Bartholdo Macheem

Up till now, I think I've only posted my own stuff here, but I'm happy to bend that rule and share this great song by my dear old comrade Greg Gould. And of course, I do play bass on this track. (That was always a nice treat - in The Characters, Greg would switch to guitar when he sang his tunes, and I would step in on bass).

This video is a kind of a mess, but I wanted to do it as part thank-you to G for his years of friendship and support, and also a valentine to a vivid time in my life.

When Greg and I founded The Characters, in I want to say 1983, I had been without a band since 1980 or so, when Tattoo moved to Oregon, and I believe my "sibling bands", Jonah and Deakin, were over then too, or soon to be. So after about four years of being immersed in playing music - and how I mainly defined myself - I passed through a three-year limbo.

And it was grim at times. Now, I was living with and soon to be married to Teri, so I was extremely happy in that part of my life. But playing in a band - especially when you're working on original material - is not like any other relationship. And to have that drop away leaves a hole.

For most of that time, Teri worked nights, waitressing and bartending in Sausalito, while I worked days, rebuilding and refinishing antique oak chairs. (Different story). So, alone most evenings, I would usually mess around on guitar and sing, just so I wouldn't lose what modest skills I'd acquired before the diaspora. Along the way, I wrote perhaps a dozen really shitty songs, but eventually wrote a couple I wasn't ashamed to play in front of people.

It was Greg - who had a few really cool tunes under his belt by then himself, including this one - who took on the burden of finding musicians to join us. The challenge was this - we wanted people who a) played well, b) were relatively easy to get along with, and c) were willing to play with no immediate expectation of getting paid.

This required Greg's extensive networking skills, among which was his long-time practice of asking just about every single person he met if they played an instrument, then, if possible, getting their name and number and writing them down in one of the shirt-pocket-sized notebooks he always carried.

We eventually managed to put together a functioning band that practiced once or twice a week, the core being Phyllis on piano, Drew on drums, me on mandolin, guitar, and vocals, and Greg on bass (except when he wasn't). Along the way, I managed to bang out a few more decent songs, as did Greg, and we decided to start recording them, at a really nice and inexpensive sixteen-track studio on Adeline in Berkeley, Madman Studios (long gone, alas).

We could only afford to record and mix four tunes every six months or so, but we would just practice our brains out on the tunes we'd chosen for each session and we at least went in with the ability to record the basic tracks in just a couple of takes. And we didn't do a whole lot of overdubs.

So in about eighteen months, we had a twelve-song "album" that we were overall pleased with. This was one of the tracks that really had a great, loose, party feel to it, I thought. (It may have been one of the last we recorded, so we knew the studio pretty well by then).

During this same period, my son was born, Teri quit the bar business, I stopped fixing furniture and began selling it, among other major developments. So when The Characters eventually did fade away (turns out gigging regularly is important to most players, and we just never did get the hang of managing that aspect), I had plenty to keep me busy, and that made the end less traumatic than the end of all the Skywheel sibling bands before.

Years later, still proud and happy to be writing and singing and playing, and I owe a lot of that to Greg, without a doubt.