One of my housemates has one of the small bedrooms downstairs in the main house. He works as a waiter at a very popular fish restaurant in Sausalito called, amazingly, "Fish". He is also an ardent, and very skillful surfer. When he's not "fishing" or surfing or wandering the aisles of our local Whole Foods Market looking for the best deals and muttering about how much the prices have gone up---behavior I have personally observed---he is in his little cloister at Happy Acres either watching the internet surf cameras or PBS TV or he is writing on his computer. He lives a quiet, some might even say ascetic life. He doesn't have a girlfriend, doesn't date and doesn't socialize with anyone but an old school friend who he sees maybe twice a year.
Here's Matt when he used to help with the vegetable garden and the chickens. That's the old homestead's original dairy milking barn in the background.
He would be considered a catch if he put himself out there as he is ruggedly handsome, has a great physique and is imbued with all the boy scout virtues. He has also shown talent in the past in various arts. Matt's life was not always so circumscribed, for he once was a truly swinging guy.
Here's two copies of watercolors Matt painted back in the early nineties. They adorn the wall of one of our kitchen counters.
These are gifts to the mayor when Matt was in his paper mache period.
When I first met Matt thirty-four years ago, he was living in the house next door with a couple of other bachelors. Upon our first meeting, he was loading up a pick-up truck with music equipment. He explained to me that he headed up a trio of piano, stand-up bass and drums called the Matt Cassell Trio. He played mostly swing tunes on the piano and sang. He came off, on that first meeting, as kind of cock-sure, boasting of how he could walk into pretty much any night club in San Francisco; sit down at the piano; belt out a few tunes, and instantly get a gig for him and his music mates.
I could tell just from listening to him talk that he had an impressive set of pipes and I could well imagine that he probably sounded very good singing and playing. His father had been in radio here in the Bay Area back in the day and Matt had inherited his voice. "When I was just a kid in junior high", Matt once told me, "an older girl in our school came up to me and said, "you know Matt, you're gonna break a lot of hearts with that voice of yours"". He invited me and my lady friend to come hear him play at the Pied Piper Room at The Palace Hotel.
The Pied Piper Room was one of the older swanky watering holes in The City, made famous by a large Maxfield Perrish painting of The Pied Piper over the bar. So one night my lady friend and I took him up on his offer. We were treated to Matt's wonderful renditions of "Mack the Knife", "Heaven, I'm in Heaven", "Come Dance with Me", "Minnie the Moocher" and other popular swing tunes of a bygone era. Matt's trio was tight and they were swinging and Matt's singing did not disappoint.
By the late nineties, the constant hauling of gear and schlepping to various venues around the Bay Area was getting to the fellas. The bass player had a pretty good day gig and his wife was agitating for him to give up the band. Soon thereafter, the band packed up their instruments and called it quits. Matt embarked on a career as a resource teacher at the local middle school here in Mill Valley. His job was to look after the mentally and physically challenged "special ed" kids. The school was thrilled to have Matt's masculine presence at the school and he was instantly drafted into outdoor lunch and recess monitor duties, aided ably by his stentorian voice. A couple of bellows from Matt, out on the playground, usually brought the miscreants quickly into line.
Back in the late seventies Matt, sporting a lion's main of rock-star hair, had aspirations of musical stardom. He had written a bunch of songs and recorded several albums in a local studio in the Palo Alto area where he grew up. With a bit of self promotion and his dad's radio connections, he managed to get a decent amount of local air play. Since his records were self produced, he only pressed about a thousand copies and they eventually all sold out in local record stores. Then, like so many others before him, interest in his music slowly died out and Matt hired out as a singer/piano player, eventually forming his own trio.
The cover of a three song CD that Matt recorded live at a venue in Palo Alto. He's doing his best impersonation of Frank Sinatra...
This is the back cover from Matt's second album. Nowadays, the pipes are still there but the hair is gone.
