the basement remix of serengeti & polyphonic's 'sunrise' has been tested by studio rats and will be available over the counter in 2009 . hear a short & sour preview just overhead on the music player . the audio 8 world is a wonder . check it
http://www.audio8. com/releases/ A8020.html

you have the patience of a planet . we are done recording and are now mixing our new record . no title yet . untitled . dig the sneak previews and stop by virginia howells for a taco with taco . paz . rvb

ASTRONOMY CLUB GHOST STORY
DELIVERS THE GOODS
right here
http://www.myspace.com/astronomyclubgs


TOP TEN OF 2007 - SONG BY TOAD, PHAWKER, HERO HILL

SONG BY TOAD
http://www.songbytoad.com
9.
Ray's Vast Basement - Starvation Under Orange Trees
Beautiful, wistful and very old fashioned. This is an album of dust-bowl Americana with a sprinkling of loveliness, all based on the work of John Steinbeck which, on listening to the album, is no surprise at all.


HERO HILL - MOST AMBITIOUS PROJECT OF 2007
http://www.herohill.com/2007/11/best-of-2007-most-ambitious-projects.htm
3
This record came out of nowhere for me. Jon Bernson was originally asked to write songs to accompany a theatre production of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. He ended up creating a masterpiece. Of Mice and Men is one of my favorite novels, so naturally the project intrigued me, but trying to capture Steinbeck's voice and settings in song is no easy project, especially when every hipster loves his work and was probably waiting to dismiss it out of hand.

Not only did Bernson succeed in sound tracking a play, but he manages to evoke imagery from a collection of Steinbeck novels, without losing his independence. The songs stand on their own, with beautiful instrumentation and tone. Considering it was written for a small play and resulted in one of the most beautiful records of the year, it deserves special mention.


PHAWKER
Best Record of 2007
Hear Ye! Starvation Under Orange Trees
Dan Buskirk
Phawker.com
A Philadelphia Blog
http://www.phawker.com/2007/09/14/hear-ye-starvation-under-the-orange-trees/

BY DAN BUSKIRK I am willing to wager double nickels on the dime that you have never even heard of what is quite simply the Best Album of 2007: Ray's Vast Basement's Starvation Under The Orange Trees. Well, now you have. Starvation is the San Francisco band's third release and it's their most fully-realized disc to date. Their name stems from their highly theatrical past: The band's early shows were mixtures of staged scenes and musical performance, conjuring the fictionalized history of a tiny corner of the rocky coast of Northern California where a guy named Ray ran a speakeasy out of a cave. This morphed into their first release On The Banks of the Time (2000) which included a stack of hand-screened postcards giving a timeline of the history of the cave and the many colorful denizens who occupied the imaginary town of Drakesville. Despite its self-release and its limited distribution it found its way to David Dye's desk, who proclaimed the disc "a homemade masterpiece" and invited the band to perform on the World Café.

All this self-created myth is the brainchild of Jon Bernson, a young man whose family history evaporated in the tumult of the Holocaust that enveloped Europe in the second World War. This deep-seated need to secure the past gives Bernson's writing a unforced resonance that makes his stories come alive and escape being merely musty nostalgia for a world gone by. With Starvation Under the Orange Trees the band breaks away from the Drakesville cycle but it is still consumed by the past, its song written for and inspired by a recent staging of John Steinbeck's Of Mice & Men.

Wide swaths of that Central California landscape that Steinbeck wrote about is remarkably unchanged and the disc find ways to capture it with earthy shading provided by musical saw, harmonica, washboard and cornet. Keeping the disc from turning into a retro hoedown is an underpinning of found sounds and field recordings. And then there is the songs themselves, beautifully arranged little nuggets of love, regret, hope and apocalypse — complex emotional weather systems that are as much tomorrow as they are yesterday.

In a world aching for music this rich and real how could this miracle of a record miss? Maybe because it's a real full-length album, it songs building and cohering, as opposed to a collection of tracks jingling around like loose change in our I-Pod driven world. Maybe it's too grand for our lowered expectations. Certainly that isn't you though, just click on to Phawker radio and separate yourself from the teeny-boppers as Ray's Vast Basement quietly burns down the universe and re-imagines it to their own liking.

