinghams. Criss got a job, but I stayed dependent on music to support myself.

Luckily, I scored a gig co-writing a musical theater adaptation of the story of the Little Rock Nine, titled ‘Little Rock’, for Seattle Children’s Theater. I’d also struck up a relationship with a producer and songwriter from NY living in Seattle at the time, Bruce Paskow.

Paskow’s business partner Barry Gruber agreed to put us in the studio with Bruce producing to cut three tracks, which we did at Lang Studios in Richmond Beach WA in early ’94. Bruce sadly had AID’s, which I did not know until late in his life.

Paskow died in ’94, with the tracks unfinished. Gruber committed to finish the project and hire engineer Don Gilmour to help us, which we did at Triad Studios in Redmond WA. We finished the tracks and a lawyer I met through Al Milman, a friend of Paskow’s and Al attempted to get the band a record deal.

In the meantime, Denton left the band and we decided to not replace him, instead going as a three-piece. We then did three tracks at Vagrant Studios in Seattle. I also got Criss and Garey Shelton the gig playing drums and bass on the ‘Little Rock’ soundtrack at Triad to be used at the performances in lieu of a live band.

I co-wrote ‘Little Rock’ with musical director Richard Gray and script writer Kermit Fraser, though Richard and I wrote all the songs. The show was a remarkable success in Seattle and went on to have runs in Pittsburgh PA, Minneapolis MN, Washington DC, Little Rock AR and elsewhere. It was very expensive to do, requiring around 25 decent actors, which held it back from being much bigger.

When the Seattle show closed, Richard was able to take us into Triad to cut the original soundtrack album, with the tracks we had cut there and the cast. At this time the Rockinghams made a deal with Mike Foss to record and produce five songs at his Stepping Stone Studios in Seattle. From that session we released a five song CD EP, ‘Monsters of Rock’.

It included three songs from Foss and two songs from Paskow/Gilmore. After that I was also involved with working for Gruber helping him with other projects he was involved with. In the course of that work, I was able to convince him to record two songs for the Rockinghams at Ironwood Studios in Seattle, which we did with Foss engineering and co-producing.

When I was in Pittsburgh watching the production of ‘Little Rock’ there, I spoke to an indie label about releasing a Rockinghams single. They agreed, so we had a Seattle artist design the cover, but then they changed their mind. We also recorded a number of great live song demos with Daniel Casado and his wife Kathryn on their portable recording equipment.

The plan was to record more multitrack master recordings of some of these new songs and release a full CD album by the band. We played a lot of gigs in Seattle, Vancouver BC, Bellingham, Tacoma, Portland and LA, including Seattle and Portland with the Plimsouls, from 1993-1998, but Criss left the band to join the Dusty 45’s, a rootsy, rockabilly styled band.

US indie label Not Lame offered to release the best of what we had recorded, we agreed and ‘Makin’ Bacon’ was released in 1999. During the 90’s and early 2000’s I was able to place tracks on literally dozens of compilations on various labels around the world and the Rockinghams had a number of tracks come out that way.

Jack and I tried to find another drummer, but by that time another band, which had arisen from my solo gigs, was taking up a lot of my time and getting lots of gigs. I was also releasing CD compilations of older material on overseas labels, starting with ‘Sexteen’ (all tunes from the Steve Grindle era Moberlys) on the Bear Family (Germany) label in 1996 and “Seattle-NY-LA” (all tunes from the Dave Drewry era Moberlys) on the Pop the Balloon (France) label in 2001.

I also released an LP of Moberlys tracks, ‘Pop Pleasure’ on the Rave Up (Italy) Records label in 2006 and a CD album ‘Jim Basnight and the Moberlys Return’ on the Wizzard-in-Vinyl (Japan) Records in 2006.

11. The eleventh band I was in was called The Jim Basnight Thing. It started out of my solo appearances at coffee houses and other private events during the time I was in Sway and the Rockinghams. It also came out of my work with Gruber and an opportunity that happened through Starbucks. I was writing lots of tunes which didn’t work for the Rockinghams and I also needed a musical break from full on rock.

I started out playing solo dates, as I had been playing in Hollywood for a number of years, right after returning to Seattle. I cut a solo demo at a studio which had been put in the Ethnic Cultural Theater of around half a dozen or so new tunes. Gruber hired me to co-produce some of his tunes for an album he was planning, which Paskow had been helping him with.

Part of my payment was to be able to use the session musicians he was paying to do the sessions, to cut some of my tunes. I cut three tracks this way at a studio in Mill Creek WA and Lang Studios with Shelton, Ben Smith (longtime Heart drummer who had co-produced a Hollies cover with Heart roadie and future Alice in Chains guitarist Scott Olson), guitarist Gary Lanz and percussionist Matt Chamberlain.

Also, I did a demo of ‘Lattes’, a song I wrote about coffee for an old friend Tim Jones, who had just started managing a music division for Starbucks. Jones loved it and wanted me to record a full production of it for a prospective compilation album he was going to release to sell at Starbucks locations, tentatively titled ‘Songs About Coffee’.

Tim was able to get me a budget to record it (though the album got shelved), which I did with Smith and Shelton. Gray was able to play piano on ‘Lattes’. I also had Jim Knodle on trumpet and Clayton Park on violin, both of whom I started integrating into my solo acoustic act in 1995. I also was working in that acoustic band with stand up bassist John Sampson and his wife Polly on cornet and vocals.

Casado cut tracks in ’95 with Smith, Park, Sampson, Polly, Knodle and Ben’s wife Libby Torrance. After that session we cut ‘Lattes’, but also had enough of a budget left over from Starbucks to cut three other tunes with Sampson, Smith, Park, Knodle and Torrance. Gruber agreed to release an album on his new label, Band Together, which I was also working for, promoting records to radio, which they had released.

“I had been living a lifelong dream”

To finish the album, we cut four more tracks at Garey Shelton’s studio, with Shelton on bass, Smith on drums, Knodle on trumpet, Torrance on backups and new violinist Jeffrey Sick (now Geoffrey Castle). I also brought in harmonica player Joe Meyering, who guest starred with Jim Basnight and The Moberlys and Toby’s old band The Queen Annes in the 80’s.

Gruber was always a bit unstable, but he suffered from very serious health issues, so the label fell apart. He made good on pressing the album for me and paying for the artwork, posters, mastering and gave me the first pressing as my severance. So, with a new album and a longstanding reputation as a songwriter, recording artist and career musician in the NW and beyond, I put together a live band to support it.

We played all kinds of concerts. It wasn’t much of a club band, but it was a great draw for concerts, holiday events and fairs, which we played many times in 1996-2003. I also did two songs for tribute albums when asked, for the Left Banke and Gene Clark. I was also asked to do a song for a Who tribute, which I did with Smith, Shelton, Hazen and Libby’s live replacement Suze Sims.

I also did a song for a Beatles tribute, with Hanan, Hazen, Sampson’s replacement on electric bass Mikel Rollins (on sax) and a friend of Jack’s on drums, Dave Warburton. Casado helped me do a solo track for a Real Kids Tribute for an Australian label, by recording, mixing and playing bass and some percussion instruments.

The band lineup was Knodle, Sick, Rollins, Sims and Smith, but Ben was always working with Heart or various sessions, so we ended up hiring Rollins friend Mike Slivka to do the live band, with Ben fitting it into his schedule occasionally. In 1997, my 2nd wife Carol and I bought a house in Shoreline WA. I needed more income, so I started booking shows with national acts at casinos and fairs.

I also did some work for a local promoter, who did theater shows. During this time Garey offered to start work on a new album with the band, which by then had become The Jim Basnight Band in 1998.

12. The twelfth band was my current band, The Jim Basnight Band. Everyone got together to cut the new album and we started cutting tunes at Garey’s with Smith, Sims, Knodle, Rollins and Sick. I was so busy doing gigs and booking and managing shows and Garey was busy too. Between our two schedules it took a long time to get the album done.

In the studio and at live gigs the band evolved as well, as the market driven need for me to play rock, moved the band in more of a rock and roll direction. We cut nine tracks with the lineup we started with, then added four more songs with Smith, Hazen, Hanan, Sims and another backing vocalist we worked with when Sims was unavailable, Marcella Carros, to make the album more rock friendly.

The last set of tunes we cut was more rock and featured a lot more of my lead guitar, which I also added to some of the previous nine tracks to make them sound a bit more rock. It took a long time, with everything going on. We were playing all over the states of WA, OR, ID, MT, UT, WY and into CA a bit, while I was booking touring shows at tribal casinos, county fairs and other venues.

Garey was constantly working in his studio and playing live gigs and bass sessions. So, it took all the way to 2004 to release the album, which I titled ‘Recovery Room’. I didn’t know what to do with the album, as the record business had really changed, so I just sold them off the stage, along with copies of all my albums, which at that time (2004) numbered six.

