A lot of the music that happens in my life comes from down at our amateur mechanic shop at the Recycling Center in Heber City, Utah. This is where we spend a lot of our time working on old Toyota Land Cruisers and other misc vehicles. We do all sorts of interesting work: major modifications, engine swaps, modernization of old vehicles, and other crazy fabrication. We’re down there for hours and hours upon a time and usually the music is very loud and the music is sort of our essence and the soul of our time and essence down there. We have a pretty sick old stereo, interestingly the same old stereo I’ve had all the way since high school and some parts (the receiver) since middle school. It is an old school 400 watt JVC from the early days of compact disks, back when their players were called “DADs” or “digital audio devices.” I bought it from my friend Sam Spiegel for $25 in I think 8th or 9th grade, who is now a famous DJ and music producer in L.A. I’m sure he’d be psyched to know I still have it and am using it and the direct role this receiver has had in my life. Through out the night we basically just turn it up and last night we found ourselves listening to the album you hopefully just hit play on (above) – “Secrets” – the famous old album by Herbie Hancock from about 1974, so I thought I would post it for your enjoyment in its entirety…

This is the album that followed the Head Hunters’ famous self titled album with “Chameleon.” My best interpretation of it is Herbie Hancock and his group really progressed heavily from the Head Hunters album. Herbie also had a lot of new, neat interesting toys that were coming out at the time and was getting really good at using them. For example he started using a machine/synthesizer called an “Arp Odyssey” and a few others. Yes the name is an accurate representation of it’s sound.

“Secrets,” to me, is a way-more advanced read than “Head Hunters.” Simple and tuned down, a little more poppy and generally catchy-er. But it also wasn’t “new” and “out there” like Head Hunters so this is why Head Hunters was always their best selling album, whereas I remember the first time I bought “Secrets” (its been purchased several times, LOL) I remember it in the discount bin for $8 in Tower Records at the bottom of Central Park in New York. Here is the album cover…

Herbie Hancock Secrets

I think this picture says a lot about Herbie and sort of the era there. If you look at photos of Herbie these days you’ll see he is pretty sharp and clean cut. And that really about-describes Herbie and the mantra of this site spells out, the old school jazz and bebop movement was largely dead with the rising shortly-lived popularity of avant-garde jazz music and the increasing popularity of increasingly complicated rock music, such as the progressive rock band Yes, and even the Beatles. For many Americans, it wasn’t too odd by then, I figure (though I wouldn’t have been born until 6 years later) to see Yes and the My Favorite Things album occupying the same milk crate.

So the interesting thing is that this is probably when it really mattered to Herbie, he had a good past that he could ride out, but so did his competition like Miles Davis Guitar Player John Mclaughlin who beat him to the punch with this killer album (earlier post on this site). Herbie really had no idea what the outcome would be and what his future would be, he had no idea he would go on to basically always have and audience and put out God-knows how many Grammy-winning albums.

Down at the shop I was going to say that our environment is sort of “young” and I realized that I’ve been really clinging onto my “twenties” possibly as a method that I believe I “still appeal to young people,” college kids etc. I was right about to write that “we’re all a bunch of 20-somethings” but I realized that as of last November I turned 30 and in fact none of us are 20-something now.

It’s also funny for me to think of myself as the youngest guy in the shop as well. The good news is we’re all at least pretty “mentally” young. Bill is a pretty hardcore adventurer. His facebook profile picture is a bumper sticker that reads “My vacation is your worst nightmare.” Right on Bill!

Scotty and I, I feel like, are tremendously close these days mostly revolving around life at the shop. He has this absolutely bitchen’ old 4WD ’77 Dodge Van that he bought for $500 that he is sooping up to be a sweet lean mean shaggin’ machine in true 70′s style (and bare min it has a bar and tons of shag carpeting to be installed), he even has a plexi-glass mirror for the ceiling. He’s been doing tons of bondo and fiberglass (and minimal rust work as its just too far gone) to make it a fun-ass vehicle to drive till its death, put a month of work into, and get a good 5-10 years of ever-rotting enjoyment until it finally dies. His goals this year are bare min, the Desert Rocks Music Festival (in Moab Utah in just over a month away – gulp!) and Burning Man. How sick is that.

