PART I – Fostex Nation

Recently our oldest daughter turned 20. She is a talented musician and so it was a cinch that we give her a substantial present on a substantial birthday, and we gave her a nice 88-key keyboard for home and for gigging. It took me back to a seminal moment in my youth – my 18th birthday. Like our daughter, I kind of knew what I wanted and needed, and it was a little more expensive than a pair of jeans. So it happened that I received my first 4-track cassette recorder, the mighty Fostex X-15, April, 1985.

Up to this point I had composed music in all the ways that I still do today: make up a song and hone it with no music written down, just the words; play extended jams into a cassette player; and, by this time I had begun to compose some music on staff paper. I had also experienced the crisis of needing to multi-track. Like others of my generation I began to do this by setting up two portable cassette players-recorders and commencing to play one part, then play along with it into the second tape deck, and ping pong takes with more parts until the sound was worse than an AM car radio – unusable, ugly, and ultimately a waste of time.

With the new four-track my creative life took that next step up the staircase. My catalog of songs that I had been honing for a number of years on the piano all had parts in my head for bass, drums, and guitar, and now I could get them down. Mind you, this is all I cared about – I knew nothing about microphones or mixing. I only knew about levels because of all the LPs I had recorded to cassettes. I did not care. This was a compositional pursuit for me, not a gearhead thing. And my old recordings sound that way. I think I used a Realistic mike on everything. One room mike on the drumset, the same mike on the bass amp, the guitar amp, the piano, the voice. Not only were my production skills non-existent, I had no patience to replay parts and make them better. Once the drums were played I moved to the bass and so forth. There were no punch-ins – if I made a critical error I’d play the whole part again until it was acceptable. How could I punch in? I recorded alone and my hands were playing music. I didn’t spring for the footswitch. Once the song was down I was ready to move on to another song. Of course, that didn’t stop me from thinking everything I did was brilliant just the way it was. The folly of youth.

Again, just as I do today, there were experiments. I would improvise and use found sounds and improvise some more until I had a piece of musique concréte. I reveled in sounds and was stoked that I could use a cassette 4-track to record in ways “not intended.” Sometimes I would borrow a synthesizer and jam tracks on top of each other, composing as I went as opposed to knowing a song in advance. I logged a few instrumental pieces that, at that time in my life and listening history, I did not have a major frame of reference for. Looking back at this activity, I do not know why I did not look around at the world and see that, perhaps, I was not unique. At summer camps, and then college, I did, in fact, meet some other multi-instrumentalist songwriters who had facility with multi-tracking, and they were impressive. But I was in a world from which only I could report upon the wonders that were revealing themselves to me.

PART II – Mr. Fostex Goes to College

When I got to The North Carolina School of the Arts in Fall of 1985 to begin college, the Fostex was in tow – along with my percussion, mallets, bass guitar, amp, and everything else. With new-found friends a band was started. The multi-tracker was never put in the service of recording a band demo. It was a personal toy – one that helped me put my original songs down to show the band, among other things. This is just as well because the Fostex was pretty primitive, and the pressure to ever “record a band” well was unthinkable.

I asked my teachers about “electronic music,” thinking that such a course would basically be a place to multi-track to my heart’s content. Mercifully, NCSA did not have such a course at the time. As I now know, “Electronic Music” as taught in a conservatory did not (and often still does not) have anything to do with the pop-rock studio arts, but is generally a music history class dealing with the 1950’s avant garde. I would find this out in a couple of years at Oberlin and later at University of Michigan, and still later when I was faced with teaching just such a course. Even my daughter, home for her 20th birthday, spoke of learning about Xenakis in her History of Electronic Music class. Some things never change. There are more curricular choices today – but kids really need to decide if they want a music program in the commercial studio engineering arts (like a Berklee) or an experimental electronic music course of study (any conservatory). Or maybe just carry on, as I did and so many others who have gone on to great success in serious or popular music or somewhere in between, and weave all the threads together as you evolve into tomorrow’s creator on your own terms. The irony is that I *was/am* an experimental composer and the 50’s avant garde is really cool – I am just sure that I wasn’t looking for it at age 18 when I asked around about an “electronic music” class.