After 2003, I was so busy playing gigs on the road that I stopped functionally booking and managing shows, though I still left the door open, if a good enough opportunity arose. We were doing around 200 or more shows a year. In 2005, in order to save money faster to build the home I currently live in, I took a job as a site publisher for a sports network.

I worked for Rivals, which became a subsidiary of Yahoo, from 2005-2008, publishing articles I assigned to staff writers and captioning photos taken by a couple staff photographers, while working on the road doing gigs, with 2-3 day pit stops at home in between road runs. In 2008, I moved in with a woman with a six year-old girl named Paisha, in the home I had built in Indianola WA, where I live today.

Having a kid was a big adjustment and an even bigger blessing, so I started pairing down the traveling to extended weekends, so I could be there during most weekdays to walk her to the school bus stop and pick her up after school. After working for Yahoo, I started an independent sports site and a podcast which kept me in the mix in the sports media locally, but took up a lot of my time.

I didn’t have any extra funds to spend on recording and no one was coming forward to make many offers. That made sense, as I was not doing much new material in my shows; just tunes from the same six albums, plus rock and roll cover songs from the 1950’s through the ‘90’s. I wasn’t playing any of the gigs that bands looking for record deals play, just money gigs.

Luckily, I was asked to work in partnership with a blues researcher on a documentary film and biography project in January 2012. The subject was harmonica player “Sonny Boy Williamson” (Alex Miller), who lived a mysterious life from around 1912-13 to 1965. I doubled my income after starting the work with my partner Bill Donoghue, which included a lot of traveling to do interviews, much of it in the Deep South.

I had been living a lifelong dream, in being a dad, but I had not lost my dream to create music, songs and records. I cut four new songs with Shelton engineering, co-producing and playing bass and Smith on drums. Rollins guest starred on fuzz bass and Meyering on harmonica, each on a single tune. Steve Pearson sang harmony vocals, while I did everything else.

I had a lot of tracks, going back to the very beginning of my recording in the Meyce, Pins, through the Jim Basnight Band, with a lot of Moberlys, Rockinghams, et cetera. I decided to release a new album, ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’, with the four new songs, followed in chronological order going back to a Meyce track, with the best tracks of mine which had never been released.

It was a good record, but I had no idea how to market it. Again, like ‘Recovery Room’ and the others, I sold them off the bandstand and to folks who followed me around the world on social media. So from 2012, I continued to do live gigs, sell CDs off the bandstand and research ‘Sonny Boy’. My research partner Bill was in poor health from the beginning and the deterioration of his health delayed the project many times and in many ways.

He wasn’t healthy and sometimes didn’t know when to back away and let me run things, so we could finish the projects. He was a good person though and it was very sad when he passed away in January 2017. After his death I needed to figure out how to move forward. His family didn’t want to continue the project, the way Bill and I had planned it to unfold, so I figured out the way forward.

It took some time to find new funding, but in January 2020, I did so and was able to finish the biography, which is currently being edited by the world’s premier archivist and scholar on ‘Delta’ and ‘Post-War’ blues, Jim O’Neal. But while I was looking for funding, starting in early 2017, I started writing a bunch of new songs.

By 2018, I was recording a new album, after recording over 40 song demos with Garey Shelton, at his studio. By 2019, I had recorded and released on CD a brand new album titled ‘Not Changing’. It featured Hazen on guitar on four of its 14 tracks. Garey played bass, engineered and co-produced all 14 tracks. Dave Warburton played drums on every track.

Steve Aliment, who I knew going back to the Pins, sang backing vocals on all 14 tunes. I sang lead and backing vocals and played acoustic and electric guitars on every track. I released one of its tracks, on the first of what would become four two-sided singles on the Big Stir Records label. The flip side was a song from ‘Pop Top’.

The 2nd single was a recent Moberlys track; Kinks cover ‘This Is Where I Belong’ and another song track from ‘Not Changing’. The 3rd single was a track from the ‘Not Changing’, sessions, which we left off the album, but that appeared on my next album ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’, along with ‘This Is Where I Belong’ in November 2020.

The 4th Big Stir Single was another track from ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’, plus a track from ‘Makin’ Bacon’. I released ‘Makin’ Bacon’, ‘Pop Top’ and ‘Seattle-NY-LA’ as intangible album releases (for downloads and streaming), as I had ‘Not Changing’ and ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’. My current plans are to release more intangible albums and tour Europe, the US and possibly other regions, as COVID allows.

The online music world has turned out to be a good place for me, as through the experience of these five album releases and accompanying digital singles releases on Big Stir and on my own Precedent label, in conjunction with Power Popaholic Records from NY, has spread my music around the world to a degree that has never happened in my entire career.

What were the circumstances within the band. You have trouble with EMI?

There was a certain amount of tension in the band between Dave Drewry and I. Mainly because he would not get a job in LA or NYC. In both cases I felt he was damaging our image. I didn’t think he would do this in LA, as I thought he learned his lesson from what happened in NY.

I love Dave and it was heartbreaking to lose him. In 2016 we had plans to put the band back together, whether Toby and Glenn could be involved or not. We talked about going to Japan and Europe, which would have made sense.

We could have worked in the NW and in California pretty easily and I think there was a lot of promise. It all came to a halt when he got sick and then passed so quickly, in the space of around 3-4 months it was over.

After all of that time since we split up in 1989, I think we finally sorted it out. We had played a couple of gigs up in Seattle, one with Glenn and Jack Hanan. Things were great between us and we were able to communicate better than ever musically.

I think the band broke up also because my girlfriend, then fiancée Anne, was involved in my business. She was seven years older than I and I deferred to her on a lot of things. She was so sharp. She used to beat the pants off of me at poker, but it was more than that.

She was very worldly and street wise and I listened to her intently. She said that Dave was holding me back; that his drumming was not dynamic. In retrospect, she was wrong. She knew a lot about the world, but I knew more about music than she did.

This, despite the fact that she had been signed to a label (with Alan Vega), been to Europe (also with Vega) and other things I had not accomplished. Dave wasn’t a showboat drummer, but he was really good at what I do best, which is rock and roll songs.

He led the band and kept the band together tempo-wise and helped establish nice, unique feels. Ultimately, it was me who did it and thus, it was me who was responsible. Dave had his faults, but he was who he was.

A lot of people feel I gave it a lot of time and energy and nothing big had happened, so what I did was not a bad decision. Ultimately, it’s in the past and we did a lot of great stuff which I’m very proud of. Most musicians don’t have half of that to look back on.

In summary, I feel very proud of what we did and I feel very good about deciding to hitch my wagon to him from 1981-89. I also feel that way about Anne. As far as Glenn and Toby, they were a true pleasure to work with, in the band, on stage and in the studio.

The only trouble with EMI was what I already described. They merged with Manhattan and decided to cut most of the rootsy rock and roll acts they had. The guy who brought us in got fired. It was really too bad, because the band was really good.

Probably the best straight ahead rootsy pop rock band in LA at the time, with the possible exception of the Plimsouls. I think we had huge potential, probably more than we realized then or now. If Petty, REM and other lesser successes like the Replacements and Smithereens were worthwhile, so were we.

The music speaks for itself though. I don’t have to schlep it. The problem wasn’t with what we did. The problem was the record business. What it’s become over time, clearly demonstrates that. Should we have done things differently?

Maybe, but we did a whole lot right too, that a lot of acts who made it really big didn’t come close to doing. I feel that way, not only about LA, but about what happened in NY and Seattle before and after that, as well as what I’ve done up here since I left LA in 1992.

I can live with my decisions all down the line. I feel especially blessed, because I’m still here. Still able to dream and enjoy the thrills that I felt the first time I wrote a song, did a show, cut a track or made a record. I appreciate your excellent, intuitive, insightful questions.

That’s it for question #7.

Here’s my answer to question #8:

In 2015 you reunited…

It’s self-explanatory. Here’s the entire show:

It was a ton of fun. It was so great to work with the four of us. It was pure magic. I’ll let the music do the talking.

What about your work with The Rockinghams? How did that come about?

As I mentioned earlier, one of the first people I contacted, to play with, when I returned from LA to be with my dad in his last days (which ended up being around 18 months), was Jack Hanan. I also spoke to Rick and Chris Friel, who were in a band with Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready in LA called Shadow.

I got Shadow (who were all from my high school, but 8-10 years younger) a few gigs, including opening up for us at Club Lingerie one night when Peter Buck guested with us. They were very talented. That didn’t work out, as they had their own band called Easy.

I also talked to Paul Solger, who I had always had fun hanging out and jamming with, whenever we got together, but he was also in a band at the time called Meddaphysical. Meddaphysical was a hybrid of rock and hip hop, similar to Ice T’s Body Count.