Around the early 2000's, Matt was renting a room in a lady's house here in Mill Valley. Every afternoon after school he would come up to Happy Acres to hang out with me and have a smoke (strictly forbidden in his rented room) and a drink. I had a pretty sophisticated music recording system set up on my computer and Matt recorded several of his newer tunes in my living room.
One day, Matt came bounding up the back stairs to the living room at Happy Acres, where I held court, and breathlessly exclaimed, "Dude! You're never gonna believe what happened to me today!" Because Matt had enjoyed some air time back in the day with his self-produced albums, he had an account with ASCAP, one of the groups who monitor the airwaves for their client's music. They bill the radio stations and send a check to the artist. Matt, who hadn't heard from ASCAP in some time, was holding a letter that had been forwarded to him by ASCAP. It read, and I liberally paraphrase here: "Dear Mr. Cassell, I am a young hip-hop producer down in Hollywood. Me and my music buddies down here and back in New York think that you are the bomb! A buddy of mine out in Phoenix was going through his old records out in the garage and he found your first album "Heaven". He sent me some MP-3s of your tunes and I was knocked out with your great tracks and your bitchen voice. I sent it around to some other producers and DJs and they agreed. I don't know if you are still playing. Heck, I don't even know if you're still alive but if by chance you get this letter, I would be thrilled to hear from you."
So Matt called the phone number in the letter and talked to the letter writer. "Hello, this is Matt Cassell. Is Dwayne there?" (arbitrary name). "Matt Cassell? Matthew Larkin Cassell?" said the breathless voice on the other end of line. "You got my letter! I'm so stoked! What are you doing these days? Are you still into music? I would love to use some of your tracks as samples under some hip-hop tunes I'm producing." Matt was genuinely touched by this young man's enthusiasm and said he'd be interested to hear how his old tunes were going to be utilized in this new musical genre that was so different from the tunes' original jazz-rock format.
Within weeks, Matt started hearing from old music buddies that they had heard tunes on the radio with his old song "Heaven" sampled underneath some rap songs. Eventually Matt hired a local entertainment lawyer to pursue royalties and penalties for using his music, (which had been copyrighted), without his permission. One rap duo in Southern California called "The People Under the Stairs" had had some success with a tune using Matt's material. He got the name of the record company that had put out the group's single and was finally able to locate and talk to one of the duo's rap artists.
They sounded very apologetic on the phone and professed to ignorance about the provenance of the sampled tracks. When Matt asked them where they had found his old record they told an amazing story. The two guys had been traveling down in Mexico with a camera planning on shooting stuff they might be able to use in a music video. One day, they found themselves at a small flea market outside of Mexico City. The flea market was being held in front of a women's prison where the purveyor's were trying to raise funds for the incarcerated. In most Mexican jails, you have to pay the jailer's to provide food for the inmates. While going through the merchandise for sale, they spotted an old album with a black and white picture of a cat called "Matt the Cat". They were intrigued enough to buy the record, thinking it was some local Mexican wanna-be rocker.
When they got home and played the record what they heard instead were the dulcet tones of our very own Matt Cassell. They loved what they heard and promptly "borrowed" one of Matt's old tracks to sample under their rapping. Matt also contacted some other rap producers that had sampled his tracks without his permission and had his lawyer write them to try and collect for "damages". The official fine for using someone's copyrighted music without permission is $ 150K. None of these struggling little labels had that kind of scratch so Matt had to, mostly, settle for the comfort of knowing that several current rap artists thought enough of his music to sample it. Though not credited or compensated, Matt was getting air play again after all these years.
