Ever start something silly that just sort of takes on a life of it’s own? Welcome to Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail. It started as a silly little idea: Make the Life of Buddha into a Christmas story oh yeah and make it a snail. The story was originally created to be read by Shawn Stewart as part of the Red Eye Collaborations Uneasy Listening series Holiday extravaganza. Cause nothing says Christmas like a whole mess of feedback.

Time marches on as Time is want to do and in 2003 we retooled Snaildartha this time as a Soul Jazz record, a Christmas gift for friends and family limited to 100 copies, then we gave it away free on the internet. It sounded , well kind of awful but it was free, two years latter we remixed it and it was released on Innova, as a limited edition of 500, and it did quite well. Then of course Tower records folded, and most of the copies disappeared into the either, now you can buy it from Innova, for a reasonable price, or on GEMM or Ebay for a ridiculous price (last time I checked about $35 (us)

All the while every holiday it seems my bandwidth bills would spike up in December, that’s when I remembered the original was still up.

So now we are taking it down, but not to fret here in its stead is the remixed, remastered version yours for free. Sure its available on Itunes but the labels never sent me a check, so pppbbbtttt to them. And Happy Holidays to you!

The band here is truly something else Organ by Scott ”Pink Slippers” LeGere master session player and demigod of the Ecletone records label, On Drums the Buddha of the beat Mr. Terry “Poker Face” Haanen, and rounding out the musical trio Free Jazz legend George Cartwright , one of the many things that makes this record special is that it marks a much more melodic side of his playing, as opposed to the insanity of his group Curlew.The story is told (and mostly written by)by Comedian and raconteur Matt Fugate. Mixed by Brian “don’t give me nickname” Jacoby .Mastered by Bob ”What’s with all these strange capitalization last names” DeMaa and produced and directed by me ; Chris Strouth.So here it is Download and spread the wealth, its Creative Commons licensed and you can use it as lon as its not commercial.

Happy Holidays from all of the Snaildartha 6 and your friends at AlliedChemical.com

PS: these are the liner notes from the original l release just for the purists:

So dig it: in your hands you hold a special Holiday gift just for you. well that would be the case if this was the disc, but since it’s the Internet you probably have something else in your hands…like a mouse! The Story was written by Matt Fugate and myself a few years ago for the Red Eye Uneasy Listening series Christmas Show, where it was read by Shawn Stewart, who still is annoyed about some of the tongue twisters she had to pronounce. To be honest I don’t remember what year that was, anyway suffice it to say Britney Spears was still a virgin.

The story hasn’t changed too much since it debuted. It was one of those ideas that I always wanted to revisit, so here it is, reborn as a soul jazz record. Well, a soul jazz record about a Christmas snail, that’s really just a thinly veiled retelling of the life of Buddha. But isn’t that what Christmas is all about; Jazz, Buddhism, and Snails. Well, it has as much to do with Christmas as a fat guy with a thing for elves.

As to why you have a copy, well, you must be pretty special because there are only 100 of these made.Ok well again since your seeing this on the internet you might not be as special, I mean i am sure your special to someone not necessarily to me but someone must like you.Even GW Bush has friends, granted there all on the board of Haliabriton but they must like him. Just a little bit of holiday cheer that comes from the heart, for people that are special to us, and of course you poachers on the net who might like it as well.
Happy Holidays,

It’s a little easier on my bandwidth if you just get the zip download, but if you want to here what it sounds like then here are the first two tracks:

Rhapsody In Snail
(1 Meg)

<A Snail is Born
(4 Meg)

This work
is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License

There are a lot of Minnesota’s: The Garrison Keillor Minnesota with Uff Da’s aplenty, lots of pie and coffee, Sven and Ole, Lutefisk and Lefsa, astute literary references and a romanticized notion about the past. There is the Cohen Brothers Minnesota as embodies in the movie Fargo, with Uff Da’s aplenty, lots of pie and coffee…Um ok I guess the Cohen brothers version and the Keillor version are a pretty similar, well save for the whole bloodthirsty wood chipper thing.

There is the Prince Minnesota, which is a much funkier one then the aforementioned, with its God meets Sex bass lines, it’s Doves crying and its Purple Rains, this is not to be confused with the Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis Minnesota, which is a different kind of funky one that made us a destination spot for the diva of the moment, a reason for the celebrity sighting. Well out side of those here for the Hazelton Minnesota- that’s the one of temperance, and soulful understanding a place for mediation and repair.

Let us not forget the punk rock Minnesota the Replacements one, of course there is the Hüsker Dü one (ones a little harder, ones a little drunker- I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which) There is the Minnesota that’s National Public Radio, and the one that is NASCAR, and the one that is Rhyme Sayers. All states have more then on identity, but Minnesota seems to be more profoundly schizophrenic. It is one that gave the world Guy Noir and Mac Lethal. F Scott Fitzgerald and Jessie the Body.

Which brings us to one of the truly odd things about my home state- Christmas Decorations. Before you get all PC on me (which by the way would be a very Minnesota reaction) this really is about decoration for Christmas, when was the last time you saw a really tacky Chanukah display? Christmas is the holiday when otherwise sober Lutherans, deck their snow-covered lawns with enough lights to make the Vegas strip seem dim and inflatable snow globes with licensed characters cavorting about. It’s a season that makes wearing a fur-trimmed cap not only socially acceptable, but encouraged.

Do realize oh dear and gentle reader, that I am rather fond of this seasonal decorative disorder; when my neighbors’ homes light up their dull facades and bring forth their inner Liberace. It is these kind of acts that give me hope, seriously how messed up can the world be if the guy next door has the word “peace” light up like an airport runway in his yard, It certainly is a better thought then the sign it replaced which consisted of “These Colors Don’t Run over a an American Flag Motif”. So it’s a change of heart or an irony he hasn’t picked up on.

