pepper and tim kaye.. late night.. cleveland.. long ago..

i have been getting a good deal of mail lately from people wondering if i have been in touch with pepper mcgowan lately, and i realized that i hadn’t heard from her in a few years.

coincidentally, while cleaning my office the other day, i ran across a postcard she sent me when she was recording “bad stars”.. she was leaving for la, and i asked her to send me a postcard. in true pepper style, i got a hand cut piece of colored construction paper in the mail one day, with a scrawling on that back reading “hi you… love.. me..pep” when i finally got my copy of bad stars, she pulled out the original liner notes, and scrawled a picture of a martini and a star, shoved it into the cd.. and shoved it into my pocket. i then noticed that in my box of stuff, i had a smallish stack of scraps of paper with drawings that pepper had made for me when i was started asking for things.

in the same vicinity of my house, i found a box of negatives of millions of events in cleveland rock history.. and on the top of the stack were some pepper pics.. i will be putting a few of those historical shots out over the next few days, just for kicks, and maybe to hear how pepper is doing these days. if anyone has a line on her, tell her i said hex!

back in the day, when she was pepper acton, i would find her before the show, and make her dedicate “solar flare” to me, and look off into the crowd longingly. she pulled it off well enough that even i was half convinced.

one night, a mutual friend, tim kaye, came in from baltimore for a show with pepper. after the club closed down, and we were shuffled out the door, i somehow ended back up at pepper’s with pepper and tim. the night ended up in a surreal concert of of the two of them running through some old cure songs… to an audience of one.. me.. weird.. but the good kind of weird.

anyway.. this is tim and pepper. singing something off ‘staring at the sea’ .. to me… and the herd of cats..