In my quarter-century as a New Haven downtowner, I’ve gotten to know oodles of larger-than-life characters—the kind whom, when I nod to them on the street, others marvel, “You KNOW them?”

Nobody earned me more “You KNOW him?!!” double-takes than Andre Ness. First off, Andre was hard to miss—about twelve feet tall with Rip Van Winkle’s facial hair and a voice like five megaphones. And in case you wanted to miss him (I never did), he wouldn’t let you, bellowing your name from blocks away, or honking at you from his lowslung convertible antique roadster.

Andre used to live in an abandoned school bus in a junk yard, an urban Paul Bunyan. Everything about him had the air of legend. Some people likened him to Lurch from the Addams Family, others to Bigfoot. But unlike Lurch, Andre talked a lot. Unlike Bigfoot, he’d stop and chat. And unlike both of them, he was real. For all his supernatural or cartoon-fantasy escapades, Andre also had a reputation as a devoted father, a loyal friend, a guy who was nice to dogs.

The first I heard of Andre was around 1988, when he was pointed out to me by someone I worked with at Book World on Chapel Street. “That’s Andre across the street. Do you know him? He once hit a man so hard that the guy flew out of his shoes.”

That was some introduction. I couldn’t wait to get to know this true-life Bluto from the Popeye chronicles. I’m an experienced Gilligan-esque “little buddy” type from way back, and have always got along with large dangerous men.

When I became Book World’s manager, I encouraged Andre to hang around at night so he could scare away shoplifters. He was happy to oblige. We’d talk for hours—or rather, he’d talk and I’d listen. His tales were unstoppable, even when I’d want them to stop because they were so scary.

Once night while I was in the Book World basement trying to do some bookkeeping, Andre sat on the steps, which reminded him of another time he’d sat on steps: When he was a kid, he said, he’d been minding his own business on a fire escape when there was gunfire above him. “Blood rained down” is how he described it.

Then there were the alien abductions. He talked about them as matter-of-factly as any other encounter in his life. “Saw the aliens again,” he’d mention in passing. His visits with extraterrestrials had informed Andre’s whole worldview.

He shared the alien stories not just with me but in his book The Real Truth About Alien Abductions. I’m privileged to own both the original photocopied edition and the vanity-press  reprint which Andre got Barnes & Noble bookstores to carry in 2002. (I can only imagine his promotional techniques.) According to the book, the abductions started while Andre was in his late 30s, though he came to relate them to experiences he’d had a child in Vermont, when he had a vision of Bambi the Disney deer and a random dinosaur holding his hand; he awoke holding a carrot.

The Real Truth includes a section dedicated to:

the law enforcement officers of the cities of New Haven and Branford CT. you have been told to let me slide unless I do something real bad. The reason for this is that the military has told you hands off. It is a matter of national security. Do you really know why? I doubt it. Your higher-ups know. They have given you a line of bull. Here is the reason In the late 1980s I started to smoke crack. Nothing was any different for the first five months. Then one day I saw something in a tree on Park Street, New Haven. It was an invisible man. He was watching the people dealing coke on the first floor. I was on the third floor sitting on the couch watching TV. As I was watching TV, I kept seeing something move in the tree outside the window. I could see this with my peripheral vision. When I would look straight at it there was nothing there. This happened about six times. It was winter. There were no leaves, birds or squirrels in the tree. So I knew something was wrong, because air can’t be seen. I focused it in. I sat looking at the TV straight on, with my peripheral vision I focused what was moving outside the window in the tree. What I saw, I thought was a hallucination at first. There was a man in a black skintight outfit. There were sparkles, all the colors of the rainbow moving around him in the air not more than three to four inches away. When I started to turn to look at him, he disappeared, so I turned back. I could see him again. I went to the window and looked very hard at what was in the tree. I could see nothing at first. So I turned my head so I could see him with my peripheral vision again. When I saw him I turned very slowly and looked right where he was. After a while I noticed a distortion about the size of a man on the branch. This distortion looked like heat rising from the ground (what you see on the streets in the summer) but fainter. As I looked at it I could see the outline of a man inside of it. I opened the window and said “I can see you. What the hell are you?” That was when he started to look at me.

