A cassette tape marked “NNCK Hint House 3-26-98 No JF.”

Now it can be told, but can it be remembered?

(Nothing here now but the recordings.)

Keith kept notes not of the musicians present (which was almost always constant) but of the musicians absent (which was rare.) The No-Neck Blues Band had a rigorous practice schedule, twice a week, without exception. I remember, upon my re-arrival in NYC late summer 1995 (after a brief post-grad attempt at living in Olympia, WA,) after exiting my brother’s Saturn station wagon, having driven several days across the country, being immediately met on the street by Nuss, who demanded I pay $100 for rent on the LES practice space NNCK maintained, and that we were playing there right after I finished unpacked whatever I’d shoved into the back of that Saturn. And so it (re)began…

Why “No JF?”

I, a scorpio, fiercely loyal and devoted soldier in the troop of NNCK almost never missed a session, but there are memorable gaps in my attendance. Summer of 1997, after a disastrously violent performance at The Learning Alliance (which put a couple people in the emergency room, including my girlfriend at the time) I quit the band for a bit, which also coincided with NNCK getting kicked out of our Chrystie Street space (for, in the words of the stressed-out E. European proprietor, for being “Too CBGB’s” with our green light bulb and reggae records, art-fashion-music world fans, etc…) I later, late that summer, rejoined the band, whose practice sessions had moved to Columbus Park, Chinatown, competing with the Ma Jong players and Chinese folk musicians thronging the crowded urban center.
My attitude toward the band was one of sunglasses-on disdain, but when a new practice space had been secured, (actually an entire building in Harlem) and a new atmosphere of the hippie, homespun cultish commune "Hint House," I couldn't help but recommit myself 100% to the NNCK experience.

Another notable absence was in December 1999, when I excused myself to attend a double nighter of Stereolab at Irving Plaza at the invitation/insistence of my (different) girlfriend at the time. This was considered a major act of willful disobedience within the band, and certainly predicated my departure from NNCK a month later, but in my mind at the time, they all missed out on some Stooges-level heaviousity.

So why the March 1998 absence? Not a relative’s wedding or graduation, probably just a run-of-the-mill illness that typically affects 20s-year-olds who work in offices. Nothing remarkable. (Now, an office illness can shut down an entire industry, city, country, planet -- but those were different times.)

And what of the music? Listening back, it’s a NNCK practice session that I would have sorely missed, with aggressive percussion, reckless forays into Jazz and Funk, in the mould of the previous year’s “Letters From The Serth,” but with every member of the band articulating and expressing themselves openly. The “anonymous collective” drone zone ideal of three, four years previous, now giving way to a kind of basketball dribble and pass style of “sports” music. We were still young, still developing as individuals and players, but the strength of our egos had not yet cancelled the possibility of free interplay.

The blossom of spring in NYC was just weeks away.

John Fell Ryan

3-26-2020

Chicago IL