We're proud to announce that Illinois John Fever is issuing its first release, NOW IS NOT THE WAY IT IS, due via the internets everywhere sometime in mid-December! Stay tuned for updates....

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And now that the CD is finished, it's high time we kick off our next project: First off, we've torn down the recording studio while Bobber guts and rebuilds the inside of his house. This is the second time we've dismantled the studio in as many years but its new home will be permanent (and a helluva lot bigger) once when we rebuild this winter.

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Meanwhile, we've got things rolling at Studio B, located in Tucker’s basement, taping to our 2-track hi-fi VHS field recorder. Mm, we like it: It gives all the warm love of analog while providing none of the technology to which we've grown accustomed. The guerrilla approach also fits the stripped-down nature of our street-material, which gets featured on the next recording. 

Hope everybody's well.

LOVE,

ILLINOIS JOHN FEVER

This here's a quote from the insightful CORNEL WEST, and we believe it fits the profile of IJF quite nicely:

Q: So you’re optimistic about the future?
A: The categories of optimism and pessimism don’t exist for me. I’m a blues man. A blues man is a prisoner of hope, and hope is a qualitatively different category than optimism. Optimism is a secular construct, a calculation of probability. Black folk in America have never been optimistic about the future – what have we had to be optimistic about? But we are people of hope. Hope wrestles with despair, but it doesn’t generate optimism. It just generates this energy to be courageous, to bear witness, to see what the end is going to be. No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended. I am a prisoner of hope. I’m going to die full of hope. There’s no doubt about that, because that is a choice I make. But at the same time, the end doesn’t look too good right now.

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From GUIDE FOR THE SEEKER by Richard Hittleman:

"You find yourself existing in a dimension of constant threat and danger. You are beset on all sides by endless problems which, in your delusion, you attempt to resolve with the very instrument that creates them. You seek to Know and Understand, but you cannot because you are eternally separated, in a subject-object relationship, from that which you would Know. Through a universal conspiracy--in which you unknowingly participate--you accept these situations as 'the natual course of events,' as 'life.' Hypnotized by the self-appropriated authority of ordinary mind immersed and believing in not only one but many 'selves' which ordinary mind manufactures and maintains, you subscribe unquestionably to its illusory propositions. Among these fantasies, the doctrine of DESIRE-ACTION-FULFILLMENT convinces you that it is natural and necessary to strive for happiness, success, pleasure, and security, that such elusive objectives can be achieved through the right kind of action, and that somehow your achievements can be made permanent. So, dutifully complying with the party line of the conspiracy, you experience incessant desires that compel you to undertake the incessant actions dictated for their gratification. But because your desires are interminable, because your actions can never truly satisfy these desires, and because you seek what is ultimate and permanent in a state where only constant impermanence and fluctuation obtain, you suffer. You suffer throughout not only this lifetime, but throughout an infinite number of lifetimes.

"How does one awaken from this illusion, this dream of self, to that Reality which is his/her true and eternal nature? By total abandonment of all that is of the not-Self."

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