Friend of a Friend: Joe Yoga

Friend of a Friend spotlights people of interest to the greater AMR community: poets, rockers, artists, aesthetes, and assorted bon vivants. The series is called Friend of a Friend because all the interviewees are my friends, and hopefully you’ll be their friend too once I introduce them to you. – Nick Courage

DISCUSSED IN THIS INTERVIEW: living art vs. making art; the transformative properties of the atlantic northeast; the all-embracing bosom of the LES; psychic warriors (and how to be one); selling out vs. staying true; the most powerful acid in Maine; seven minutes in heaven; the death of the author; record store seductions; what to do about the rastafarians on the couch; &c.

Nick Courage: It seems like “Joe Yoga” is pretty much shorthand for the LES underground arts scene right now, what with your residencies at the Theater Under St. Marks and your pretty much daily shows, both solo and with Gutter & Spine. You also work an unrelated 9-5. How’s that working out for you? And when do you sleep?

Joe Yoga: Well – I don’t sleep a whole hell of a lot, that’s for sure. It helps to live really close to the building where my office is; my commute is around 15 minutes door to door. If I get more than five hours, I consider myself rested. A typical week is two or three shows; Penny’s Open Mic on Tuesdays and one or two of the following: a solo show, a show with Gutter and Spine or performing with God Tastes Like Chicken (first and third [and fifth] Thursdays) There’s also rehearsals and prep and cleanup and all that stuff that goes into putting on these shows. A typical show night ends with me getting home around three or three thirty, which leaves about five hours for sleep, which is fine. Once it hits four AM, that’s when I seriously start thinking “It’s going to be a rough day tomorrow”….

And there are other complications to this too, such as New Year’s Eve, when me and the great Mike Milazzo put together a cover band and made a set, which took over my life for about a week, then doing Shadow Songs with Almost Clever took about ten straight days of 4 am rehearsals … anyway I could talk about my gigs and the underground LES art scene all day but I would probably end up just pointing you to other people and showing you websites and telling you YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS. I’m flattered that you think Underground LES when you think Joe Yoga, but really I am just a cog in the works – I’m fortunate to have found a community.

Live @ the Theater under St. Marks:

I don’t know how you build an audience and get people to leave their houses but I’m pretty sure you can’t build one by sitting at home (at least that didn’t work for me)… And as long as my job doesn’t mind me rolling into work 10-15 minutes late every day (which they don’t seem to, knock on wood) I can keep plugging away at it. But how bad would getting fired be? I’ve been stressing about how much of my soul, motivation and eyesight can be developed and brought into maturity by sitting in front of a screen for eight hours a day. And a friend of mine said the other day, and I’m paraphrasing here, in reference to working on commercials: “Is it that much of a difference to be sitting at a desk for the Man than to write a jingle or act in a commercial?” I hate sitting at the desk. I’d much rather be driving a van or painting houses to be honest.

NC: So, and this is something you and me have talked about on occasion, there’s got to be some sort of endgame with the whole rock and roll community thing. To be honest, I think I’d rather see you getting paid to play in a band with floodlights pointed up your rock and roll nostrils than have you delivering the milk. Any thoughts on cashing out on bass licks – or are you just playing for your passion right now and whatever happens, happens?

JY: Sure, plenty of thoughts on cashing out on bass licks. I have a few things working against me: one, i can’t read music and I can’t do genre stuff. Also – I have a feeling that as far as bass players for hire go, there are a lot more people with better gear and more skills, and I’d be kind of lost. Plus the chances of finding a band or songwriter that a) I like enough to make a career out of and b) that actually has a chance of making it, ie recording, touring, etc. is pretty slim. But I guess you’re right in the sense that if somehow it could be a similar workload to a 9 to 5 it would be OK but that doesn’t really solve my problem. How happy would I be as Hinder’s bassist? How much money would I be making, really? If something fell into my lap I’d have to consider it, but would it take me away from the city? For how long?

I don’t know where the endgame is. Is it getting a grant and buying a theater? Is it just picking up enough work? Is it getting noticed? Is it getting a song in a film? I think at some point years ago I just gave up the hope of ever getting paid to do art… my feelings on that have changed as I’ve actually met more artists who do get paid and as I’ve grown up a bit and realized that working a desk job doesn’t make me happy and perhaps I should start thinking about it more. The problem is I’m so over-committed at the present time that there’s no way I’d even have the time to try and hunt down work unless I quit my job and that’s a leap I just can’t take at the moment.. I’ve thought about giving bass lessons. But when would I give them? Is it going to pay my rent? Now that I have a studio it helps give me a central place to work out of, but there just aren’t enough days in the week or weeks in the month.

