So I’ve been taskt with filling you in on some of the background details for August Fools like how Jude and Ceejay and I wound up playing together. But first let me clarify—I do not have hypergraphia and I don’t spend all day compulsively writing things down, that’s just what Jude says because of my skill at writing papers, which I’ve done for him many times over the years in exchange for his taking care of my math homework. It’s also true that I’m prone to run-on sentences in less formal formats like this blog, so that may be what he’s referring to as well.
Jude’s family moved to Malvern a couple years after mine did, the house across the street from ours being a parsonage for the United Methodist Church and Jude’s dad being the minister at Hazelwood U.M.C. in Smyrna. We were in the same grade at school and happend to be the same brand of adolescent cut-up, so from riding the bus in the morning to playing video games and guitars at night, we were inseparable. The Mosses are a musical bunch; my own folks are not. Everything I know about music thus far I learned from being around Jude and his family. However, my folks tolerated the loud squeals of amplifier feedback—along with the squawks of my bird Naranja, God rest her soul—much better than Jude’s, who were more into singing hymns around the piano. So we practiced at my house. Junior year we meet Jordan Crouch, whose parents and stepparents are spread out across the country (like mine will be soon enough) and for whom Tennessee was just another state to inhabit after Missouri, Mexicali, New Jersey, etc. He fell in with us fairly fast, to the dismay of his mother and stepfather who thought we were “troublemakers”—a funny thing to infer about Jude and me, the respective sons of a preacher and of a professor. But Jude is quick to challenge authority; and I have brown skin. Wherever we go we tend to cause arthritis of the thumb(s). I guess Mr and Mrs Martelli saw us as outcasts and feard that their eldest son was becoming one, too.
One day Jordan, using money he’d saved by working for his stepdad in the summer between junior and senior years, bought a drum kit and brang it to my house and set it up in the practice space of our converted garage. We cald Jude over and decided we were forming a punk rock band: me on guitar, Jude on bass, and Jordan on drums and vocals. We chose “the Bastardheads” for our name, wrote six or seven songs, recorded them with the help of Jude’s older (half) brother Luke as a self-titled EP. Jordan didn’t know how to play the drums and he can barely carry a tune but he’s loud and he’s a natural showman, so it was less about singing a song or keeping time as it was about him making as much noise as possible.
The whole thing fell apart when Jordan got caught with weed and had to go to an alternative school for the rest of the year. Then it was just me and Jude and a drum machine borrowed from Luke and we played one (1) show like that, at the Muse the night after Halloween with a band cald the Neo-Fugitives, another two-piece: guitar and drums. This was Jeremiah Riddle and Ceejay McClellan, who grew up playing music across the street from each other exactly like Jude and I did, and whom we’d seen perform many times at the only two all-ages venues in the Basin that mean(t) anything: the Muse in Nashville and the now-defunct Red Rose in Murfreesboro. Jeremiah was quitting the band tho because he’s the father of a 1.5-year-old girl (named Olivia) and can’t afford to be out playing gigs late at night anymore. There we were in need of a drummer—and here was a drummer fresh out of a job. We bonded instantly and moved our practice space out of my family’s house in Wilkinson Co. into Ceejay’s basement in Sumner Co. on the other side of Nashville. And we re-christend ourselves “August Fools”—like our idols the Meat Puppets, we named ourselves after one of our songs.
Once we graduated high school and Jordan was free to hang out again and become our frontman (tho this has yet to actually happen) August Fools took up artistic residence at the Muse, which is located in an old postwar brick-and-mortar on Fourth Avenue South next to the interstate as “Kung Fu Coffee” selling drinks and snacks up front and “Mixed Urban Sound Experiment” the official name of the venue in back, with concrete floor, lighted stage, and PA system. Jude and Ceejay went one step further and took up physical residence upstairs where the owners are trying to establish a tattoo parlor and where four or five people are usually squatting at any given time, in violation of code (which designates the 2nd floor as “offices” for the downstairs business) but with implied consent from the owners. The building’s previous tenants had been running a pawn shop, and before that, a liquor store. Local legend is that back in the day these businesses were in fact fronts for a whorehouse, given the vast, carpeted floors upstairs that have already been partitiond into rooms, some with closets, and a single bathroom with a shower stall. Nashville has always had its seedier side—an underground economy formed when it was just a frontier river town, sustaind thru the Civil Wars and the city’s occupation by Union and Texian armies, to today where it services the throngs of honky-tonk tourists flooding Second Avenue every weekend. If you go all the way to the back upstairs, there’s a set of French doors alleyside that are suppost to lead to a deck or balcony of some sort, only there’s nothing there—just a stark view of the parking lot for our neighbors to the rear: the World’s Largest Adult Video Bookstore, whose giant sign is well known to any little kid that has been able to read it from the highway, often aloud to the chagrin of parents or grandparents driving by.
So that’s pretty much how we came together to form a band. And we’ve had a decent run of shows this summer, tho many of them have been for crowds of five or less. One Saturday night there was this old guy in a baseball cap with a clipt white beard and grandpa shades, standing right up front next to the monitors, headbanging to our no-vox set, fist occasionally in the air. Afterwards he came up to us outside and said “Hell yeah! I came down from Kentucky to see what the hell was goin’ on in Nashville, and you all whupt some ASS! Whoo!” and hopt in his clunker and drove off, back home on the Pennyrile. Those are my favorites.
I almost forgot—regarding my sister Junie: first of all, she’s not my birth sister, we’re both adopted. But I was adopted when I was a week old; she was adopted at six going on seven years old. She grew up in foster care before that. Her biomom was a teenage junky. She’s eleven now and altho she’s improved, she’s still got some behavioral issues. She makes Jude uncomfortable and I can understand why. Nonetheless I love her and she’s a great kid, and second of all Jude needs to tell you about his little shadow that follows him around, his nephew Will Roman, who could soon be giving Junie a run for her money in terms of behavior…