Scotty Ray's Mean, Bitchen '77 4WD Dodge Van

The story of the shop is pretty neat. I was fresh out of college in about 2002 and took on my first attempt at doing something “crazy!” with a vehicle: restoring an old ’71 Toyota Land Cruiser from the ground up. Previously I’d never attempted anything remotely similar. I was doing it in the basement garage of a hour I was sharing with a bunch of guys and I managed to kill the furnace from all of the airborne dust that came from removing literally pounds and pounds of bondo-dust from the 30-year-old vehicle. So after that of course, I needed to move operations…

Shortly after my neighbor revealed had an extra bay in a shop he owned down in neighboring Heber City, so I ended up down there. A couple years later I became good friends with a new transplant to here in Park City Utah from Kentucky named Damon Leake and maybe a year later we ended up sharing the shop. One year after that I was recycling one day and I met Dirk Spangenberg, the owner of Curb It Recycling, and we ended up moving into his larger shop on the rear side of his facility. One after that our friends Scott Ray (also from Kentucky originally, one of Damon’s good friends from home who is just awesome) and our friend Bill Hartlieb who I met through the world of biodiesel have also moved in.

We have a pretty good environment where its a lot of fun and we do a hell of a job pooling tools and resources and really with I think all of ours only complaint being a lack of cleanliness and too much clutter unfortunately..

We’ve done some pretty neat things. At least two full diesel engine conversions, some WVO conversions, several major rust removal projects, a full motorcycle restoration, countless suspensions installed, fabrication of potato guns and bicycles, and absolutely huge amounts of fabrication in general – definitely a fun place to be… I’m liking it so much these days that perhaps sometime in the future will be to create a site for the shop for the 4 of us where we constantly update all the fun stuff we’re doing…

This all leads me to last night where Scotty, who’s really into the Jam Band scene and all the bands from there (and I’m sort of into a lot of those guys too), are listening to the album you’re listening to right now. Except it was really really loud and on our amazing sound system. This era of Herbie Hancock was probably cranked in thousands and pot-smoke-filled vans, just like the one he was working on, through the 70s and everyone knows who Herbie Hancock is but I find not a lot of people have listened to his tunes… I think we were both likening it to a lot of the music we’re going to see down in a month and a half at Desert Rocks, but I described it to him as “real early – 1973. You have to imaging a room full of the darkest soul brothas just getting down and funky. Listen to the congas!” I did point out that there was a white guy with an afro in the band though. Mike something-aruther, who was the drummer… Cool, funky stuff… Scotty was down….

If you’re done with the tunes and want to get a visual of it all. I believe I’ve posted this earlier on this blog but here is a good 17 minute (you can skip through it of course) video of Herbie playing “Chameleon” from his famous Head Hunters album which was the one that lead to this album. I hope you enjoyed this…

Cheers,
Andre

Herbie Hancock – Chameleon Live 1974 from Andre Shoumatoff on Vimeo.

This was back in college.   We were maybe 19 or 20 at the time…  Two good friends and I went to Taos, New Mexico for a month-long ski trip over winter break. Pretty quickly it became the worst ski trip ever. The first day out, Sean tore his ACL only to go home a couple days later. Evan developed brutal food poisoning (after recently returning from Ecuador), and I snapped a ski first or second run out.

We were all close to best friends from boarding school and this was our last real adventure together and really the last time all three of us would be together. It is funny how even the best of friends can grow apart from each other.  More about this below…

It never snowed beyond the 6″ that first day, making for a piss-poor early winter when were were there. So we basically resorted to bumming around there and Las Vegas New Mexico and a little village called Rociata where Evan’s family had just moved to from Connecticut. In the end, it was a neat trip, but really long and slow and sort of painful for a variety of reasons.

About the second week in, growing up back east (its funny how things like this can be so rare for some people) I had never seen a rare FJ55 Toyota Land Cruiser before and sure enough there was one on the side of the road right in downtown Taos.

FJ55 Toyota Land Cruiser

I was driving at the time and screeched to a halt to check it out as we had nothing better to do. We started poking around and it was really funky… It was completely covered in NM red clay, bald and worn and totally beaten up but still running, New Mexico style.. Huge holes through the front fenders that you could put your arms through but not that bad. Or so I thought…

We poked around some more and sure enough it was actually for sale, there was a sign that had fallen off the dash under the front bench seat long ago. It’d probably been for sale for months I imagine with little to no one paying attention to it, including the owner. It had badly expired plates, but looked like it was fully functional sitting in a little dirt pad just off the side of the road. It was a ’72 or so, the old 3 on the tree style shifting transmission. And old school Land Cruiser, the famous old work horse station wagon from Toyota.

