The Dark Mists of Days Long Gone

When I was a mere slip of a lad, I had a band named Colefeat. This was a band destined to make a serious mark on the American musical landscape. A five-piece blues-based band, we sometimes played behind John Lee Hooker, and we often played stages at such prestigious clubs as Keystone Berkeley, the Longbranch, West Dakota and the Great American Music Hall. We were together for several years, in different formations, and we played a lot of gigs. Most everyone who heard us seemed to like us.

There are a hundred thousand dramas that go along with this band. Just an example: the keyboard player was my wife. She had been, previously, my English teacher in high school. The band ultimately broke up when this woman met and fell in lust with a half-Aleut fisherman in Kodiak, Alaska while we were there on a six-week gig that had been arranged by ABC Records, prior to them signing us for a record deal. The band leader (me) couldn't handle the emotional fallout from that, and went home with no warning to the other band members. The other members went on to form the briefly successful Yankee Reggae band, The Shakers. They even put out a record. 

Anyway, it was a heady experience, those Colefeat years. But we never recorded any official music, and I don't have any of the reference recordings that were made, so whatever that band sounded like was permanently lost to the mists of time. Or so I thought. 

But Gil, the original drummer, just sent me a CD of five original Colefeat tunes we recorded at LaVal's Pizza in Berkeley, on his penultimate gig with us in early 1974. For me, it's a life-changing recollection. This is a Jim Caroompas (or, as I tried to be known then, JC Scott) that was completely immersed in the music -- focused on little else but making a way as a musician in a weird, often-cruel world. Married, sure, but not much of a husband. Stoned most of the time, a momma's boy from Lafayette, CA, tossed into the rough and tumble East Bay music scene, with very few clues and even fewer experiences. The voice is young and squeaky. You can hear me trying to sound like BB King, and sounding more instead like someone just stepped on my foot. But at least I'm trying. But the guitar work... well, I was playing every day back then. Some day I'll write a book about this band. For now, I'm just grateful that there are a few sonic remnants to take me back there.