Category Archives: microprose

Steve ‘Caz Camberline’ Becker… Rest in peace, my brother.

I don’t quite remember the first time I met my near-lifelong pal, Steve Becker.

He was a childhood friend of my first roommate, a quiet, even taciturn element in the sometimes rowdy mix of mostly musicians who hung out in our strange — and supposedly haunted — garret/loft apartment, a sprawling, mostly empty, multi-level space that occupied the third-and-a-half floor of a rickety old wooden mansion that had been divided into 5 apartments.

I didn’t play music at the time, though I’d tried repeatedly to learn guitar as a kid. Steve had been playing guitar a couple years — he’d been something of a star at his high school as a singer and harmonica player — and he, my then-girlfriend, and my roomy all encouraged me to try again. With their help and encouragement, I strung up my barely playable guitar with new strings and gave it one more go…

The other musicians who hung around our place were all experienced, several of them in my roomie’s very accomplished, label-intriguing band. Their nuts-and-bolts music talk was way over my head, but Steve wasn’t so far beyond where I was that he couldn’t stoop to give a guy a hand, sharing what he’d gleaned from his own self-taught pathway.

After the landlords (an adjacent church) demolished  the old house — which had been the home of ‘Old Man Carroll,’ the developer who subdivided the historic Carroll Park neighborhood in Long Beach, California — to make way for parking for the Church, Steve and I stayed friends, talking and, in time (after I’d assembled some rudimentary skills), playing music together for hour after hour.

We talked about pretty much everything from music to girls to everyday philosophies of living.

For a time we both found ourselves ‘back at home’ living with our respective folks. I got to know his mom and dad and his little brother, Craig, and Steve’s best friends, Evan Jacobson and David Black. I even hung out some at the family’s car lot and wrecking  yard, eventually buying my second car from Steve’s dad, a two  year old, SAAB 96 that the senior Mr Becker gave me a great deal on.

It was the 70s and life was all over the map.

Steve got to know my core friends, becoming longtime friends with many of them.  We even went out, a little, with a couple of the same girls, though there was never any real rivalry. (It was the 70s… we were above all that proprietary stuff. Uh huh.)

And, in addition to entwining our musical lives, we had adventures, long, late-night drives, a camping trip or two, one long and wild trip marked, near the beginning, by driving in my SAAB along Sunset Boulevard toward the mountains in the east, no particular place to go, but heads full of adventure… Someplace near the fabled ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ on Sunset a big Lincoln Towncar pulled up along side of us and Steve said, “That guy scowling at  us looks just like Lawrence Welk.”

I looked and, sure enough, it did look just like Welk, who I’d grown up watching with my family.

With one last frown, the fella in the Lincoln floored it and the big car dropped a gear and surged ahead so we could see the rear, personalized license plate: “A1ANA2.’ Our brush with fame.

Later on that same trip, Steve and I would find ourselves wandering on foot through the mountains, losing the trail we’d followed for several hours up from a roadside parking area… as the afternoon progressed, Steve said, “So, you do know where we are, don’t you?

I wasn’t entirely sure but, given the givens, I thought it best to exude confidence, promising I could get us back to the trail and the car. But it was starting to get cold… and dark. I found myself running through various cold-night survival scenarios in my head. Steve had essentially put his safety in my hands.

Still, with the sun sinking to the horizon, at least we knew which way was which, and, knowing the trail head was in a valley below us, I directed us down the hill, finally, after what seemed hours of walking through low chaparral scrub, seeing a road below. We followed the road a bit more to the west and, finally, as it was starting to get pretty dark, we found the SAAB waiting for us some hundreds of yards down the road. I don’t know about Steve, but I shivered for about 15 minutes after we got in the car and cranked the heater up full. Adventure. Best to have when you’re young.

Both Steve and I were more than a bit cynical, particularly about pop culture — though Steve had a more open, accepting musical sense — and his earnest advocacy of more than a few popular songs I’d already rejected with the most withering pejorative I knew at the time, lame, eventually opened up my mind a little to the innocent joys of good, innocent fun music.

Meanwhile, we were both doing the musical auto-didact thing, individually teaching ourselves music, while occasionally sharing notes on what we had managed to figure out.