For the next few weeks everywhere I went I would see military personnel following me. In cars, in the stores, walking down the street. If I lived in a town that had a military base, I could see. But New Haven, you are lucky if you see three military people in two months. I must have seen 300 in two short weeks.

This went on for a while. Then one night I woke up, on a spaceship. With military people telling the grays what to do to me. What a big mistake. I should have just sat and watched TV. But my big mouth got me into it again. Now because I can see through this Metamorphic Camouflage you let the government and the grays abduct and experiment on me.

I quote The Real Truth at such length in order to share a burst of Andre’s prose as tribute to his rich life and sad passing. That passage is pure Andre. He came to believe that he was being protected and persecuted at the same time, just as he came to believe that aliens and the U.S. government were in cahoots, and that the invisibility technology he’d witnessed was being used not just for voyeurs in residential neighborhoods but for covert warplanes which kept tabs on the citizenry. He offered to share video footage of the invisible planes with me on umpteen occasions, but when he finally got a DVD to me, it was unplayable.

He was also open about his drug use. Once, when I complimented him on looking so healthy, and how he’d clearly lost a lot  of weight, he smiled grandly and loudly grunted his secret: “Heh! Cocaine!”

He felt he could distinguish his drug highs from his other out-of-body experiences, and I had no cause to doubt him. He was eager to find outside proof of the alien persecution he’d undergone. The Real Truth ends with an offer to “split a lawsuit down the middle with whoever comes forward with proof of what is happening to me. Just think of it, this would be a very, very large sum.” The end section of his book also includes a dedication to his late brother Claude and this upper-case confession:

This I know for sure. By writing this I am putting myself in the bull’s eye.
BUT IT WAS SOMETHING I HAD TO DO

BECAUSE I LOVE MY COUNTRY MY DAUGHTER MY FRIENDS MY FAMILY MY DEAD BROTHER’S MEMORY.

Andre’s writing took other forms. He spent years fashioning, and memorizing, an epic poem about (among other things) world peace. He let me publish part of it in the New Haven Advocate, then later transformed the text into a rap song which he videoed himself performing atop West Rock. He could deliver dozens of lines from the poem at the drop of a hat.

The recitations and abductions and entreaties and catching-up conversations of Andre Ness made me late for work countless times. I think he was to me what the grays must have been to him—a nuisance sometimes, hard to explain to one’s friends, but fascinating and mind-expanding and impossible to ignore. The idea that Andre Ness is gone—invisible—is something I’m going to have trouble believing.

They took a song and they threw it into the sea.

“It had been dogging us for years, that submit tune. We used to jam on it, then it destroyed us. We tried to turn it into like a dozen different songs. It was the theme for some idiot rock opera we tried to write.

“This thing consumed us. It was ‘our song,’ the way couples in love have a song. It grew until it was bigger than all of us. And it nearly destroyed us.”

The only recourse for the band was to divorce the song, erase it, evaporate it, put out a hit on it. They couldn’t give it away—bad luck for all.

So in a van on a three-show tour of one-state-over, they scientifically eviscerated and disembowelled the song. They declared key parts of it off limits forever. Then they each wrote separate parts of it down.

Then they ripped the pieces, put them all in a bag, tied a rock to the bag, and tossed it the ocean.

When they got back to town, they felt a curse had been lifted.

We’re not mentioning the band, or the song, because our readers are cretins who like nothing more than to shout out a request for this devil song the next time the band plays. Part of us wants to protect the world from inevitable doom by keeping the specifics to ourself. Another part of us wants to shout out the request ourself.

Coming to the Bullfinch within 40 hours of now: Horn of the Hunter, I Didn’t Know It was Loaded (with former members of Use Enough Gun) and The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older… At Hamilton’s: The Lost Classics, One for the Road and Something of Value… At D’ollaire’s: an indie incursion of The Honey Badger and the not-as-metal-as-they-sound Grenadine’s Spawan…

Slept 32 hours in the bath. Nobody said anything.

Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx, We’re New Here.