SHIPWRECKERS TOP 20 ALBUMS OF 2007
Posted in Music Related on December 31, 2007 by Doll Is Mine
Simply put, it's been a disappointing year for music, and in particular, for well-known indie artists. Music from artists that I've come to count on to challenge me musically, instead released albums that were at best, safe and uninspiring, and at worst, unlistenable. Not many could have predicted that a Blonde Redhead album would not make my year's end list, but unfortunately, their latest has the distinct honor of officially being my biggest disappointment of year, followed closely by releases from Beirut, Caribou, and Electrelane. In contrast, newly discovered artists, most of them in non-indie rock genres, replaced the stagnancy of indie rock stalwarts such as the Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, at least, making 2007 a bit more enjoyable.

My Top 20 of 2007

1. Burial - Untrue
2. Portugal. The Man - Church Mouth
3. Sole - Sole & The Skyrider Band
4. Thee Moths - Glytchvölk Musique Concrète
5. Skeletons And The Kings Of All Cities - Lucas
6. Telephone Jim Jesus - Anything Out Of The Everything
7. Blockhead - A Page From Uncle Tony's Coloring Book
8. Deerhunter - Cryptograms
9. Woods - At Rear House
10. Doseone - SkeletonRepelent
11. The Mary Onettes - The Mary Onettes
12. Odd Nosdam - Level Live Wires
13. Nostalgia77 - Everything Under The Sun
14. Kiln - Dusker
15. Amon Tobin - Foley Room
16. Secret Mommy - Plays
17. The Besnard Lakes - Are the Dark Horse
18. The Bird Names - Wooden Lake/Sexual Diner
19. RAY'S VAST BASEMENT - STARVATION UNDER ORANGE TREES
20. Lo ModA - Gospel Store Front

Ray's Vast Basement: Bernson turns Steinbeck score into Album
Derk Richardson
Thursday, January 10, 2008
96 HOURS

Jon Bernson took on a daunting project when he accepted a commission to compose songs for the Actors Theatre's 2005 staging of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men." First, Bernson, the San Francisco singer-songwriter who helms the "musical fiction" band Ray's Vast Basement, had to bring something fresh to a classic play by a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner; then he compounded the challenge by deciding to extrapolate the project into the third Ray's Vast Basement CD, 2007's wondrous "Starvation Under Orange Trees."

"It was hard," Bernson said, as he nursed a late-afternoon beer in a San Francisco bar. "If I was a different type of musician, I might have just scored the play instrumentally. This play doesn't need any more words." But he had been recruited for the job explicitly for the song craft he demonstrated on the early Ray's Vast Basement recordings, which spun tales about a fictional Northern California town, Drakesville, populated by eccentric characters. In a way, Bernson, an Oxford-educated New York native whose Lithuanian lineage was severed by World War II massacres, was imagining new local roots and a surrogate ancestry.

Bernson similarly finessed the Steinbeck assignment: He wrote impressionistic songs that incorporated themes from the author's broader body of work, including "Grapes of Wrath," "Tortilla Flat," "Cannery Row" and "East of Eden." "My advantage was that I didn't have to tell a story," he said. "I was bringing music to the table, and the words could be more stream-of-conscious, more modern - tapping into the subconscious world of John Steinbeck."

After nearly 75 performances of the play, Bernson and the band went into the studio and took a first pass at recording the music. "It was cool, it was tight, it sounded good," Bernson said, "but listening back to it two weeks later, I thought, 'That's not a record.' I'm trying to represent some really layered, complex works of literature, and I want the music to have the same layers of complexity." The resulting CD, several years in the making, with myriad Bay Area musicians (as well as the Decemberists' Nate Query) bringing their talents to bear, is a richly textured, soft-focus tapestry of abstract but familiar imagery that equals or eclipses the work of such heralded indie-folk auteurs as Iron and Wine, M. Ward and Jim White - all masters at evoking mood, period and place.