Steve was always a bit ahead of me but he had a somewhat idiosyncratic way of expressing his musical discoveries — and I would find myself pondering observations he’d made, sometimes for months — sometimes for years. Sometimes I still find myself slapping my forehead and saying to myself, Ah, so THAT’s what Steve was talking about!

Well before I had the chops or discipline, I found myself in a handful of bands, playing bass (so often the tyro guitarist’s path of entry into the band world).

After a few bands, including one scruffy little trio I agreed to fill the bass slot for that played a bunch of shows in a few short months, I started feeling like I was ready to be in a band where I could sing some of my own songs. I’d become good friends with Rick Black, the little brother of one Steve’s good friend, David, buying a guitar from him and jamming with him and Steve in loud, silly living room jams.

When I ran into a fellow I’d met in a surrealism class at Long Beach State at a local live music bar, James Norling, things began to click. Steve wasn’t part of it directly, but was often around. Rick, James, and I added the drummer ex-boyfriend of James’ sister to our lineup and started practicing, building loose, punk-inflected ‘arrangements’ of songs written mostly by James and myself, with Rick contributing a handful, as well.

But it was a hard-luck band. First the drummer got in a fight and broke his ankle. Precisely one month later, about the time that the drummer was able to start playing again, James fell asleep behind the wheel and wrapped his truck around a tree, rupturing his gall bladder and breaking his ankle. Not long after he came back on board, and precisely two months after the drummer’s accident and one month after James’ own, a careless driver t-boned me on my motorcycle as I was driving home from a local Mexican restaurant, breaking my femur, my hip and, of course, my ankle. Each incident precisely one calendar month apart. (I called Rick, the only untouched member of the band, and strongly urged him to lock himself in his apartment on the one month ‘anniversary’ of the accidents. He escaped harm, I’m happy to say.)

At that point, Steve stepped in to fill my place in the band, playing bass (which he was very solid at, though he had little experience) and also sitting in on lead guitar — which he was much better at than any of us regulars.  Steve graciously stepped aside when it was time for me to come back, but, I had to  admit that the rehearsal tapes I heard from my absence sounded much tighter and together… damn that guy! 

I eventually dropped out of the band, which went on to play a few shows and then dissolved, but that left more time for Steve and me to jam and explore music together.

Playing in various pickup get-togethers with our pals Rick and James we recorded and edited together a number of improvised jams which we dubbed the Emergency Jam Force — or EmJamFo, as I, an early fan of camel case, dubbed it.

We were long on ferocity, weirdness, and lack of what you might call structure. It was huge fun. We also found ourselves jamming with a wide variety of the friends we’d made during the punk years.

After my motorcycle accident, stuck on crutches and then a cane, I eschewed getting in any permanent bands, but rededicated myself to the recording/production course I’d started just before the wreck. After a semester or two I was able to convince all three pals to get into the class, where we recorded the then-current version of the old band and managed to work with a variety of artists, including some of our local musical heroes, like Randy Stodola’s original Alley Cats. (NOT the neo-doo-wop band of the current era, not by about a million miles.)

The Alley Cats at LBCC

The Alley Cats at LBCC, with (L-to-R, back row) TK Major, Steve Becker, James Norling, and Jose Alba

In that recording program at Long Beach City College, I met the tough talking ex-tank commander, Joe Alba, who would become my engineering partner on a number of projects. Joe and his wife, Barbara, took to Steve almost immediately, becoming good friends.

I almost perfectly remember the day that Barb, Steve, and I drove up to the Valley to see then-breaking country chanteuse, K.D. Lang. Joe was otherwise engaged [he was still in the Army Reserves] but Barb, Steve, and I had a great time. Steve kept us laughing the the whole time with his off-the wall observations and often wicked humor. A wonderful day.

Time marches on and, eventually, beginning in 1990, I found myself doing an early, live, echo loop act I cheekily dubbed Frippenstein, an off-handed tribute to Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics echo loop explorations.