I was thinking that the Friel Brothers and Paul would be a good rock band, but it would’ve been hard to get them together outside of the other bands, day jobs, et cetera. I also approached Jack and he and I talked about possible folks to play with.

The guy we thought of first was Steve Pearson, but he had just put a band together with some guys from Heart and a late 70’s Seattle band called Stryker, who put out one album on Arista in 1978. Steve seemed interested, but he’d just gotten that whole thing together and wanted to see it through.

I also at that time, started doing solo guitar gigs to make some income and write quite a lot of material, both for rock band or solo purposes. I was also in the process of mastering, packaging, manufacturing and releasing ‘Pop Top’, for release on cassette, which I did by fall of 1992.

Jack suggested Richard Stuverud on drums, who worked with him at a sign company. He also suggested Sean Denton, with whom he’d played in a band called Moving Parts, after the Cowboys. We started that up, rehearsing in a studio in Ballard in late spring of ’92.

As I mentioned, we called that band Sway, I assume for the Rolling Stones tune. Richard and I started writing some tunes together in that studio, after our rehearsals. He would often be coming from rehearsal with War Babies, who was Brad Sinsel’s band.

Brad was in a band in 1974, which opened the New York Dolls in Seattle called The Pickle Sisters. Brad also fronted a successful local metal band in Seattle in the late 70’s and 80’s called TKO. So Richard would always rehearse with us after work, sometimes after War Babies rehearsals.

Jack and Sean (who worked for a company which made t-shirts), would also rehearse with us after their 9-5 jobs. Richard and I wrote two songs which we recorded in late ’92 and early ’93 titled ‘Looking Through Glass’ and ‘Burning In The Sand’, which I included on my odds and ends 2012 CD album ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’ and a few other tunes.

We also did a few songs from ‘Pop Top’, like ‘Houston Street’, ‘Hello Mary Jane’, ‘Stop the Words’ and ‘Blue Moon Heart’ and a Moberlys tune, ‘Uncertain Girl’, which we had recorded at EMI Studios with Harlan Hollander in 1985, but had not been released.

We learned a handful of other new songs of mine; including ‘Bad and Beautiful’, which was the 3rd song we recorded in late ’92 and early ’93 at Todd Pierson’s studio. We also cut another new song, with Rand Bishop in late ’92 called ‘Circumstance’.

We did ‘Baby Jane’, a song that the Skyscrapers had done, which I wrote with Czekai and Wheeler. Richard was always busy with War Babies and we had to turn down a number of decent gigs, because he was always working with them on good paying weekend nights.

Stuverud also became kind of belligerent, which I wasn’t sure why. I’m not sure which happened first, Criss informing me that he wanted to play with us, or Richard leaving the band, but Criss replaced Richard in late summer ’93.

Criss had seen us at a club, on a visit to Seattle and was very impressed. Criss and I had always been close, kind of like family. His parents knew my parents and his musical history and mine had converged a few times.

When the Loverboys played at Roosevelt High School in 1975, Criss was there and told me that it was at least part of a life changing time in his life. When Bill Walters left the Moberlys in late ’70, we auditioned Criss and Grindle really liked him.

Perhaps it was because he was too young (I was 22 at the time and Criss was 18), but for some reason we didn’t hire him. Criss played with me on a couple of impromptu gigs, where various musicians got up to support me at clubs in Seattle, after the first Moberlys band broke up and then when I was living in NYC and visiting for holidays and what not.

He was also in The Living, Duff McKagan’s early band, which opened for us in ’82 on a few occasions and with whom we opened for once doing a Johnny Thunders tribute. Most importantly, we were always friends, kept in touch and still are.

So when Criss joined Jack and Sean and we finally were in a band together, it was a lot of fun. Criss was an intense kid and as a young adult (in his early 30’s) he was even more so. It made for great shows, but at times in professional situations it was difficult.

But, I loved playing with him. He was such a live wire, never boring and a ton of fun. He was also a great drummer and singer, who sang great harmonies, which Jack also did. They did a fantastic job of filling out tunes with great vocal arrangements, to go with outstanding drum and bass parts.

So we went through the Sway song list and decided which tunes to continue with, as well as go through new tunes I proposed to choose new material. Jack and I started writing together consistently when Criss joined the band too.

Criss added some help with a verse on a new one of mine called ‘More Than One Way’, Jack, Criss and I reworked a song I had written with Bruce Paskow titled ‘Rock and Roll Girlfriend’. There was another tune which I had written about the glut of espresso joints in Seattle called ‘Lattes’, which contained some racy language, though all of it was in Spanish, French and Italian.

Fitting as the people who frequented these Seattle coffee houses and take outs were constantly mispronouncing words in those languages which they often didn’t know their meaning. I rewrote the tune later with a tamer approach for the Starbucks ‘Songs About Coffee’ project, which ended up on my ‘The Jim Basnight Thing’ album in 1997.

The band was a lot of fun, but as I detailed prior, Criss and Paskow had problems in the studio, just before Paskow passed away and the situation led to Denton leaving the band. I was not daunted by that, though I felt sympathetic to Bruce’s feelings in that case.

I’m not blaming Criss for Denton leaving. He was probably irritated with me. We cut a new version of the Moberlys tune ‘Hello Mary Jane’, ‘Uncertain’ and ‘Rock and Roll Girlfriend’, as I mentioned before, finishing up after Paskow died, with Don Gilmore.

I don’t think Criss understood Bruce. We had a similar experience with Ben Smith and Scott Olson, when they produced a Hollies song which Criss found, ‘She Gives Me Everything I Want’. Scott and Criss seemed to lock horns and Scott made a pitch to me to find another drummer.

I didn’t agree with Scott and we moved on, Criss Jack and I. We cut three tracks, ‘Baby Jane’, ‘Lattes’ and ‘More Than One Way’ with Erik 4-A (Foure) at his Vagrant Studios in Seattle’s U-District, which were great.

4-A liked Criss and got on well with him. Unrecords, a local startup label asked if they could use ‘Baby Jane’ on a local compilation CD album and we complied, as did a label back east for ‘More Than One Way’, on the ‘Pop Matters’ CD comp.

‘Rock and Roll Girlfriend’ was used on a Spanish compilation, along with my track from the 1981 ‘Seattle Syndrome’ compilation album, ‘We’ll Always Be in Love’. We put a lot of tunes on compilations. It was around this time that I started working on ‘Little Rock’.

I tried to include Criss on ‘Little Rock’ and have it not conflict with the band. I even got in trouble with Seattle Children’s Theater for doing a feature with the Stranger about the show and the band as well, kind of mixing up PR campaigns.

Since the theater production was sponsored by AT&T and other big corporate sponsors and that their core audience was schools bringing in kids for shows during the week, they didn’t like getting mentioned in a publication like the Stranger, which featured a number of sex ads and the like.

But the show went well and brought in a lot of general theater goers. It was the “Children’s Theater Event of the Year (1995)” in the Seattle Times and received a lot of great ink, from as far away as the New York Times.

At that time we started working on a five song session at Stepping Stone Studios, with studio owner Mike Foss engineering and co-producing. We did ‘Need a Car’, ‘Space’ and ‘Played a Trick’, three songs written by Jack and I.

We also cut ‘Middle of the Night’, a song written by Paskow and I, then rewritten by Jack, Criss and I after Bruce passed on. Finally we recorded ‘Rock and Roll Cowboy’, a Cowboys song written by Jack, Jeff Cerar and Cowboy’s lead singer Ian Fisher.

It was a great session. We were surprised major labels didn’t love it, along with the other stuff we had done, but Criss’s contacts at Warners from the Muffs didn’t want us, nor did any of the folks I sent it to, from my contacts in LA and NYC.

We should have been signed, but it hadn’t happen yet and it started eating at our hearts, which were so full at first. So we released a CD EP titled ‘Monsters of Rock’, which got some great reviews around the world, but not much warmth from the Seattle scene or the record biz.

It included three songs from the Foss sessions and two from the Paskow/Gilmore sessions and had a fun cover of a cartoon depiction of us by Roland Boe, a great artist who was a friend of Criss’s who also did a number of posters for us.

Gruber wasn’t that enthused, but I convinced him to give us a shot at recording one more time with Foss, this time at Ironwood, where he had a deal going. So we recorded ‘Ho Chi Minh’, a song Jack and I wrote and ‘So Glad You Came’, a tune that came from some music Gruber and I wrote together, to which Jack and I wrote lyrics.

It was probably the fact that he co-wrote one of the tunes that tipped the scales for Gruber to go ahead with it. Jack and I continued to write songs and the three of us continued to do rehearsals and gigs, but Criss was getting fancy.