Still so far out there that many people can’t locate him, even an underdone Gil-Scott Heron collaboration like this one (with Jamie xx, the musician/remixer from the band which shares his surname, adding his stamp to Scott-Heron’s earlier album I’m New Here) has a revelation in every track. There’s grooviness which gets coarse quickly (“The Crutch”), bubbly sounds that devolve into Tom Waits-ish blues (“Home”) and muddiness which turns unexpectedly crisp and danceable (Ur Soul and Mine). Nothing on the album ends the way it began, except the wistful “Piano Player,” a one-minute-and-21-second late-in-the-album-interlude that seems flown in from some farflung Brechtian cabaret climes. Not a mindmeld by any means, but Jamie xx enables Gil Scott-Heron to mess with your head as handily as ever.

Hate Annual #9 (Fantagraphics)

It is my considered opinion that, with his overstuffed anthologies Buddy Does Seattle and Buddy Does Jersey—Peter Bagge wrote the great American novel. Those books compile eight years of adventures of slacker-era everyman Buddy Bradley, as issued bi-monthly or so in Bagge’s own comic book Hate. The Buddy Bradley stories hang together so well in long form, forming such an indelible and rich portrait of life in the 1990s, that Bagge’s pulling back his output to a single Hate Annual per year since 2001 seems sad.

If it weren’t so dead-on and funny. And, much as I hate to say it, appropriate to the storyline. Buddy Bradley’s settled down. He’s married with a kid. He’s found an identity that suits him—and that involves wearing a captain’s hat and an eye patch, a far cry from his youth when he was indistinguishable from millions of other plaid-shirted long-haired 20somethings. In the earlier Buddy Bradley escapades, whole issues could be taken up with the aftermath of a bad date. Middle-age isn’t as spontaneous or combustible. Bagge perceives this and doles out the action at the proper pace, however annoying that might be to readers who crave more frequent episodes.

Hate Annual #9 involves that old novelistic trope of watching one’s parents grow old and having to consider putting them in a nursing home. Bagge expands the premise considerably. For starters, the parents are Buddy’s wife Lisa’s parents, and Buddy’s never even met them. The story involves a family trip and lots of unsavory supporting characters. In presenting Buddy Bradley as a relatively responsible (or at the very least, self-aware) adult, the 24-page multi-chapter adventure becomes as much about juvenility as senility, with Buddy in the deep center.

So colorful it adds to the creepiness of some of the characters, this is yet another burst of brilliance from a writer/artist who uses grotesque cartoons as ways to paint empathetic portraits of modern life. We may continue to, as the comics’ old promo stickers used to say, “Love Hate”—while hating to wait a whole year between installments.

We’re like red mulch. We were all sharp and shiny, and we just got ground into dirt.”

That’s an assessment of the music industry by Russ Itch (ne Itzkawicz), who’s named his new purposely non mainstream project Red Mulch as a result.

He’s planning to keep the music fresh and red- hot and untrammeled this time.

“No studio tricks. No overdubs. No session musicians. No extra producers. No nothin’,” he swears.

Oh. Also no guitars, drums or bass. Piano is where it’ s at. Prepared piano with little woodchips under some odd the wires to enhance the lower notes and add a clippiness to the upper range. You can hear the results on a four track tape available at Red Mulch’s next gig, Wednesday at the Bullfinch.

Comparatively naïve bands which wouldn’t mind being signed at pervade the scene tonight: The Norm Law, Denby Quits and Wiener Dog at the Bullfinch… Shelly’s Old Flame, The Hopeless Cause and Versus the Kid at Hamilton’… and at least one band that’s “made it,” The Denbys, at D’ollaires with up-and-comers (or down-and-goers) Crush on You…

I look for another place to live, but there’s nothing i can afford. I can’t even afford live here, but I haven’t told anybody.

Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

I distrust the saxophone as a solo instrument, if only because it’s such an important member of soul, R&B and jazz conversations that it seems a shame to let it blurt lonesomely. Colin Stetson’s got a relationship to the instrument that makes it seem more like a Terry Riley keyboard, and I’m fascinated. Recorded without overdubs but with an array of microphones, Stetson’s minimalist bleeps and bloops and tentative melodies echo, glide and bounce off the walls. Some sounds are fraught (the haunted “Home”), others are funky and fresh (the rollicking “Red Horse”). It all ends with the foghorn industrial “In Love and Justice,” which reminds of how little Stetson is working with here, and how much he’s capable of.

