About Donnette

Aislinn was one of two names we had picked out for a daughter, the other being Fiona. We had a son, so we never did have to make the choice. Besides being an unusual name, had Donnette any political reasons for the name?

Hello Jack, and congratulations! There's nothing better on earth than to cuddle your sleeping child, is there?

I have no political reasons for naming my daughter Aislinn outside of a real weakness for the brilliant but vainglorious James Joyce. Irish folk music, these beautifully melodic songs about death and loss have also always greatly appealed to me. I liked the meaning of Aislinn too, it seemed like all the other names meant “God’s gift” or some irrelevant or decrepit old sentiment like “loved” or “first born” or “red-haired” or “from blah blah blah”. Aislinn means “dream vision” and I just couldn’t pass that up.

I hope she doesn’t hate me for it later. I had a childhood friend - a boy with the family first name Gaelin. Naturally we all called him Gay Lad, or if we felt really mean, Gay Bray or Gay Lady. He went running to his mom in tears one day after we had been particularly merciless, saying “Guy Mom! (In Denver kids say guy instead of god) Why couldn’t you a named me something cool... like Steve?” Well, you gotta know that thereafter we referred to poor Gaelin as O Cool Steve. Anyway, Aislinn has already been butchered into Asslimp (this by a well-meaning adult - God forbid what the kids will do), so maybe I have done her wrong, poor thing. At least her middle name is something kinda normal - Margaret. She can go by some variation of that if she wants to, my sister [Meg] did.

I have heard of a few other Aislinns around; Bono’s wife’s name is Aislinn I heard. I hope that public exposure to this unusual name solves the problem for her. I still love the name, no matter what. Thanks for telling me that you would have risked it too!

From a book called "1000 unusual names for your baby". It means ‘beautiful dream’ or ‘dream vision’ in Irish Gaelic, and was used as a code word for Ireland in Irish poetry when the English were attempting to squash everything Irish.

I’ve been asked the question about the effects of an unusual name on a child many times. Having been Donnette all my life, I've found that having an unusual name was useful in several ways. Since I had an unusual name, I was expected to be unusual. When I wrote my treatise on the madness theme in Shakespearean tragedy at age 12, no one was surprised. Impressed, but not surprised. When I taught myself how to play guitar at age 10, nobody was surprised either. Other kids thought I was "weird" though, but there was a hidden prize in that too. Since I was already weird by the time I introduced myself, I had little reason to curry social favor by playing the game by normal rules. I invented rules of my own, generally established my own kingdom by creating interesting and fun things to do and included you if you rated; this forced everybody else to curry my favor. That's good practice for running a band, or being a successful entrepreneur of any kind.

So I wanted an unusual name for my daughter, if nothing else it will be an obstacle for her to overcome. Reminds me of the reason my mother gave me for forcing me to go to church: you have to have something to reject.

Besides being an unusual name, had Donnette any political reasons for the name?

No, and she's not even remotely Irish, either. So outside of my slavish devotion to James Joyce and Irish folk music, the name itself and its interesting meanings and history were enough to make it win the name contest. It's Bono's wife's name, too, I heard.

No, I like the feel of drums behind me too much. It's a physical thing and I love it, that wall of drums pushing mountains of air against my back. I got addicted to Bruce and can't do anything without him now. And when you add drums, you have to have everything.

One thing about female guitarists - they try to do it on the cheap and aren't willing to put the money into the gear and gadgets that can make a good guitarist seem like a great one. Maybe they don't feel like they deserve it, spend too much money on clothes or make-up or something, but I think that any real guitarist needs a quality guitar and amp, (I use a 60's Telecaster fitted with special pickups, a Martin 12-string acoustic, and a Guild 6-string acoustic; and a 60 Twin Reverb fitted out with groove tubes) a good distortion unit, digital delay unit, chorus, and condenser. The more effects you add on top of that, the better. I have every respect for a guitarist who doesn't use this type of padding, but I'll bet it's built in to their setup in some way (I once used a 60's Gibson Les Paul Junior straight through an old SuperReverb in a session - that set-up screamed! What a sound!)

I've never known another female guitarist (granted I don't know them all) except Jill Sobule who was as much of a gear-head as I am, or as is required to be a competent guitar player. You should have heard the gear discussions in the Church recording sessions! Yikes!

If these ladies knew that one of the side benefits of being a gear-head includes the ability to corner the rocker of your choice and watch them talk animatedly to you for hours about gear, they might visit a music store from time to time. If any ladies want me to feed them some gear lines so they can skip the music store, I'd be glad to oblige. Aren't I bad?

