The Birth of @toastbeard

Who is @toastbeard the writer/poet? I've lived my entire life pretty creatively, they had me doing cover artwork for my 2nd grade yearbook, making Mardi Gras floats in the 4th grade, etc. My mother is fond of some of the pictures I did before I was in school, some experiments of a young mind involving framing and context. I had done a crayon drawing of a sabre-toothed tiger which was really just a cross section of his mouth open with one tooth and the savanna behind. I'm continually worried by the sense I get writing this blog that it is only about me. There I go again with another sentence construction pivoted about an "I" and you don't have to wait very long for the "me" and "my." But then again, if I create so many things I've got to promote them, I've got to get them out there and tell people about them, I've got to talk about myself.

In high school I dabbled in quite a few different visual arts. I did paintings, still-lifes, some sculptural work, mixed media, etc. Once we did an assignment where we found an image, broke it into composite squares, separated the squares, reproduced/represented the squares individually and then finally reassembled them for a final product. I remember people chose images of tigers, landscapes and the like. I wanted to do a map of the mid-west, the teacher at the time said it would be "too easy." I said it would be "too interesting." I convinced him, and if you follow any of my recent short-form work there is an intense focus on maps, systems, etc. I'm continually mining the implications of Korzybski's "map is not the territory" statement. In fact, I've written about things that are similar to that on here already, as Magritte's images bring up this discrepancy between signifier and signified.

But the real story of the writing and musical @toastbeard doesn't begin until after high school. In spring of 2001, the year I graduated, I began a regular blog. I'd never really kept a journal regularly before but I had a history of writing letters and doing other short writing projects. But nothing on a regular scale. The May 2001 beginning of my livejournal, in hindsight, seems a momentous occasion. But only hindsight is 20/20. I began writing there on a regular basis, perhaps weekly, etc. Over the next four or five years it began to blossom, the content got more and more fractured and stream-of-conscious, the structures became less prose and more poetic. Also in this time period I began playing the guitar and writing music. This process went for four or five years and then Katrina hit.

We were lucky where I've lived as regards the storm. I am just far enough west to have not been affected by flooding in the New Orleans area from Katrina and just far enough east to not have had terrible effects from the storm following, Rita. All of this strikes me as terribly boring at the moment but I'll trudge on... Around this time I had worked in several bands: No Good Flies was a punk/ska band whose main itinerary was basically helping us learn to play our instruments. We had a lot of fun playing a few local gigs and goofing off together, it was a great way to get acquainted with the local punk and young-person scene. Afterward some of the same friends and I had started a dance band by the name the Fashion, which soon changed names to Oh No Explosion. We did a lot of dancey material in the vein of the Rapture, Le Tigre, Blonde Redhead and the like. We even had a girl singing for us for a while and that was a lot of fun.

But as all things must, that band passed. Eventually I was in a trio with my friends Chase and Jeff called Raise High the Roof Beam! I started writing songs for this band, probably wrote around 4 or 5 and we'd play them at some house parties and possibly played a proper gig or two. But by about 2005, the other guys in the band went off to college and things dissolved. So I shortened the band name to Raise High and took a Dylan trajectory. From 2005-2007 I wrote about three dozen acoustic songs with flowery Dylan lyrics and some twee romance on the ultra-quiet side akin to Iron & Wine and Bright Eyes. I played quite a few gigs in the New Orleans area, some in Luling and some in Baton Rouge. It was a great experience because it allowed me to get a good grasp of chord theory and the structure of songs. I was a long-haired hippie who would smoke up a little and write two songs in a whirlwind. It was tremendous practice, but all things must end...

At the beginning of 2007 is when the more contemporary @toastbeard emerged. I had moved back to Bayou Gauche, where I've grown up right outside of New Orleans, and a transformation began. The spring of 2007 alone saw the birth of me as a semi-formal poet and the birth of what was to become Toast Beards. There was, of course, the requisite relationship drama and other personal strife that sometimes sparks creative outputs. I spent the spring of 2007 teaching myself formal poetics. I read through the old English texts I still had from my days in the Communication department at UNO. I read through all the poetry collections I had lying around. I would read daily from these surveys of mostly modern poetry and then right afterward go and write. These early poems are collected in this folio. The first months I wrote quite prolifically (as if I don't still do that now...), but when I look back now I feel a bit embarrassed by them. But who isn't embarrassed by their own art from years ago? It's a map of a territory that is dynamic, always amorphous and essentially infinite. The "map" is the verse trying to replicate some of the music of that life, the "territory" remains ineffable.

The next two years, as I said, saw the flowering of that poetic idea. I went through a course of work, I did early metric verse in a style of Frost or Shakespeare but less formalized. A lot of it was driven by vocal rhythm with a preponderance of imagery. I have a distaste for a lot of it because it is entirely sentimental, sometimes self-concerned, and at base desiring. In truth, I struggle with these same themes to this day and the remnants of that struggle can be found in my "self" poetic cycles and other concerns with the "nothing" and annihilation. But enough self-analysis, the folio contains all the work and the work speaks for itself.