We called the guy up and it belonged to some NM riff-raff and it turned out the cruiser was sort of like the village bicycle, even belonged to some guy called “Kramer” at some point the guy kept mentioning for some reason. But in my eyes (I owned a beat up FJ60 at the time, in college in Vermont) it was a gem. The rear window was busted or blown out so someone had built a wooden barrier behind the back door with a piece of plexi glass to see with your mirror. And when we started it it had a bad rod knock. But ran and drove with a max speed of about 25-30 at max power and piss poor if not non-existent old cruiser drum brakes front and rear (they sure don’t make them like that any more).

So we negotiated, I tried to trade my back pack but the guy luckily said no (I still have and love the backpack) and ended up getting it for close to what we had to our names I think, I bought it for $225 with the agreement that me and the friend with food poisoning would split it later. Also, we had to return our borrowed Jetta shortly and would be without wheels (which had become our lifeblood with no snow), so it was actually exactly what we were looking for.

The cruiser eventually became the highlight of the trip. For example I am a die hard skier but really remember little of Taos the ski area. I remember meeting the author John Nichols (who wrote the Milagro Beanfield War), who is old friends with my old man, at a cheap diner, with the cruiser..  He had just married and divorced his 5th wife I think, a 20-something Mexican and she’d taken him for everything he was worth. He was driving a beat up old late 80′s small Dodge pickup.  He arrived wearing jeans he’d probably been wearing for 5 days, it looked.  I remember from the few times I met him when I was a kid that he took out his upper retainer which held 2 or 3 fake teeth, from when he played hockey at Loomis Chaffee Academy in New England.   He was older than I remember him, at this point in his late 50s or early 60′s. And I remember he was awesome, and so down to earth versus what I had come to remember from only distant childhood memories of the great writer John Nichols, and what an honor it was to meet him in all of his humbleness. And he also dug the old cruiser and our little adventure; he really thought it was cool that we had bought and were tooling around in this old POS…

And I remember the funky New Mexico land scape, and how barren it was. The encroachment of box stores like Block Buster into the funky down and out town of Las Vegas. I remember the little adobe house Evan’s family was living in, which had the address “House behind Church, Rociada NM.” And I remember most of the days there oddly having a cold, hazy and cloudy feel.  Odd for New Mexico.

Anyway, the Land Cruiser basically saved the day. We eventually returned the borrowed Jetta and the Land Cruiser was our only wheels.  We ended up spending most of our time bombing around Taos related to the no snow, and stayed at a family friends of Evan’s parents near town. This family was very cool, modern back east New Mexico hippie transplant types, but authentic and not phony. Where they lived they had a lot of land, off a gnarly road to the north. They already had a parked fire truck and a number of old non-rusted decrepid vehicles they had acquired which was also cool.  So we cruised around, and the day we were supposed to leave Taos (with this hairbrain idea to drive the cruiser down to Las Vegas to Evan’s parents place–a bad idea with an engine with a knock), the engine had a significant loss of power and change in noise and we knew it was about toast. It limped down to about 15 mph max and could not longer make it up the mildest hill. So we called the family with the fire truck and asked if we could store it there and they said yes. The Jetta and Evan’s parents reammerged to pick us up and we actually used the extra power of the Jetta to get the cruiser to the property of these people and parked it. That night, I flew home and returned to college in Vermont (’72 FJ55 even dotted my sig for several months on some of the Land Cruiser sites & boards).  But I eventually forgot about it all…

*   *  *

Years go by and Evan and I had long lost touch.  Sean, the guy with the torn ACL, had his own bouts with the desire to ski from the year he lost from the ACL tear, that this trip took from him too.  He eventually took a year off college to live in Crested Butte and ended up living in Lake Tahoe, and we still keep in touch regularly.  We were also roommates my senior year at college.

I had lost complete touch with Evan and still thought he was in Siberia still (literally), finishing his masters degree.  He is crazy enough to actually get his masters degree in Siberia.  He’d perfected a dialect of Russian, he reported last time we spoke, that was good enough that most people thought he was from a different part of the country.  This is funny because this is how he carried himself at boarding school with a Southwestern accent and a big belt buckle, even though was from Connecticut.  When we next spoke, probably 4 years later, he told me the story of having to headbutt a Russian in a bar fight he’d started by accident over some beautiful woman, to escape with his life.  In Siberia.  And today, he is an assistant professor at University of Kansas in some sort of foreign studies.