He talked about how he had never been in a band that long and how it looks like we’re not going to be given a chance by the “Seattle Scene.” It really was rotten that folks who we’d known for years, who were becoming established in the music business over the course of the “Grunge” era, were not willing to help us.

Criss rewrote a Tuff Darts song called ‘Fun City’, about how the NY scene was so dog eat dog, and filled with backstabbers and changed the lyrics to Seattle references. It was hilariously funny I thought, though the newly self-important Seattle scenesters would have probably viewed it as disrespectful.

A label in Pittsburgh said they wanted to do a single, so we all arrived on ‘Rock and Roll Cowboy’, ‘So Glad You Came’ and ‘Lattes’, for the single and Roland designed the cover. I had met the label owner when I was in Pittsburgh working on ‘Little Rock’, for the production there.

He agreed to do the single, then said he wouldn’t do it. I really got the feeling that someone was working against us. I found out more about that eventually, but there’s no reason to go into that now. We just dusted ourselves off, but especially Criss seemed to think that we were ‘Jinxed’.

We cut new songs that Jack and I had written, ‘Ripple In The Bag’, ‘Microwave’, ‘Look Inside’, ‘Miss America’, ‘Minute Just A Minute’, ‘Python Boogaloo’, ‘Pop Shooter’ and a song which has never been released called ‘Pony Coat’, with Dan and Kathrine Casado.

Criss was enthused about the new songs, but we weren’t getting many gigs. My plan was to get someone to finance or self-finance another recording session with these tunes, which would have left us with a lot to pick from for a great album.

But Criss was not enthused about the way things were going at the gigs. He started playing with the Dusty 45’s, a rootsy, jump blues, rockabilly, Americana band. I was also working on my ‘Jim Basnight Thing’ album and playing gigs with some of those folks, but I’d been doing that from the beginning, since I didn’t have a day job and needed income.

Nothing changed and no one stepped forward with a plan to push us forward and after a depressing gig at a bar near Jack’s old neighborhood in Seattle (Skyway), he stated his intention to leave the band. We stayed in touch, in hopes that something would happen to change our luck.

Bruce Brodeen from Not Lame Records in Colorado offered to release our best tracks as an album. At that time, I thought that this would renew Criss’s enthusiasm. So we put it together, but it took around a year to get it out.

By then, Criss had really moved on with the Dusty 45’s and Jack and I had no luck finding a new drummer we liked. Criss for all his moodiness was a powerhouse drummer and everyone we looked at just didn’t have that same energy.

There were a lot of good drummers, but it wasn’t going to be the Rockinghams without Criss. So Jack and I parted ways for a while. Jack joined an Alt-Country band, for lack of a better term, the Souvenirs and played with a number of other folks over the next few years.

Meanwhile I was doing the Jim Basnight Thing, the Jim Basnight Band, booking and managing shows and squeezing in recording sessions at Shelton’s for songs for tribute albums and songs for what would become ‘Recovery Room’ in 2004.

The post Rockinghams era for me was a very productive time in my life in truth. Owning a house for the first time, starting in 1997, then selling it and buying another home in 2000, both with my 2nd wife Carol, was a big adjustment.

I needed to have a more consistent income. The Rockinghams, for as much fun as it was, was a money loser for me and a few others. I needed to do things in music which were market driven and made sense financially.

It forced me to develop a new sense of discipline. It became even more serious when Carol and I split and I no longer could lean on her income to make ends meet here and there. She moved to Dallas and I didn’t want to leave, as I had put down roots in the music scene in the NW.

That made me have to travel to make a living, which I did constantly in WA, OR, ID, MT, WY, UT and a little bit into CA. Constantly on the road from 2000 when we split up, until 2008, when I started needing to be closer to home to help care for Paisha, when I entered my next serious relationship with Paisha’s mom Tessa.

You released a lot of solo albums. What’s your creative process when it comes to solo input?

