Listening Party

By Mike DeCapite

Jim Jones, who died last week in his lounge chair, at the helm of his unparalleled archive of music and videotape and movies and memorabilia, in his house on Lake Erie, played with three of the best bands that Cleveland produced (or that produced themselves in spite of Cleveland)—Pere Ubu, Easter Monkeys, and Home and Garden—and he influenced most of the rest of them. Whether by way of the music he made or by way of the music and sensibility he introduced people to as resident DJ and clerk/consultant at Record Rendezvous, or one-on-one, through mix tapes and listening sessions at his home, Jones opened people’s minds. He was a connection to the wider world. I called this “Listening Party” because Jones was always having people over and setting them up with chili and whatever they needed to drink and putting them in that chair—the one he died in—and playing them records and showing them clips from movies and the Three Stooges and Ghoulardi and the early Stones or whomever and opening up the world. And he did this at Record Rendezvous, too: He’d stand at the turntable and play you things for as long as you’d stand there and listen. The last time I saw him he gave me a stack of CDs he’d burned for me, including Max Richter, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky score, a Captain Beefheart radio show, and Erik Satie, and we hadn’t even really been in touch in years. A full description of his career (Mirrors, Electric Eels, Styrenes, Foreign Bodies, Easter Monkeys, Home and Garden, David Thomas & the Pedestrians, Wooden Birds, Pere Ubu, and solo work, but minus his work with Speaker/Cranker and King NXN) can be found in an interview posted at Ubu’s website. I’ve never felt a more immediate or unmediated connection to a musician’s work than to Jones’s. He was the first person I met whose work made me think, “Wow, I want to make something that good.” I realize that by writing about him, I’m setting myself up as a prime target for a pie from beyond the grave, so I’ll end this quick and then duck. Nothing I can say about his work can convey the hundredth part of what I feel when I hear the songs posted below, but I’ll just embarrass everyone, me and Jones included, by saying it’s something blazing and senseless and pretty close to love.

Download:

"Emerald Necklace" mp3
by Foreign Bodies, circa 1980.
CLE magazine 3A flexidisc
out of print
all instruments: Jim Jones

"Marco Polo: City of Kin-Sai" mp3
by Home and Garden, 1984.
available on History and Geography
guitar: Jim Jones

"Underpants" mp3
by Easter Monkeys, 1984.
Splendor of Sorrow
out of print
guitar: Jim Jones

"Nailed to the Cross" mp3
by Easter Monkeys, 1984.
Splendor of Sorrow outtake
previously unreleased
guitar: Jim Jones

"Heaven/.357" mp3
by Easter Monkeys, 1984.
Splendor of Sorrow
out of print
guitar: Jim Jones

"Miss You" mp3
by Pere Ubu, 1988.
available on The Tenement Year
guitar: Jim Jones

"Forever Lost (Nocturne)" mp3
by Jim Jones, circa 1990.
News from the Firelands
previously unreleased
all instruments: Jim Jones