Bob Petric – Screen of Distance

Best of 2021 Playlist – Parting Gifts

After the reactions to last year’s more formal (as opposed to background for a Pink Elephant) playlist honoring people who passed away that made an impression on me. I tried to keep better, more methodical track, and good lord. So many people who changed how I heard things or turned me around on a genre, who deepened my connection with a kind of music or got me interested in a genre, who connected me with people. The person the track stands for who passed away is in parentheses.

On that same note, there are people who aren’t musicians or producers who have as great an impact on my understanding and love of music who should be acknowledged. Lane Campbell, who I probably knew less well than 50 people on my friends list, but who I met at Twangfest many years ago and still remembered me well enough to see me on my front lawn during the pandemic when he and his partner were visiting Columbus and stop to say hello. I thought about him a lot after that chance meeting, and more after he passed away, often revisiting music I loved that I hadn’t gone back to as often in recent years.

George Wein, who created the contemporary music festival, and certainly helped create the versions of it I still love even as I grumble about the ubiquity and encroachment of the festival as a thing: it’s easy to draw a line that there’s no Big Ears without Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals, no Nelsonville without New Orleans’s jazz fest. I finally read the great autobiography co-written by Nate Chinen this year and it made an impression on me.

Wrapping this up on January 3^nd, with a second case of COVID, and grateful to meet another day. Thankful for anyone reading this, anyone who turned me onto any of these artists, and anyone I might talk about them with. I’m sure I’ve missed some, I always do. That impossibility is one of the things that keeps me going. Continue reading if you’re interested in my rambling.

Things I’ve Been Digging – 04/12/2021

The last photo I ever took of Bob, how I like to remember him, at Ace deep in conversation with a few of my favorite people. From left: Chris Quickert, Bob Petric, Nick Schuld, Aleks Shaulov

As we get closer to the first little slice of normalcy – my second vaccine is coming up this week – there are reminders that we’re not out of the woods yet: horrifying statistics around the world, anecdotal evidence from every channel.

One that hit close to home for me was Saturday’s public announcement of my friend Bob Petric’s death. I probably didn’t know Bobby as well as at least 100 people on my friends’ list, but I had genuine conversations with him once or twice a week.

The definitive retrospective comes from great writer and longtime friend of Bob’s, Bela Koe-Krompecher at the Alive: https://www.columbusalive.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/04/11/remembering-thomas-jefferson-slave-apartments-guitarist-bob-petric/7180845002/

He was someone I thought about regularly: the sly one-liner, the big laugh when you landed, and that hand on your shoulder that reminded you he was glad to see you. When I was at a loss for what to do, getting off work or a summer afternoon, “Head down to Ace of Cups and see Bob” was always one of the best options on the table.

Before and parallel to that friendship was his presence in my life as a guitar player. I never got to see Girly Machine (I squandered a few opportunities as a kid), but I saw Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments every time I got the chance. The way he fused an almost hyperactive, polished technique to a frenzied wildness was breathtaking. There was the emotional quality of opening a nerve at the same time he compressed the entire history of the guitar and cracked the sky at the same time.

I saw a couple of TJSA shows that were shambolic trainwrecks but even those had a few minutes that affirmed I was in the right place. Far more often, they were mind-blowing. Petric’s melodic, fiery counterpoint to Ron House’s wry, cracked lyrics over a shifting series of great rhythm sections were what I’d reach to 9 times out of 10 when someone asked me what “Columbus music” sounds like.

A tangent: one late afternoon, Anne and I were at HiFi Bar in Manhattan (RIP) who had an astonishing jukebox, a precursor to the now-ubiquitous internet jukes, called El DJ. El DJ boasted a hard drive we controlled with a trackball through an interface that cross-referenced bands. One highlight of EJ DJ, for me at least, was a surprising number of Columbus acts: Times New Viking, Gaunt, New Bomb Turks, and, of course, TJSA.

As the two-for-one happy hour shifted gears, I put on “Cheater’s Heaven” off their seminal first record Bait and Switch and owner Mike Stuto lit up. “Who played Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments?” He exclaimed from across the bar, and Anne and I spent a great hour talking about Bob’s guitar, Ron’s singing, the connection between our town’s scenes. When I think about Columbus crossing the world – and there are a million stories – that’s the one I go to first.

So while this is not something I was digging, there’s never a bad time to remember our friends and tell the friends here we love them. If you’re reading this, I love you. If I haven’t told you lately, I’m sorry and I want to do better.

If you haven’t listened to TJSA, maybe the best place to start is the blistering live record from their legendary tour with GBV just released on Bandcamp:

Some other video evidence of this juggernaut at the top of his powers:

This one taken by great friend (of mine and the band’s) Shirley Tobias