I’ve released the following solo albums:
1. ‘Pop Top’
2. ‘The Jim Basnight Thing’
3. ‘Recovery Room’
4. ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’
5. ‘Not Changing’
6. ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’
1. ‘Pop Top’ was a mix of four tracks I recorded and mixed with the Moberlys in the late 80’s, three tracks cut by the Moberlys with parts added and remixed, 10 tracks I recorded with a band that I formed immediately after the Moberlys and one track recorded in the interim between the two sets of guys.
The ones that the Moberlys guys (Dave Drewry on drums, Toby Keil on bass and Glenn Oyabe on guitar) recorded where all I did was remaster them for the ‘Pop Top’ album were:
1. ‘Stop the Words’
2. ‘Hello Mary Jane’
3. ‘Restless Night’
4. ‘One Night Away’ (includes later era Moberly keyboardist Roger Burg on backing vocals)
The ones recorded by the Moberlys guys with parts added and remixed after the band split up:
1. ‘Evil Touch’ (Ted Bishop on piano, Kelly Wheeler guitar, remixed by Rand Bishop and Mike Morongell)
2. ‘Blue Moon Heart’ (Ted Bishop on piano and backup vocals, Rand Bishop backing vocals, Arno Lucas percussion, Charlie Gregory on backup vocals, remixed by Rand Bishop and Mike Morongell)
3. ‘Mr. Resident’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion, Ted Bishop on organ and backup vocals, Charlie Gregory on backup vocals, remixed by Rand Bishop and Mike Morongell)
The ones that I recorded with the band I formed after the Moberlys split (Mike Czekaj on drums, Al Bloch on bass and Kelly Wheeler on guitar), which was called The Jim Basnight Group, The Skyscrapers and Crank on live performances:
1. ‘My Vision of You’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion, Ted Bishop on keyboards)
2. ‘Don’t Dance with Strangers’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion, Tim Pierce guitar)
3. ‘Houston Street’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion, Al Bloch backing vocals, Mike Czekaj backing vocals,)
4. ‘Asphalt Field’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Al Bloch backing vocals, Ted Bishop on piano, Mike Czekaj backing vocals,)
5. ‘Price of our Insanity’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Al Bloch backing vocals, Ted Bishop on piano)
6. ‘Love and Hate’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion)
7. ‘Opportunity Knocks’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion and backup vocals, Ted Bishop on piano, Carla Olson backup vocals, Jimmy Garcia backup vocals, Bart Bishop backup vocals, C.J. Buscaglia guitar)
8. ‘Still a Part of Me’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion, Ted Bishop on piano, Carla Olson backup vocals)
9. ‘Tears in the Rain’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Ted Bishop on piano)
10. ‘Jasmine Perfume’ (Rand Bishop on backup vocals and guitar, Arno Lucas percussion, Ted Bishop on piano)
For one tune (‘Talk is Cheap’), we cut (along with two other basic tracks which remain unreleased) after Dave Drewry was fired, when Mike Czekaj joined us, but during which we didn’t use the Moberlys name, instead using Twist of Fate.
For this track, Toby Keil played bass with Mike. When we were recording tunes with Bloch, Wheeler and Czekaj, Rand, Wheeler and I started looking at other tracks we could include in the album, which we could improve and this one made this list.
1. ‘Talk is Cheap’ (Toby Keil bass, Mike Czekaj drums, Kelly Wheeler guitar, Rand Bishop on backup vocals, Arno Lucas percussion, Ted Bishop on organ)
The creative process on ‘Pop Top’ was simple. I was looking to put forth the best pop and rock and roll tunes as I could, using all of the best folks I had worked with in LA, among songwriters, singers, musicians, engineers and producers.
I often wonder if I should have included ‘She Don’t Rock’, which the Moberlys cut with Roger Moutenot, but then I would have had to drop a track.
If I knew ahead of time that I would have had the opportunity to put out ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’ (19 years later), I probably would have dropped one of the medium tempo numbers like ‘Price of Our Insanity’ or ‘Tears in the Rain’.
I realized at the time that everyone was jumping on the “Grunge” bandwagon, but I thought that the tunes on this album were deep and strong and for the most part sound more current and relevant today than much of the trendy “Grunge” tracks of the early 90’s.
I’m a big fan of the bands from that era that were lumped into that marketing niche, especially Nirvana, but also Alice In Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Oasis and a number of others, so I’m not trying to say anything bad about the incredible work that they did.
I will say this. For every big “Grunge” band that made it big then, there was a Material Issue, Muffs or for that matter a Rockinghams who were pushed aside for not being current enough, in the favor or the powerful and connected or whatever reasons the record business dug up then to dismiss people who don’t make some sort of selection system.
The good news is, the music is still here and the good stuff rises to the top eventually. And the record business itself has paid enough of a price for their callous, elitist, self-important ways.
Oh have they.
2. ‘The Jim Basnight Thing’ was not a mixture of musicians as much. It was a project which came from the band which rose up from the acoustic solo shows I started doing in Seattle when I moved back in 1992 and continued during the time I was in Sway and the Rockinghams.
It was also closely tied to my relationship with Barry Gruber, who was Bruce Paskow’s production partner.
Paskow produced the Moberlys along with Don Gilmore and some great help from Mike Morongell on ‘Hello Mary Jane’ and ‘Uncertain’.
And Gruber also helped the Rockinghams record two more tunes with Mike Foss we did at Ironwood, after the five tracks we did with Foss at his Stepping Stone Studios.
But Gruber was more interested in my acoustic band, which developed from my solo show. The first addition happened when Jon and Polly Sampson from up the street from my home in North Seattle started playing with me at solo gigs.
Jon played stand up bass and Polly, cornet and backing vocals. I also ran into violinist Clayton Park and asked him to join us.
I thought it would sound, as Jon would often bow his bass “violin” as he called it. Gruber, shortly after Bruce passed on, asked me to help him with his tunes for an album he wanted to produce.
He was using Ben Smith on drums and my friend Garey Shelton on bass, as well as Paskow’s old bandmate Gary Lanz.
So we went into the studio at Lang Studio, where the Rockinghams had recorded with Paskow, to cut two of Barry’s songs, one of which I co-wrote called ‘As It Turns Out’.
As part of compensation for my time, Barry allowed me to use Ben and Garey on one of my songs and I chose ‘Don’t Wait Up’, a tune I had been playing live a lot with Jon and Polly.
Gary Lanz also played guitar on it and Matt Chamberlin who Gary brought in to do percussion played on it.
I loved the track, as it was a nice break from the Rockinghams rock and roll madness. Kind of like a Burt Bacharach tune, but I felt it needed the trumpet treatment that Polly gave it.
But to be frank, I wanted a more experienced horn player than her. So I asked Steve Flinn, a jazz drummer who I knew in the old days at Roosevelt High, when he was a huge Mott the Hoople fan.
Steve suggested Jim Knodle, who coincidentally was a regular musical collaborator with Al Hood, Paul’s dad.
I always liked Al, who was like family and Jim and I hit it off from the beginning. So I brought Jim in the studio in Lang and had Jim cut the track and I loved it.
I did a mix and took it to LA, where Mike Morongell did a mix at A+M Studios which was great. The next session I did with Barry was at Northern Sound in Mill Creek WA, shortly after the Lang session, engineered by Ken and Ron Latimer.
That was with Ben and Garey, where we did four tracks, two of mine and two of Barry’s. I helped Barry produce his tracks and he let me finish mine, at the same studio we cut the tracks at Hanzsek Audio, with Chris Hanzsek engineering.
At that session I cut ‘Mexico’ and ‘I’ll be There’. By this time Jim Knodle and I were playing live gigs together with Jon and Polly, but I didn’t use either on this session.
I was going for a melodic pop rock vocal sound, in my mind like the Beatles or the Beach Boys, perhaps a little like Todd Rungren, as I played and sang everything except for the bass and drums.
What resulted was definitely me. I took those three tracks and started sending it out to people for evaluation and got a lot of nice compliments from among others Burt Bacharach’s publishing and production company.
It was also at this time I put together the deal with Starbucks to cut ‘Lattes’. Before that, I had demoed ‘Lattes’ first at Garey Shelton’s Studio, with me playing everything except bass by Garey and a drum program that Garey created.
So we cut ‘Lattes’ at Hanzsek Audio (with Chris Hanzsek and Mike Foss engineering), but I had enough budget left over to cut ‘Hell In A Nutshell’ and ‘Cinderella Dreams’ too.
On ‘Lattes’, Richard Gray, with whom I co-wrote ‘Little Rock’, played piano, Knodle played trumpet and Park played violin.
On the other two Gray was replaced by Ben’s wife Libby Torrance on backing vocals. So then I had six songs.
I was then able to get two more songs done during another Gruber session at Lang Studios, this time with Rick Eakes engineering.
This time I used Sampson on standup bass (for that growling sound), with Smith on drums, Knodle on trumpet, Park on violin and Torrance on backup vocals.
I wanted to capture the sound of the live act with the acoustic bass, violin and trumpet, to go with my voice and a female harmony voice.
Those two tunes were ‘Red Light Moon’ and ‘Happy Birthday’. ‘Red Light Moon’, was a Mike Czekaj song that I rearranged for an acoustic treatment, after performing it with Sway as a big rock number.
Criss didn’t think it fit the Rockinghams, but I really liked it for my acoustic gigs, so all worked out well. ‘Happy Birthday’ was a co-write with Gruber that really connected with this acoustic band.
So then I had eight songs. Gruber wanted to put out a Jim Basnight album on his startup label Band Together Records, which at that point I was working for, helping him with his and other projects.
But, my album needed some more tunes. In the meantime, Park was looking to get married and decelerate his music career.
He was planning a move to Florida with his new wife. All worked out well, because I found a cool violin player who was a real showman named Jeff Sick.
Sick was from DC, as his dad was a career diplomat, but he had lived in NYC for a lot of the 80’s and early 90’s.
He was new in town, but had made a buzz happen. So Jeff fit the band pretty well and we brought him in the studio at Shelton’s with Garey, Ben, Libby and Knodle to do the last four tunes for the album.
I chose three Moberlys songs which had all been big hits on acoustic gigs, ‘Alone with Her’, ‘Elma’ and ‘Summertime Again’, to go with ‘No More War’, another big number from the acoustic shows.
They turned out great and I got Roland Boe to design a wonderful cover and promo poster. The album was in the process of getting pressed when Barry had a series of health issues.
One thing led to another and he was forced to abandon the label. As part of my severance, I agreed to accept the CD pressing, posters and Barry forgoing any interest in the project, other than his co-writing credits on three songs and publishing interest in those three and another tune.
In return I gave up the promotion and marketing focus that Barry had committed to and had to do that on my own.
So I released ‘The Jim Basnight Thing’ CD album on my own label and played a lot of gigs with the band that emerged to support the album.
Ben was too busy with Heart and doing all of his session work to play on more than an occasional gig, which he did.
Garey was also more tethered to the studio to do a lot of gigs, but he also did a few. I had to hire a new rhythm section, but Jeff brought in a guy he had played with named Dave Christianson.
Dave suggested Steve Kim, a well known and respected bassist and bass teacher in Seattle. So Jim, Jeff, Steve, Dave and I took a promo pic, which we used for a while, as I booked a ton of concert gigs.
Steve never really gigged much with us and was replaced by Jeff’s bass player in his band Mikel Rollins. We also needed to replace the female harmony vocals, so I auditioned a number of women.
I decided on Suze Sims, who we started working with. Dave ran into issues with Jeff and Mikel, after a while, so we needed a new drummer.
Ben did his best to fill in and provide us with a few good prospects. After a few guys and one gal (Terri Moeller of the Walkabouts, who were in a slow period), we settled on Mike Slivka, a veteran pro who Mikel brought in.
With Slivka we cut two songs for two different tribute albums, ‘You Showed Me’, for a Gene Clark tribute and ‘Brother Louie’ for a Left Banke tribute.
We cut the tracks at a studio in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle in a building which had been a movie theater, The Columbia City Theater.
We took the tracks and finished them and mixed them up at Garey Shelton’s Studio. It was at that time that Garey and I discussed co-producing the recording of a follow up album at his studio.
As it turns out, ‘Brother Louie’ was the first song from that album, which five years later would be named ‘Recovery Room’.
3. ‘Recovery Room’ started out as a showcase for the Jim Basnight Band, the act I put together to support ‘The Jim Basnight Thing’ CD album release.
Since I was heavily involved in playing gigs, as well as booking and producing gigs with national acts over the five years that it took to finish the album, its sound evolved too.
It was an album with a variety of influences, flavors if you will. Garey Shelton, Ben Smith, Suze Sims and I were the four constants.
With Garey’s great ears and studio ingenuity, Ben’s solid song interpretations and vast versatility, Suze’s astounding vocal chops and theatrics; I used two different band sounds and molded them into one.
