"Splitterty Splat has the intensity of Jonathan Richman being sawed in half by transvestite pygmies." (Jud Cost, Magnet, September 1997)

Inset Photo: McMahon/“The Eyeball of Hell” LP. [Not shown in online edition.]

Yeah, that’s me in the gangway at 88 N.Washington(Electric Eels' rented house in Columbus, Ohio, circa Spring of 1973). I think Joe Warren took that. And much as I like it, right this moment I'd rather have one of him.


In memory, Joe mugs like a slightly younger ash-blonde Belmondo circa “A bout de souffle”— mimicking large and relentless the very icons of the Euro/American 1960's Culture of Cool he venerates and deprecates by turns. Andy, Miles, and, of course, Jean-Paul himself. It occurs to me that you really gotta know the violin well to play it badly.

Oddly, his goofing issues on “smudge-resistant”, 4-frame, vertical, black & white strips in these recollections. Why in that format, I wonder—we never hit a single photo booth together? Most probably my id’s having a nod to our favorite cinema surrealists while at once reminding the dandifying Irish in me that Joe was as much snapshot as archival print. Yeah. But this time the mise-en-scene’s a bit different: His girfriend’s glove box pops open spilling 3-by-5 pics like late autumn leaves out of a Rexall drugstore envelope onto her Mustang’s mudboard just "8 Super-Fast Service" hours after Joe’s sulked and pouted mock-pretentiously into her Kodak Instamatic. Joanne beams, pointing at three contiguous chemical baths floating grainy contacts across the car’s back seat: “And that’s Joe’s own photography!” “But, how?” I doubt back, “he’s in every shot!”[bent like a hairpin in the groundglass glow; a dark orphaned branch on 1969’s first-sticking snow; stooped to fallen moss-cloaked tree trunk breathing shallow above Rolex viewfinder exposing tight brackets of Tri-X Pan to carefully-metered cast shadows of his own twiggy figure].

“Joe always was in two places at once,”Joanne reminds me.
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