Come All Within

Hey, I just signed (inked, in Variety-speak) with Mighty Quinn Records here for release of my new Gods and Monsters album "Coming Clean" in the US, Canada and Japan! Deal was a longtime coming, and lucky for me I have a big friend and fan in Jerry Roche (and also Meg Griffin, programming visionary of Sirius Satellite Radio who steered me to Jerry)--Jerry is the guy behind the label, a music lover, jazz reissue honcho at Mosaic, and industry vet who's been a fan of my work for years, has seen me play live numerous times, and is way way gung ho on my band, my little avant-punk supergroup known as Gods and Monsters--and that's the kind of enthusiasm you need these days!!

Same is true of Fred Barnes (Pete Townshend's godson) and Max Cross (Julia Fordham's nephew--whip-smart lads, both of them) who signed me to their Side Salad label in the UK last year where "Coming Clean" drops Oct. 4th through Universal...and Freddy Venant who has signed me for France to his Productions Speciales label, album due Nov. 2nd...and Jack Pisters in Amsterdam who's got us coming out on his Dawa Records label for the Benelux. And let us not forget Andrey Borisov, the mainman behind Exotica Music in Russia who put a version of my new album out a year ago in Russia under the name "Follow", where we followed up with some killer live shows in Moscow and Saint Petersburg courtesy of Sasha Cheparukhin last spring that brought Jerry Harrison and his brilliant keyboards into the mix and into our fold--Jerry is going to join us at the CMJ at the Bowery Poetry Club here Nov. 4th where we're taping a live album and DVD for Mighty Quinn, so come on out and support the Underground Generation...

Played the Golem last night at the Museum of Jewish Heritage for Michael Dorf's Oyhoo Festival, where a couple of cop cars with red lights ablaze sat in front of the building (quite near Ground Zero) all day and night to remind us that not all is peace, love, Donovan and flowers in the world at large...saw some great acts there like Afro-Semitic Experience, Hebrew acoustic hip-hopper Chana Rothman, and my old buddy composer/trumpeter/madman Paul Brody all the way from Berlin with his cool klez-jazz ensemble--Paul and I met at the Krakow Jewish Heritage Festival a few years ago where I was unleashing my "Golem" in a kino off the Krakow Old Town square, where in attendance at my performance was Princeton Professor Jan Gross, author of "Neighbors", about the 1941 Jedwabne massacre where all my remaining family on my mother's side (and all the remaining Jews in Jedwabne) were incinerated in a barn... by the way Jan has got an important new book out about Polish anti-semitism called "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz" which is a harrowing must-read and received a laudatory cover review in the Sunday NY Times Book Review Magazine a few weeks ago...

Last night my Golem performance brought out my good friend the Honorable Martin Palous, who was just made the Czech Republic's permanent ambassador to the UN, and his son Michal--Martin is definitely one of the Good Guys, a close friend of Vaclav Havel's and a brilliant, well-spoken intellectual and passionately engaged thinker and writer who has translated much of Hannah Arendt's work into Czech...I heard him lecture at the New School a couple years ago on Hannah Arendt and sat spellbound...he recently commissioned a concert of my guitar arrangement of Czech classical music at the Czech Embassy in DC where I performed works by Smetena, Dvorak, Janacek, and my buddies the Plastic People of the Universe (a classical avant-rock ensemble if I ever heard one!)...

On sale in the bookstore at the Museum of Jewish Heritage--and hopefully a bookstore near you-- is a new tome from my friend the writer Steven Lee Beeber called "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's--A Secret History of Jewish Punk" (Chicago Review Press) which even if you don't agree with his premise is a wildly entertaining read and chock full of great photos (and I'm just not saying that because he put a photo of me performing the Golem in it!--the shot was taken in Amsterdam by my buddy the great Dutch new music photographer Arjen Veldt...)--in fact Steve put some fantastic photos in there, including a shot of my buddy Danny Fields in his bar-mitzvah get-up! also a wonderful photo of The Modern Lovers with a baby-fat cute Jonathan Richman next to black leather-jacketed intellectual punks/ Harvard badasses Ernie Brooks and Jerry Harrison--who are now playing in MY band funnily enough, and with my Yale credentials added to their Harvard pedigrees we are the true Poison Ivy League :-)...there are also wonderful shots of Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye back at the beginning before the PSG was formed, and a great photo of my pal Lou Reed at the Downtown Seder from a couple years ago where we both performed...

The writer and editor and website maven Brad Balfour also came down last night for my show, and he is one of NYC's great cultural men-on-the-scene who really knows his stuff re music film and books, has schmoozed with just about everybody and who introduced me awhile ago to my new friend the lovely Chun Yu, an ex-pat Ph.D from mainland China who wrote a free-verse book called "Little Green" for Simon and Schuster about growing up during the turmoil, madness and depredations of the Cultural Revolution which is quite affecting/ gripping--she's now hard at work on a graphic novel about Chairman Mao, check out her stuff here--and on amazon.com, well worth your time...

Have to dash now to prepare for a talk I'm giving at New York University this afternoon for Professor Leslie Lee's class on Dramatic Writing...

Topic?

"Words and Music"...

XXLove

Gary

ps There's a gathering tonight (Thursday Sept. 14th) from 6pm to 11pm at Sin Sin at 85 2nd Ave. here in NYC for friends and fans of the late great visionary DJ Adam Goldstone--read this article from this week's Village Voice here--as mentioned, Adam was a collaborator and a friend of mine--and I will miss him dearly...