Anyway, post our last discussion, I had received an email saying something along the lines of, “oh yeah, you remember that old Land Cruiser?”   I had forgot about it enough that I didn’t even remember to ask about it.  I also assumed it was probably still up on that property in Taos, New Mexico.

“A couple of months after you guys were out, we went up and pulled it off of the property.”   And he went into the specifics of actually repairing the damn thing.  Little did he know old Land Cruisers had become a life obsession for me by then (I’ve already owned three more of those old rare FJ55 wagons).

He said he’d bought a little mig welder and started cutting out panels here and there.  He’d basically gotten almost completely done with a complete frame off restoration on the pig back to original 1972 specs!  The only thing he’d done beyond stock was a modest swap to a 3 on the floor instead of on-the-tree which is beyond understandable.   He wrote, “you have no idea how much time and labor I put into it.  FJ55′s as you know have a flimsy roof so I cut the roof out of an old Ford van with ribbing in it and installed that into the FJ55.  It is all primered and I have the engine all ready to go and to put into it.”   And he sent pics…

The old bomber from Evan Emmott...

*   *  *

So, I should have known and suspected as much because his Dad and older brother had an old MG British Sports car, at the time, at his parent’s warehouse.  They sell/sold at the time yarn out of a warehouse in Las Vegas New Mexico and had the car stored there.   They’d restored the MG to about 90% but never put back together other than the shell of the car.  We were checking it out back then, I recall, and I remember thinking how cool it was and admiring the quality of their work.

And..  They did the same with the old cruiser.   Last we spoke Evan in Kansas and it was still in that restored minus final paint, ready to go back together, oddly in about the same shape as that old MG.  He had learned how to use an english wheel, which is the ultimate metal worker’s tool and the pinnacle of metal forming ability in my opinion; what the motor cycle builder Jesse James uses to build gas tanks from scratch, and a tool from the early last century.   He’d sucessfully and cleanly adapted the ribbed Ford van roof into the FJ55 roof to give it some structure, and the photos showed really good work…

And he wrote “I forgot, I still owe you $112.50!,” which I had completely forgot about meaning that in a sense I still sort of “own” this old beast…     Payback’s a bitch Evan if you’re still out there.  Just kidding, it would be my pleasure to give you this old FJ55 after the work you have into it.

*     *     *

And basically that’s about it..  Someday, when I finish this next round of restoring my old FJ55, I plan to cruise on down sometime when Evan is home and check out that old FJ55 and see how its going, and maybe help get it running again if its not yet.

The old email from Evan when we first got in contact again…

Dear Andre:

Howdy! I was looking on the internet for a new carburetor for the FJ-55 and I saw your name pop up a whole bunch of times on Birfield, which I still don’t fully understand how to use, so I thought I would see what’s up.

I am an instructor in the History Department at Kansas State University for Modern European and Russian history while I work on finishing up my Ph.D. That’s going OK. I was in Moscow for the summer, and got to do a bit of traveling around in the countryside, and then in the Caucusus, too. The Caucusus was great–bought a couple of nice tribal rugs, which are really pretty, and tried to stay away from menacing bearded men with Kalashnikovs.

I attached a couple of pictures of the Iron Pig out in NM. I am almost finished, but I have only been working on it sporadically as time and money allows. The lastest thing I did was replace the roof, since the old one was terribly stretched, and pretty rusty, and basically just a piece of junk overall. I skinned a roof off of a junk-yard Ford Econoline van because it had a series of parallel ridges pressed into it for strength, which the 55 series does not. After just getting the roof skin, I cut out ten inches of width from the middle and then about a foot in length, and pieced it back together so that the roof fit onto the Pig, and then it was glued and welded back together with a spot welder so as not to distort the metal. I wasn’t sure if that would really work, but since the roof was already off the Pig, too, I figured at worst I could always put a rag top on instead. But, it worked out fairly well. Other than that did a lot of metal-patching to fenders, quarter panels, replacing floor panels, inner fenders, basically just about 40-50 percent of all metal in the entire vehicle. But, I got a lot better at welding. So, it’s getting there…

The motor is totally rebuilt and key-starts, but I need a new stock carburetor. Do you know where I could find one? I don’t really want a rebuild, or a new aftermarket type, like a weber, but the original for a F-series engine. I would appreciate any help you could give me.

Let me know what’s going on with you.

Best,

Evan