Bernson, who teaches after-school electronic music classes at the Sunset Neighborhood Beacon Center, has already turned his attention to a new Ray's Vast Basement incarnation (a trio that includes a turntablist) and the next RVB album, which he said will be "more futuristic and more based in my experiences living in my neighborhood in the Mission, although there are a couple of characters from Drakesville who moved to the city with me."
- Derk Richardson, 96hours@sfchronicle.com

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/10/NSJ5U88HG.DTL

------------------------

WIRETAP MUSIC POSTS RAY'S VAST BASEMENT VIDEO & REVIEW
http://www.wiretapmusic.com

Ray's Vast Basement
Tuesday, December 04 2007
Ray's Vast Basement
Feature Review
Dec. 5, 2007



The first time I saw Ray's Vast Basement take the stage I was immediately intrigued. I really had no idea what to expect from the ensemble except that a reliable source had told me I would like them. After seeing their backline on stage, I leaned over to my companion and whispered: "Two acoustic guitars and a turntable…fucking awesome."

The performance that followed was both unforgettably good and consistently surprising. It was also easily one of my favorite live music experiences to date. During Ray's Vast Basement's set I decided to express my newly formed passion for the group by sending a mass text message to my friends, as I often do when carried away in the moment of live musical bliss. I wanted everyone to share in my experience.

Ray's Vast Basement is a gypsy-like rotating ensemble lead by Jon Bernson, a front man who bears a clear resemblance to Tom Waits: Bernson's slightly gruff vocal style weaves in and out of songs that tell sad tales of struggle and longing. But Bernson's voice is sweeter than Waits' in both tone and message; his throaty whispers choke out far less gravel.

Bernson and crew were commissioned by the Actors Theatre of San Francisco to craft songs based on John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and then perform them live during the troop's performances of a play based on the novel. After the close of the successful show, the band went to work on Starvation Under Orange Trees, an album that is heavily inspired by Of Mice and Men but encompasses the entire works of Steinbeck.

Steinbeck is an author who made his first burning impression on me in 7th grade with his short story "The Red Pony." The story evoked an emotional response I wasn't at all prepared for in my pre-adolescent phase. "The Red Pony" is one of many early literary discoveries that influenced my decision to become a vegetarian at 16. Interpreting such heavy literary prose into song is not an easy task, but Bernson, with his Waits/Springsteen style of storytelling, seems to have been perfect for the challenge.

Starvation Under Orange Trees is eerily accurate in its depiction of the rolling countryside and the endless lament of depression-era farmhands. It is almost cinematic in its scope, each song being so delicately and precisely layered that it takes more than one listen to unravel its secrets. The haunting backing vocals on "The Story of Lee" strike me at my core and sound as though they are echoing down from above the rest of the song. The period mark can barely be heard via a flash of horns on "Black Cotton" and a hint of ragtime on "Danny's Party." The repetitive hum of "Work Song" is extremely effective in evoking the image of sweat-stained, dusty workers.

Ray's Vast Basement delivers a folky, organic rock guided by a strong narrative. Starvation Under Orange Trees, with its heavy subject matter and jumble of talented contributing musicians, could have ended up an incongruent mess, but, thanks largely to the vision and orchestral talent of Bernson, the album succeeds in both its thematic and musical concepts. Bernson is clearly a huge talent as a singer, songwriter, producer, arranger, and visionary. The album will grab hold of you and just won't let you go.

But again, I can't express how taken I was with the live performance of Ray's Vast Basement. I recommend if you are lucky enough to have the chance to see them live, you do so again and again. Two acoustic guitars and a turntable…enough said.

[Katie Kaapcke]

Ray's Vast Basement will be playing on Jan. 12th, 2008 at Café Du Nord. Thao With The Get Down Stay Down and The Dry Spells are also playing. Don't miss this show!!!


