On April 13, 1989, Thelonious Monster came to Seattle to play songs from their masterpiece, Stormy Weather. Leader Bob Forrest was supposed to be newly sober, but he wasn’t, and so prepared questions about AA and the link between substance abuse and creativity gave way to a discussion of the merits of crashing Robin Trower’s soundcheck at another club, or trying to catch the first half of the Sonics-Heat NBA game.
In the end, soundcheck and beer won out. And then the beer won out, and Forrest began the show by apologizing for puking berry-flavored microbrew on the sidewalk outside the Central Tavern. Once he began to sing, everything else that hurt came out. Notes from what followed suggest he held his pint and the mike stand as if they were the only two things left in the world, and maybe they were. It was an amazing, riveting performance.
Midway through the tour, he and/or the band did something to thoroughly piss off their record label, and got dropped. RCA spent a pile of money reworking an album that Capitol finally put out, and then Forrest disappeared.
He had his reasons. His racist father was his grandfather, because his sister was really his mother — she became a fundamentalist Christian — and he was mostly orphaned on the streets by high school.
Six years later, two friends and I, after an evening spent as the only Anglos at the Olympic Auditorium watching Mexican luchadors wrestle, stopped at a quietly trendy Los Angeles restaurant in Silver Lake. On the menu was something called Bob Forrest Ham, and so the story of the Central Tavern came spilling out to general hilarity. Truth to tell, pretty much everybody in the music business in L.A. had a Bob Forrest story.
Thing was, Forrest was the busboy that night, clawing hard at sobriety. And maybe he heard — probably he heard — but there was no polite way to apologize. Anyway, the point of the story had been what an amazing show it had been, and what a gifted songwriter he was. And hopefully he heard that part.
That’s who Bicycle Thief is: Bob Forrest and a cast of friends. The album originally came out a couple years back on a tiny indie, but has been augmented by two new tracks (notably the opening “Song For A Kevin Spacey Movie”, that was, alas, not what the producers had wanted) for this broader release.
He is singing: “I’m lucky I’m alive, ’cause I should be dead, and I have been dead, but I’m not now, no.” His voice, especially the night I saw him in Austin during SXSW two months ago, is a wisp of his punk-blues growl, and he is adorned in fragile, Chaplinesque costume, made to seem even more frail by the clothes he’s chosen.
You Come And Go is very much a rock album, and Bob Forrest is still very much a gifted songwriter. The price he has paid these long years is counted in his lyrics, and tangible in his voice. And yet there is peace here, as well; from the stage in Austin, he announced the fifth anniversary of his sobriety, and though he still sings longingly of heroin and cocaine (and the first single, about his bored twelve-year-old son, is called “Stoned”), it seems to be sticking.
Heck, even his beloved Clippers are showing signs of rebirth.