But Garey and his studio were in high demand and I was also traveling a lot and very busy, so it took five years to complete.
It was a session here, a session there, as we wound Sick (changed his name to Geoffrey Castle during the time this album was recorded) on electric and acoustic violin, Knodle on trumpet and flugelhorn, bassists Mikel Rollins (who also played flute and saxophone) and Jack Hanan (also on backing vocals), guitarist and harmony vocalist Bruce Hazen and backing vocalist Marcella Carros into a consistent album.
In the end, it was an album that had a lot to offer, but came at a time in the music business that wasn’t a fit for its content.
Like an album like ‘Aladdin Sane’ or perhaps Prince’s ‘Parade’ album, it had such a wide range. But unlike those masterworks, it didn’t have a lane to travel in the music business of 2004.
It was very dark at times as well. At this time the music world was all about indie rock and college radio. Rock and roll was definitely not in a mainstream phase.
There wasn’t a Sub Pop, Matador, or one of those types of labels to champion it to the powers that be in that world.
Its songs and tracks were strong, literally amazing, but it not only didn’t carry with it that political strength, it didn’t contain the entire necessary pretense.
I wasn’t in that very competitive scene. I was playing one date after another on the road and making a decent living, between constant gigs and booking and managing shows.
Those I booked and/or managed were mostly dad and mom or grandma/grandpa shows, like old country, old R+B pop, old rock and roll, classic rock and 80’s rock.
But, as I look back, that album was a real achievement, which holds up with time. Dark it was, but very interesting.
The first session for ‘Recovery Room’, after the one that produced ‘Brother Louie’, included eight tracks.
‘Guilty’, ‘Something Peculiar’, ‘Microwave’, ‘The Heart’, ‘Comfort Me’, ‘Riding Rainbows’, ‘Princess’ and ‘Swoon’ were in that group.
The second session included five tracks which were all tunes that Hanan and I had written for the Rockinghams, but didn’t get an opportunity to cut masters of for possible inclusion in ‘Makin’ Bacon’.
Those tracks included ‘Miss America’, ‘Python Boogaloo’, ‘Look Inside’, ‘Minute Just A Minute’ and ‘Ripple In The Bag’.
Also as we finished that second set of tracks, I took the time to add more electric guitar to the prior eight tracks, which I barely played any.
My show had evolved into more of a rock show and I was going out much less often with trumpet, violin, et cetera.
I’d also come racing back as an electric lead guitar player, as far as my passion for that spot. So I gave ‘Guity’ and ‘Something Peculiar’ some very nice rock edges and added a little R+B electric guitar touch or two to ‘The Heart’.
So, it made for an album which had a more rock feel overall, but retained a lot of R+B/Pop feel, plus the bluesy and jazzier flavors.
Sick’s violin was so versatile; as he created Isaac Hayes styled string section passages, used effects to create wild guitar sounding violin sections and a variety of other nice pop touches.
Knodle the same, working with Sick and Rollings (on either sax, flute or both), to create horn section type accents, Beatlish or Bowie-like musical arrangements and a nice smattering of other musical moments.
Suze just found her character, like the schooled performer she is. She was so dominant that some may have felt she upstaged me, but I found it a wonderful place for this material.
Rollins and Hanan were both truly outstanding on bass and Ben led both of them expertly. Hazen made the five tunes he played on all quite a lot better with his subtle, yet impeccably tasteful pop guitar mojo.
Finally Carros, who passed away from cancer tragically, just as the album was being finished, did a superb job of adding personality to so many tunes.
Whereas Suze was out front, Carros was pensively reverent to both of us and helped everything blend so well between Suze and I on the five tracks she appeared.
Same can be said of Jack’s and Bruce’s harmony vocals, which were just what was needed to give the five tracks they were on strong harmonies to my leads and filled in rough edges between Suze and I.
It was an album I believe all of us can be proud of. I sold it at my shows over the next 7-8 years, along with the rest of my back catalog and made it through a couple pressings of it, before I released my next all-new album release ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’ in 2012.
Each song on ‘Recovery Room’ has its own story worth telling. ‘Miss America’ is a nice opener for the album.
Bruce made it for me, with his Mick Ronson like guitar licks on the vamp out. Suze and Marcella gave it their all to give the song such vocal depth.
As did Bruce and Jack on the lower end of a nice rich vocal arrangement, which Garey expertly blended with a very rockin’ band sound.
‘Guilty’ is a song which traces back to the post Moberlys era. It was written with Wheeler and performed by the band then with Czekaj and Bloch.
Mikel Rollins made it a lot funkier and the JB Band gave the tracks a more R+B feel than the earlier band. I truly think the guitar solo at the end and the crunchy big sound Garey and I created, really helped it.
‘Something Peculiar’ is a dark tune, but beautiful to my ears. I wrote it with Gruber then Knodle and I arranged it.
Jim was brilliant how he added so much color to the arrangement and chord movements. It was a sad tune, but it came out of the time when I was going through my breakup with my 2nd wife Carol.
So the motivation was clear, whether the specific lines in the song have anything to do with her, or someone else in my life or Barry’s, I really don’t know.
Just the feelings, expressed in music and the solo that I added, during the 2nd set of tunes, when I went back and added electric guitar to tunes we’d done in the first sessions, was one I’m particularly proud of.
‘Python Boogaloo’ is a lot of fun and the backing vocals by Suze, Marcella, Jack and Bruce, plus a really rocking job by all on the tracks make it a standout number.
It’s about snakes and how I think they get a bad rap, which in itself is ridiculous. After the first four numbers which though they rock, have shades of conflict and struggle, it’s a needed dose of pure fun.
‘Microwave’ is another fun tune, completed in the first sessions. It’s a light-hearted look at modern urban living.
It pokes fun at the ups and downs of trying to get a meal with a loved one, while parking, working long hours, trying to keep them happy and other common and droll nuisances of the 21st Century.
‘The Heart’ is another hard shift, but this time to a sincere love theme. I wrote it late at night, after having watched the 1995 film “Dead Presidents”.
I started writing the tune at around 3:30AM and after getting some of the basic sections and the concept of the song together, rather than leave it for later, I finished the tune at around 8AM.
The song has grown to be a major part of my live show, both with the band and solo and has evolved, so don’t be surprised to see me include it on a live album or some such thing, one fine day.
‘Look Inside’ is another rocker, with perhaps a bit of psychedelic on the side and a touch of classic power pop on top.
Another song from the second set of sessions, which everyone played such a vital role in, this is one I’m particularly proud of.
It has tons of great vocals, guitar playing, drumming, and an outstanding mix by Shelton, plus a super cool bass part by co-writer Hanan.
‘Minute Just a Minute’ is another rocker from the second session, though it carries a dark, ironic side. It portrays a man driving down a dark highway to a strip joint.
It name checks Highway 99, a Seattle landmark of the dark side of prostitution and the land of transients and runaways.
It’s a well executed rocker, which provides drama, humor and plenty of ear candy. Again, it was well executed by everyone, with some very catchy hooks to boot.
‘Comfort Me’ is another hard shift, from the first sessions. It’s a love plea, also in the dark of night. It’s seductive and sexy, but motivated by deep feelings.
Driven by a duet with Suze and I, which sounds like we are both singing alone in two separate rooms, it’s highlighted by Knodle’s swanky trumpet and a very cool funk groove by Mikel and Ben.
I play electric guitar in little spots to add accent, but mostly bed the song in a super nice 12-string sound. I wrote the song with a long time friend Andromeda Spitz.
‘Brother Louie’ has a great feel, which is much different from the US #1 1973 hit by the Stories or the UK #7 hit the same year by Hot Chocolate.
Sick and Knodle did a phenomenal job of creating string and horn sounds and arrangements which recall classic early 70’s soundtracks like ‘Superfly’, ‘Shaft’ and ‘Across 110th Street’.
Suze and I did a great job on the vocals and Mikel and Slivka on drums lay down some legit funk, which vamps out on a jazz influenced groove.
‘Riding Rainbows’ is another major shift, to a grinning portrayal of an eccentric, possibly a bit unbalanced individual.
But it’s all in fun and Suze here shines, playing the caregiver assigned to maintain our poor unfortunate, while Knodle does magic portraying her charge talking back, projected through his horn.
Though Torrance didn’t perform on the album, as she did expertly on ‘The Jim Basnight Thing’, she and I co-wrote this one, drawing more than a little inspiration from the plight of a mutual acquaintance.
‘Princess’ is a Czekai song, which I rearranged in a completely different feel from the original. The Rockinghams used to do it as a cool out number on our heavy rock gigs, on longer shows.
It worked great as a feature number in my solo shows, once I added players and on this record it succeeds as a complete inspiration.
The song takes the subject in “Minute Just a Minute” a step further, into an actual sexual liaison. The bed of a song is a bass part I wrote, but played expertly by Rollins.
Ben’s simple unobtrusive drum part leaves plenty of room for all, starting with Sick, who again approximates a string quartet sound, to achieve a cinematic backdrop for the vocal.
Knodle playfully adds to the mood, with a mean street at night treatment, while occasionally shifting into horn accent mode when the band lifts out of the tune’s dronish feel into a groove.
Suze goes scattering on the vamp out with Knodle in support, which brings out the legit jazz talent this band brings to the table on this album as a whole.
‘Ripple in the Bag’ is one of the 2nd session tracks, which all rocked in style to my thinking, but this one is particularly insane.
It was a chance for everyone to burn off steam, among the vocalists and we let it all hang out. The song, about someone angrily dismissed, ponders revenge or recompense.
After some serious vitriol, the subject comes back from the brink and sings a futile, light-headed verse with his friends, as they head for home.
It would be a way to end the album in fine fashion, but the last song, resolves the question as to what’s next.
‘Swoon’ is a song I wrote with my longtime best friend forever Paul Hood (Meyce and Loverboys), then finished with Knodle, which is fitting in that Paul’s dad Al and Jim were such musical kindred spirits.
In this song, the subject recants his frustrations and feelings of being abused, but resolves in sober terms the answer going forward.
The answer is unconditional love and the subject’s realization that his having found and attained that makes all of his missteps and defeats.
That was the reason for the title ‘Recovery Room’. Like the hospital room where the patient recovers from surgery, this album was a place for me to take stock of where I had been.
Because of my uncertainty, as to how to market it, it was mainly an album which people who came to see my gigs bought off the stage or people who knew me well and got it from me directly.
Because the rock numbers were so good and were all Rockinghams songs originally, I included all five on my August 2021 intangible release of ‘Makin’ Bacon’.
I had taken two songs (Cowboys cover ‘Rock and Roll Cowboy’ and Hollies cover ‘She Gives Me Everything I Want’) from ‘Makin’ Bacon’, for my October 2020 all covers CD and LP album ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’.
I also took ‘Brother Louie’ and ‘Princess’ from ‘Recovery Room’ and included them on ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’.
So for now, ‘Recovery Room’, is a rather obscure product. I may release the tracks from ‘The Jim Basnight Thing’, other than ‘Red Light Moon’, which also made it on ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’, plus the tracks from ‘Recovery Room’, which haven’t been released intangibly.
This would make one very cool album, including the entirety of my work with Knodle and violinists Park and Sick (Castle), plus Torrance, the rest of my work with Sims, Rollins and a few other characters.
So, after I released ‘Recovery Room’ in 2004, I was very focused on playing gigs. Having worked very hard, hard enough to save about half the money I needed to build a house, booking and producing shows and constantly touring, I decided to just play gigs.
I was playing constantly, but came to the realization after about 18 months that it was going to take a lot longer to save the money I needed to build a house, if I didn’t have another source of income.
I could have supported myself, but it was about getting ahead. I fell into a gig publishing a sports site for Rivals network, which was later bought out by Yahoo, covering college football, basketball and some other sports.
All I had to do was maintain a stable of writers and a photographer or two and assign the stories, and then publish them, which entailed copy editing, fact checking, sizing photos and doing captions.
I was able to do this while traveling on my laptop and phone. Without going into a lot of details about college sports, I found myself drawn to investigative journalism.
College sports are filled with stories below the surface. Stories you need to find the inside story, regarding coaches, players changing teams and the ‘who, what, why, when and how’ of it all.
