The August Sessions...Unearthed

Recently while visiting North Carolina, N'Gai convinced me to patch together all the equipment I needed to digitize some sound recordings. The occasion was his unearthing of a forgotten stash of cassette tapes documenting the legendary August Sessions. Dating from the infamous summer of '93, the second summer N'Gai lived at the Pink House before leaving Chapel Hill for the Far East, these tapes captured a series of day and night jam sessions held in his downstairs room.

They featured a rotating cast of musicians, including N'Gai on flute, Lem on buckets and various other percussion, Grant Tennille on guitar, Bryan Ellerson on keyboards, Charles Overbeck on the cello, and Karen Hurka on harp. The sound quality is surprisingly clear for having been recorded on an old boombox ("I think the cassette door was broken off, and the tape was just held there by the heads," according to N'Gai), and several priceless, previously unheralded moments in Pink House history have been discovered (like Lem macking on Jyoti). More details will be forthcoming.

Jay Murray returns for Gerald's 40th B-day

In April, Gerald Bundy turned 40, and Jay made the scene, taking a train up from Davidson to do it. Gerald hung out with Jay a lot at the Pink House and found him a room at 401 Pritchard when everyone got kicked out in '97.

On Friday night, we grabbed some grub at Milltown in Carrboro, then crossed the road to meet up with former housemate Karen Hurka (summer '93) at a free record release party at the Cradle for the latest LP from her husband Ryan's band the Kingsbury Manx. This show sparked even more Pink House memories when we all ran into Grant Tennille and Matt Hedt.

The next day, enroute to Gerald's in Durham we picked up Barbara and Jeff, and did a drive-by on Sam's Quik Shop. I had invited Lydia to come along, but she couldn't make it. Also at the party was Allen Sellars, Chez Pink resident during 1995. Before that, Allen also lived at 401 Pritchard. Many Pink House and 401 stories were told, including the tale of the two hippies who lived in the Pink House driveway. Gerald fed us oysters, wine, and gourmet root beer.

"Jay and I missed getting to hang with you at the birthday party the other weekend. He had a tough night's sleep on our lumpy futon couch, but was good to go after shaving his head on the porch. Here's a photo, the other people are Jay's friend Gerald, Barbara, who used to live at 401 Pritchard Ave with Jay, and her husband, Jeff."

- e-mail to Lydia

While in town, Jay also owned up to various Pink House housemate misdemeanors.

J: I remember once I was making out with my girlfriend at the time Julia, and somehow we ended up fooling around in Steve’s room. Then Steve suddenly came in and cut the lights on, and we were like, oops! Busted! I also remember when Steve took my fan. I came back home one day, and my fan was gone, and I was like, what happened to my fan? And it quickly mushroomed into a conversation about how I wasn't doing enough around the house.

E: This was your fan?

J: It was supposedly a house fan.

E: And there was a confrontation between you and Steve?

J: Yeah, but you were there, backing him up.

E: That was cold.

J: I wasn't the perfect housemate. A couple times, I mooched some of Sally's food, and when she found it missing, she immediately blamed you. And I was okay with that.

E: Fifteen years later, the truth all comes out in the wash.

Behind the scenes on The Pink House movie set

It was August 1, 2001, and ten years to the day from when our original Pink House lease began. Jay called me because Ian had invited him and any other former housemates he could round up to drop by the set where they were making the Pink House movie. They were planning to film the movie's big party scene that day, and the idea was for real housemates to join all the other extras. I had read an early copy of the script, and of course was curious to see how the shoot was going.

Especially since it was all happening at Clay Boyer's former pad on 15-501 South, the Starpoint house, which I remembered fondly as the spot where Melissa Swingle told me I had an "old soul" at a glam rock party sometime around 1998. The nice Christian girls then living at the real Pink House had refused to let them shoot inside the house, so Ian and company had to find a stand-in location for the interior scenes. I swung by the Teeter to buy a few bottles of Boone's Farm, without which no Pink House party would be complete, drove downtown to pick up Jay from 401 Pritchard, and we made our way out to the set.

The Pink House movie set, aka the Starpoint House, August 1-3, 2001.

Ian welcomed us with open arms, and immediately resumed his directorial duties, leaving us both with all-access ability to hang out as long as we wanted. Greg Humphreys and the rest of Hobex were there, including Kai, who would shortly leave the band, but had spent the past couple of years playing keyboards with them after his stint in Dag ended. Stephen Akin showed us some dailies. We met Zack Ward, who played Murray, the film's lead, based on a hybrid of Jay and Ian. He was very cool and down to earth. We met Rick, the art director who was also cast as the head neo-Nazi who N'Wal ends up dosing with acid. And other crew and cast members, including Omar, aka N'Wal, the doppelganger of N'Gai, and Pilar, the Spanish actress who played Zola, who I gathered was based on both Zia and Jiffer. Plus a ton of extras. Everybody was super friendly. And it was very exciting to see Ian and Tessa making a bona fide feature film, even more so since it was about the Pink House.

Jay had his own liquor of some kind, and we were sipping all afternoon. Which meant by the time the party scene was filmed, we were the only two souls who were actually a little buzzed, since everyone else had pink cups full of water.

Then, we came back either the next day or the day after that to chill some more. During the times we were there, Karen Hurka stopped by, and Lem, and Chip. I took a bunch of photos, exactly 130 of them, as it turned out later. Which I thought was a good omen. And then we went home and started looking forward to when the film would be completed, so Jay and I could be discovered by Hollywood poohbahs as the extras who shone brightly enough to be given their own talkshows, or something. Assuming our scenes didn't end up on the cutting room floor.