A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAMBAY IN 8/11 TIME

Memory is a strange thing. It creeps up on you when you least suspect it and throws you back into time. Your body stays here, but the mind travels to places and scenes that seem to be ghosts on the fabric of now. Am I really remembering what happened? Or am I only seeing my memory of what may have once happened to another person only distantly related to the interpretation of me now? Or am I actually going back into time, a time only as static as my dynamic interpretation? 

To try and extricate the beginning of Jambay from Glenmont would be like trying to take the breath from your lungs or the water from the sea. "But what is a Glenmont, and where can I get one" I hear someone cry out in the distance, and I realize I haven't started the story back far enough.

(Everything becomes blurry as I project back, back, back............)

1987. Ronald Reagan is acting President and George "I didn't do it" Bush is on deck. I'm in Solana Beach California, a suburb of San Diego (which is just a suburb of LA). I live with some friends, and around the corner is another group living on Glenmont Street. We all go to college at the prestigious university of California, San Diego. And we were the hippies, the freaks, the party people, the ones who really knew how to have a good time. It was odd for me, I think, always having been a part of the scene. Ben and Jerry's and champagne in the jacuzzi at three o'clock in the morning seemed perfectly natural, but I guess to the fairly conservative student body at UCSD our house gained a status just short of legendary. And a well-deserved reputation it was.... we always had the most epic parties. If there wasn't a band, then it was just a get-together. The real events were for bands and kegs and good friends. Then, about twenty minutes after the cops had come by and chased all the riffraff away, the party would really begin. People would appear out of the woodwork, the jacuzzi would be hot, and the acoustic instruments would play until dawn. They say that youth is wasted on the young, but I don't think I wasted it at all. I just lived it.

Of course, Glenmont was much more than just parties. We were living a co-operative lifestyle that you just couldn't find in San Diego in the eighties.... the only way to get it was to create it for yourself. The bonds that were created in that scene have transcended time itself, and to this day I have a network of close friends who I stay in regular contact with, a tribe that's scattered like leaves around the globe, but who I know love and care for me as much as my own family. People who in many ways are my real family, the one I would choose and who would chose me. This was and is Glenmont, and it was within the womb of this sheltering college experience that the roots of Jambay were first set, roots that have now spread across the country.  

Still, I can't help but feel I haven't made the point. It's hard to describe something that is as much a part of yourself as your arm or your leg. Glenmont wasn't just a house or a collection of like-minded people. It was a state of mind, a conceptualization of what could be that I will carry with me the rest of my life. And out of this state of self-induced chaos rose Team Friendly. Anyone who wants to be a member can be... all it requires is love and respect for those who share the experience of Here We All Are Now, So Let's Have Some Fun.

It was either late `88 or early `89 that all four members of Jambay first played together. Or so they tell me. I was there, but that's another thing about memory. What seems important now wasn't really so important then. I distinctly remember the party. When we had night parties, they were in the Playroom, a garage that had been converted into a room. For years we had a pool table in there. Above this room was a loft, which looked out over the people crowded and dancing in front of the band. The particular party I'm thinking of was Ewing's Birthday Party. (I would tell you about Ewing, but that would require a story unto itself. A fast cat struggling through alcoholic haze as he wailed a beat up guitar strapped to a basketball. The pub rat who would play until dawn and occasionally landed on your couch for a few days, only to disappear again for weeks. Not a role model for the feint of heart) There was no PA, so there was no singing, just long extended blues jams that seemed to (and did) last forever. Then the guy with the nitrous tank showed up, and the music started to get really weird as we sucked gas in the loft. That's about all I remember. But apparently the conclave of musicians that played praise to the spirit of spontaneity that night included in its ranks Shelly, Mike, Matt, and Chris.

Fade to the spring of `89. Spring in San Diego is the season of the beach, the season of blow off class and lag in the sun. And then comes graduation, and bands are playing everywhere. Ron and I were on a mission, and one of the stops was to see my friend Shelly's new band. I don't think they had a name yet, or if they did it didn't stick. I vaguely remember meeting Chris, and saying I liked some song or another that reminded me of the Grateful Dead. (May have been "Desert", but some memories are known to be false) Then it was off to the next adventure.

I saw Shelly again in the fall of `89. We would run into each other between classes, and every time I saw her, she asked, "When does my band get to play at Glenmont." So finally I said, "How about this weekend. We'll have an outdoor thing, by the pool. It'll be mellow." So it was set.

None of us expected what showed up that day. They had a name now, Jambay. They had been living together through the summer, and with a handful of all original music they were ready to explode into our world. You have to remember that back then, at the end of the eighties, improvisation had nearly died. All we had left were the Grateful Dead and a bunch of rock-and-roll cover bands, some of which only played Grateful Dead music. Don't get me wrong..... I loved it. But we always complained that our friends never wrote their own music, never expressed themselves, and hence, ourselves. In Jambay we heard a breath of fresh air, a band who improvised on original music and who NEVER played a cover (this was before the infamous "Disco Phase" when Jambay wore only sequins and played monotonous seventies covers for three hours straight. More on that period of their career in a later installment.)

The first song that day was "Prelude". Shortly into the show, KR came up to me and said "We should be taping this." I asked around, and Andrea offered her boom box as a recorder. Not being a taper myself, I placed it in the worst possible place, right next to the keg (When I hear that tape now, I think I put it in the perfect spot. The sounds of voices from a past that I lived seem somehow more tangible than the swiss cheese of my memory.) The squeaky tap and Ron going on and on and on about Black's Beach, man..... very professional, if I do say so myself. You'll have to ask someone else for the set-list, but I remember Desert, Grab-On, Mother Scolds the Twins, Tumult and Boom boom as some of the first songs ever performed. And when I listen to those tapes now, I can hardly believe I ever was into this band. The songs are so slow and simple. Yet, somewhere in there lies the sound that is Jambay. You know what I mean.... the answer to the question "What kind of music do they play?" Even from the start, they played that same kind of music.

There's more to the story than that. And if you were to ask someone else who was there, they may tell you it all happened differently. All I know is what I remember. And that's all I can tell you for now.

Peace.

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