Fojammathon

Fo Jammi is one of my oldest friends, and a friend I made almost before I even started sarcastically playing the guitar and pretending to be a big rock star. He is famous around St. Louis for his fierce intelligence, musical endeavors, and referee work for the Arch Roller Girls.

In the early 1990s I started going over to his house every Monday night to donk around in his tiny studio. He did everything in midi back then, using the wonderfully capable Atari computer to sync up banks of synthesizers. We would record drum tracks - a painful process for me after a while - and then he would build up many synth tracks and finally we would record something with me playing the guitar and singing live as best I could. There was no second takes, no singing along with my own voice, no playing guitar over anything but a tiny sample of guitar. It was fun and we did some really beautiful work, including some remakes of Jambox songs that sound far better than Jambox ever did.

The songs we did together back then fall into three categories: Jambox remakes, songs I wrote myself and he arranged and produced with me, and songs we put together on the spot. We did a few that were basically improvised and finished in one night, and others that took a couple of weeks or more to finish. FoJammi doesn't much like to take more than a few hours to do anything.

So I divide up our work into three "albums;" FoJammathon Does Jambox, "Tough" Jonny Tone Sings The Hits That Made Him Great, and Fojammathons.

We still work together to this day, much to my delight.