It was easy enough for me, improvising keyboards, to set up spacey, live-tracked echo loops and play over them… I’d decided to create an act ‘perfect’ for playing ambient music for otherwise occupied/and/or/distracted coffee house patrons. But an artist needs to be challenged…

At some point, I enlisted Steve, playing lap steel guitar, six string electric, and clarinet, my pal Kurt Schnyder on hand percussion, recorder, and flutes, and our friend, the eminently talented (and quite beautiful) Ann De Jarnett (once of Mnemonic Devices, later of Ann De Jarnett and the Falcons)  on violin and keyboards.

We called the project band Drift, playing a number of small clubs including the old System M as well as at the first Long Beach Outside Music Festival (I may be mangling the name of the festival… apologies). We made sprawling, totally improvised, rather undisciplined music.

(And we took forever to set up, that all my fault, as I flitted back and forth across various stages trying to patch together all the primitive echo loop gear — a rig that required at one point over 80 separate signal and power cables. I understand there are still people grumbling about the set up for our c. 1994 show at the Long Beach Museum of Art.)

In the years following, Steve (and sometimes Kurt) and I found ourselves jamming with Steve’s younger brother Craig’s old friend and classmate, Bill Moulinos, a classically trained violist. Steve dubbed the grouping, The Mercy Fox, and arranged a weekly, free-coffee gig at the struggling coffee house of a friend, mostly playing from my ragtag songbook, with all the ‘arrangements’ totally improvised.

Steve was always a fine, intuitive, expressive harmonica player, and a fierce, fast, aggressive 6 string player, but he also became a sensitive and nuanced lap steel player. In the 1990s, he sat in on a number of occasions with local legend, the late country crooner, Chris Gaffney. Someplace along the line he took to using an old alias he’d kicked around since the 1970s, Caz Camberline. (That early automotive experience reemerging.)

By that time, Steve and I had something of a sixth-sense musical relationship — and Bill was right there with us, probably one of the most intuitive  players I’ve worked with. Which was good, because I had pretty well zero interest in anything approaching musical discipline.

We’d show up Friday nights, grab some goopy, sweet coffee drinks, and just start in, whether there was anyone there or not. It was enormous, if chaotic, fun.

It wasn’t until near the end of that open-ended gig period that I became privy to the wicket pun at the heart of the name. (Mumble it out loud a bit and see what you come up with.) By that time, it was too late for dignity.

Steve and I kept jamming together with Bill, Rick, James, Kurt, Ann and other friends. The intuitive musical bond between Steve and I continued to develop. I had become fascinated by free improvisation approaches and, no matter how far from musical convention I drifted, it seemed like Steve could be there with me, echoing my lines, playing off them, exploring harmonic variations. (James passed away in 2005. Kurt passed in 2007.)

I always figured that Steve, who always seemed just a bit bigger, and tougher, and definitely healthier and more level-headed than me, would live a long, healthy life. He took care of himself. While I’d been a heavy drinker for several decades before quitting in 1994, Steve barely drank, never smoked cigarettes, wasn’t a druggy, probably only smoked pot a handful of times. Both his parents lived into their late 80s or 90s.

never dreamed for an instant that Steve wouldn’t outlive me — probably for decades, I imagined.

But life is a funny damn thing.

Steve, healthy, robust, roustabout Steve — he’d worked as a roadie into his 60s — Steve, of all people — Steve, whose family all lived to ripe old ages — Steve who I would have counted on to tell the world about me after I was gone…

Steve somehow, through some crazy trick of fate, developed lung cancer that spread to his brain. He was diagnosed not long before the current coronavirus pandemic emerged, though even before the epidemic closed things up, he was reticent to meet with old friends as he battled cancer, not wanting to worry them, I suppose. We talked on the phone about getting together to jam, I was going to help him with some computer music things, but his treatments took time — and, of course, precious energy. When I talked to him, his sense of humor was there, but it wasn’t hard to hear the tiredness between the lines.  It was reassuring that his brother, Craig, and his old friends Evan and David, were there for him to the end.

Steve ‘Caz Camberline’ Becker passed away at the beginning of June this year.

I still sometimes forget he’s gone. It seems like I’m often carrying on some kind of dialog in my head with him about music or life, then catching myself, and thinking, Damn. 