[STREAM] Ray's Vast Basement: Various Tracks


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hear Ye! Starvation Under Orange Trees
Dan Buskirk
Phawker.com
A Philadelphia Blog
http://www.phawker.com/2007/09/14/hear-ye-starvation-under-the-orange-trees/
NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO: RAY'S VAST BASEMENT

BY DAN BUSKIRK I am willing to wager double nickels on the dime that you have never even heard of what is quite simply the Best Album of 2007: Ray's Vast Basement's Starvation Under The Orange Trees. Well, now you have. Starvation is the San Francisco band's third release and it's their most fully-realized disc to date. Their name stems from their highly theatrical past: The band's early shows were mixtures of staged scenes and musical performance, conjuring the fictionalized history of a tiny corner of the rocky coast of Northern California where a guy named Ray ran a speakeasy out of a cave. This morphed into their first release On The Banks of the Time (2000) which included a stack of hand-screened postcards giving a timeline of the history of the cave and the many colorful denizens who occupied the imaginary town of Drakesville. Despite its self-release and its limited distribution it found its way to David Dye's desk, who proclaimed the disc "a homemade masterpiece" and invited the band to perform on the World Café.

All this self-created myth is the brainchild of Jon Bernson, a young man whose family history evaporated in the tumult of the Holocaust that enveloped Europe in the second World War. This deep-seated need to secure the past gives Bernson's writing a unforced resonance that makes his stories come alive and escape being merely musty nostalgia for a world gone by. With Starvation Under the Orange Trees the band breaks away from the Drakesville cycle but it is still consumed by the past, its song written for and inspired by a recent staging of John Steinbeck's Of Mice & Men.

Wide swaths of that Central California landscape that Steinbeck wrote about is remarkably unchanged and the disc find ways to capture it with earthy shading provided by musical saw, harmonica, washboard and cornet. Keeping the disc from turning into a retro hoedown is an underpinning of found sounds and field recordings. And then there is the songs themselves, beautifully arranged little nuggets of love, regret, hope and apocalypse — complex emotional weather systems that are as much tomorrow as they are yesterday.

In a world aching for music this rich and real how could this miracle of a record miss? Maybe because it's a real full-length album, it songs building and cohering, as opposed to a collection of tracks jingling around like loose change in our I-Pod driven world. Maybe it's too grand for our lowered expectations. Certainly that isn't you though, just click on to Phawker radio and separate yourself from the teeny-boppers as Ray's Vast Basement quietly burns down the universe and re-imagines it to their own liking.

« WORTH REPEATING: It's Always Sunny In NY Mag
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One Response to "HEAR YE: Starvation Under The Orange Trees"


Herb Behrens Says:
September 15th, 2007 at 5:30 pm

"Starvation Under the Orange Trees", published in 1937, was written by John Steinbeck in response to the increaslingly desperate situation of the migrant agricultural workers that he first uincovered in his Oct., 1936 expose, "The Harvest Gypsies" for the San Francisco News. "Starvation Under the Orange Trees" was later added as an epilogue to "Their Blood Is strong", a pamphlet compiling the original "Harvest Gypsies", published by the Simon J. Lubin Society. Proceeds from the sale of the pamphlet were used to assist migrant workers. Steinbeck used the notes he had compiled for Harvest gypsies, with those collected on later trips to the migrant camps and the observatrions of tomcollings to write his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.

ALL MUSIC GUIDE GIVES ORANGE TREES FOUR STARS!
(out of five)

Link to RVB Overview & Orange Review:
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:gbfpxqy0ld0e

Biography
by William Ruhlmann

Ray's Vast Basement is a folk-rock-country band led by singer/songwriter Jon Bernson and based in San Francisco, CA. Bernson's writing for the group has been ambitious and highly conceptual. His idea for the band was drawn from his conception of a fictional town in northern California called Drakesville and a character named Ray McKelvey who runs a speakeasy in a cave called Ray's Vast Basement. Bernson wrote songs describing other characters and events in the town for the group's debut album, On the Banks of the Time, self-released on RVB Records. A second album, By a River Burning Blue, continued the stories. Bernson was hired by the Actors Theatre in San Francisco to write and perform music for a production of Of Mice and Men, which stimulated his interest in the writings of John Steinbeck. He expanded his music for the play into an entire album inspired by Steinbeck's novels, Starvation Under Orange Trees, which was released as the third Ray's Vast Basement album by the Howells Transmitter label on July 3, 2007. Joining Bernson on the disc were guests including Nate Query of the Decemberists and Michael Zapruder of Michael Zapruder's Rain of Frogs.