Yeah, I checked that page out, and the problem is that the fella is forgetting that most meat is not raised on pastoral little family farms where the cows moo and nuzzle acres and acres of fresh green grass until they take that long walk up the ramp that takes them to the truck that takes them off to Cowshwitz where they'll get their heads chopped off.

If all cows, pigs or sheep needed to do was roam around grazing, you wouldn't have knackers (these guys are called something else here - rendering plants) cooking up dead beasties (including their brothers and sisters who died of unknown causes and thus cannot be sold for direct human consumption) for the cattlemen to feed their cows, giving them Mad Cow Disease, and us Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) (wikipedia) if we eat these diseased creatures.

So, much of the guy's statements about farming are true, but he conveniently forgot to mention that a large percentage of agricultural products grown on industrial farms ultimately become feed products. OK, here's what the Animal Rights Resource says [dead link]:

In the U.S., livestock stand at the center of agriculture, absorbing much of the country's crop harvest along with vast quantities of energy and water. Elsewhere, most livestock are raised as they've always been: as a sideline to crops. In some circumstances, they turn plants people cannot eat into food they can.

Every nation in the world that's wealthy enough, nonetheless, is taking notes from the United States and is starting to shower resources on raising animals for meat; U.S.-style animal farms seem to be the wave of the future. If the American diet alone does not pose a mortal threat to the natural estate, its adoption around the world certainly would. the prospect of 5 billion people eating the way Americans do is an ecological impossibility, requiring more grain than the world can grow and more energy, water, and land than the world can supply.

Actually, the rest of that page is an adequate rebuttal.

I take it you're not a vegetarian! The truth is that vegetarianism is certainly not 100% good. The main problem with vegetarianism in my opinion is the vegetarian self-appointed papal see and accompanying competitive morality crusade in which they engage. I have experienced this; many people I know became vegetarians because I simply abstained from eating meat and fed them tasty meals without casting aspersions on their choice of diet. They eventually realized that it’s easy to not eat meat, it’s better tasting, better for you and better for your conscience. Now, a few years later, a vegetarian friend (one of my converts) berated me for having fish from time to time in an ever so smug way, indeed in just that way that had kept her from accepting vegetarianism for so long. To this day, when I hear "Eating meat makes you a walking tombstone" or some other judgmental diatribe, it makes me want to go out and order a big steak. Of course, if I ate said steak I would puke. Sort of like, Oh God, protect me from your followers.

Vegetarianism also has had a harsh effect on the lovely sprawling ranches that are now being sold in smaller parcels as vacation hideaways. This really ticks off the old ranchers, but in truth, nobody else was buying the land, cattle ranching is dying and they had to sell the land to some one, so that's how the vacation thing got started. I have cattle ranchers in my family, and they used to really make a killing (pun intended). Business is failing, and many ranchers are getting really scared. As for my relatives in the moo-die industry, I really like them, they are the salt of the earth. But that's not a good enough reason to accept meat consumption. I'm sure there were many very nice slave owners. That didn't make it all right to continue the institution of slavery.

Killing is abhorrent to the civilized man. That's a fact. If we had to personally off all of the little creatures we chomp down each day, if we had to look them in the eye and wax them, I don’t think we’d be wolfing down serene old Bossie or wiggly excitable little oinking Porkie for brekkie, brunch, lunch, dinner, supper and snax.

Here's the discussion that Steve and I had that convinced me to become a vegetarian. I mentioned that my aunt Sarah Hunt (back in the 1600’s - I’m a real American) was burned at the stake in Salem for being a witch. (My family covered it up, they were very wealthy, and they were also publishers. You'll never find her name in a public list, just a few old unpublished memoirs and such.) He described how it must feel to be burned at the stake, to watch your former friends light the dry sticks and branches at your feet, the fire probably didn't start right up, so they probably had to try to light it more than once. Then when the flames are roaring, the sound of the fire, the heat of it billowing your clothing until it catches the flame. The sickening smell of your hair singeing, the sight of your skin blistering, the sound of your own screams in the crackling fire. “Wow”, I said or something really clever like that. “And that was only a few hundred years ago. Even only just over one hundred years ago, we still had slavery here. We’ve really become sophisticated haven’t we!” I said insipidly. Steve apparently felt no urge to respond. Facing a deadly conversational lull any wily female will fight with all her resources, I said “I wonder what we might be doing now that future generations would regard the way we do such things as slavery and ritual sacrifice.”

