Trying to Stop being Clever

I want to tell you about my friend. My friend is a very talented instrumentalist. I met him a long time ago, a guitar player, a friend of friends of my brother's. After just hanging out and partying, like amateur rock-and-rollers did in the '80s, we ended up together around a cassette 4-track machine. He recorded one of my songs. It was one of the first times I can remember that someone else showed an interest in my music. Later on, it happened that we were in touch and decided to form a band. I still had my songs, and he still had an interest. Chocolate Zulu was born. Existing in the dining room of a house in Monrovia, CA (211 S. Alta Vista Ave), Chocolate Zulu wrote, played and recorded around the Los Angeles area for maybe a year and a half, two years. After that I moved to Atlanta. I had tons of new material from a musically active period, and I recorded a whole new collection of songs ( Up From Here ). I played around with the songs at open mic nights around the city, a...

The Rosemarys was a band from San Francisco in the '90s known for their light-tastic live shows. They were generally categorized as "Shoegaze" in style (Wikipedia calls then "shoegaze-dreampop"). I had never heard of them when I used to trade cds at my local used record shops, and I came across a used copy of their second, eponymous album. Some of these shops had listening stations where you could sample the used product before buying it. I picked up "The Rosemarys" based on the cover, and I went and put on the headphones. The vibro-guitar and the understated vocals grabbed me immediately, and I bought the disc. I, too, was dreaming of Manchester, and it really "struck a chord" with me. This was in the '90s (they were probably still playing shows at the time) before the internet was a household thing, so all I knew about them was what was printed on the sleeve of the cd (come to think of it, I might have started with a cassette and bo...