Review
by William Ruhlmann
The fiction of John Steinbeck might not seem the most amenable to musical adaptation, but there have been some notable attempts. In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote and recorded "Tom Joad," a 17-verse song version of The Grapes of Wrath that earned praise from the novelist. Fifteen years later, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II used Sweet Thursday as the source for Pipe Dream, one of their less successful Broadway musicals. A half century after that, Jon Bernson, the creative force behind the Bay Area band Ray's Vast Basement, was asked by the Actors Theatre of San Francisco to write and perform music to accompany a production of the play version of Of Mice and Men. Bernson fulfilled the assignment, but he also went beyond it, and Starvation Under Orange Trees, a title borrowed from a Steinbeck essay, is the result, its songs inspired by works such as East of Eden ("The Story of Lee") and Cannery Row ("Ocean Notes," "Palace Flophouse") as well. Musically, Bernson is closer to Guthrie than to Rodgers and Hammerstein, creating folkish arrangements that begin with acoustic guitar and add lots of other acoustic instruments -- mandolin, banjo, dobro -- plus the odd keyboard, reed, and more exotic folk accompaniment, such as washboard and musical saw. He also throws in "field recordings" and "found sounds," to give the tracks atmosphere. Over the top, he sings in a laid-back and gruff tenor, his phrasing often slurred and rarely emphasizing meaning over sheer sound. His lyrics tend to be more impressionistic than specific, retaining, perhaps, the intentions of the theater company that wanted a musical accompaniment and complement, but not to turn the play into a musical. Starvation Under Orange Trees can be enjoyed without reading a shelf full of Steinbeck books, and, in fact, a close familiarity with those books isn't that much help in appreciating it. But Bernson captures the mood of Steinbeck's writing, which seems to have been the idea.

STYLUS MAGAZINE REVIEWS STARVATION UNDER ORANGE TREES
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/reviews/rays-vast-basement/starvation-under-orange-trees.htm

Ray's Vast Basement
Starvation Under Orange Trees
Howells Transmitter
2007
B

Jon Bernson has the uncanny talent of having a voice like Jeff Tweedy—a smoother Leonard Cohen, warm in its narrative speakability. Starvation Under Orange Trees is a lengthy, at times bold collection of soundtrack and rumination. It contains the recorded renditions of music for the Actors Theatre of San Francisco's Of Mice and Men and later arrangements grown out of a studio flood and, following that, a year's productive hiatus. Bernson is helped by a small army of musicians including Nate Query of the Decemberists and songwriter Enzo Garcia, who has also played with Jolie Holland. Together, they create deep contexts in soft interludes and proper songs, most of which hearken back to "the refugees of Steinbeck's shanty towns."
Leaving aside the concept for a moment, Starvation Under Orange Trees is fondly reminiscent of mid-career Wilco, whose fans may find more pleasure in this album than Wilco's latest. The smooth, honeyed quality of the production is full of understated drums, peaceful guitars, and friendly piano twinkles, peppered with the windy whistles Andrew Bird is known for. A well-arranged and sophisticated later track, "Palace Flophouse," demonstrates how this insanely friendly formula can also achieve something more substantial in the listener's ear. "Folksy" (what, because it has an acoustic guitar in it?) music is always inviting but only half the time is it actually interesting or new. Bernson is exceedingly interested in slow tempos, but there are simple ways of keeping our attention, like by adding melodic lines later in a song that play off an already established formula (the piano does this often).

Bernson, mulling over the skeletal pieces from the Steinbeck production, seems to have benefited from the extra time, and by glorifying the old he's managed to make something new of an easy, breezy genre. The context of each song is still seeped in Steinbeck, such as the full-fledged experience of "The Story of Lee," with its terrifying, echoic chorus, "No one's going to take me home" (taking East of Eden as inspiration). The more wholesome and familiar major-key descents of "Not Just Mine," directly following "Lee" are lovely complements.

