I lived in Ames from the start of my first attempt at college in August 1993 until around the same time the following year, after I dropped out and made a somewhat poor attempt to get myself set-up and independent in Ames. I liked Ames for a number of college-towny reasons that Cedar Falls didn’t quite do for me. But I didn’t care for my music courses at ISU and wanted to experiment more, and realized I could experiment more in the punk/indie rock scene than I could in the more academic circles that I had originally associated with the avant-garde. After the school year was over I rented a spare bedroom from a guy but I lost my dishwashing job and couldn’t pay rent, and we didn’t really get along anyway. So I moved out and into my ‘79 Bonneville, parked in a lot near campustown, figuring I could get along with that arrangement while the weather was still good and hopefully in that time put together a new job and place. It was during that period that I spent an afternoon hanging out with Seth and recording Gee… Okay. Same lame dorky humor, but way more stonery. It manages a couple times to get surprising psychedelic-sounding for just a guitar though a little amp and a cheezy Yamaha keyboard. For a while that summer the only music I had to listen to on my Walkman as I trekked around Ames on foot, broke, pretty much homeless, trying to scramble my shit together, was the tape that we recorded it on, the other side of which had a copy of Godz The Third Testament. You can only imagine what that did to my frame of mind.
After moving back to Waterloo, I put some copies of some Gok tapes up on consignment at Co-Op Records. Joe had bought one, maybe more, and written me a letter which he forgot to send – but we ended up meeting anyway. So it’s two years later and I’ve been hanging with Joe and the Ragman scene. Joe was a bit of a fan of Gok I guess. I arranged to go visit my old buddy Seth in Ames again to hang out and catch up, and Joe requested we record a new Gok tape. This was the last thing Seth and I ever recorded together. I think we hung out maybe twice more.
Gok-Luther_Drive_Blues_aka_Luther_Driver_Overcliffe.zip (67.0 Mb)