“Eating meat”, he said, without hesitation. I responded that vegetarianism would never be a way of life for the general populace, that meat is too depersonalized in markets, restaurants and prepared dishes to betray its regrettable origins and thus offend anybody enough to force them to change. He said that my point was irrelevant, that killing is killing and killing is wrong.

All the next day, I tried to come up with an adequate counter-argument. But the truth was, I couldn’t find one. He was right, and I was wrong. He was just plain right and no two ways about it. I am not one to rationalize a way around my beliefs, whether they are new or old. I changed my life then and there, and I have not eaten meat since. When I see a report like the one you pointed me to, it makes me sad because I know that what’s really happening is a bunch the members of our primate tribe are pounding their chests to make their point, sending out such a half-baked denunciation that it can be shot full of holes by running one search on the Internet. And all because they know that their audience will not question them; they are too lazy or old or frightened to accept the error of their ways and denounce the mainstream.

Here's a quote too good to skip:

Animal farms use mountains of grain. Nearly 40 percent of the world's total, and more than 70 percent of U.S. production, is fed to livestock, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Last year, 162 million tons of grain, mostly corn but also sorghum, barley, oats, and wheat, were consumed by livestock. Millions of tons of protein-rich soybean meal rounded out the diet. No other country in the world can afford to feed so much grain to animals.

Were all of that grain consumed directly by humans, it would nourish five times as many people as it does after being converted into meat, milk, and eggs, according to the Iowa-based Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, a nonprofit research group.

So, one fifth - hey let's be generous and give two fifths - the total agriculture without meat products. Then the wilderness would just be wilderness with no human intervention. Inconceivable!

OK, I’m done flipping around in the bottom of your boat. Take the hook out, Brian, and throw me back in. Don’t think I’m not onto you!

Yes, Aislinn just had her second birthday a few days ago. I cherish her more than anything, past or present, in my life.

Doest thou wish to wither in my disconsolate presence? For as the roses list and at last do fall swiftly from the vine, thus we all unerringly seek the healing earth, longing merely to become food for worms, our velvets and lace all dust as we move on forever to nowhere in our solitary caskets.

How was that? Do I qualify for the economy size bottle of eyeliner?

Well, I like the Morticia look, it can be done cheaply since most of the clothes are necessarily second hand and the style functions well on stage in that it’s formal and classic and concurrently rebellious and outlandish.

I'm not kidding here, I used to like to wear long velvet dresses with actual trains on stage if you remember that look, which used to really upset and confuse people in Southern California in general and in the rocker dives I had to play at in particular. They would alternately pick up and carry my train about for me, which I always found incredibly amusing - to have someone follow me around carrying my train these seedy pee-stained Hollywood dives I have frequented as a working musician; they would hand me my train as if I had dropped it; or they would just stomp all over it not even noticing that it was there (this was fun too, because I could give the fabric a little pull and often the unwitting drunk would topple right over). That's why for fashion reasons I’d call myself a Goth except for three things:

1. I tire quickly of the skulls and flames and piercings and the rest of the goofy accoutrements Goths love (are Goths allowed to love? Does anybody remember laughter? Or Zeppelin?). Real death isn’t cute or even a fun fashion statement.

2. Life is scarier than death, because although life includes such things as the tender green of a soft hillside in spring, the tenuous, improbable flight of a ladybug, the clean, pure fragrance of mountain mint, the hush of new snow, and the chimey sound of a well-tuned 12-string acoustic guitar played by someone you love when you’re feeling just a little bit drowsy; it also includes parking tickets, diarrhea, fleas, veal enclosures, chemotherapy, litter, prison, the passport office, and the act of dying in which we all participate every day.

3. Black lipstick really makes your teeth look yellow.

Other than that, sign me up! I wanna be Goth Babe of the Week!  [dead link]

I visited London for a week, what an enchanting city! I liked the people there best of all, and perhaps because I’m a vegetarian, I thought the food was marvelous. There was a pub that served a wonderful chopped mushroom on toast appetizer that I loved! Wish I had known you then, I travelled alone, and it got lonesome at times.

Would you ever consider a reunion gig for any of your previous bands? Sure! I don’t know the venue that would be willing to accept the responsibility for the massive crowds that sort of reunion would attract, though ;-).