Plus I’m trying to record an album and it strangely doesn’t help that this has been a really prolific few weeks for me, so I’m writing new material for the next project and I haven’t even wrapped up the material for the last album.

NC: Okay, well I gotta stop you short here and say that one or two of your solo songs are some of my all time favorite songs (see: video above), and – along those lines, with or without monetary compensation and making it big – I think you can just go ahead and consider yourself as somewhere on the sliding scale of musical success… especially when you think of the rock pantheon you and me share: Robert Johnson, Daniel Johnson, Daniel Higgs – basically heartbreakers revolving around some variation of Daniel or Johnson. When you get down to it, you’re working on what they’re all about: that basic passion, a sort of land-where-blues-began attentiveness to the half-broken heartbeat of a sound.

In terms of paying the bills, I’d like to see someone like Merge or Drag City pick you up – someone’s got to fill Dave Berman’s shoes… but you’re out in the world and you’re playing shows almost every day, and maybe that’s an issue for another time. Lord knows it’s always looming.

And you’re working on a new CD (and apparently an old CD too). What’s the story on them?

JY: Oh man- I would love for a little label to pick me up and just put out albums. I don’t know how one gets discovered by Merge or DC… I sent them recordings and got back form letters. Which is beyond discouraging considering that’s all I ever got back from publishers and agents back when I was writing fiction. I just don’t know how to do it. I’ve got enough of an artistic sensibility to know that the songs I write are pretty good. The recordings are lo-fi but the quality is no better or worse than an average home recording. I’m not sure what people are looking for, and I have almost no idea of what I can do differently.

So the only thing to do is keep going. I think my best bet is quality and persistence. I’m recording a new album which is tentatively called Life Out East and it’s the collection of songs I wrote over the past year or so, which was a really fulfilling and prolific time for me artistically. The recording is maybe 25% done. I have high hopes for the album, and I’ll be doing all the right things for this one, putting it on i-Tunes, etc. Then I’ll be doing something I’ve never done, which is a tour. Who knows when all this will get done. If I come out and say one month, it will probably be the next month. I have a big show in April with Almost Clever, so I’m hoping to finish it before then, then tour after. Nothing fancy, maybe Boston, Philly… if I can get out west I’d do that too.

NC: I think, for small labels, they just see you play every week and fall in love with your band. Either that or you’re on a little label because you straight-up founded it so you could get some records out. I gotta work more on getting AMR into being more useful as the latter – i think the streaming jukebox is probably a good start – but iTunes, that’s a great way to go. And i think we probably still have a strongish Boston and Philly contingent to show you some love at those shows. Exciting!

I sort of want to step back a little bit from this whole meta-musical discussion, though, because you’ve got some deep running back story going on… as well as an origin myth or two.

It’s tough to skip past the backlog of Yoga bands I dig (Trousers, Coach, Noisebin), but you’re also a writer and – I’m just gonna say it – one of us (echo: one of us)… a sort of psychic warrior. You’ve mentioned how tough it is to make it as the former – especially in New York, Jesus… if you pay too much attention you can feel the competitiveness bubbling up behind your eyes and blinding you – but it seems like the writing is really a symptom of an overarching Yogic sensibility, just another battle on the psychic field. I’m jumping here… but tell me about Maine. Or am I, like, way out of my fucking mind here?

JY: Can you go a little more into what you mean by psychic warrior? I’m feeling you, just kind of wondering what angle you’re on…

yoga with noisebin at trashbar, 8/10/07:

(photo by miek)

NC: Well, you know… I’m basically just working on the basic Situationist idea that it’s really easy to turn off in contemporary society, and it’s sort of a daily battle to turn on, to actively fight for a life worth living – for a basic spiritual and artistic fulfillment… and i also think that, whatever you do, that life has to be inherently creative. That’s just – that’s the kind of animal we are. And it’s hard to be creative when you work a 9-5 and have to pay the bread man. To work through the thousand daily suicides that we necessarily have to deal with and then go home and write something beautiful to buoy everyone up for another day… you almost have to be superhuman.

