On this date in 1993, Half Japanese headlined the original Knitting Factory on Houston Street, but the big news was that David Fair would be joining Jad, for the first time in years. When we were invited to be on the bill, we couldn’t say yes fast enough. We opted to perform in our Sleeping Pill guise–James and Georgia on drums, some live loops and a tape collage. I was all set to play maracas, but then I remembered there was a perfect percussion instrument sitting in the trunk of our station wagon: Our muffler had recently fallen off and for some reason I hadn’t just thrown it away. Now I knew why. Do you see where this is going? As I beat my hands to a pulp pounding as hard as I could on that big metal contraption, trying in vain to get any sound out of it, it slowly dawned on me why it was called a muffler. Oh well, at least it weighed a ton. Working out much better was our horn section. We lined up Chris Nelson on trombone, Phast Phreddie Patterson on the C melody saxophone, and Lars Espensen on tenor sax to parade around the audience, taking the music to the people, as it were. (Lars would subsequently report that he’d played the theme to Car 54 Where Are You nonstop.)
