Joe's arrangement of John Hovorka's Boston classic "Bridgeport Lathe" had begun as an original basic track consisting solely of his rhythm guitar and Howard Ferguson's drums -- plus a vocal cue track with basic instructions as to where they were in the arrangement, necessary since they hadn't had time to practice the song. Joe had considered +Howard Ferguson his favorite drummer since 1978-9, when he spent time as a roadie for the Real Kids, and was delighted to discover Howie was working downstairs at Rounder Records on the final day of basic sessions. Howie's drum tracks had had to be the last laid on the initial weekend of basic tracks, as he plays lefty and the kit had to be switched around and re-mic'ed.

Since laying basics with Howie Joe had added 3 more instrumental tracks during late-night sessions: a * Coral Sitar doubling the rhythm part, a whammy bar Strat track, and a staccato reading of the melody line notes using a Tele and Joe's "wooly flute" tone i.e. a variant of Beck's and Cream-era-Clapton's tone -- in this case achieved via Eric Rose' old purple-fuzz covered Foxx Tone Machine and the Telecaster's rhythm pickup.

So stood "Bridgeport Lathe" as Brother Cleve's unprecedented daylight session began, and whose results we are hearing here for the first time. Bass and vocals would be added later; it was time for keys. It was time for Brother Cleve!

During the long months of overdubbing for Country Eastern most of the recording was done between 11 pm or midnight and the next day's scheduled commercial sessions. On a few occasions Joe was able to grab an afternoon or a whole day when busy Fort Apache North wasn't booked, and these were considered opportunities to record the highest priority material with respect to realizing the Country Eastern musical idea he had in mind. The day whose efforts resulted in the trippy instrumental approach to John Hovorka's classic 2x4's tune "Bridgeport Lathe" was one of those Big Days.

Joe:
"I was really psyched to have Cleve coming over for the whole afternoon. I had always loved his work. Cleve was one of the cats I invited to do the ** One Rehearsal All Star Band live recording at the Middle East in '88, we had played shows together in Dave Bone's Jolly Ranchers, and he was simply the kind of engaging, urbane individual one was lucky enough to find crowding Boston's stages in those days. His ideas were as fine as his playing in other words. I laid in some libational refreshments, bit 'o the old idea encouragement and gris gris, lit the High John the Conqueror candle ... it felt like we were going on an indoor outing."

The Brother part of Brother Cleve may have since become Reverend, given Cleve's long relationship and position as an Ordained Minister in the Church of the Sub-Genius. There is undeniably the strong scent and sense of Bob all over this instrumental version of Hovorka's unique mechanical melody.

Joe continues: "Cleve is a brilliant musician, more importantly a beautiful cat. He had played with the Del Fuegos, I'd run into him in North Carolina at the Brewery one memorable night as the Fuegos were driving in with their beer-sponsored Winnebago ... '84 or '85 , we cheered their arrival from our disintegrating yellow Lifeboat van. So Cleve could do the garage thing, & do it as a workman with just a single Korg C3 that he'd make sound like a pissed-off B3, but he was in no ways restricted to that world, and his later work with Combustible Edison, as a busy composer for cable, and as a Bhangi DJ give some indication of the depth of those musical waters."

Cleve's sense of evoking the exotic, one of his central future contribution's to the group Combustible Edison, came in especially handy. So did his skill at crafting his own keyboard sounds [or patches].

"Having worked closely with Ted Pine in Mr. Happy I was henceforth spoiled for lazy keyboardists. The sound should be made to fit the vibe and not vice-versa, unless you are looking for vice-versa specifically. Cleve is cut from the same cloth as Theo. If you made them use a patch out of the box they would be disappointed, but still make it sound better than most anyone else through a massive injection of personal charisma. But neither of those cats would choose to use an unedited store-bought sound in a critical sitch. Cleve came up with some great stuff for 'Bridgeport', more than we needed, and we could've done a whole EP just throwing Cleve's ideas around, had we the time."

"One thing Cleve did was to make a patch where the main harmonic content of the song was absent, but every kooky overtone and other harmonic closely surrounding it WAS there. So the note was defined by the hole where the note should be. We couldn't use that patch in a way that was too forward in the mix, or even too present in the patch sound percentage-wise, it's part of the patch Cleve created but we sat and listened, discussed it, he tinkered and scaled it back ... the effect was super weird, it made you laugh out loud the way it clanked along but it wasn't a happy laugh. So there's note mixed in with NOT-note here, it jumps out sometimes especially when the Coral Sitar overtones bump up on 'em."

"The coolest shit didn't make it onto the LP version, due to the way the vocals sat when I eventually added them. Sometimes it's like that when you are producing, recording things. You get a sound in your head for a certain part of the song, and after a bit of hunting you finally say got it and there's the sound -- but it doesn't fit the section after all! And in this case my vocals are never too strong, and they were sort of being derailed by the NOT-notes."

Some of those NOT-notes survive here in all their glory on this Wooly Flute version.

"Finding one track like this makes 4 weeks of digging through old work cassettes worthwhile. Too bad there isn't one with these keys and John's bass part ... but there are still a few hundred cassettes to go through so who knows?"

John Rosato eventually added the fretless bass part heard on the finished LP version of "Bridgeport Lathe", with the distinctive mini-solos that have become part of the JH arrangement over the past decades of live performance. A fellow East Bostonian who'd been in a band with the younger brother of Joe's bones bandmate Bob Salvi, John Rosato's kiddie band Time Delay had recorded way back in 1985 at So-So Studios, and later Joe produced the Mies at Fort Apache South when John joined as bassist. John and Joe would play together in the short-lived Florence Dore and JH band, along with Jon Macey, and still later form both Local 22's and Old School Bitch with Matt Burns.
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+ Howie held the throne for the Real Kids during the key Red Star LP years and long beyond. Howard, who had begun playing congas on the Cambridge Commons at the same time as fellow future Hub legends Jonathan Richman and John Hovorka, went on to Barrence Whitfield and the Lyres among other key local thrones, and recorded his own solo LP at Fort Apache South --an all percussion affair that eventually was released under the working title Joe had used for it: 'Howie's Drum Madness'

** an idea for insuring that the old Kenmore Square-based scene became part of the new Cambridge-based scene when the Music at the Middle East series started to take off -- a live-to-16 track recording of my Hub heroes and pals jamming on songs I liked and chose for quick learning; Fort apache provided the equipment and amps, Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie engineered