Categories
Improvised Music

The Broken Armed Drummer

“Luna’s Broken Arms” from The Growth Years by Death Worth Living

Recorded Live at Luna’s Cafe, Sacramento, spring 2007

Steven “Shane” Schneider aka Pixie Storm aka Reverend Papa Sweat, was a primary source of ambience and spontaneity, drumming and percussion, in the improvisational super group that I led from 2007 to 2011, Death Worth Living.

This performance took place 24 hours following a terrible accident in which Shane dropped eight feet down through an opening to a llama stable, because Shane was feeding the llamas, because we both lived on this farm on the edge of Portland, Oregon, in 2007.

Shane was already kind of feeble, elderly, and weakened due to a life of great times, strenuous activity, and the onset of Parkinson’s Disease (he was not quite yet diagnosed) and previous injuries and surgeries that bothered him, so he had vicodin and weed. We did not go to the doctor.

My bandmate at the time Joe helped set up a few shows in Sacramento and Davis. We are in Luna’s Cafe, Sacramento, 2007, and a Sony MiniDisc recorder is keeping the memory.

We encountered some mushrooms from a backwoods type of dude in central Oregon, and we bought them. We later took them, with ground nutmeg in the form of tea, and performed our show.

This is the audio of that performance, where Shane has a badly damaged arm, is delirious from vicodin, weed, and mushrooms. I too must have been on another planet as I had been driving all day, stoned, and also on mushrooms.

Shane is the only member that played in my first show, and last. This is on a Bandcamp collection (there was a small handmade CD-R run) called The Growth Years.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.