Stone Tiger (Percy Jones, Bill Frisell, Doug Bowne) the Other End, NYC, April 12,1984
STONE TIGER
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This legendary and not well documented band existed for a brief time in the early 1980s. It is hard to characterize their music. The best I can come up with is space-prog. Collectively, Jones's wild bass playing, combined with Frisell's wild electric guitar sounds and Bowne's heavy-duty drums sound like the house band at a bar in Blade Runner. Listen to those sledgehammer drums right out of the gate of the first track. Stone Tiger started as a trio, but by April 1984, Anton Sanko occasionally sat in on synthesizer (as on this recording). I saw them live at CBGB/Omfug on the Bowery as a trio on a week night, and was one of maybe 20 people in the audience. Although the photo shows Frisell holding a Stratocaster, when I saw the band -- and as is obvious from the music -- he was playing the Roland G-303 guitar synthesizer, which was his main rig for a few years in the 1980s.
Percy Jones - bass
Bill Frisell - guitar
Doug Bowne - drums
Anton Sanko - synth
The set list:
0:00 Squelch
4:37 Heidelberg Switch
9:40 Zimbabwe
17:50 ICBM
24:48 Barrio
32:26 Bluetron (?)
38:07 [title unknown]
This was Percy Jones's (Brand X) band, and apparently they had difficulty getting any record company interest. Meanwhile, the career of Bill Frisell, then an ECM recording artist and sideman (who lived in Hoboken, NJ at the time), started to take off in many directions (and still is), leading the group to disband. Doug Bowne had been the drummer in John Lurie's Lounge Lizards.
This recording is from my personal cassette collection and is posted solely for educational purposes and historical interest.
I uploaded a copy of this show as the first on this channel two months ago (Nov. 2023). Since I was new to YouTube, I hadn't really figured out the look I wanted, so I am re-posting this with a more attractive look. It was wanting to hear this tape that I hadn't heard in probably 30 years that motivated me to start a YouTube channel, so others could hear this amazing band, which isn't otherwise available on the internet (at least that I could find).