I spent my Christmases as a kid in Hibbing MN, which is really known for two things 1) being the worlds largest open pit mine-essentially the worlds biggest hole and 2) being the childhood home of Bob Dylan. However what Hibbing always brings to mind is the wonder of Christmas decoration, as a kid living in the suburbs, I thought that Hibbing was much cooler then where we lived. They had a downtown, with a movie theater and a joke shop. It was right out of the Andy Griffith show…well minus the Hillbillies.

Downtown Hibbing got decorated with shiny tinsel decorations in the shape of candles and snowflakes, the kind of decorations that they stopped making in 1965 but keep putting up now matter how much disrepair they are in. All the trees on the boulevard were lit up with fairy lights, and all the windows had the greetings of the season.

As for the neighborhoods, many of the houses had giant painted Christmas Cards lit up in the front yard, and most of the houses had bags with candles in them that lit up the sidewalks, which lit the path for the neighbors to visit. In our neighborhood of Fridley the neighbors coming by meant something was wrong, but here it was a big party.

My parents resented being there, they kept making jokes about small towns and nothing to do, but had we been home we would just be watching TV, and at least in Hibbing they had cable. Sure I had no idea who all the people visiting the house were, but they all seemed pretty happy to see me, and thee all brought candy, which as a chubby eight year old is always on the plus side.

As I got older I saw my Grandparents work wit their neighbors throughout the fall, to coordinate with the neighbors for the holiday season, making sure that the neighborhood followed a theme. I think of this every year when my south Minneapolis neighborhood can never pull together any kind of gathering for National Night Out, or that none of the kids from the neighborhood trick or treat there, they all caravan out to “the Mall” where shopping and mini Snickers bars dance their unholy dance.

Yes I am a sentimentalist dear reader, but if you can’t be sentimental at Christmas time when can you. My Christmas has nothing to do with Jesus, or Churches, it’s the peanuts Christmas Special, and Frank Capra movies, it’s a remembrance of days that have passed, and dreams of what is to come. Its the moment to remember what wonder is like.

Happy Holidays Everybody!

Ever start something silly that just sort of takes on a life of it’s own? Welcome to Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail. It started as a silly little idea: Make the Life of Buddha into a Christmas story oh yeah and make it a snail. The story was originally created to be read by Shawn Stewart as part of the Red Eye Collaborations Uneasy Listening series Holiday extravaganza. Cause nothing says Christmas like a whole mess of feedback.

Time marches on as Time is want to do and in 2003 we retooled Snaildartha this time as a Soul Jazz record, a Christmas gift for friends and family limited to 100 copies, then we gave it away free on the internet. It sounded , well kind of awful but it was free, two years latter we remixed it and it was released on Innova, as a limited edition of 500, and it did quite well. Then of course Tower records folded, and most of the copies disappeared into the either, now you can buy it from Innova, for a reasonable price, or on GEMM or Ebay for a ridiculous price (last time I checked about $35 (us)

All the while every holiday it seems my bandwidth bills would spike up in December, that’s when I remembered the original was still up.

So now we are taking it down, but not to fret here in its stead is the remixed, remastered version yours for free. Sure its available on Itunes but the labels never sent me a check, so pppbbbtttt to them. And Happy Holidays to you!

The band here is truly something else Organ by Scott ”Pink Slippers” LeGere master session player and demigod of the Ecletone records label, On Drums the Buddha of the beat Mr. Terry “Poker Face” Haanen, and rounding out the musical trio Free Jazz legend George Cartwright , one of the many things that makes this record special is that it marks a much more melodic side of his playing, as opposed to the insanity of his group Curlew.The story is told (and mostly written by)by Comedian and raconteur Matt Fugate. Mixed by Brian “don’t give me nickname” Jacoby .Mastered by Bob ”What’s with all these strange capitalization last names” DeMaa and produced and directed by me ; Chris Strouth.So here it is Download and spread the wealth, its Creative Commons licensed and you can use it as lon as its not commercial.

Happy Holidays from all of the Snaildartha 6 and your friends at AlliedChemical.com

PS: these are the liner notes from the original l release just for the purists:

So dig it: in your hands you hold a special Holiday gift just for you. well that would be the case if this was the disc, but since it’s the Internet you probably have something else in your hands…like a mouse! The Story was written by Matt Fugate and myself a few years ago for the Red Eye Uneasy Listening series Christmas Show, where it was read by Shawn Stewart, who still is annoyed about some of the tongue twisters she had to pronounce. To be honest I don’t remember what year that was, anyway suffice it to say Britney Spears was still a virgin.

The story hasn’t changed too much since it debuted. It was one of those ideas that I always wanted to revisit, so here it is, reborn as a soul jazz record. Well, a soul jazz record about a Christmas snail, that’s really just a thinly veiled retelling of the life of Buddha. But isn’t that what Christmas is all about; Jazz, Buddhism, and Snails. Well, it has as much to do with Christmas as a fat guy with a thing for elves.

As to why you have a copy, well, you must be pretty special because there are only 100 of these made.Ok well again since your seeing this on the internet you might not be as special, I mean i am sure your special to someone not necessarily to me but someone must like you.Even GW Bush has friends, granted there all on the board of Haliabriton but they must like him. Just a little bit of holiday cheer that comes from the heart, for people that are special to us, and of course you poachers on the net who might like it as well.
Happy Holidays,

It’s a little easier on my bandwidth if you just get the zip download, but if you want to here what it sounds like then here are the first two tracks:

Rhapsody In Snail
(1 Meg)

<A Snail is Born
(4 Meg)

This work
is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License