Wow, 2025

So far Dad died, He initially gave me the idea to what became JWD Jam, I was in Barbara Houghtens’ Video Art Class at Metro, I had an assignment to make a video, this could have been 1989 or so, back then we were using analog video gear, home based VHS and video 8mm camera units, My dad worked at a radio station, he showed me a compact disc, Ironically it was his professor at Columbia University in the late fifties who pioneered the technology that went into the development of the CD player, Charles Townes, his professor developed the Maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) with evolved into the laser and as such, a CD is read by an optical laser which translated digital information into sound. Well anyway I came up with the premise that I was going to put out a CD, I’d been in bands in my youth, playing guitar in an 80’s post punk hardcore unit, Barbara was leaving town, She had accepted a job teaching photography at the University of Kentucky, so I wrote a song about that, “Barbara, Barbara, Leaving town after this semester, Barbara, Barbara, got a good job and you think you’re real great, I don’t wanna be in your video school, I don’t want to be any bodies fool,” I’m not sure if those lyrics are accurate as they were subject to change in different iterations. Dad graciously supported my idea, I had to submit a story board to Barbara, I think I did after filming. I went to the radio station, my dad ran the video camera as I played my songs through a pig nose amplifier and a thin necked Dan Smith Stratocaster, Andy Lavender, the engineer was a new arrival from England, he tells me to this day, that making recording is the highlight of his time being in the United States. He cut the tracks on cassette tape, as CD burners were not yet available, I made a self portrait via black and white photography, again , something I was exposed to since birth my father was a major photographer He was always in the darkroom. I put the photo in a cd case. Mounted the camera on a tripod and set up scenes at Wax Trax, the local punk rock record shop. I went through the motions of selling the CD on commission to the clerk. There’s scenes of me paying the Sound engineer, Scenes where I say “I have to write this song for a video, I guess I better rehearse,” in my apartment where I crank up a Marshall 50 watt half stack, run through the riff and knock over the mic stand as I collapse into the wall. Back in these days we edited in a linear format. You couldn’t jump around and insert images here of there or you’d get a huge blotch of video snow, I dumped video from the Kodak Kodavision 8mm camera,( a fantastic machine, that my dad found me at a pawn shop, He told me the sales guy said it’s got the same form factor as what the professionals were using back for broadcast.) onto the schools 3/4 inch tape machine, all the audio was recorded in camera. Someday I’ll find the 3/4 inch master tape to link with this article. Barbara said, He’s a natural” to other students in the room, I passed the assignment!, At the time I wasn’t a declared major and somehow sifted through all the advanced photography classes without any of the prerequisites, By the time Barbara left, I dropped the idea of getting a communications degree much to my dads chagrin and went in for a degree in fine art with encouragement from my mother’s theater professor Brad Bowles. A communications degree might have been a better path, Actually Brads field is communications, My moms’ Masters was in communications.A communications degree would open doors in radio, broadcast, Television, and Cable news. My dad was right as everyone he had encouraged everyone to engage in Communications became successful in these endeavors. By the time I was a declared major, it was a dredge, it occurred to me right off the bat that Art degrees are only set up to give students access to jobs working in art galleries, or work as a studio assistant, mostly commercial art, yuck. luckilyI just did my photography in silence while plodding through the requirements for a degree in art, the new head of the Photography department was so oblivious to what I was doing she tried to fail my senior thesis show. Word crept around and all the teachers I’d had , and even heads of the departments came out in my defense placing me in the honors show at the schools off campus gallery. That’s the gist of what JWD Jam is about. It has nothing to do with Jamming, (except to purposely put a fork in the works to disrupt the status quo,) it’s my initials, Joel William Dallenbach, with Jam tagged along, This was before Jam bands were even a thing, I mean, in my day when someone said let’s Jam it meant, let’s make some noise, I do not mean to say that Jam Bands didn’t exist, it’s just that there weren’t people going around saying that they were in a Jam band. The Grateful Dead and or Alman Brothers played long extended jams. Jimi Hendrix Jammed with other musicians, I’m got a complex about it because of Will Sergeants book about the Bunnymen, he came down so hard on the word Jam, it’s connotation in reference to band names and musical idioms, that I wanted to delete my page, By the way, the sound guy for the JWD JAM video studio track said that in London, he remembers seeing people lined up around the block to see bands like the tear drop explodes, that Explodes and Julliane Cope figure largely into Will Sergeants book, If that’s your Jam. Oh and maybe my reference is more akin to Paul Wellers Mod punk band “The Jam,” Who can tell. anyway, I’ll stick with JWD JAM, it’s already got my initials. Thanks for reading.