GENESIS (liner notes from Caught in the Act insert card)
In 1995 my friends Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza and Daniel Hauser, known collectively as the art group relax, first urged Alain Meyer to interview me in San Francisco for Swiss Youth Radio. Two years later he brought me to Basel for a rollicking experience onstage with the techno-word band A-Poetik. The year after that he sent us around Switzerland as part of an irreverent rock’n’roll revue called Le Cirque Electrique. A run of enthusiastically received shows where I collaborated with a raft of talent inspired the dream of releasing a CD of live spoken word with music.
I next toured Europe in late 2000, on a six-week circuit of France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Slovenia and Austria, half of it with an expanded lineup of Le Cirque, dragging along a box of blank DAT tapes to fill. Now I usually don’t write my own tunes, and it can take unthinkable machinations to obtain rights to other people’s “intellectual property.” I kid you not: US $6000 was demanded for five seconds of reggae. Are you out of your fricking mind, Mr. Canadian reissuer? Also, The Sex Pistols took an eon to tell me to fuck off. (Sorry for that, Garf, because your blistering guitar on the hijack of “Anarchy in the UK” was a great loss. Apparently turning their lucrative and proprietary anthem into a song about personal hygiene outpunked even those guys.) So as I slogged through the last details of licensing, I added new North American and Swiss tour tracks to the Le Cirque Electrique recordings. The energetic once-in-a-lifetime performances that I am so lucky to have participated in ultimately yielded the raw material captured here for this no-holds-barred sampler of outstanding musicians and me out on the road 2000-2003, Caught in the Act.
MAKING THE ALBUM
The process of actually making the album involved several steps beyond simply collecting recordings and permissions. For the accompanying graphics, I culled through my girlfriend Margery’s tour photographs. And when I got a rough idea of what the album’s shape was going to be, I engaged a college chum of mine to design the cd packaging. This selfsame Stanley Moss is a prize winning global branding specialist who has been designing album packaging since he was in high school. He brought along a great friend of his, the rock star photographer Henry Diltz, and Henry did a casual portrait session of me one night when we all went out to dinner at Cinnabar, my composer buddy William Ashford’s favorite restaurant down in LA. Need I say it helps to have friends involved in a project like this? When we had the graphic elements in place, I had fun showing potential cover pics to a few people. Perhaps taking into account some of their reactions, Stanley later made what I think is an excellent cd packaging design.