What's your favourite Game Theory album & song?
Favorite Album: Lolita Nation, favorite song: all of Lolita Nation. I played Lolita Nation for Steve shortly after it came out, and he liked it very much. He complained about how he would never be able to put out a sprawling record like that, much as he would have liked to. He said that his project was being restricted by Greg Ladanyi to the guitar song format, and he had to stick with archetypal pop songs like “Under the Milky Way” on his unassuming little record “Starfish”. Poor Steve. (To be fair, Steve also credited Greg Ladanyi at that time with having an amazing amount of music savvy, and had a sense that the work they were doing on Starfish would take him for quite a ride.)

Who or what is your greatest inspiration with regards to songwriting?

Scott Miller taught me how to write music that holds up in court (so to speak). Because of his direction, I don’t write lyrics that I can’t publish on their own, hoping that the music will carry them. Steve taught me how to groove; his objection to Game Theory was that the minute we caught a groove, we would be off on something else (and indeed most Game Theory songs had about sixty zillion chords, forty bridges and two hundred different verses). Grooving is hard for me. I like billions of chords, it makes me feel safe and accomplished, and in a way that creates a kind of a groove/nongroove Zen thing. But my main influences have always been my muses. I’ve given it some thought and have developed a list of methods of approaching your muse:

1. Await the Muse:
Get up in the morning with a cup of coffee and go to your workstation (guitar, keyboard, pen and paper, computer - one or all) and fiddle around for a given length of time. If the muse is unwilling, you can quit after the amount of time allotted. If she comes down and gives you a visit, you’ll forget that there is such a silly thing as time. This is the most effective method of attracting the muse. But it can be wearying, disheartening, and downright frightening to face the creative void this way. That’s why every artist always also tries the following unreliable methods:

2. Dream the Muse:
This is where you inform your subconscious that you will write a song or a story in your sleep. You grandly tell yourself just prior to sleeping that you will write a hit pop song or whatever specific creation you have in mind. Then, if you encounter a dream that fills the bill you get up RIGHT AWAY and record it as it rapidly subsides into the ether. Problems here are if you are lazy or really tired, it won’t work. If you don’t dream much, of course it probably won’t work, though if you pay attention to your dreams they will become more prominent in your mind. Then also, something from a dream might work in the dream, but not in reality. I came up with a fabulous equation for equanimity that made all kinds of sense to me in my dream and incorporated elements of Buddhism, relativity, organic farming and witchcraft. Now I still have the equation, but I'm damned if I can remember how it was supposed to work. Another fella I knew got up in the middle of the night to record a song he dreamed that he was sure would be a hit; he woke up excited to play back the song he wrote and it turned out to be “Hard Day’s Night”.

3. Kidnap the Muse:
This is where you take a song you like and do a half-assed job of learning it, then try to remember it a couple of days later and realize that you’ve written a song because even though you aren’t anywhere close to the real song, you’ve got something kinda cool. Other unreputable types just go ahead and steal stuff, which is plagiarism and doesn’t involve muses at all, so I’m not including that technique. People really seem to like stuff that is plagiarized, though. I don’t get that, cause I can’t touch that man in black.

4. Date Rape the Muse:
As you might suspect, this technique involves imbibing lots and lots of some intoxicant and stumbling upon a song or a delivery technique. This procedure was used very successfully by Howling Wolf when he sang “You Put A Spell On Me”; he says that he was so drunk at the time he doesn’t even remember recording the song at all. This can be a useful technique for beginners, but it obviously limits the intellectual and the more subtle emotional content of your work, and you run the risk of rusting your strings or shorting out your keyboard with drool or urine. If you choose heroin as your intoxicant, I hope you like songs and prose about heroin because that’s all you’ll get - probably for the rest of your life. Boring! But somewhat tidier than a drunken rampage. Cocaine makes for a fun songwriting fest, but you end up with songs that have a lot of bar chords played really fast that you can’t remember later because they suck. At least with cocaine there’s a reasonable chance that you might write seventeen bad songs and still get those dishes washed.

Seriously, the best thing I have ever done to ensure productive creativity is to keep a journal every single day. And to work work work work work work work. That’s it!

And is it true that you did an album with him?
Yes, my sister (Meg Thayer - screenwriter and actress) and I sang ambient vocals on the delectable “Percussive Environments”, Jim’s first release. Jimmer told me that this record was inspired by the work he was doing at meditation retreats where he would play drums for hours at a time while people meditated, and this over the course of several days. If you’ve ever been involved in something like this, you know that things can get pretty weird that way, boundaries defining reality and separate entity begin to blur and dissolve. This record really captures that feel, and is great to play while concentrating on some non-musical creative endeavor. Meg and I sang harmonies on some chanting parts I wrote that I thought were just random syllables, but apparently there are some who say I was actually singing a love chant in some Carribean pidgin! Who woulda thunk it!