Does anyone listen to this kind of music anymore? Wilco, M. Ward, and a handful of others do very well in this genre, but whether they're always—or still—pushing their own boundaries is another matter. So Bernson's foray into theater—and back to indie—deserves applause. His imaginative ballads are exemplary of a rare, yet increasingly popular, trend of creating an entire fictional universe. Bernson's interest is not just Steinbeck stories but his invented locale, Ray's Vast Basement, a 100,000-year-old cave. But he is still really dependent on literature and art's precedents, and in a more obvious way than most musicians.

The fuzzy-blanket pleasure of "How Through Sacrifice Danny's Friends Gave a Party" is utterly contemporary but hinges on history (Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat). These songs may teach personal lessons, but the inspiration comes mostly from the outside, and the outside that has passed. They achieve clairvoyance of the usual love, loss, etc., through stories true and made-up. Bernson is just the vessel—a gesture that only fosters a more integral dialogue between art in its most general, umbrella-term form.



Reviewed by: Liz Colville
Reviewed on: 2007-07-02

PITCHFORK MEDIA REVIEWS STARVATION UNDER ORANGE TREES

Ray's Vast Basement
Starvation Under Orange Trees
[Howells Transmitter; 2007]
Rating: 6.8
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In 1996, I saw Bruce Springsteen on the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, when he took the stage for two hours with only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. He was pretty good when the songs were fast-- I remember the lusty "Red Headed Woman" being a stand-out-- but whenever the tempos flagged, the show became deadly dull. When he interrupted the show to recount his favorite passage in The Grapes of Wrath, I actually fell asleep-- despite being in the almighty presence of the man I considered at the time to be my hero. This is the Springsteen flip side that is rarely considered when artists from the Killers to the Arcade Fire cite him as an influence: There's anthemic Bruce of Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A, whose music seems to embody everything that rock and roll can and should be, but then there's serious storyteller Bruce of The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, whose devotion to Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie is so personal that it often comes across as exclusionary.

While his colleagues go for the might and majesty of anthemic Bruce, Jon Berrnson is somewhat bolder: while he may not be directly citing the Boss as a source, his third album fronting Ray's Vast Basement seems squarely in the vein of Tom Joad, right down to its last period detail. Starvation Under Orange Trees was, according to the liners, inspired by Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and commissioned by the Actors Theatre of San Francisco. This is a concept album as literary endeavor, which doesn't just mean the lyrics are smart, but rather that they evoke a time, place, and culture specifically and artfully. Fortunately, Berrnson doesn't try to retell that story through song, which would be largely unbearable. Starvation is not a piece of Dustbowl realism like Steinbeck's novel, nor Americana fantasia like HBO's defunct Carnivále-- nor, for that matter, anything resembling the AbEx of its curiously anachronistic cover. Instead, he and the band explore Depression culture on a larger scale: "Work Song" and "California's Gone" follow itinerants westward to labor in orange groves, and "The Story of Lee" recounts the trials of a Chinese immigrant. On the closing "Annalisa", a boxcar-jumper longs for the love he left behind, and the spirited "Cotton Black" is a boxing tale that could have been inspired by George Bellows' pugilist paintings.

With a large cast of musicians that includes Michael Zapruder and Decemberists bass player Nate Query, Bernson anchors these songs in some of the same folk sounds that inspire storyteller Springsteen, but dresses them up in Sufjan-style orchestration. And yet, Berrnson actually incorporates very little period music into these songs, aside from scraps of ragtime on "Danny's Party" and blasts of trumpet on "Cotton Black". Starvation is overly modern, from the watery bossa nova beat of "Palace Flophouse" to the brushed snare on "Ocean Notes" that sounds like a loop. The trembling atmosphere of "Work Song" and "Tall Bob Smoke" are too cinematic, their gravity a kind of soundtrack shorthand that seems empty without a visual, but the backing vocals on "The Story of Lee" and "Not Just Mine" are mic'ed to sound like they're emanating either from a beat-up radio or from the firmament directly-- a nice atmospheric touch that suggests a dramatic chorus watching over these characters. Starvation achieves the brainy scope of a good novel, but to what end? Too firmly rooted in contemporary musical styles, these songs have much to say about the present-day. There's no activist spark here, just an academic scrutiny that rarely extends beyond the stage or the page.

