Let Us Now Praise Famous Bakkens
Happy Had a Premonition 2
Friends and Fauxs,
When the world seems dumb, sometimes a little art can go a long way.
Simply being alive to wonder at art is a reminder that you can still make noise.
You’ve got the gift, baby!
My old friend Steve Bakken, who passed away on January 11, 2023, and who I wrote about in these pages, made spectacular use of that gift to make noise while he was still here.1
This week, under the prodding care of his loving friend and former bandmate, Michael Lopez, a tribute recording project has been completed and publicly shared: listen at this link.
I, singing cowboy Faux Jean, contributed one song to this project, and I encourage you to go listen to all of these noise interpretations, which are lovingly housed at basementsketches.org.
It felt really inspiring listening to all of these artists performing Steve’s songs.2
I actually rap on the song I did, which is called “Elevator Action.”
My daughter said my rapping sounds maybe even better than the singing.
I shoulda been a rapper.
Hats off to Michael Lopez for spearheading this project and herding cats, I hope y’all find your way over there.
As I do every Tuesday with this epistle, I have added one song to the evolving album series “From the Mixed Up Files of Mr. Matthew T. Schindler,” which lives over on Bandcamp. [This here is the Substack with the same name :) ]
Today’s song addition is a 4-track cassette demo that I made with Steve Bakken back in 2005 when we lived in the Tyler Street Warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis, pre-gentrification.3
The song is called “Happy Had a Premonition,” and this is a second attempt at this demo; listen in the player below:
My guitar is hard left and Steve’s is hard right. I think Steve played the drums by tapping it out on a drum machine as I laid down the first/left guitar. And then he overdubbed the tasty solo guitar on the right channel.
I’ve got some lyrics ready to go from 2007 for when this arrangement finally takes shape.
WWSD?
I remain your humble servant,
OX&C,
FAUX JEAN
P.S. Did you know that Burt Bacharach always had the nickname “Happy” when he was growing up. Can you imagine everyone calling you “Happy?!” That’d get old by like 4th grade, right?
Bakken has six albums on the streamers and probably more hiding somewhere.
All of the artist who contributed songs: Michael Lopez, June Panic, Rank Strangers, Jeff Esterby, Michael Moore,Mark Schumacher, Miguel Ayala, Matty Schindler, Dax Eckel, Brock Klein, Justin Dullum
Generally I try to play all the instruments and do all the singing on this album series ‘cause I’m crazy like that.