Album Notes

Jay Mark is a 400 year-old man with the mind of a chicken. In a former life he was a plate of cheese. He likes small animals although he complains that their fur frequently gets stuck between his teeth. For many years he was The Beatles.

Or maybe not.

It would probably be more accurate to say that Jay is a 59 year-old white guy who lives in New York and who has a penchant for playing the blues and writing weird songs. He's a disk jockey turned recording engineer and actually did work with The Beatles once - he was the house engineer when they played Convention Hall in Atlantic City in 1964.

"Jay Who?" is Jay's first CD and consists primarily of solo acoustic guitar and vocal performances. A few of the tunes feature friends on background vocals and harmonica, and the last three cuts (there are 14 in all) are larger productions which were recorded a while ago but never released publicly.

Jay has a wry, sardonic wit which shows up in almost all of his songs. "Western Omelet," for example, is the lament of a cowboy who hates everything about the West, from the soreness he feels "where it hurts the most" to the smell of his horse. "Meningitis Blues," which was written while he was in the military, tells the tale of a soldier stricken with the disease who's in a hospital bed laid up on "what used to be my back." And in "Black & White" we learn that the country's racial problems would disappear if everyone just started drinking milk shakes.

The CD also features songs by the likes of Leadbelly and Jelly Roll Morton, which Jay sings in a traditional blues style that a lot of his fans swear they like.

Hopefully you will too.