The Joggers

Converging independently upon Portland, OR, from greater New England, The Joggers formed in early 2001. They employ 4 vocals, 2 electric guitars, 1 electric bass, and 1 set of drums. Jake used to play a game with the older married ladies in his neighborhood. He’d show up on their doorsteps at 3:00 with a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a half-finished Gibson, and two silk blindfolds tucked into his sweatbands. By 5:15, washed in the indelible truths of antiquity, the soft glow of Rochester dusk bleeding silently through the drapes, Steely Dan’s Aja purring on cassette -- the two souls, utterly blind and naked on the upstairs carpet, forced each other to learn rythmes of the universe, moment after moment, until the unmistakable creak of the Kodak middleman’s entrance below. Jake whispers: “Don’t flinch, pilgrim.” Laid off from his job as a NASA janitor, Darrell bought a bass in a short-sighted scheme to advance the zamboni sciences. By early spring of ‘98 this horny genious had come clean twice about his latent desire to grant wishes to the clumsy. His hobbies led him to the prime meridian and three ugly games of Blackjack: the first won him a trailer. The second won him a wife. The third plays endlessly between his softening brain and over-torqued libido. The estuary fetishist of the group, Murphy grew up in love with snowmobiles and NWA. Fog sat like a translucent pall over the skirt of the White Mountains. Guitars played. Later things changed, he built a valve-state amplifier from mint, thicket, arsenic, elbow-grease and the remnants of a fin-de-ciecle (siecle?) polish telescope. If Icarus watched tv, he would be it. A benchwarmer with major rushing yards, a luddite with huge schematics, Ben hates epitomies of urbane ambivalence. This 3rd string marching band buggler shook things up in his home town with a self-released cover of The Shagg’s cover of Toto’s “Africa” at the age of 12. During his education in the mid-west he retreated to the comforts afforded by Powerball and cheap Korean guitars -- shunning sunlight, friendship, allegory and the brisk walk -- all in the pursuit of his 4 bands: Bizarre Asthmatics, Royal Nature Shots, The Colonel St. Private’s Precious Void, and Huckleberry Booya.