Damn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pass the dust, I’m apparently under the gravely mistaken impression I’m Bowie…

Scared of the Light [Electric Version]

 

When he awoke, it was dark. His heart was pounding. He felt as though a giant hand was wrapped around him, squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He must have been dreaming but he remembered nothing. He forced air into his lungs, but his breath felt odd and shallow and each breath seemed to take tremendous effort.He tried to shut out the panic but that seemed to make it more acute. He threw off the covers and turned on the light on the little table next to the bed… but its dim and yellow light seemed, if anything, to make his room just that much more oppressive and claustrophobic.

Steeling his grip on himself, he quickly got out of bed and threw on the clothes he’d been wearing the previous night, a pair of bluejeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Glancing at the clock, he saw the red glow of 4:43 a.m. He pulled on his boots and laced them, grabbed his phone and keys, and walked out into the crisp pre-dawn air.

As he often had decades earlier, running from the all-but-forgotten demons of his youth, he found himself walking toward the ocean through the empty, dark streets.

He walked past the lagoon, the shadowy trees looming above languid, almost black water, along the manicured sands of Mothers’ Beach, finally across the trendy little business strip to the bay. As he walked along the crescent of sand, still moving toward the ocean beyond the little bay, the tiniest sliver of golden sun appeared above the houses and trees across the bay.

Until that moment, he’d just been walking. Not thinking. Trying not to feel. Just trying to get away from whatever unknown fear had gripped him in dream so tightly that he feared it would crush the breath out of him.

He searched inside himself for the sense of relief he thought the sun should bring. But all he found was a veil of vague and uneasy dread, pierced by a slim, rosy crescent.

He walked a few steps down closer to the shore, the shift of perspective returning him to the moment just before sunrise. He surveyed the low line of houses, the mirror-like calm of the water. It was beautiful, he recognized numbly.

So beautiful that it seemed a shame to waste it on this moment of vague and free-floating dread.

He paused, pulled his phone out of his pocket, switched its camera on, held his breath just a moment and heard the simulated sound of a shutter snapping open and closed.

_______________________________

 

From the very first zero
to the very last one
I can see what has happened
I can see what will come

Like a train in a tunnel
like a mole in a hole
like a bullet in a barrel
I know where to go

From the very first day
to the very last night
I’ve been through the darkness
but I’m scared of the light

From the very first zero
to the very last one
I can see what has happened
and I see what must come

From the very first day
to the very last night
I’ve been through the darkness
but I’m scared of the light

(C)2013, TK Major

The third (and final?) version of “Scared of the Light”…

(The title of this post is a light-hearted lift from the late, lamented Black Randy — of infamous LA punk/funk provocateurs, Black Randy and the Metro Squad — whose first album was called, “Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie.”)

I’d written out about three quarters of the lyrics and was settling into the chords and melody when I started roughing out the arrangement… something about the way it was going together really made me think of post-Berlin-era Bowie and, I dunno, I ran with it.

 

 

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Flat Five Jump (Instrumental)

Flat Five Jump

 

 

 

new instrumental

Wet eucalyptus leaves buried the wipers on the old Falcon station wagon. He scooped up three handfuls, throwing them into the gutter by the curbside of the rusty wagon. A light drizzle was falling and he knew in his heart of hearts that the car wouldn’t start.  It’d been three days.

At least he’d prepared as best he could, even though when he parked the old beast he was just coming down with what would prove to be an epochal bout of respiratory flu. In the back of his mind, he had seen himself crawling out of a death bed to feebly try to push start the battered jalopy, a long term loaner from a budget body shop.

Prescience is often poor recompense, he told himself as he gauged the logistics of the presumed push start, even as he turned the key.

Clunk.

At least it clunked.

He looked around. Not a soul in sight. Middle of a rainy workday in a working class neighborhood. And his jumper cables had been stolen out of the wagon only the night before he started getting sick.

At least he’d parked near the corner and had a clear out — and he’d made sure to park on a street with a bit of a slope, downhill on his side.

But the Falcon felt about twice as heavy as his Volkswagen — and it felt like it hadn’t been lubed since the Johnson administration. Laboriously, he turned the leaden steering wheel and pushed with all his might as the car slowly nosed out into the traffic lane.

Leaning into the door jam hard, one hand on the wheel, he tried to put everything he had into it and, waiting until the car had passed a little bump, he jumped in and slammed the tree shifter into low… for a terrible moment it seemed like the engine would stop the car’s slow roll, but the old four banger caught with a deep, chassis shaking cough and he gave it a discreet amount of gas.