[Christopher Arnott continues to recount his 45s]

The Coral, Dreaming of You/Answer Me/Follow the Sun. The whole white British soul/psychedelic scene of the late 1990s/early 2000s sounds so tentative now, so underproduced and a bit out of it. It was an exercise, a step in a direction later realized more fully and creatively by hip-hop and neo-glam acts. But thanks for trying, guys.

The Vagabonds, Too Much Tension/No Outlet. There are bands called The Vagabonds all over the planet, have been for eons. This one was from Rocky Hill, Ct., and palled around with New Haven power pop exemplars Chopper. This single from ’87 keeps the band’s shoutiness and unfettered guitar solos crisp and neat, which is not how I remember them live.

Names for Pebbles, Sunnybank/Under My Blanket. A one-sided two-song 33rpm single—the flipside is utterly flat and grooveless and blank. Frisky pop strummings with thoughtful lyrics, evokes a whole era of pleasant young bands holding forth in the mid-1990s on small club stages before the well-dressed collegiates who couldn’t handle the ska or hardcore scenes their peers were flocking to.

The Woggles, Carnivore! EP. Four songs (“Carnivore,” “Flash Flood,” “You Belong to Me,” “Hi Hi Pretty Girl”) on a single 45 rpm seven-inch. A woman appears in the band photos on the sleeve, which led to some confusion when the Georgia-rooted garage band appeared at Cheri’s on York St. for a 1993 gig in which they’d been paired with the female-fronted local garagistas The Botswanas. Keyboardist Donna Bowman had left the band between the recording of this single and the subsequent touring the band did. It took The Woggles 17 years to make it back to New Haven, but they’ve been back a couple times since. Singer Manfred Jones has become a noted archivist of underground ‘60s rock, helping program the Little Steven Underground Garage radio show. The recordings lack Manfred’s flailing hairdo yet hold up just fine.

Raspberries, Go All the Way/Tonight. Have it on CD, cassette, LPs… but this is one of those records that was made to be a vinyl 45 (on the Beatles-cool Capitol label, yet). I once dated someone who thought the song was saying “Goooo Away” rather that “Go Away,” begging off rather than getting it on. Gave me a fresh perspective that totally renewed the tune for me.

Inspiration struck like a speeding bus. Two of them, even, headlong from different directions.

“We’d been on a road trip,” writes in Geoff of the up-for-anything band GOTM, “and we got tired of the board games and the mystery novels and the videos. We really enjoy playing music together, so somebody is always playing or practicing or writing.

In one city, one of those cars with the big bass speakers in back, blasting the hip-hop, pulls up next to us. As a joke, we start playing back, loud as we can. Suddenly we’re in this musical drag race to the corner. Could have gone either way, guy could have been a total asshole, but he was great and we had a lot of fun.”

Then, in a college town, GOTM was wandering the campus after their gig and noticed one of those electric folk duos—almost always a male guitarist and a female singer—doing one of those increasingly popular routines where they play in the driveway of a student-populated house, using their car as a stage and an electricity source. “It struck several of us at one,” Geoff says—meaning the idea and not the car. “It seemed so wrong for the car to be parked.”

The band already mingles electronics and live acoustic instruments, so they felt up to the challenge. Within three weeks they’d written a song cycle which could be played and enjoyed through the open windows of a moving vehicle. The driver is allowed to play along on the car horn (“it happens to be a perfect B flat,” according to Geoff) while the rhythm section (bass sounds via keyboards) occupies the back seat and the singer rides shotgun.

So far, this street symphony has sounded along the highway, on residential streets on Saturday nights, and in a town parade. This Wednesday it will be performed in the round driveway at the Arthur K. Nifferstein High School (affectionately known as Rat Fink High). It’s an official school event, arranged by GOTM keyboardist and RFH alum Christopher Snook. The crowd will sit within the grass oval while the GOTM car circles at 5 mph. The school is being filmed for a driver’s safety class. (We made that up.)