I was not devoid of business savvy, despite myself. When word got out that I had a fancy tape recorder and liked recording, I began to get requests from people to record their classical chamber recital. It didn’t matter if I told people that my tape recorder was “fancy” only because it could multi-track, and not necessarily because it, or I, held some keys to the castle of high-end recording arts; they had to have me record their recital. And I would do so for $100. Well, hey, I even got to become acquainted with some of the standard chamber music repertoire through this side hustle.

PART III – Mr. Charlie

We come to the crux of my Fostex story. One of the people at NCSA who heard that I had a fancy tape recorder and liked recording was an actor/singer/poet named Greg Travis. We were introduced and he said he had some ideas for songs but didn’t really know where to go from there. I was a busy student, taking every course that interested me and doing every single thing that I enjoyed doing or had an interest in. Well, producing music was one of those things, so we chatted in the cafeteria and planned a meeting at a piano.

Greg had ideas pouring out of him – and this is coming from a guy who considers himself the person with ideas pouring out of him….. He was an actor, model, poet, singer, etc., and the way he described music was unlike how people I knew described music. He knew much music and had influences from singers from many genres and periods. When we met he played a few odd, clashing triads on the piano that, theoretically speaking (the worst thing!), didn’t really belong together. They were of a song he had written called “Giovanni’s Room.” His hands shook as he tried to get these four triads right. So, he was not an instrumentalist, and it seemed I could be of some help. He described the song in every way except music technicals – that it came from a James Baldwin book, a dichotomy of beauty and violence, calm and dissonance, that the rhythmic groove (kind of a skipping 6/8) mirrored a feeling of…… and so on. I was kind of blown away, and he had not even sung yet. The lyrics were his. I would come to find over our work together that he was also an incredible poet.

We made a plan to record this “Giovanni’s Room.” He knew the bass line he wanted as well, and I had the bass to play it on. I had the drums. I wrote down his piano chords and we had the piano. I don’t know if I or he suggested a heavy 2 and 4 in the bass drum, because I was so enamored of its use in pop those days, especially like Stewart Copeland’s groove on “Walking On the Moon.” With the heavy two and four Greg said he wanted each of those offbeats to be like a “car crash.” Poetry. We went to work.

As for the car crash, I knew that putting the bass drum in one of NCSA’s incredibly live stairwells (it used to be a very old high school building) would give us everything we needed. In fact, recording in the old stairwells would become a regular for us, especially for his vocals. When I finally did hear him sing to tape in that stairwell, it was a revelation. His singing matched his poetry.

This one song held a few other experiments. Some bitonal passages and a distant, disembodied, unworded singing part. He gave me the effect he wanted and I wrote an atonal a cappella line and we brought in our opera soprano friend, Twyla Casey, to sing on the equally live Crawford Hall stage, with no knowledge of the tempo of the song.

So it began that we became addicted to recording music. He had songs in various states of completion. Then I gave him some tapes of songs that I had recorded but never wrote any vocals for – could he come up with something? Of course. Every time, and always magical and always with some amazing poetry, delivered with amazing vocal improvisations and melodic care.

You can hear our “album” at this link, in its original, ambitious and unpolished glory. Every song has a story like the one above, but I will have to write that story later. He named our group Mr. Charlie.

We proceeded to work when we had time over the next two years. We completed about 11 songs together, and were still writing, when Gregory got The Gig – a chance to appear in a film being shot at DeLaurentis Studios in Wilmington – Crimes of the Heart. It was a small part where he played the boy that Sissy Spacek has an affair with, and involved photos and other non-speaking scenes. After that wrapped we went our separate ways – he moved to L.A. to pursue acting, dropping out of NCSA, and I transferred to Oberlin. We have remained in touch by letters and phone for 40 years even though – unbelievably – we have not seen each other in person. In fact, our last time in a room together might have been to record “Leave Me Alone” and “Pieta,” and if one listens closely one can hear the hum of the Fostex starting to die!