Also, in 2006 I was asked by a label in NYC, a label in Rome Italy (Rave Up Records) and a label in Tokyo Japan (Wizzard-in-Vinyl Records), to do retrospectives of my music.
The Japanese and Italian ones were strictly taken from Moberlys tracks, one an LP and the other one a CD album release.
The NYC label (Disclosed Records) wanted one from my full career, with at least two songs from all of my albums, one as many as five in a 23-song CD.
The album also included a remake of the Moberlys tune ‘We Rocked and Rolled’, as its title track. The two Moberlys collections came out in 2006, but it took until 2008 for Disclosed to get it out.
I decided when ‘We Rocked and Rolled’ came out that I would leave Yahoo and just do an indie sports subscriber site, to have more flexibility and less pressure and deadlines, as well as a podcast in the fall of 2008.
I also moved into the house I had successfully built with Tessa and then seven year old Paisha. So I had a family, which was a major responsibility.
I didn’t have a lot of time for new records, between covering sports (exclusively basketball by then), playing gigs and being available to care for a child on a daily basis.
I also started a band with Hanan, former Cowboy drummer Mark Guenther and Steve Pearson, as a review of the glory days of the Moberlys, Heats and Cowboys, for a little extra dough.
So things went on like this until late 2011, when I was offered a managing partnership in a project to produce a documentary film and write a biography on bluesman “Sonny Boy” Williamson” (Alex Miller).
With a much better income than the indie sports work was yielding, I felt secure enough to record some new tracks, which I did with Garey, Ben and a few guests.
I used Mikel Rollins on fuzz bass on ‘Sea of Blue’, Joe Meyering on harmonica on ‘Midnight Mission’ (a Czekaj tune) and Steve Pearson on harmony vocals on those two as well as ‘Stay to the End’.
The 4th tune was ‘Cameltoe’, a song which happened organically on the road in the 2000’s. It was a perfect song to parody the end of the night in a bar.
It would usually embarrass the bar creatures enough, so they would go home. Rollins lent me all of his quirky percussion instruments and whistles, which merged well with the ‘Happy Trails’ like refrain.
Once I had done those four tracks, which I really liked, I had an idea to have them lead off an album of odds and ends from throughout my recording career, going back to the Meyce.
4. ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’, was named that way because like ‘We Rocked and Rolled’, it spanned my whole career, so it gives the listener the full spectrum of who I am.
It would start with the four new songs then drift backwards chronologically all the way back. The next song was an outtake of ‘Recovery Room’, which I felt was brilliant, but similar to ‘Comfort Me’.
In retrospect, ‘Stars in Time’, was just as cool as it gets. Right from the start the groove captures you. I wrote it with Knodle and it had to be released.
‘Popshooter’ was next and it was a Rockinghams tune which we recorded with Casado, but I didn’t cut a master of it during the second ‘Recovery Room’ sessions.
Great tune also and it gives you the idea, as to the raw power of the band who perform it live to a digital two track machine, with Casado dialing in the sounds well.
The seventh track was ‘Livin’ a Lie’, another Casado recording, this time of the Jim Basnight Band, with Park, Knodle, Jon and Polly Sampson and Ben and Libby.
The lyrics about an addict are compelling and the performances are very strong by all. I wrote the song with Nino Del Pesco and was inspired by my dad, who spent the last 18 years of his life in AA.
The eighth track was ‘White Socks’, the only song thus far I’ve released from ‘Little Rock’. It was a demo I cut with a couple of the women from the show at Garey’s studio.
Garey played bass and programmed a drum program. I played and sang everything else, except the backing vocals by Felicia Loud and Lisa Estridge-Gray.
Numbers 9, 10 and 11 were by Sway (in order), ‘Bad and Beautiful’, ‘Burning in the Sand’ and ‘Looking through Glass’.
Of the three, ‘Bad and Beautiful’ has become the biggest live number for the Jim Basnight Band, but all three are very cool.
We got a great sound in the studio and I worked very hard on the mix. The spoken part of ‘Burning in the Sand’ is particularly cool in my view, though Stuverud hated it.
The 12th track was ‘Promises’, a Crank track, which didn’t make ‘Pop Top’. It showcases Czekaj, Wheeler and Bloch, demonstrating the unique rock sound that we had.
Tracks 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 are all Moberlys tracks. In order they are, ‘City Life’, ‘Open Letter’, ‘So Messed Up’, ‘Can I Trust You’ and ‘Windy Night’.
‘City Life’ features Oyabe and Keil, with Czekaj and Burg and was recorded toward the end of the band. I wrote it with Burg in ‘89, but the lyrics certainly came from reflecting back to my NYC experiences.
‘Open Letter’ I wrote with Czejak, but Drewry played on it. It also comes from NY memories, which along with LA, have stuck with me to this day.
‘So Messed Up’ was originally called ‘So F’d (as in the semi-acceptable abbreviation for ‘Fucked’) Up,’ but I decided (unfortunately) to clean it up, as we were trying to get that ‘Big Deal’.
‘Can I Trust You’ was the only song of the tracks we cut with Peter Buck, which had not been released. It was a co-write with Keil and Oyabe and as time goes on I like it better and better.
The last of the five was ‘Windy Night’, one of the tracks we cut at EMI Studios with Hollander. I really like it, as it shows this great band of Drewry, Keil and Oyabe in fine form.
The 18th and 19th tracks were with the Pins. Cut in 1980, ‘Bebe Gonna Let You Down’ and ‘In Love with You’ are two tracks which capture my early days well.
The former a Stonesy, bratty grinder, the latter a Brit pop (with occasional English accent moments) number with unique changes and feel.
Very post punk all around, with drummer Bill Shaw, bassist Bruce Hewes and guitarist Pat Hewitt doing a great job of getting punky with it.
Pat told me that he hired me in the band because of my looks and that he taught me a lot about my guitar playing and being a pro and he was right.
The 20th track was ‘Show Who You Are’, the only song on the 1979 ‘Moberlys’ LP which had never been available on CD. It wasn’t included in the 1996 ‘Sexteen’ album release or any other CD release.
It has a nice little semi-funky feel, sort of a modern Bo Diddley groove and Ernie Sapiro plays a tasty solo on it.
The 21st and final track was ‘Brown Skin’ by the Meyce, the only track by the Meyce available anywhere. The band was just Lumsden, Hood and I and it showcases our hard earned and unique sound.
Again, ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’ was a product I sold on stage only at gigs. I continued on with sports in a limited way, with the podcast (‘Talking Hoops’) once a week to keep my fingers in it.
Mostly what I did was work on the “Sonny Boy” project. It took a lot longer than it should have, because my research partner had a lot of health issues.
The only good news was that I was able to continue the research, during his troubles and added a number of interesting side trips to the blues harp player’s story that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
But I didn’t do another album or any new recordings for around five years. Though it was a very productive time, I needed a creative outlet.
When my partner passed on in early 2017, I tried to work with his brother to continue the project, but after a year of helping him to understand what it was; he decided not to do anything.
But also during 2017, I started writing and rewriting older tunes of mine which were great, but needed work.
In early 2018 I started cutting song demos with Shelton and cut over 40, between new songs, re-worked older tunes and cover ideas.
From that group of tunes, came a brand new album, which I recorded over the course of 2018. I released it intangibly in May of 2019, then on CD in July 2019.
5. ‘Not Changing’ was a major comeback for me in so many ways.
It all came together in a very unusual way. Garey indulged me by helping me try a much different recording process.
We cut tunes with lead vocal, acoustic guitar and bass as the basic track, looking for great performances to build on.
We then cut drums with Dave Warburton, who came through like a champ, hitting a ‘Moving target’, as the tempos wandered without a click track or any virtual track.
It wasn’t perfect, but it had the feeling of people playing songs together. Once we were done with drums, we went for lead vocals.
Garey got great performances out of me. Then we went for backing vocals, which were done by Steve Aliment on every tune.
Since Steve’s availability and mine and Garey’s didn’t always overlap, we started my backup vocals on songs Steve has completed.
Once the vocals were done, I recorded guitar overdubs, both acoustic and electric. Bruce Hazen came in to play on six tracks, five of which made the album.
The other one was ‘Prince Jones Davies Suite’, which was included on ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’, my next album release in November 2020.
Once Bruce and I had finished the guitars, I brought in Seattle DJ Jay Phillips to do a voiceover on one tune.
After that Garey and I mixed the album and put the songs in their final order while mastering. All of it was done stem to stern at Garey’s studio.
Everything was done with machine-like precision, but with an incredible amount of passion and feeling. From the songs, to the performances, to the mixes, everything was done with feel as the first priority.
I could break down each song one by one, as I’ve done here before, but in this case, I’ll let them speak for themselves.
Whether the song was a re-write of a song from somewhere in my past, or a new composition, everything was new and fresh feeling or we stopped and did it again or made another choice.
6. ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’ came closely on the heels of ‘Not Changing’, which was by design. I was able to break into the online music scene.
Much of that because of the help of a number of important supporters, notably Big Stir Records, but also many other folks I have known for years who somehow haven’t forgotten about me.
‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’ was an all-cover release, though a number of its tracks were songs written by band members of mine.
There were the big Rock and Roll Hall of Fame names like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, David Bowie, Prince, T-Rex and The Hollies.
But there were also acts which have not been recognized by the HOF, like The New York Dolls, Paul Revere and The Raiders, The Turtles (the song was originally done by HOF member The Byrds, so this one’s a hybrid) and The Left Banke (post-Left Banke band the Stories),
But then there are those who are nowhere near HOF conversations, like The Cowboys (featuring Moberly and Rockingham Jack Hanan, who also co-wrote the tune), Mike Czekaj, The Modernettes, The Real Kids, The Sonics, The Wailers and The Lurkers.
These songs were recorded, much like ‘We Rocked and Rolled’ and ‘Introducing Jim Basnight’ (which go back further), from throughout my career, going back to 1982 and up to and including two tracks in 2019 and one in 2020.
One major factor in this group of recordings being so rich and powerful, was the influence of Dave Drewry from 1982-89.
Dave was always picking great cover songs for us to record, and whenever we went into the studio, we almost always recorded two or more of “Dave’s tunes”.
Those included, ‘Rebel Kind’ (Modernettes), ‘Laser Love’ (T-Rex), ‘Lonely Planet Boy’ (New York Dolls), ‘So Much in Love’ (Rolling Stones) and ‘New Guitar In Town’ (Lurkers).
Another major factor was the way I got involved in a lot of CD compilations in the 90’s and early 2000’s, which led to being asked to contribute to tribute comps.
Those included ‘You Showed Me’ (Gene Clark of the Byrds), ‘Just Like Darts’ (Real Kids), ‘I Can See For Miles’ (Who), ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ (Beatles), ‘Brother Louie’ (Left Banke) and ‘She Gives Me Everything I Want’ (Hollies, but it never came out).
A third factor was my constant and long suffering support and loyalty to the NW rock and roll sound. This was represented by ‘Rock and Roll Cowboy’ (Cowboys), ‘Rebel Kind’, ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Shot Down’ (Sonics), ‘It’s You Alone’ (Wailers) and ‘Good Thing’ (Raiders).
The fourth and final factor is Mike Czekaj, a songwriter who has helped me greatly in creating some of my most important co-writes and for whom I am a huge fan of his compositions.
I’ve been extremely blessed to have had these opportunities to work with so many great musicians and songwriters.
To have been able to participate on tribute projects for some of the true giants of the music which stole my heart, is priceless.
Like the day I bought ‘The Kinks Greatest Hits’ and listened to it over and over, then took a long walk singing the songs in my head at 10.
Like the day I first opened the Beatles ‘White Album’ and put it on my portable record player at 11 years old.
Like the day I heard the huge low-E guitar note on ‘I Can See for Miles’ on a transistor radio on my school playground at 10.
Like the days I spent listening to ‘High Tides and Green Grass’, ‘Revolver’, ‘Absolutely Free’, ‘The Yardbirds Greatest Hits’ and ‘Got Live If You Wanted’ on my record player at nine.
Like those times I was able to buy 45 singles like ‘Good Thing’ and ‘You Showed Me’ and the time I traded cherry bombs for a stack of 45s including a number of NW rock acts.
Like the time I convinced a record store clerk just after my 16th birthday, to let me listen to ‘New York Dolls’, the day it came out and I heard ‘Lonely Planet Boy’ for the first time.
There are so many memories, with so many rock and roll friends whether I met them in person or not, or as I characterized them in the title, ‘Jokers, Idols and Misfits’.

