(Jay: guitar)

1989: Jay at the Cedar Bluff house

Though he should have been called Thomas McElhone III, this mercurial Aries no hit wonder found himself nestled in the palms of strangers at birth, forever housing the name of a scavenger bird flying over the midwestern prairie.

Jay Michael Harden. His kin came from South Dakota, Land of the Buffalo, the Ogalala Sioux, King Corn and Llamas.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, land of ten thousand lakes, horse flies and blizzards. This displanted, uprooted and bloodless young nest stealer used to sit and listen to The Sun Sessions in Sioux Falls on Thanksgiving while his cousins planted the demon seed of funk in his ears with Parliament Mothership Connection. The Ames Public Library provided him with the Anthology of Folk Music by Harry Smith, so there was one big Gumbo Pots on Fiyo musical stew with just the right seasoning, jamming with high school buddies to Neil Young and Lightning Hopkins, dreaming of writing the great american novel in a song. Tired of cutting the grass at the Indian Creek Country Club, Harden planted his traveling shoes in a little town called Iowa City, Iowa.

Kurt Vonnegut, Dylan Thomas, James Alan McPherson, Flannery O'Connor...the list goes on and on, those who have walked those streets, those who have studied and taught in this little backwater town.  The Engles' started it all, like Black Mountain with Creeley I suppose but more conservative. Harden used to live in the Vonnegut House, as they called it, never knowing for sure if the writer himself ever lived there. He suspects there was some connection because in the basement someone had written "Dad's on the broom again!" and this was probably Mark Vonnegut, who went schizophrenic and wrote a book about going crazy in the 1970's. I guess he's better now and I can't figure out if old Kurt is dead or not. 

Anyway, he met some crazy guys in Iowa City, some of them doing time or maybe just getting out of prison. 

People going in and out of rehab and having satellite ankle bracelets, he has lost contact with all of them.  So maybe this is a way for all of them to get in touch with him again!!  Oh noooooo!!!  

So before Totem Soul (which is why I presume you are reading this god awful tribble of a bio 'where is he now' parody thing) there was Bob Uniform.....that's right!!! Almost being called Slim Reagan Lead, the young group balked at the topical formula, fearing it would lose potency and doom them to a short life, so they opted for something really Devo-ish. The band opened for such luminaries on the Iowa City Scene as Stiff Legged Sheep and Dead Guy, mostly playing the Union Cafeteria and the Riverview Festival, Harden and cohort Bentham Paulos lost contact after a road trip to check out Ivy League Schools almost lead to a stiff jail sentence for the two 19 year olds.  It seems that in the border check point between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, the border patrol guard, a feisty dyke sort of woman, asked the typical questions to the unassuming driver, Harden. "How long's your stay, got any fruits and vegetables..." that sort of thing. Then she asked if they had any weapons or firearms and Harden replies with a straight face "Automatic or Semi-Automatic?" All guns were unholstered and placed on the temples of the once jovial youths and their Nova was surrounded by agents of the border. Once the car was ransacked and the two given a cavity search, they were released with a stern warning to never joke with border patrol again.  "We promise", they said, hanging their heads in shame.

So Bob Uniform disbanded upon returning from a bullet riddled road trip through Washington, D.C., Boston, and up into Vermont.  Harden was looking for a band. His Blue Telecaster and Stella Piggy Back tube amp, along with the Memory Man Chorus and Delay, had given him a signature hard driving rhythm sound that was beginning to fall on the ears of some aficionados on the music scene.  His name appeared in the Berliner student newspaper and the freaks from Dahm student dormitory began showing up at some solo gigs he was putting on.  One day he met someone who would change his life for the next five or six years or so about around there. 

His name was John Gilroy.  Now it's Jhon Gilroy.  His band was The Sloppy Drunks.  I don't know what his band is now, sorry, I'll look into it.  Anyway, Gilroy had a basement and a drummer and some amps and some drugs and a drunk weird family who didn't care what the boys did, in fact they loved it, so Harden decided to join the band and became second singer and rhythm guitarist.

Backing up such a fierce master such as Gilroy, pummeled along by the powerhouse drumming of that kid, what's his name, who went on to play with Run Westy Run, met the Replacements and toured with the Ramones....? Harden was pushed to new heights, replacing his Tele for a Gibson Melody Maker and a Fender Duo Sonic, (along with a Washburn acoustic for the unplugged openers they often did, getting back to their roots with Dave Moore and Greg Brown and Catfish Keith hanging around) they began to put on outrageous shows at the Crow's Nest, highlighted with anticipation by the Who's My Generation Medley and Pink Floyd Interstellar Overdrive, sometimes lasting as long as an hour and a half while the Leinenkugel's filled crowd circled the stage in a ritual dance orgy invoking the spirit of the turtle inside us all....what?  They had a great time and learned lots about how to hook up long wires and stuff like that from a really smelly weird sound man who was practically deaf but had a lot of equipment so they put up with him. Well mostly Steve did, he was his friend. 

Steve!!! Pings!!! Rawley!!! Enter stage left....this madman first walked into Harden's life at a place called Gabe's Oasis, doing sound for the Tape Beatles and Terry TruthHawk and the Sanctified Church of the Herbal Motherhood.  He joined the Sloppy Drunks but immediately had them change the repertoire to all Reggae. He had the best herb, so the other members complied and soon the public turned their backs on the youngsters.  The Crow's Nest shows were cancelled due to low turnout and even fans on the street seemed to shun the once popular members and shake their heads in dismay.