PART IV – I Drive, the 40-year song

When Mr. Charlie “ended” in Spring of 1987, we still had music not yet recorded. I had combined several of Greg’s poems to instrumental songs I had written. I simply could not divest from his lyrics even though I had to say goodbye to his voice. For example, when I had a 12-piece rock band at Oberlin called Page One, one of the originals we did was a song I wrote using lyrics of Greg’s called “Velvet Elvis.” But part of the magic was what Greg himself could DO with his own lyrics.

One song that was written and pretty well-formed right at the moment we parted was “I Drive.” “I Drive” grew from a bass guitar riff that I had made up before meeting Greg, combined with a fleshed out piano part that I wrote during those years. I wrote the vocal line and sang a demo of the song with Greg’s words – rather punily – and had it in my Mr. Charlie playlist for all of these decades. My new album, Cosmic Divan, is, among other things, a clearing house of favorite songs of mine that I felt I had to record properly. “I Drive” is easily the most venerable of those.

I had not talked to Greg, aka Loki Jordan, in a few years. Yet, even in 2018 I was asking him about my recording “I Drive” – are the lyrics still as you like them? Do you mind if I do this? etc. I was going to sing it because one method of working that we did NOT do, generally, was my telling him what melody to sing. I didn’t want to do that, and I’m not sure he needed the stress of my asking for certain things in that department. But, hey, we are experimenters and in 2024 I asked him if he was game to sing it. He was. And so now, we have a song that is not only 40 years in the making, but probably the first song we have ever properly recorded. Of course it is weird – made more so by the fact that the lyrics are about high school graduation (!!!). Loki was concerned about the age at which he/we are performing this. But I think, who the hell are we doing this for? Only us. I am hopelessly blinded by the light of a life’s work – as an artist I do not think about time. There are only two periods of time to any person – the time while you are alive and the time while you are not.

“Little birdie, little birdie
Come and sing me your song
Got a short time to stay here
And a long time to be gone”

———–

Epilogue: RIP Greg (10/9/26)

I posted the above on my Facebook page on December 14, 2025 in support of the album release, and to introduce Greg to my friends there. After a few weeks of having never heard from Greg concerning the album release I reached out to him. His lines were blocked and dark. I had wondered if maybe I had exposed too much of my friend’s life, who may feel very reclusive about it, and thought that perhaps he “went underground.” On and off for ten months I tried to find out where Greg went. Sadly, I learned yesterday that Greg had passed away in his apartment on Dec. 6, 2025. He had had a terrible year with a back injury and lost the small lifelines he had to work, health, health services, and basic living needs. He was found having succumbed to a cardiovascular disease in his apartment. This was shattering news. I had feared the worst and the worst was true – for quite some time.

Greg sang the lead parts on two songs on the album, “I Drive” and “A Quiet Place.” He also sang background vocals on “Once”, “I Drive”, and “Say Something Else.” In order to record him for the lead songs I had set up a session for him with the album’s drummer (and fellow NCSA mate), Chris Wabich. For the backgrounds Greg said he had to go out to his car to record himself, as his 300 sq. ft. studio apartment had thin walls. (As his finances nosedived he said that he lost that car.) I used these recordings.

I am intensely saddened by his fate, brought even nearer to me by the fact that we worked together in his final year. Talking with him on the phone about music again was such a joy in 2024 and early 2025. He was still recommending songs and singers to me to listen to. (Unbelievably it was from him in 2024 that I first ever heard about the song “Wichita Lineman” as sung by Glen Campbell.) He was expressing concerns about how he was sounding, asking about interpretation, and all of the normal things. And we talked about music life and health. Over the years, such as in the 90’s and when we were first went our separate ways in the late 80’s, he continued to mail me lyrics and we wrote letters about lives back and forth. Every now and then, a phone call as well. I never stopped thinking about when we would work on music again, and always read his lyrics with an eye to how I might set them. I guess I still have that possibility at least. RIP, Gregory Eugene Travis from Pilot Mountain, NC, dear friend.