-Stephen M. Deusner, July 02, 2007

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/raysvastbasement

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/43800-starvation-under-orange-trees

All proceeds will go toward the Ray's Vast Basement
record fund, which funds Ray's Vast Basement and
the recording of their records.

http://www.howellstransmitter.com/emporium.html

LARGEHEARTED BOY - NOTEBOOKS
July 3, 2007
http://blog.largeheartedboy.com/
Note Books - Jon Bernson (Ray's Vast Basement)

The Note Books series features musicians discuss their literary side. Past contributors have included John Darnielle, John Vanderslice, and others.

Inspired by John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and commissioned by the Actors Theatre of San Francisco, Ray's Vast Basement's new album Starvation Under Orange Trees is as ambitious a project as it is well-executed.

In its review of Starvation Under Orange Trees, Stylus wrote,
"Jon Bernson has the uncanny talent of having a voice like Jeff Tweedy—a smoother Leonard Cohen, warm in its narrative speakability. Starvation Under Orange Trees is a lengthy, at times bold collection of soundtrack and rumination. It contains the recorded renditions of music for the Actors Theatre of San Francisco's Of Mice and Men and later arrangements grown out of a studio flood and, following that, a year's productive hiatus. Bernson is helped by a small army of musicians including Nate Query of the Decemberists and songwriter Enzo Garcia, who has also played with Jolie Holland. Together, they create deep contexts in soft interludes and proper songs, most of which hearken back to 'the refugees of Steinbeck's shanty towns.'"

In his own words, here is the Note Books entry of Jon Bernson from Ray's Vast Basement:

I grew up with a hardback copy of 'East of Eden' in my bookcase, but never took it off the shelf. My parents kept the spine in plain site, but didn't push it on me. The title felt biblical, classical, tiring. I made it through my education without being forced to read any Steinbeck, but was lucky enough to move to California and have friends pass me paperbacks like mixtapes. Literary peer pressure: "Check this out man." Now he's one of my favorite musicians. I don't always get the lyrics, but Steinbeck melodies are gold, and there's a consciousness that never let's humanity off the hook.

When I got the chance to score 'Of Mice and Men,' the possibilities were easy. The difficult part was making personal contact with his characters. Easy to connect as a reader, but constant tension between making a record that was true to me, and true to Steinbeck. In a few cases, I found plot turns that matched my own. Other times, I sang in first person plural, with dozens of multi-tracked vocals. That allowed me to represent half the population of Tortilla Flat, or to exhale the collective smoke of Cannery Row.

One last thing. A warning. Somewhere along the line, The Man got a hold of Steinbeck and sanitized his revolutionary thoughts, brought pieces of his stories to Hollywood, fed excerpts to school kids, turned him into an All-American. I'm not into the brand of Steinbeck. It gets in the way of what's really there.

1. SALINAS RIVER THEME
I love how he uses the same river to symbolize central, but entirely different themes in different books.

> 'Of Mice and Men' - river of death.

> 'East of Eden' - faucet of agricultural wealth and drain of poverty.

> 'Grapes of Wrath' - current of human fertility.

I wanted the album to begin at the Salinas River, and for the music to capture it's wide, mutable qualities.

2. CALIFORNIA'S GONE
We all know the ancient connection between music and driving. My latest pass at 'The Grapes of Wrath,' discovered what Kerouac loved about Steinbeck and why 'On the Road' sounds like it was serviced by the same mechanic.

3. THE STORY OF LEE
I read an article about Ennio Morricone last year. He said that the music for 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' employed three main instruments, one for each of those qualities.

Lee's song seemed like a good place to try that kind of a thing. The bells are from the opium den. I asked Colin to lie on the floor of our studio and play the bells while pretending to be on opium (not a stretch). I asked Ann to pretend she was Lee's dead mother (big stretch). I pretended to pretend to be Lee (bigger stretch).

