As promised, here is our weekly article from this long serie of testimonies.

Note from Bill Bell:

John Swartz – a NY friend of Spencer’s. He mastered the Stevedores’ “Tamuawok” ( a great record) and, later, he re-mastered Spencer’s Feudal, Brutal & the American Dream album (the way it sounds today). A talented musician in his own right contributed the following to “The Ties We’ve Tied”…….

“this is spencer, ben’s friend from michigan.”

“hello.”

he was playing guitar on a chair on the lawn in the late afternoon shade of one of those sweet-smelling last days of summer. he looked at me suspiciously. he wasn’t wearing those blue sunglasses yet so i saw his eyes flash with narrowed intensity as he sized me up.

“hey.”

then i noticed the tangled mass of wire hunkering down on the ground next to him, one of many creatures that i would later learn were his sculptures; they would eventually take up residence in the backyard sandpit next to that brick hieroglyph hakapatooie. and some black rebel flag hung from a second-floor window like the whole house was scowling at me.

if this were a faulkner novel i wouldn’t have to explain that he could very well have been on a rocking chair holding a shotgun. with a bloodhound.

i didn’t see spencer again until i saw him dressed in a brown jumpsuit. with sunglasses. oh! and a cane. i didn’t realize he was so tall.

so here is his new york city debut as i remember it:

ben has been playing for about 4 months on cardboard and plastic, not bad at all; shawn is playing a lauan-veneered clavinova that weighs about five-thousand pounds and it is going through a noisy practice amp designed for acoustic guitars; up against jake’s fender tube amp which makes a house shake at setting 4, this is a balance problem; spencer, too, fuzzing out on a 50 watt marshall and one of those microphones that won’t work unless you hold it in just the right way. (and adam has this way of being so very nervously zen, you know.)

but i knew that they knew what they were doing: the microphone stand, a device supposedly used to stabilize microphones, was made out of an old cymbal tripod, a green oxygen tank adorned with a goat’s skull and a thick piece of wire, all designed in fact to cause the microphone to swing about whimsically like a drunken metronome. it was a frontispiece for the most endearing loss of control i have ever seen, musically, sonically, physically, visually. clearly, this was spencer’s invention, even though i still didn’t know exactly who the hell he was; he had promptly vanished after the show.

but i said to the others “we have got to make a record.” so we did.

* * *
spencer sets the light spinning, a dream machine made out of cardboard and old projector parts from the multiplex where he works. nosferatu skulks around on the wall behind him. “they thought that this would replace TV.” so whenever i’m on the train with my eyes closed passing through a spot of dappled light, i think of spencer. and the same is true whenever i drink knob creek or ballantine’s or eat sausage.

spencer figures out how to use all the recording equipment i’ve brought to the basement and during the course of the week overdubs 5 vocal parts to the beginning of the song we are recording. by the next week, they are meticulously erased. nobody ever sees him do this. he is also, apparently, collaborating with some people he met at the cross county multiplex. he is running a studio! on the wall over the mixer is an autographed picture of brian wilson next to some photo booth pictures: a man wearing a jacket and tie, making funny faces at the camera. clearly this is his father.

spencer and i exchange some brief words about aleister crowley.

spencer says that the can record i let him borrow is “weird.”

spencer shoots at the geese across the pond with the hand-pumped air-rifle i found in the closet while looking for something else: “look what i found” i said when i gave it to him, suspecting correctly that he would know exactly what to do with it.

spencer and i are the last ones in the sauna as the thermometer runs out of numbers somewhere around two-hundred thirty-something. somebody loses a pack of cigarettes to the pool. spencer is shooting water at people with the underwater vacuum. spencer and i invent a game which involves the diving board and water balloons. spencer counts aloud with me so that the 8 of us around the pool can hit the water at the same time in order to make a very large wave. this is music! this is like last night when i told him that he is in charge of the chorus of drunk persons, a duty which he assumed admirably, because i was secretly only sober enough to press record.

spencer gives me a little singing lesson. “try to sound like you’re nobody in particular.”

spencer makes some insightful comments about my photographs. then he starts poking around on my computer. “what are you doing?” “looking for your massive porn collection.”

spencer adjusts the cyclorama to aquamarine.

spencer is doing something with PVC pipe and lighter fluid. i don’t want to know.

spencer is getting ready to leave for madison and i’m still mixing the record. we’re both temporarily homeless and surrounded by roaches. we watch an epic episode of cosmos. spencer sleeps on the couch with a sock monster named mopey joe.

spencer looks at me. i look at spencer. we do another take.

John Swartz (left) with the Stevedores (then they were The Cactus) at Sarah Lawrence College performance 10/29/05. Next to John (l-r) Jake Miller, Spencer, Ben Johnson, Shawn Fernando and (kneeling) Adam Webb-Orenstein.

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