""...Gary’s song, “Ducks”, was a potent reminder to me that great music is still out there, waiting to be discovered. His loose and heartfelt bio that accompanies this batch of songs is well worth a read."- Derek Swannsong

Over years the more appealing recordings I have made have ended up spread out across various projects. I thought I would bring together what I consider the best of my more palatable works.

My successes have been few and fleeting in a field that has been crumbling throughout my career. Today there are a gazillion musicians on the road playing for a few audience members. Everyone has new releases on Bandcamp and yet midlevel artists are losing their shirts.

In short there is no demand for a Greatest Hits career retrospective for an artist who has never graced any charts. In a way this is, though, me finally throwing my hat in the ring after decades of being coy. I don’t really know where the ring is but I’m throwing the hat. Or is it a towel?

In my early twenties I wanted to blend the kinds of popular music I liked honky tonk and soul combined with the experimental and avant-garde sounds to which I was attracted. This resulted in a kind of very bad popular music, that alienated the experimentalists who were trying to get away from the kind of pop I liked, and also had no chance of being popular.

I released an album that the Village Voice referred to in the midst of one of our concert listings for a gig at the legendary CBGB’s (which Mammals of Zod played routinely in our heyday.) It said the reviewer hadn’t yet seen the “shadowy” local band the Mammals of Zod, but their 1993 album “remains a lost masterpiece.” This was written in 1997 or something, so I was already forgotten before I got started.

I still hadn’t figured out my approach yet by 2001 when the scene took a hit from some military shenanigans. After that I started a kind of country band out of avant-garde refugees called Fist of Kindness. This began a 8-year or so run where first, I quit drinking and had to record all the songs I’d been playing over and over for 15 years and then start writing new material; and finally eventually the whole group was writing and arranging together and sounding very great. In the meantime I did a lot of theater, music, musical theater, even playing and directing work in Europe where we got the best reviews of our career. They thought I was a combination of Laurie Anderson and Sisters of Mercy. Back in NYC we had a decent local following, would play every month or so in NYC and always had a great time with a satisfying and enthusiastic audience. We released a bunch of albums and made an opera on Gertrude Stein’s Objects together. Before I left NYC I was doing cabaret shows at Cornelia St. Cafe where I interwove Husserl, Stein and Pure Land Buddhism.

So then I finally figured out what I wanted to do. Guajira Deer Park. It’s a kind of groove my friend Ray invented back in the 80’s but has roots in a lot of latin, funk and soul styles. I am working on this now (I have released one album but more is in the works.)

I also have a top-notch diety, Guanyin, to preach. The GDP music is spiritual music and I think it’s really going to blow ya’lls minds. “Hideaway” on here gives a hint where it’s headed.

That’s why I’m releasing this thirty year retrospective. It’s a turning point in my work and I want to show ya’ll what I’ve done, at least give people a chance to check out the summary of my research.

Of course now I’m an old man. I didn’t even learn to sing until I was in my forties. It was Guanyin, the Perceiver of Sound, who turned this tone deaf punker into a maybe decent singer. You be the judge.


So I’ve been doing music for over 30 years and I have never had a record deal, I’ve never been approached by a talent scout or ever, as far as I can tell, even been so much as noticed by the music industry. I have gotten a little press. A few indy stations have spun my tunes and one was on a New Zealand compilation. A song I cowrote was on a TV show but my friend has never given me my part of the money for that, not sure why. I’ve played probably a million gigs. So I haven’t “succeeded” in music in any sense. But I also never wanted to. I had fantasies that someone powerful might take a fancy to my work and hand me a “standard rich and famous contract” ala Orson Welles as Lew Lord in the Muppet Movie, but I never put much stock in them. I was working on figuring out what the project was, exactly, and that took a lot longer than expected.

I had some vague ideas, fantasies that someone would try to tempt me into stardom and how I would subvert the situation to liberate humanity. I have lived among and collaborated with much better musicians who were more deserving of being heard than I, but who were even more obscure (a matter of degrees.) I have come close enough to the fringes of the music business to be repelled. I came out of punk, which repudiated big labels, anyhow.

All these young people come to New York to try to make it. I didn’t even know what I wanted to make. Except, music. I definitely wanted to make music. And I made a lot. I also wanted to make recordings and I made a lot. I taught myself how to engineer and mix (with some help, not as much as I should have asked for) from some major pros and fellow rank amateurs, but mostly by trial and error, mostly just error and error.

I played music with Boris Rayskin, a brilliant cellist from St. Petersburg, before he committed suicide. I was the lead singer in Susie Ibarra’s first band long before she became a big star of the avant grade. I spent years gigging with Daniel Carter in the 90’s. Also Sabir Mateen. I gigged with Jackson Krall, Matt Heyner, a No Neck Blues Band side project called Avabatauan, Will Connell, Ryan Sawyer, the Visitors, Gland, Skurge, The Friendly Baader-Meinhof Gang, The Invincibles, the Time Warners, Kitty Brazleton, and the great Cupcake Gross. I got tipped $100 by Yoko Ono at the Bell Cafe. I opened for Lou Reed once. Chris Forsyth hung out with us back in the day. I tried to recruit John Zorn to work a radio fund drive thinking he was a staffer. William Parker doesn’t think highly of me. His wife once unleashed a phone tirade on me! I was buddies with Koutoukas, may he rest in peace. I went to a party at Tom O’Horgans. I hung out with Joan Didion once (at the Council on Foreign Relations, believe it or not), and in Grace Jones’ apartment with her brother (she came in and kicked us out.) Matt Shipp and I were in the same photo spread once. I arranged performances by Roy Campbell, Butch Morris, Gerald Stern, Kate Colby; I’ve given lectures at the New York Public Library and Lincoln Center and the Manhattan Center and played venues venues in Germany and Texas and New Jersey and even Michigan. And likely as not you haven’t heard of any of these people I’ve brushed by. Well maybe a couple of them. Because the whole time I have been operating in the very bottom ranks of various arts ghettos that have their own superstars, some of whom I got to know over the years.

But I never really figured out what my goals might be were I to have some. Except the next music project or recording project. None of which have people ever really listened to, as far as I can tell. Composer Noah Creshevsky remixed one of our songs once, which was a big honor. And Fist used to pack the house pretty regularly in NYC. But they were very small houses.

What I’m trying to say is that your average American would look at my musical career and consider me lower than the folks who don’t get past the first round of American Idol. I’m a non-entity, a never-was, a no-hit-non-wonder. I couldn’t get booked for possession. (Except there’s always venues, of course they never pay.) I’m part of a generation who were exhorted to follow their passion, and so many of us are desperate artists or bitter former artists, so many of us are alcoholics, so many died already, all bear a deep burden of shame and/or denial of shame.

One thing we all know is that the call of music, to the afflicted, is inexorable. We have various versions of what exactly is wrong but starkly put, in a world where there’s more amazing recorded music available than anyone can ever listen to in their entire life, we don’t stand a chance.

So to the young people, I say, heed the wise words of the ancients, who said, what do you call a drummer without a girlfriend? -Homeless.

I’ve always combined music and friendship. They’ve always been inseparable to me. So this is also a history of my friendships. There are very few songs here that I did by myself— uh none. When I was a kid I played in a group called Devil Donkey, with my girlfriend and best friend and his best friend. Then we started a band with Bobby called Big Snuffy. Neither have cuts here because the sound quality is too bad. We didn’t learn how to start recording anything that sounded OK until around 91 or 92 with Ray Porter and Scott Wilcox in Scott’s garage using a 4-track. But I still haven't really learned to record properly. Although I'm getting, slowly, a little better. Well, two steps forward, three steps back.