Recently one of my favorite poets, Andrei Codrescu, told me that the greatest compliment Allen Ginsberg could give someone would be to call them a courage teacher: someone who inspired in others an agency to break past the day-to-day grays that keep us from the thrills of creativity and self-expression, someone who enabled people to be similarly courageous with their lives. I think that’s basically what a psychic warrior is, someone who not only fights the good fight but who fights it hard enough and unselfishly enough to be an inspiration.

JY: This is all true. The one thing I think it’s super important for artists to realize is that yeah, you’re doing a heroic thing by fighting the good fight, but it’s absolutely imperative to remember that the vast majority of people really don’t give a shit about your problems and even more important to not let bitterness over that guide your art. Because that usually leads to alcoholism and ruin. All you have to do is look at the long line of artists who were awesome, got public notice and fame, and then started sucking. I’m not going to name any names, but think of that band who was great and then they got money, and their next album sucked, and they never got it back. How many bands is that… a thousand? Artists suffer, but just a little bit of insight and compassion and self-awareness will tell you that everyone suffers. Complacent artists make complacent art.

The life of an artist is brutal… and at some point you come to the conclusion that the life is either for you, or it’s not. And you give it up, or you don’t. Art is not a hobby. And sure as fuck I am romanticizing the life of an artist. Because it’s the best. coming home from eight hours from work, there are two options, nap and/or take the night off or rock out. Sometimes I nap, but most of the times I rock out. Every day I go to hell, but every day i get to leave hell. Coming home and rocking out isn’t more work, it’s freedom. And once you realize that “making it” is bullshit and an illusion, a fake goal, that’s more freedom. I can probably count on two hands the number of musicians working today I know that have integrity and what passes for success. Maybe twenty. Out of how many? Those are worse odds than the lottery. If you’re going into art for any other reason than to tell the truth as you see it, you will drop it. I guarantee. And if you’re going into art to tell the truth, than the struggles and the pain just become more truth to tell.

But there’s no end to the horrors. For example: every day I pass by the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. They have an exhibit in the window about how they set the world’s record for largest guitar smash. They have the broken guitars in the window and the newspaper article framed. When a tourist passes by that window they may say oh! or that’s funny! or not notice it at all. All I can think about when I pass that window is how for like two years I didn’t have a guitar… I was making shit working at a bookstore, I couldn’t afford a guitar, how all I wanted was a guitar, how breathtakingly cruel and wasteful what they did was. This country’s culture is so hostile to art it’s embarrassing. Hard Rock Cafe wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for artists [....]

old times Yoga, playing with Coach:

Most people don’t a have a fucking clue. Most people have this linear future planned out, however vaguely, from day one. I know I did. growing up it was go to school, then go to college, then get a job, then get married, then have kids, then retire, etc… recreation is TV. I remember when I was a kid and showed interest in the arts, it like never even occurred to anyone in my family that I should you know, GO INTO THE ARTS. If I’d have studied music, learned to read music, I could be a studio musician or part of a broadway orchestra. Or whatever! There are so many creative type jobs I could have done, but it never even occurred to me until I was getting ready to leave college. Not one guidance counselor or family member ever steered me in that direction.

NC: Not only does this ring really true for me (except: I was basically encouraged, with complications; just too stupid to maximize on it)… but I think it’s also really important that you talk about the importance of not being bitter. Because, fellas: unless you’re one in a hundred, this is not only completely self-destructive and pointlessly abnegating but also pretty much the biggest turn off in the world. Let’s keep it healthy and happy!

JY: There is nothing more eye-roll worthy than an artist who thinks he’s so awesome that everyone else should love him as much as he himself does and is bitter about the fact that not enough people care. But at the same time, don’t get me wrong. We can be bitter about some stuff. we don’t have to smile all the time either. We don’t want a bunch of Matt and Kims running around (I kid… I kid….)

NC: Okay, PSA’s over. Before we move onto Maine, and just as a sort of name-dropping-people-who deserve-it exercise: who are five or ten of Yoga’s top twenty musicians with integrity that we should all check out? Maybe list a favorite song or album from each so we can follow along at home…

Yoga with No Sexy Regrets at Make Music New York:

JY: As far as artists with integrity, I listen to a lot of Tom Waits. This guy is just as good now as he was on his first album. Forty years later. Never safe. Always evolving, always pushing himself, always taking it further. On Real Gone, which is like his twentieth album, he had turntables and it was his first album without ANY piano on it. Plus just look at this quote: “Apparently, the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad…I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor.”

