Andras Jones
&
DEAD ROCK WEST
From ANDRAS JONES: First of all, it’s important I say this, because we avoid actually uttering the words during this session. My question is about Woody Allen, Mia Farrow and the children Mia adopted. OK, now that that’s out of the way….
Radio8Ball welcomes DEAD ROCK WEST, which is to say, CINDY WASSERMAN and FRANK LEE DRENNEN, to the realm of The Pop Oracle. This one got weird right out of the gate. Was it because our engineer Brendan and Frank were smoking out before the show? Naw, but that helped. I was in a weird mood, feeling nostalgic for something very few people experienced and a lot more people felt the impact of. I’m talking about The Iguana Cafe.
I get into it on the show but to go into a bit more detail, The Iguana Cafe was a tiny little bookstore/coffee shop Tom Ianello ran with an artistic purity, combined with an entirely surly and uninviting demeanor that would read like a Hollywood cliche if you saw it in a movie. I’m convinced many of these cliches are actually based on Tom. There were certainly a fair amount of later-to-be successful screenwriters hanging out there, drinking cheap coffee and occasionally doing spoken word; our “cool” lingo for poetry.
Duke McVinnie and Dan Bern were the key figures there as I remember it. Tracy Thielin was a product of that place. Pippi Bernstein. Hisao Shinagawa. Tom Winslow. Lyford Rowe. Deb Pasternak. Lyz Byrnes. Patrick Vernon. And then all the big names I drop on the podcast. As far as I’m concerned it was the open mike that all open mike’s should aspire to, and yes, they chose the order AT RANDOM (out of a paper bag before each artist played their first song).
All that comes to a head here with me playing a newly written song (Igauna-style) as my question for The Pop Oracle.
Oh yeah, and Dan Bern, well, I am not happy with the synchronicity of my drawing him in to our conversation in sync with his recent snowblower accident but that is what it is. If you are reading this and it’s still active, please support the campaign that Colin Preistner is running for Dan’s medical bills.