 A new formula and image had to be honed out of the rock which had risen from the sweat and blood of youthful over indulgence.  They shed their reggae robes, got down off the mountain and into the woods.  After long sessions in the Rawley wooded hutch house at the end of the road that went by Bob Black's house (former banjo player with Bill Monroe), the boys came up with a name that would resound throughout the annals of the sleepy backwater Iowa City town:  Totem Soul.    It was catchy.  It was like, the syllables were good, because the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead had the same amount of syllables. And it had double or triple meaning.  Could be the soul of the totem, the souls, totems and animal spirits, or it could be Tote 'em Soul, like bringing on the Soul shaking vibrations of musical grooves. It was christened on a windy night in the woods with the fireflies landing on them as they picked out the glow-in-the dark substance from the dead flies' tails and made Indian War Stripes on each others' faces, dancing naked under the moonlight and recording the sounds of the cicadas for use on a future project.

May Day 1988 at the Vonnegut House

Luckily for the band, Harden lived at the Vonnegut house, and at the Vonnegut house there was a barn and an annual May Day Party that brought thousands of people up the hill to listen to some great live music.  The kid drummer had left to go and play with Mose Allison in some pizza joint in Brussels, and then was heard as the studio man for Twin Tone Records in Minneapolis, adding those machine gun snare sounds to such bands as Lizard Wagon, Deep Flesh and Landing Party. They drew up a contract for another drummer, started doing auditions and finally, after agreeing to practice on a regular basis, Nigel Drahos was added as the drummer and played at the historic Barn Show on May Day, 1989 at the Vonnegut House.

Maybe this bio is a little backwards. Shouldn't you be finding out what Jay Michael Harden is doing now?  Isn't that what you're reading this for?  Have no fear, we're only about twenty years away!!  Maybe this next bit can be quick and painless, just the highlights and then maybe if you're nice you can write to Harden and he'll tell you more!!!

May Day 1989 with Nigel

After Drahos continued to disappoint the Totem Soulers with his lack of practice regimen, rifts began to grow in the songwriting team up of Gilroy-Harden and Rawley-Dalrymple. Ideas became blocked by overindulgence in Black Label beer and a growing appetite for Berkeley Acid. They decided to take a big chance, leave behind all they had worked for and pack up their Simple Lives, Acid Rains, Land of the Frees, Nowhere to be Founds and head out to the Northwest.

Seattle. No, maybe San Francisco...where shall we go? they asked themselves. Maybe we'll go to Portland first and then see about the other places.  They arrived in a big step van which used to be a Bird Ambulance.  Harden lived in the van for a couple winter months.  A couple of the other boys discoverd synthetic heroin and crack cocaine. They all drank like whales.  It was a very creative three months and then one day at a Doc Watson concert, the bomb was dropped.  Jhon and Steve quit.  They didn't want to be in the Jay Harden band anymore.  Harden was ruling their minds from the inside of the step van, causing them to become slaves to his every creative desire, imposing the songs he had written by kerosene lamp with fingers crippled from the cold.  Drahos and Harden vowed to stick together and make a go of it.  But they didn't know how to hook up all those wires so they quit too. 

Harden went on to play with Pandora's Boom Box with John Wager, former bass player for Pink Martini. He also played in Drip, Organic Grover and The Modern Troubadours. Harden has spent all his previous royalties tracking down and destroying any existing photos from this post Totem-Soul era, hoping to erase it from the minds of all those involved. 

Though he may never have been accused of eating a Robin's eggs and taking over her nest, Harden has managed to ruffle a few feathers in his quest for musical notoriety.  Still embroiled in a dispute with former bandmate Gilroy over the rights to Andy's Head, a song Harden claims he wrote after listening to a Minuteman song and thinking about his Roommate Andy Kaufman (of the Swinging Teens), the two have managed to keep business and friendship separate, reuniting for a parking lot jam session a few years back and maintaining an open mind about the possibilities for restarting a correspondence.  What with Gilroy's obsession with Native American Literature and Harden's recent work for Anna Mae Aquash, it shouldn't be too hard to imagine a renewal of correspondence between the two hard rocking midwestern lads in the not too distant future.

As for Harden's musical achievements since the demise of his former guiding light of inspiration?  He now has a weekly gig at the Lab 27 on Sant Rafael, just off the Rambla Raval in Barcelona, Spain.  Hey, the chick from Four Non Blondes is going to play there!!  She's George Clinton's sound man and a really good friend.  For now, the scene is brewing with Harden taking on trumpet duties as well in a few bands around town, still working on the Charlie Parker Omnibook by Jamey Aebersold and the Thelonious Monk play along CD.   He's got a new CD available called Carousel, featuring new songs like Blue Ribbon Cow, Gasoline, Hello My World and Nine Below Zero, along with old favorites like Slingshot, from the Wholistic Rambler's sans drummer Drahos days of Totem Soul.  Augmenting his income from the sporadic gigs in Barcelona, Harden is spreading the linguistic imperialistic message by teaching English to unsuspecting Catalans, hoping to work a bit harder for Big Brother before time runs out.  A slick living for a musician when you don't have to work until 2:30 everyday. 

If you're ever in Barcelona, drop him a line and maybe you'll find out more about the adventure, romance and political leanings of this elusive, cerebral and oft-overlooked rock and roll pioneer.  His fans are waiting to hear from you.