As I already mentioned, this time period also saw the birth of Toast Beards, but under much different guises. I had been writing and singing solo style acoustic for a while and had my own repertoire of songs. Continuing my Dylan trajectory (ha!), when I moved back I ditched the acoustic format and started a legit rock-n-roll band. I became acquainted with a few local guys who were a drummer and bassist respectively and we started to just jam together. We'd play a lot of the material I already knew cover-wise, which included some Steppenwolf, Steve Miller, Pink Floyd, and a lot of other very obvious AOR stuff. There was also a focus on improvisation and blues. This band began under the name Tiny Purple Fishes (a Cream reference) and it's MySpace presence still survives.

The band remained amorphous for much of the next three or so years and transformed in many different directions. Chase, my friend from the very beginning that played bass in Raise High the Roof Beam, was away at college in Savannah but would occasionally return for holidays. On these sessions we would also jam. I had begun helping my close friend Blake to learn to play guitar. He had an electric by his house and I'd drop by a lot to hang out. He likes to tell the story that this dumb-ass dude (me) would come by and play his guitar and he had the revelation, "Well, if this dude can do that, I can." Our friendship grew and eventually he, too, became a part of the band as a second guitar player. One of the sessions with Chase was done in a day or two during a holiday. It consisted of myself on rhythm and vocals, Chase on drums, and Blake on lead guitars. We ran through as many cover tunes as I could remember and I would just give Blake the heads-up on what the key was. None of it was rehearsed, all of it was free, and I sang through a bass amplifier. You can hear those sessions here.

We recorded a plethora of albums in a lo-fi way at the garage where we had set up shop. In fact, I'm unsure as to even the amount of recorded output we got down but my guess is in excess of 5 full albums. But that doesn't mean the quality of the material was top notch, much of it was very poor. This is why, later, I collected some of the highlights and put them together as "Greatest Hits" collections. You can find those here and here. In addition to all this lo-fi creative output, Chase and I did a two day improvisational project we titled Hurricane, Bruh!, which was a conceptual experiment about the experience of a hurricane. That can be found here. In my humble opinion, this is some of the most experimental and successful work I was ever involved with. It's basically a collection, collage of different sounds. There are mash-ups of Son House, Sabbath, Lil Wayne, Lean on Me, bossa-nova, Franki Valli, old yodeling songs, and others. There is a lot of improvisational instrumental stuff going on and we used a curious cassette recorder that gave it a strange tape-aesthetic.

Perhaps now we get to something approaching the present. After all these different formulations of basically the same musical and poetic idea, I've come to a pseudo-mature stage. Toast Beards exists and has played many gigs for many crowds. We've been known to rock the pants of off the 40-year-old crowd with some of our blistering and unhinged versions of Clapton songs, old blues, and early rock-n-roll. We cut our teeth on Chuck Berry, we've done some Barrett Strong and we really do sound like Hendrix a lot of the time. We've recently put the focus on writing our own material and that is the goal for 2011, to get more of that out. You can hear some of our new output here. Whatever you do, however, don't think it's ALL we do. Because we're completely unpredictable. We've done Kanye tunes live with a full band arrangement. We've done reimagingings of Yin-Yang Twins whodat songs. We've done Kelly Clarkson. Sometimes we're a country band. Sometimes we're a noise band and sometimes we do raga. Sometimes I play drums and sometimes I play bass. Whatever you think we are (map) is not who we are (territory).

As far as poetic output goes, I do most of my things in a very short-format on Twitter @toastbeard. I've tried to start collecting cycles from my output on there as I tend to work as a serialist. Many of the ideas I have, or the themes I approach, are revisited. These may include meditations on nothing (no thing), the self, love poems to an indefinite Her, occult imagery of pyramids and other esoterica, mixtures of forgeries and mathematical metaphor in the vein of Borges, and other things I cannot think of now. I also, obviously, have a deep interest in astrology and traditional symbolism, especially as it regards religious tradition. Follow the feed and make up your own mind. Even I cannot make an adequate map for the territory that is me.

I feel a bit over-indulgent for writing this out, but I've fussed with myself enough over the last few years about self-criticism. I feel I've done enough work, enough research, and created enough product to make an effort to show it to people. In my experience, it seems that many respond to the things I've been involved with or produced well, so I feel less guilt and indulgence sharing them. But speaking about myself is something that always troubles me. I hope you've enjoyed this glimpse into my creative life, the things I've done in the past, and some of my thought processes as regards promotion, creative development and the like. You are all lovely and I do none of this for me. All of this is for you. Much love always.