What else currently occupies your life and what are some future plans?

I’m getting back to playing live gigs, which I’m doing at around a 50% pace to what I had been doing prior to COVID going back to the beginnings of the Jim Basnight Band in 1997 (25 years ago). I’ve been able to stay healthy and actually increase my health regimen over the course of COVID, so I’m feeling fit and ready to go.

I’m aiming at summer to travel to Europe and play a number of festivals, as well as some club and concert gigs for the first time. Though I’ve released quite a bit of music there, I’ve never played there and I’m pumped to start gigging there.

I’ve been able to get out there and befriend a lot of folks around the world via social media and the like, with whom I have a lot of common tastes and interests. I’ve been very proud to have gotten a lot of airplay and play online for my recent (February 2022) single ‘Opportunity Knocks’ and ‘Still a Part of Me’, from my ‘Pop Top’ intangible release, which was also released in early February.

I’m getting ready to release a 2nd single from ‘Pop Top’ (To be announced). I’m waiting for my “Sonny Boy” biography to be finished being worked on by Living Blues co-founder Jim O’Neal, so I can make necessary changes and have it ready to be published.

That should take me around a month. It should be soon, so if I get it, I may delay the end single from ‘Pop Top’. I’ll also be booking more gigs for my band and solo in the NW US, as I do that for myself, along with sound, PR, et cetera. I’m looking forward to going to Maui (Hawaii) with my kid Paisha for her 21st birthday, along with her boyfriend Tyler and her half-brother Troy (12) in May.

I’ll be watching the news with a concerned eye, as the war in Ukraine has me very spooked. I’ll have one eye on basketball, for a little mental relief, as March is a big month for that here in the US. I’ll probably have to do some spring cleaning and other house maintenance chores.

I may actually see some friends!!

That’s also the last word. I can’t wait to see friends more and more, as this COVID nightmare unravels and we come together again.

Klemen Breznikar

Jim Basnight Official Website / Facebook
Big Stir Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp / YouTube