I listen to a lot of Mission of Burma. They broke up after two albums because of Roger Miller’s tinitus and didn’t reunite until they knew they could put out albums just as good… twenty years later. I saw them on their first reunion tour and they were awesome. I got the album and it was just as good as the old stuff. different of course,
but still as challenging, as alive. i saw them this past summer and they were better, even more ferocious.

I listen to Daniel Johnston. I listen to Geoff Farina. I listen to Alabaster Rhumb. I listen to Mike Milazzo. I listen to Bill Hicks. I read Denis Johnson. I read David Foster Wallace and Kurt Vonnegut. I listen to Television. Sebadoh. Silver Jews. Beethoven. These are people who are dedicated to the idea that art is pure and able to change people. Groan all you want, Art is communication. if you’re not trying to get through to people to either a) change their perspective or b) make them understand your perspective or a via b then they’re doing it for another reason. Which ends up just being TV in the end..

Yoga with noisebin, live:

NC: Okay, I think I have two more questions for you. From talking with you in the past, I’ve always sort of gotten the impression that Maine was a real turning point for you in your life – geographically, intellectually, emotionally. Can you give me the dish – maybe with the whole freytagian pyramid of the experience: pre-Maine context, Maine climax/anti-climax, current denouement?

JY: Maine was huge for me no doubt… and it was a turning point in the sense that the whole experience was just so different than anything else I’d ever done. I don’t consider myself a very conservative person, but I have been known for making safe decisions and holding to a routine (for good or bad). Maine was just tossing all my shit into the wind. Is that coherent enough to be a mixed metaphor?

Anyway, I was broke, out of patience, had lost my girlfriend and my roommates and I knew we couldn’t be more than more than a month or two away from getting an eviction notice. So at some point in the winter of 2000 a friend of mine that I knew from Barnes and Noble came down from her college in Maine with a friend of hers on break and stayed with us. We were telling them our plight and my friend’s friend says, “well you could live with us in Maine if you wanted.” We were desperate and tuned in enough to take her at her word so when things started really hitting the fan we decided to take her up on it.

No money and desperation makes you make decisions that you wouldn’t normally make. In retrospect it was ridiculous, but it has totally shaped me. I would not have made it as long as I have in NYC without those months in Maine. For one, I realized that I belonged in NYC, not in Maine. I realized I would have to fight for it, I realized that I could not do it alone, I realized that I would have to learn to be more responsible with money… a lot of this came from seeing people do the opposite. I entered Maine a boy and left a man, I entered Maine a writer and left a musician. How does this happen exactly? In many ways the whole experience is like a blur… but Maine is where I stopped running.

I’m not sure how many personal details are relevant… I may just have to give you a heap of broken images and maybe some moral will come to me:

If you tell rastas they can stay on your couch, they will stay and stay.

It’s hard to tell someone you love that they can’t stay with you anymore, even though they are broke and have nothing. Sometimes you have to do it.

I did the most powerful acid I’ve ever had in Maine. it had pictures of Vladimir Lenin on it. We hung out on the fire escape and listened to opera.

One of the rastas stole a giant Guinness mirror from the bar below us and i made him give it back. He retaliated by shoving a broomstick through the wall.

We lived in a famous section of Portland, the Old Port, famous for its cobblestone streets and wharfs etc but the residential buildings were like 95% owned by a slum lord.

I remember it snowed a fuck load, and the heat was electric and expensive as fuck. We had a whole floor (four bedrooms) and I didn’t realize that there was no heat in the room I’d chosen (we moved in in the spring). It was fucking cold. There were floor to ceiling windows.

We arrived in Augusta on Apr 15 2000, the day after my 25th birthday. The girl I knew from Barnes and Noble was there at our friend’s place and the whole night was just so pissed at us, saying “I can’t believe you guys actually did it!!!”

One of the first nights I was there I was up late smoking pot and editing my first novel (part of my reason for moving was to finish my second and publish my first) – I was getting it ready for a vanity press for print-on-demand. This process was gut-wrenching; I realized that the novel was largely no good and un-publishable, parts of it were more or less incoherent… and I was starting to realize that it wasn’t going to happen. But one night I was staying up real late, smoking, going over the book, and I turned on the radio and it was so clear… I was getting an AM station from NYC that was giving traffic reports from the morning rush! It was surreal.