After Vast Halos, I wanted to take a break from the music business, so I went on an archeological dig in the area surrounding San Martin, Mexico, just for fun as an assistant - I helped catalogue the relics. While there, I became friendly with a *curandera* (healer) who became very ill and was convinced that a local witch had stolen her soul. She asked me to enter Talocan (the most holy earth - the underworld - accessible only in dreams) to search for her soul. Why this woman decided a gringa would be able or willing to save her soul, I do not know. I do know that I suspected foul play, and I had heard of locals using bat guano to send an evil wind, so I disinfected her house (using my favorite magic potion - bleach) in one of my ceremonies. She was cagey, though, and not satisfied with my Western ritual, and insisted that I learn with my heart, and not just my head. I became fascinated with the rituals and practices of her art, and spent quite a lot of time as her apprentice. My little grandmother is still alive and well, at age 87 years.

[Brian : Did I mention Donnette "lied through her teeth" about that answer ? :-)]

Yay ! a Scott fan. He is certainly one of the true geniuses I have known in my lifetime. Though one wonders what he might choose to say if The Church ever came up in a casual conversation. Should he divulge the sordid particulars over a beer in a smoke-filled bar? I think not; besides that’s one of the purposes of song writing - to tell the whole story in all of its gruesome detail and then claim poetic license. Another possibility involves a lackadaisical mention of this connection, one which caused him great pain in many ways. Unlikely that any one would want to initiate such a conversation, certainly not a man as reserved as Scott. His best possible course of action would be to smilingly acknowledge such a comment, and let it pass. And yes, I have been in limited contact with Scott, he seems to be doing very well. Gil Ray, who was the drummer when I was in Game Theory now plays for Scott’s band the Loud Family. They tour regularly, I hope to see them soon.

While you're writing and recording it, as you said, everything is possible - try this or that, sing this or that etc. But once the song has been released, it will never change again ! Why is this ? Have you ever looked at something you wrote five years ago and said "this verse sucks, I've got a much better one", or would fans boo you off the stage for modifying your own song; a song which, for no better reason than musical tradition, become frozen and immutable once put onto CD ?

Any song writer hopes that a song will transcend itself, and mean much more to people than anything one single person could have ever instilled in it. Songs, if they are lucky, become a context that holds a person’s life, they become a frame of reference for a period of time, and that way they are always a part of that particular life, and thus (my opinion) more deeply embedded in the fabric of the universal consciousness. To want to change a song that has undergone such a transformation is pretty close to profane, I think.

Usually when you’ve got a song where some part sucks, it will curl up quietly in a corner and not bother any one ever again. If some one else does the song, they might get rid of the sucky part, or maybe even make it work somehow. It’s better to work on stuff until it doesn’t suck though. I edit edit edit my stuff. Steve doesn’t do that, and it makes you really respect his genius to work with him and watch him whip this stuff up out of the thin air. I forced him to edit sometimes anyway, and he was usually glad we did.

Making music seemed like such a decidedly straightforward method of engaging in the creative process that it really appealed to me. In theatre, you have to recite someone else’s words, in art you have to go to a lot of openings and stuff, know all the right people (theatre was like that too). But in the music business, the less of that taking tea with the Dean type of thing that you did, the better rock and roll seemed to like you (though I may have been mistaken). I started out in a college town that had a lot of interesting alternative bands, and I took up bass, partly because someone gave me one, and partly because if you played bass, you could always get a gig in a working band no matter how lame you were.

I had a lot of initial success, and I got hooked. I loved all the attention and photographers and parties. Somewhere along the line, I realized that the real fun was in the writing, that the chore I had engaged in at first as a sort of test of spiritual strength was at the core of it all.

25th November 1997
When Donnette said she was thinking of changing the album cover I suggested getting input from visitors to these pages. She replied :

Sounds great ! It also goes along with my original concept for this group which was that it was supposed to be a vehicle for creativity for any one who wanted to be involved. It was completely democratic, I offered everybody opportunities to write and arrange, write their own parts, etc. My philosophy was something like in order to transcend hierarchical social arrangements, alternate methods of leadership need to be employed. Even in the smallest way, if I could not boss people, I wouldn’t. Boy, bosses come out of the woodwork when you do that, it’s unbelievable how difficult a non-hierarchical situation is for people to accept, much as they may complain about injustice in any other circumstances.

