The Cover
The Background
Once upon a time, say January of 2011 or thereabouts, four gentlemen with some practice in assembling a word and a tune here and there determined they would join together as The New Saints to participate in February Album Writers Month, the challenge being to write fourteen songs in the four weeks of February. Now, three of these tunesmiths had done this the year previously with some impressive results thus causing the fourth to latch onto the enterprise like a barnacle to the keel of a China clipper and joining up for the 2011 effort. Needless to say, it all went better than expected, the team produced not fourteen but sixteen tunes to delight the ear and mystify the mind and thus were named FAWM Winners along with many others who met the challenge and so on and so forth. Needless to say, here are the results of that effort so that you may judge the extent of their success, remembering that these are, to one degree or another, rough mixes and demos and, as such, works in progress.
The Concept
There’s a place in Cleveland or Topeka or Greenville called Absalom Road that you can’t get to unless you have the number for Mr. Sticks Taxi Service and nobody has ever gotten Mr. Sticks' number. On Absalom Road it’s always midnight and the neon is always flickering and bright. There you will find Poppa Pajama’s Pawn Shop and Peep Show, Madama Melodrama’s Bounce House and Jook Joint, The Elegant Swell Hotel, and The Chapel of the Reluctant Redeemer, along with various and sundry sugar shacks, diners, dives, greasy spoons, flop houses, burly-q palaces and dime-a-dance arcades.
Poppa Pajama, he’s got a peg leg carved from a post that came from Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed and his granddaughter, Sweet Tourmaline, has got two glass eyes made from polished rock crystal said to be the marbles David used in his sling to bring down Goliath and though she can’t see a damn thing, she surely has The Sight and sometimes her eyes shine like little blue suns. Finally, helping out in the shop, is mute and wordless Big Red Rogers, the red-headed albino giant. Now Poppa, Sweet Tourmaline and Big Red run the pawn shop but it’s Mr. Quiver, mean as a graveyard rat, a hunchbacked dwarf, as twisted on the inside as he is on the out, who handles the peep shows as well as the bully boys, the loan sharking, the shakedowns and deals The Glaze on Absalom Road.
You may think that a peep show is just a chance to look at a nekkid lady or some such but at Poppa Pajama’s it ain’t like that at all. When you take a look at one of Quiver’s peeps like "The Eyes of Cthulu" for instance you need The Glaze just to keep your mind from spinning apart like a Fourth of July pinwheel.
Meanwhile, over at Madama Melodrama’s Bounce House and Jook Joint, along with the finest Blues in all of the known world and the sweetest ladies and prettiest boys ever sold for a C note and a song, there’s always a game of Shivaree simmering dealt under the deft hands of Molly Methane; a game where fortunes are won and souls are shaved, shorn, dissected and sometimes utterly lost.
This place it ain't nothing if not interesting and we surely invite you to join us in taking the tour 'cause nobody wants to go it alone down Absalom Road...