I met Rick in 1996, in Hollywood. I was looking for a guitar player for the Horde tour, and some people had recommended him. I went to see him at a tiny place that seated about thirty, it was actually a furniture store or something. I was squashed in the back and I started to sneeze so I had to leave after his second song. But I decided he would probably be fine, so I called him up and he came over. He said, look, if you want someone to play your songs like the records it's not me. I had just said that was what I did not want, but I reckoned he had prepared his disclaimer speech and was going to give it anyway. In spite of our shaky meeting, I hired him and we began to work right away. I liked him very much, he was lose and free when he played, whatever particular skill he lacked he made up for in intuition and testosterone. He was perfect for me, because he did not judge me, or so it seemed, and I could, like him, pick up a guitar and make a lot of noise, and take chances, and abandon control of the box of music that is the band. It was joyous. He knew how to play a lot better than me, but I was able to interact on an instrument with the band, and it was all new for me.

So we went on the Horde tour together in 1996, under the name of Chain Austin. It was filmed for a PBS show, I think, and you can still see it on t.v. It was pretty hard core, and it helped me move in new directions. It was necessary to travel under a made up name, as is evidenced by the scathing
and uneducated writings of some reviewers who would later find me suspect for being "middle aged and jumping on the hip hop bandwagon" or some bullshit that I read a couple of times. So that I would not edit myself, out of reaction to what I imagined might be said, and could learn and move in new direction, and because it obviously was apparently different than anything I had ever done, I gave it a name. Chain Austin still sounds pretty amazing. The highlight of that work, and one of the highlights of my career, was when a kid about fifteen came up to me in New Mexico, walking around the fairgrounds, and he said, "What was the name of your band? You guys were
the best thing here."

The most fucked thing about being famous, is people decide who you are and what you can be, in their minds, without knowing you. They stand from a distance, myopic and undereducated, and say, you have to do this one thing, you cannot do anything else, and if you do, we will believe it is because you doubt yourself, or because you want to be perceived differently (all those things are ok, by the way). But how about it's because I am a student, and I like many kinds of musics,
and want to keep growing, and what kind of petty discussion to say a songwriter should only write
a certain type of song.

Anyway.
I asked Rick to help me work on some songs, and a few months after Horde, I began to visit him in his apartment, where he had a little drum machine, and he began to make very goofy samples, inspired and of the moment, exactly the way I needed and need to work, and we began to write this way. I made up songs to these drum tracks, or record samples. We took it into the studio then, and spent a few months making a magnificent record. But guess what? The only thing people seemed to note was that it had loops.

Now some years have gone by, and when I play Ghostyhead, or Little Yellow Town, there is a great recognition, and an understanding of what seemed to be incomprehensible to much to the audience at the time. Much of my work seems to be a thing that has to be understood over time. It's place is not so simple, I guess, and I find that it takes some years for people to feel like
they understand what a thing is.

The Ghostyhead tour was the most rewarding tour of my life. There was pure inspiration and improvisation on the stage every night. Granted, I was a little afraid, but I think that is a good thing, at least once it's over, because it feeds the blood of the sound. People who were there in Boston (I
met one) or Santa Cruz, and even new York, or towns where the meaning of it all was resounding and understood, I think they saw me at my best. Maybe it was hard because they came to hear, as one especially articulate fan expressed, 'the old shit'. But with things like Ghostyhead, and the Magazine, that are more plays or environments than concerts, you got to take it home for a while and think about what it is.

So I haven't seen Rick Boston for many years, but I hear he is still working down there in LA. He was in a band called Low Pop Suicide before working with me, and also has written a song or two you might have heard on the radio. If anyone has information on him, especially discography kind of stuff, and what he is doing now, I would be glad to add it to this page, send it to the
webmaster here.

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More about Rick:
The Januaries