4. NOT JUST MINE
One critic complemented me for writing a song full of generic phrases. What a relief: you can't fool all the people all the time, but the time is here and we will always be together, cause I woke up this morning and then I got myself a beer, woke up this morning and dragged a comb across my head, woke up this morning and got myself a gun, got myself a gun.

5. DANNY'S PARTY
A musical attempt at method acting. Scott rallied a ragtag bunch of musicians and we just went ballistic. Wish I could have included the entire 45-minute horn and string freakout. We emulated the exact arc of the climactic ending to 'Tortilla Flat' (greatest party novella ever written). Like Steinbeck, we are drawn to the sadness and tragedy behind all parties.

6. HOW THROUGH SACRIFICE DANNY'S FRIENDS THREW A PARTY
This is the same song as Danny's Party. I split them up so Clear Channel stations wouldn't have to write corporate headquarters to request permission to play a five-minute song. We have a friend who took his own life while we were working on this play. Why do people do this? Why did Danny do this? Another friend reminded me that when standing at the edge of a cliff, the only reason we don't jump is because the urge not to jump is slightly stronger.

7. OCEAN NOTES
In general, my favorite books have no real plot. How do you get away with that? How do you write a good song without a melody? Cannery Row is a pure tribute to place. I need place. I'm absorbant. I have porous qualities.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.... It's inhabitants are as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole, he might have said 'Saints, angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing."
- J. Steinbeck 1945

8. BLACK COTTON
Curley from 'Of Mice and Men' was a boxer. I've never won a fight. This song is for you Curley. This song is my personal revenge anthem. Curley's wife didn't have a name. Although Steinbeck is a god in human form, his female characters have a tendency to come up short. Some might even say that they adhere to certain cliches. To such people I might say, you can't fool all the people all the time, but now we've seen the light, you've got to stand up for your right.

9. WORK SONG
My favorite part of the play was when every actor in the show came out during a scene change to build the bunkhouse. They worked fast, but it usually took about 5 minutes. This song was more jubilant during the show, but on the first recorded version it sounded hokey without the 15 builders. Don't get me wrong, I love the version on the record, but it ended up focusing on different elements, more about the dark delirium of repetitive physical labor.

10. TIA IGNACIA
Google 'Tia Ignacia'. It's good reading.

11. TALL BOB SMOKE
When you google 'Tall Bob Smoke,' the first thing that pops up is: "wants to be admired, is laughed at". There's a guy worth writing a song about. One thing about Steinbeck is that he has great tangents, until you find out they aren't tangents. I know Largehearted Boy don't dig spoilers, so that's all I'm going to say about Tall Bob Smoke.

12. WHITE LAND PINK LAND
As we've discussed, certain substances are habit-forming. The same lyrics appear elsewhere on the record. I've read the first chapter of 'The Grapes of Wrath' over a hundred times. I'm not boasting. It's a chemical thing. Possibly genetic. The pages remind me that my place in the world could be swept away at any time. It's impossible to watch nature's traffic signals on a day-to-day basis, but that's how accidents occur.

13. PALACE FLOPHOUSE
In Cannery Row, Chong 'inherits' a dilapidated fish warehouse, which he 'rents' to a group of drifters. Reminds me of places I've lived: "Mack, with a piece of chalk, drew five oblongs on the floor, each seven feet long and four feet wide, an in each square he wrote a name. These were the simulated beds. Each man had property rights inviolable in his space. He could legally fight a man who encroached on his square. The rest of the room was property common to all." - J. Steinbeck 1945

14. ANNALISA
We opened the show every night for sixteen weeks with this song. I wanted to set the tone and take our audience immediately to the Central Valley. I had an actual woman in mind, and a character from the play who I thought might like her, but they're still not on speaking terms. Real people and fictional people are doomed to lives of forbidden love.




East of Eden . Chapter 13 . 1952

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves, but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on the preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

also at Largehearted Boy:

Previous Note Books submissions (musicians discuss literature)
Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)

tags: books music literature" indie" steinbeck"

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