Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 29-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
My father and I were talking in the kitchen about a pair of stereo speakers that photographer Selwyn Pullan made for my parents, which, because they take up a lot of room, my parents want to get rid of. I had my eye on them until the point when my father blew out a bass cone when he decided, in a rage, to deal with a noisy neighbor by dragging one of the speakers to the back door and blasting said neighbor. I probably asked at the time, “With what?”
I will have to ask again. “Hey, Dad,” I’ll say. “Remember when you blew up Selwyn’s handmade speaker by cranking it at the neighbor?”
And he’ll say, “Yes, Jean. Yes I do.”
And I’ll say, “What were you blasting? Like, who?”
And maybe he’ll say Keith Jarrett The Köln Concert or Oscar Peterson or it would be better if it was a horn man. Lester Young, with whom I have the longest connection, spanning back to before I was born. In my late teens and early 20s, I got into jazz after having been subjected to it through childhood. I was all grown up at 20 or so, living across town with a man 10 years my senior, playing jazz and having people “over for dinner.” It is now quite likely that I will happily never have anyone “over for dinner” ever again, but that’s what I was doing back then.
My parents were coming over, and I’d bought a couple of new albums that I was going to play for them, one of which (I’ve told this story, I know) was Lester Young’s “Mean To Me.” It was at that dinner, that my dad told me that he had that same album and he was playing the hell out of it while my mother was pregnant with me.
I bought a fucking sax because of this album and set about learning to play it in the basement of that house. I was 21 or 22, I suppose. I still have the album. I really like knowing that I heard this exact music through the burble of blood and muscle and skin, while I was in the womb.
Anyway, so he wrecked the one speaker and I think Selwyn said to replace the cone with something from Radio Shack. Lordy. I looked at it in the early morning light Christmas day, the holes from where the original speaker had been mounted; shaking my head at some of the things my father has done.
“Something To Be Said,” from Sitting On Snaps (Matador, 1995; Smarten UP!, 2009) (download):