Shadow Songs (“Elsewhere”), with music by Yoga and Milazzo:

A few days after we got there one of our cats got run over. my ex sent me my tax return in cash in an envelope. There was a punk house called Waste House where we watched movies. There were roadhouse bars. We played this place called The Wharf at an open mic and people didn’t know what to make of us at all.

Did you know that there is so much space in Maine that there are large chunks of land up north that’re not even counties? They’re not named. They just have numbers and letters. On a hill near Augusta there’s a huge field of radar dishes… it was an early warning system from the cold war, abandoned now but awe-inspiring.

So the girl who told us we could stay at her place in Augusta pretty much lied when she told us that she was moving out, and she’d talked to the landlord and we could take over the place. We had to be out. We’d only been there a month. I was working at Barnes and Noble. They had an art gallery, and I was supposed to have some work shown there. It was not promising. Here is where shit gets weird:

My buddy who I’d moved with had brought his girlfriend and she hated it, so she left. Said buddy was not dealing well with life at this point and had no money so we didn’t know what he was going to do… leave or stay. We went up to a hippie bonfire (swear to god) in West Athens and drank ourselves silly, got into paranoid conversations. People were turning on each other.

I was hanging with my B&N friend (the one who earlier was saying I can’t believe you guys came here) and she was getting kicked out of school, or something to that effect, had to leave, something like that, so we were all let’s move to Portland! I had a little money, not much; she had a car and no real money but could probably borrow some – we were [basically] fucked. the night we were getting kicked out of the place we went back there to find out someone had robbed the basement and stolen most of her drum set and we just said fuck it and split with whatever we had.

But we were a team. You know how crazy shit like that brings people together. So we stayed on floors, in the car, for around a week while we tried to find the slumlord in Portland and get money together… we eventually did. The first night we slept on the floor in an empty flat, running an extension cord in from the hallway.

I promptly started drinking heavily, and painting. And reading lots of Bukowski. I haven’t painted a whole lot since then… I think I shot my load.

Oh god, her idiot brother and his girlfriend moved in. she would make these paper cranes, literally hundreds of them, all different sizes… and leave them around the house.

One night close to the end we were hanging out in the apt during a snow storm and there was a ruckus out front when the bar closed. We went to the window and the cops were hauling people out of the bar and handcuffing them. It looked like everyone was calm-ish, just another bar fight… and then one of the cops started whacking one of the guys in handcuffs with his baton. Then another guy lobbed a snowball into the circle of cops and the cops hauled like three people out of the crowd at random and started cuffing and whacking people. We could have had the whole thing on video tape but my GF (by this point) had lent the camera to her idiot friend who still hadn’t returned it. so we had to settle for screaming Fascist! Pig! from the window at the cops, one of whom made a “come here” gesture at us.

So self sufficiency. I was either going to have to do it by myself or with a team I trusted all the way. I didn’t realize how hostile the universe was before, how people will fuck you over and not even think twice about it. I made my first real enemies in Maine, which is always a sign of growing up. I worked my ass off, two jobs… I was the manager of a second-run theater. I worked temp jobs. I was overflowing with righteousness. When I saw the “George Bush – 43rd president of the United States” graphic on MSNBC at 4am in the morning, I knew it was time to go, back to NYC.

Shadow Songs (“Elsewhen”), with music by Yoga and Milazzo:

NC: And now you’re back and working it to the bone as a musician in this LES/Brooklyn scene… this scene that I see as trying to very consciously embrace the role of the contemporary artist as envisioned by DFW: “It seems that one of the things about living now is that *everything* presents itself as familiar, so one of the things the artist has to do now is take a lot of this familiarity and remind people that it’s strange.” (That’s from a 1993 interview in Whiskey Island Magazine, by the way). What kind of strange making are you up to these days, show-wise?

JY: Holy shit, I just now read that same interview, meditated on that same fucking line, then came here to see you asking about it. If that’s not QED as DFW would say, then what is? It’s basically how postmodernism will die is what I think. Making the familiar strange is a way to recapture the wonder that you lose when you run through a life when people are telling you it’s all been done.