One of the record producers was a fairly stand-up guy and, though he couldn't pay Matt for his transgressions, he offered to re-release all Matt's old music along with some of his modern tunes. Eventually a double CD of Matt's music was released and was subsequently picked up for air-play in various far flung places all over the world, including a college radio station in Sydney, Australia. He was the featured track on an album called "The Kings of Digging" which was comprised of obscure but quality tracks from the past. A trio of Japanese girls calling themselves the Nubian Slaves featured his music on a radio show they had. Eventually a Japanese label called Pea Vine put out a CD of Matt's music. Today, if you Google "Matthew Larkin Cassell" you will get over 150,000 hits. A rap and hip-hop producer of some note back in New York wanted to re-record some of Matt's old music and even had evoked some interest from Jay-Z, avowedly the biggest fish in the hip-hop world.
Although nothing ever came of those connections, a different phenomena regarding Matt's music came about. There is a group of music aficionados who look for buried treasure in the bins of old albums in used record stores. Through word of mouth, Matt's old records quickly became valuable collector's items. One day Matt came bounding up the back stairs, kind of like the last time, with more breathless news. One of his original records had just sold on e-bay for $ 1,325! Soon, several copies of his first two albums started showing up on e-bay and none of them sold for less than $ 700. Matt still had some of his old records and he was able to cash in on the collector's craze.
By this time word of this implausible musical odyssey of Matt's had gotten to the editor of the entertainment section of Marin County's local paper, The Independent Journal. Paul Liboratore, the long-time music critic for the paper, came out to Happy Acres to interview him. He also took some pictures of Matt with his piano keyboard and one of him crossing the street carrying his surfboard. Soon after the article came out (he was headlined on the front page of the entertainment section with several color pictures), one day while he was walking into our local Whole Foods, a late model black BMW pulled up alongside Matt. The driver rolled down his window and exclaimed, "Hey, aren't you that guy who was in the IJ the other day?" Matt had been briefly plucked from obscurity for another fifteen minutes of fame. Although his old songs had become popular all over the world, the songs were being passed from fan to fan via MP-3 format with nothing in it for Matt. Like so many others, Matt found fame but not fortune on the internet. Although he does get the odd and very modest royalty check from his re-releases.
Here's one of the pictures featured in our local newspaper.
Matt, at one of our parties a few years ago, in the process of saying goodbye to his hair...
Matt, with his shaved head proudly shining in the sun, playing his guitar on the back stairs outside his bedroom at Happy Acres.
Matt's story eventually caught the attention of the long-time music critic for the SF Chronicle, Joel Selvin. For decades, Joel had been chronicling the music of people like Santana, Journey, the Grateful Dead, Boz Scaggs and the like. Joel called Matt, who by now was living here at Happy Acres. "Hey Matt, this is Joel Selvin from the Chronicle. Is this really true what I've been hearing about your music?" Matt responded that, yes, it was all true. "Fuck" said Mr. Selvin, "Looks like I'm gonna have to come out to Mill Valley and interview you." Joel made it clear that the only reason he was interested in such a small musical fish like Matt was because of the back story. So one day Joel Selvin and a Chronicle photographer came out to Happy Acres, interviewed Matt and took some pictures. A few weeks later Matt got the same treatment in the SF Chronicle that he had in the Marin County IJ.
Since then, Matt has recorded some of his new tunes at a music buddies local studio. He put together a little ad hoc band and performed a couple of times at one of our local watering holes here in Sausalito called "The No Name Bar". However, it was a one time deal and Matt had no aspirations of trying to resurrect his music career. Every now and then someone will stop him and say, "Hey! Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"
Here are some lush vocal stylings from Matt, the cat, Cassell. Enjoy! I sure do.
Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres
Here's a link to Matt's Wikipedia page. He is written about in the Huffington post. If you go to the article there is a link to a YouTube recording of one of Matt's early recordings. Just copy and paste the web sites below and paste in to your favorite search engine and you'll find more material on Matt and links to a bunch of MP3's of some of his tunes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Larkin_Cassell
Here's a link to a comprehensive discography of his double CD:
http://www.stonesthrow.com/store/album/matthewlarkincassell/the-complete-works
And on top of his other accomplishments, he and his trio played at both a friend's wedding and ours back in the late 90's.
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