As he rolled toward the busy boulevard a block away, he had the clutch back in and was working the gas pedal warily, trying to coax the sludgy engine into steady firing on all four cylinders. It seemed to stabilize into a lopsided equilibrium and, since a car was bearing down on him from the rear, he engaged the clutch and gave it a little more gas. It lurched forward, as he backed off and then reengaged the clutch, trying to keep the engine running.

As he rolled to the stop sign, he disengaged the clutch — but he was too late… the engine lurched and died and with the car’s dying momentum he pulled over, rear end still out an an awkward angle to the curb.

Feeling broken, he lowered his forehead to the steering wheel. He thought about just leaving the station wagon there and calling the body shop — but it would surely be towed and they would surely be pissed and he would surely be on the bus for the duration, one way or the other.

He could try push starting it again — but he was pointed into a busy four lane boulevard and, if he turned the wagon around — in itself an arduous, shoulder-bruising task — he would then be pointed back up the slight incline he’d just come down.

He  looked around. Cars zoomed by on the boulevard, a few pedestrians walked across the mouth of the side street. Across from him, a pretty girl in a yellow rain slicker was headed toward the corner. As he looked at her, she looked back at the beat up Falcon and he felt, for the moment, shabby and broken.

As he watched, she changed direction, stepped out into the street and over. She put down the hood of her slicker, brown curls falling out, and smiled.

“I saw what happened as I was walking down here. If you can wait five minutes I’ll walk back to my house and get my dad’s car and his jumper cables.”

A few minutes later, she was holding an umbrella over his head in a light rain as he hooked up the jumpers between the wagon and the girl’s father’s Impala, double parked next to the Falcon. He banged some oxidation off the terminals of the Falcon, twisted to dig the teeth in, had the girl restart the Impala and twisted the key… for a long moment nothing seemed to happen. Finally the Falcon struggled to life. He nursed it along with a cautious foot on the throttle until, after a long time, it seemed to settle into something approaching a rough rhythm.

He looked over at the girl. She beamed at him from behind the wheel of the big Chevrolet. Maybe life wasn’t so bad after all.

Looking back on it thirty — or was it closer to forty — years later, he couldn’t even remember the girl’s name — though he could still see her smile and feel the sudden warmth that seemed to jump from her to him through the wet, winter air. It was a feeling he wanted to always be able to remember. He wanted to look back and think, maybe life isn’t so bad, after all.

(C)2009, TK Major

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I’m Starting to Really Hate Dreaming

I'm Starting to Really Hate Dreaming
New song alert!

He woke up with sweaty sheets wrapped around him like swaddling, like the shroud on a mummy. He felt like he hadn’t been asleep at all. His stomach felt knotted and empty but the last thing on his mind was food.

Every dream was different. Every dream was the same. A thousand different stories — but always with the same ending.

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Every night he met her again for the first time. Every night it was different.

Sometimes, in a dream they’d meet on the street, he’d pass her by and turn and look as she turned to look. Sometimes at a party or in the supermarket or in a park. Once at church. Another time, she was a new hire at his work and they had a cute meet in the lunch room, right out of the kind of sappy old romantic comedy she loved.

In another dream, he met her in high school but somehow it looked like his old, half-forgotten grammar school. There was an innocence to the dream that made it just that much more heartbreaking when it ended — as each dream always did — with them parting forever… a forever that seemed to stretch, empty and as lonely as space itself to the end of time, the end of the universe.

lyrics
I’m Starting to Really Hate Dreaming

I’m
starting to really hate dreaming
I can’t stand to see the night fall
if can’t close my eyes without dreaming all night
and I’d rather not close them at all

all my dreams start out happy
we have just fallen in love
day by day it starts slipping away
by the morning, it’s all come undone

Losing you one time
baby that was hard enough
losing you (each and) every night
makes me sorry I (ever) fell in love

It’s better to have lost
than never fall in love
that’s what some loser said
I say it’s better — better not to dream
time for dreaming when I’m dead

All of my dreams start out happy
in all of my dreams you’re the one
we fall in love every night
by the morning it’s all come undone
(C)2009, TK Major

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