Of course when some bonehead started bossing people (usually starting with me), I would have to assert myself as the real boss, which was exactly what I was trying so hard to avoid, and in my mind, negated all of the work that I had accomplished up to that point. I don’t know why I had to make it into a social movement. I wanted to change the world, literally, if just by 0.001%. Maybe I did. Who knows.

Nothing is currently scheduled, you never know, though!

Yes, you guys have been debating this one quite hotly [Donnette read the archives of the Seance mailing list.] This is an interesting question in that it really seeks to do several things at once. You’re asking are we simply chemical beings? Is there a consciousness beyond the accumulation of memories and desires of which we are comprised? Is there a greater consciousness that can be attained by altering the chemicals we use to perceive it ? How does this pertain to The Church?

1. Well, I guess we are chemical beings, that much we know, and we will alter our consciousness any chance we get. And so will birds eat the fermented berries and carouse and fight with each other, and the lab rat keep pressing the lever for more cocaine instead of more food. It’s not our fault that we like drugs, we’re wired that way. Scientists have been trying to get at the root of the desire to alter consciousness for a long time. There’s something immensely attractive about it that must have provided some incredibly powerful evolutionary bonus that nailed it into all of us animals so deeply. Nobody knows what that reason is.

2. What exactly is consciousness? For a long time, science and spiritualism have been split, and science would have it that we are $5 worth of chemicals and some water. Lately however, some interesting experiments have been performed involving fields, and it turns out that there is something that we can’t detect that has a discernible influence on atomic behavior. An interesting experiment was performed where a World War II vet was shown war footage while his skin was monitored for galvanic response (this is in Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body Timeless Mind). Naturally, he became quite agitated by the footage. Here’s the funny thing: cellular material scraped from his mouth was monitored also, and exhibited the same response - although it was seven miles away. Similar experiments have been performed on atoms, I’ve read the abstracts of these studies, but I can’t tell you what they said except that atoms that have been bonded react to stimulus in an identical manner regardless of the distance between them. So I believe that there must be some force or law or something that is causing this. Is it part of what we call consciousness? Why not? This certainly is not disproven by the new findings. Could it be a greater consciousness? Why not? Who knows? What an exciting time to be alive!

3. If I get High enough, will the songs just come to me involuntarily from the void? I have to say I would do anything to chase down the elusive creative moment, and using drugs (which in my mind includes coffee, alcohol and cigarettes) to achieve this was perfectly acceptable to me. Except that it kind of doesn’t work. Drugs seem to be a shortcut to the euphoria that puts a sock in the mouth of the critic that tells you to shut up and sit down or at least for god’s sake go and do the dishes. So you whoop it up and kill off half your brain cells in the process, get carried home on a stretcher made from coats and umbrellas and spend the next two days regretting ever being born.

And you know what you get? A start. That’s all you needed in the first place. Just an ugly blob that you can trim a little off of here and chip that thing off - what the hell was that supposed to be? and then next thing you know it’s all coming together, and soon it looks like it’s always been the beautiful finished piece you see before you, and you can’t believe this thing of beauty was brought about by your hand. So you say, ha! It wasn’t! It was the drugs!! Must Have More Drugs. Then everything you do is somehow related to drugs and it all becomes very tedious and single minded like a million jokes that all have the same punch line, and you hang out with only people who Get It and then you can’t get out of It because of Them. Sad, sad, sad. And completely unnecessary, in my opinion. I don’t know about a greater consciousness per se, but I do know that my muses like it when I just sit down and invite them to come inside without fanfare or ceremony.

As for Steve and his writing music for The Church, he has always used whatever tools he had available to bring you the finest music he could offer you. If he believed that that involved sacrificing himself to drugs, he willingly did so. And I’m sure some of those creative moments was mighty fine.

In 1982 I led a band called The Veil; we put out a record called 1000 Dreams in 1983. I can only say I was very young and the printing was (thankfully) very limited. Produced by Scott Miller (now of the Loud Family), this record did have some pretty good moments I guess, and featured a couple of very good guitar performances by Brian Marnell of the group SVT. He also played with Jim Carroll, and SVT had Jack Cassidy (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna) on bass. After that I played with Zach Smith (later a member of the Louds) in a really short lived group called No Matter What.

And some more info regarding her new album (esp. where I can lay my hands on one! :-)

You can send $10.00 (U.S.) $12.00 (Australia) (no cash please) plus $4.95 shipping and handling to:

Donnette Thayer
P.O. Box 1354 (Incidentally the day of the month and the year of Steve's birth)
Hollywood, CA 90028

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