When you’re talking about the LES scene that I am in, it basically revolves around Under St. Mark’s theater, which is our home base. Most of the people I work with now I met through Penny’s Open Mic, which is there every Tuesday. Not only is it hands down the best open mic I’ve ever been to, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted an open mic to be.
Penny is an enigma, an ocean, yet at the same time so down-to-earth and accessible…. I guess this is what makes her such a great host. Her love for the performers and the space is palpable and just makes you want to be a better performer, and person for that matter. Just try and separate them… I dare you!

Several of us that met through the mic play for a show that takes the stage on 1st and 3rd (and 5th) Thursdays called God Tastes Like Chicken which is hosted by John Murdock, one of the sharpest and most intense people I’ve ever met. While a booked show, it still retains the feel of an open mic, because people are still taking risks. And it’s that kind of feel that is such a draw for me.

What I see people doing when I go to these mics is people finding their voice… the process is sometimes scary sometimes awkward and sometimes god-awful… but absolutely essential… everyone’s reasons for wanting to find their voice is different. Some grew up in an artistic home and were instilled with that value…some were abused and had it beaten out of them, some had it ground down by mediocrity and banality and television. But once you find your voice you realize that – wait a minute – it hasn’t all been done. Go up in front of a mic for seven minutes with no plan and I guarantee you that you will learn something. What could be more familiar than talking?

Every single person reading this has done performing, or public speaking… if you’ve been at a party and told a story to a group of people standing around, you’ve done what we’re doing. But put it in a black box, give the person a mic, and lights, and a stage, and… voila, NOW it’s strange. but now it becomes a lot more urgent… you can’t just go up there and be all “oh man I got sooo wasted last night” or “oh my god, did you see Biggest Loser last night?” … not because people don’t care, but because all of a sudden *you* care. You don’t want to bore people. You don’t want to bore yourself. You’re taking a familiar thing, talking, and making it strange by putting it in the context of for those seven minutes, it’s the most important thing in the world.

yoga at the mic:

NC: My heart is telling me this is the perfect stopping place; my other heart (the one that beats in dixieland syncopations) is saying that we’ve talked a lot about musical integrity *and* we’re coming up on st. valentine’s day. Would you mind pasting together a self-representational valentine’s mixtape (you know, like in high school!) for all your fans and friends out there?

JY: Do you mean a playlist of songs that i would send to the one i love or one that takes a journey of analyzing our culture’s bankrupt attachment to the ideals that corporatism attaches to everyone’s needs, especially and in this case, love? because if it’s the former I can’t guarantee that Tesla’s “Love Song” won’t be on it, and if it’s the latter I can’t guarantee that Every Rose Has Its Thorn won’t be on it. (You did reference high school after all)… or should this be a side a/side b thing?

NC: I’m going to obliquely answer that question. Let’s say you’re at Academy Records and you see a girl in an open plaid button up and “hey how are you” tee. She’s bitching to her friend about Dave Brubeck, but you can’t make out exactly what she’s saying. You notice that she has ‘ “…” ‘ tattooed on her left wrist, and that she leaves with a couple of nondescript 78s and a Belle and Sebastien re-release. Also: she’s beautiful. You want to her, not just carnally but metaphysically… so you make her this mix tape (self-representational as in aspirational, as in you want it to impress her but not give her the wrong idea [a fine line]) to leave at the counter c/o the benevolent clerk:

JY: She sounds awesome. She can have some deep cuts, like Willie Nelson doing rainbow connection, but she’s not getting away from Tesla. I feel like I’d be lying to her. Buddy Holly and Sam Cooke will hopefully cure her of her Belle and Sebastian kink….

SeeqPod – Playable Search

NC: Hey thanks so much for letting me profile you, Joe. I consider myself just ridiculously lucky to have met so many people that I can call both an inspiration and a friend, and you’re at the top of that list… If I ever get over my bedroom recording BS and learn to play live, it’s going to be because of – and for – you.

Everyone else, please do yourself a favor and click some of those links up there (all his bands have been great for completely different reasons – noisebin still soundtracks some of my more sludgy rock&roll dreams), or check out Joe Yoga live at Penny’s, God Tastes Like Chicken, or any of his other many, many shows! For more information, friend him on Facebook or check out his website. Even if you can’t make the shows, it’s good to be in this particular loop (which is less a loop than a bear hug, really).

• Scratch (clip)
• cinderblock rock (redux)
• Greatest Hits (1877)