The Original 5 Poi Dog Pondering Cassette Albums 1984-1987

AVAILABLE NOW for the very 1st time on digital download and short run CD! YOU CAN ALSO STREAM IT ON SPOTIFY, ITUNES/APPLE MUSIC, AMAZON ETC.,.

Hear Frank’s Original recordings of “Everybody’s Trying”, “Pulling Touch”, “Sound of Water”, “Bury Me Deep”, “Living with the Dreaming Body”, “Fertile Fields”, “Fall Upon Me”, “Shake of Big Hands”, “Big Walk”, “Praise the Lord”, Wood Guitar”, ”Sugar Bush Cushman”, “Fact of Life” and many, many more

While living in California in ’84, my brother Malcolm taught me how to use his Tascam Portastudio 8-track cassette recorder. I started writing songs on it… laying down drum beats, then adding a guitar line, then another, then a bass track. I would listen to them over and over, make up lyrics and record them. When I had a fist full of songs that I liked, I made a master cassette of 5 songs and duplicated them one by one at home. I hand drew, cut and pasted cover art on typing paper, went to the copy shop, copied a few, folded them into the cassette cases for cover art/liner notes and gave them to family and friends. I began to sell them on consignment at local record shops.

One day while shopping for records at Vinyl Fetish record store on Melrose avenue, I met the record buyer, Michael Meister. We became fast friends because of our mutual love of the Scottish band Orange Juice. and he accepted to sell my cassettes on consignment at the store. (He would later start Texas Hotel Records (with Susan Farrell & Steven Tesluk) and they continued to sell my subsequent Poi Dog Pondering cassette albums (1 through 5) at the new store, even after I moved back home to Hawai’i, I would mail them copies. (They would eventually sign me to my 1st record contract).

I moved back to Hawai'i in late ’84 and bought a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder and continued making albums at home (and at Pierre Grill’s, Rendezvous Recording Studio in Kakaʻako, with the help of my friends; Kit Ebersbach & Joe Espinda). It was an explosively creative time for me. I became a songwriter and a musician and knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life… no question. I would invite friends one by one to record with me. Suniva, Teal , Abra and Jean would help me water color the covers.
Texas Hotel and Vinyl Fetish in LA and Jellies records in Honolulu were a few of the stores that carried the PDP cassettes. (My sister Chris worked at Jellies, so that helped :))). Eventually, I formed a band around the songs and we played PDP's debut live performance at The Honolulu Academy of Arts in 1986. We used to play on the street a lot in Waikiki for fun and beer money. We loved doing that so much we decided to travel across North America as a street band. We sold our stuff, flew to California and bought a truck. Our first performance on the continent was at Texas Hotel record store in Santa Monica.

As we traveled we duplicated these cassette albums on a boom box, printed & water colored the covers, folded them into the cassette cases and sold them on the street corners as we played (busked) from the West Coast to NYC, 1986-87… These provided us gas, bread and coffee money on the road :))) They are dear to my heart.

Many of these songs were later re-recorded on vinyl and CD for Texas Hotel and Sony / Columbia

- Frank Orrall / Poi Dog Pondering 2020

The Story of how I met Michael Meister, and how I signed with Texas Hotel Records.

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I first met Michael Meister in a mutual friends house in Hawai'i… 1977…) I didn't really met him, he was renting a room at the Nunokawa family house on upper Makaweli street: Michael had a lot of rock posters on his wall - we used to sneak in and look at them.
Fast forward 7 years later, While I was living with Malcolm Orrall and Deborah Alpert-Orrall in LA, I walked into a record store on Melrose and picked out two Albums: an Orange Juice EP (not sure now… "Two Hearts Together" possibly) and the other was a Rolling Stones 12" remix of "undercover of the night" - walked up the register and handed them to the guy there - and (because he did not revere the Stones nearly as passionately as he did Orange Juice) he said: "I'll sell you both, but I refuse to put them in the same bag"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It was Michael Meister at the register... but I did not know that yet... he was just another hard core Orange Juice Fan like me too, and so we became friends right away.
A year later, after I had made the very 1st Poi dog pondering home 4 track cassette album, around 1984-ish, I took it to him to see if he would sell it on consignment - he loved the cassette, and so said yes, and took 4 - I was delighted!

It was only then that we talked more, and connected the dots, and realized that we had met before at the Nunokawa's house Hawai'i, and with his friend Susan Farrell, who lived there as well. Strange Coincidence. Kismet.

They went on to start a record store together with Stephen Tesluk, named TEXAS HOTEL records (after an Orange Juice song titled "the day I went down to Texas")
I used to go to Texas Hotel records as often as I could, they had great, rare records and amazing instore performances. I once saw the JAZZ Butcher there, playing acoustic… they came in dressed to the teeth, in sailors caps, wrinkled suits and looking happy… like they were still up from the night before…. I wanted that life :)))

I moved back to Hawai'i and recorded 2 more PDP cassette albums there (which would eventually be the bulk of the songs for the first 2 PDP releases)
and when Sean P Coffey, Kalea Chapman, Abra Moore, Jean Francois Berneron, and I set out From Hawai'i in 1986 (with friends Matthew Miller , Karen Sestak, Therese Tonti and Helen), for our the first leg of what would become a pan North American road trip. Our first gig on the continent was at Texas Hotel Records - an acoustic / electric show… (back in those days we were a cross between PDP's first ep, the velvet underground 1st & 3rd record era, new order and Jonathan richmond… we were having a lot of fun, and were not really trying to be a band... yet - we were just on the road for adventure :))

A year later, after we finished our road trip in NYC, I demo'd some songs while staying with John Nelson in Camden, & sent Texas Hotel a tape of some demos, and asked if they would consider putting out a record together, they were interested, and so me and Abra went out west and tracked a demo session in Davis California (via the help of Matt Miller, Stephan Tesluk and his buddy Stephen Calen ) and on the basis of that, Texas Hotel decided to sign us.
So we called up Bruce Hughes & Moved to Austin to record a 6 song e.p. test... what became the 1st VINYL EP.

Michael Meister, Susan Farrell & Stephen Tesluk are huge in my life, because they believed in the music, and supported the recording of it, and protected me when the going got rough, and when the major label indifference clouded me, they inspired me to do the art full thing.

Michael, took Susan Farrel, Luke Savisky and I on a major road trip through the deep south around 1991-ish: where we visited some beautiful emerging Folk Artists of the time: Howard Finster, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, B. F. Perkins, Mose Tolliver, R. A .Miller and others….
it was a pivotal trip for me - I had always loved to paint - and did… but after this trip… and seeing all those artist's…. it was like hearing the first Velvet Underground record for the first time…. it changed you…. made you want to make art. In any way possible.

I took a photo of Michael Meister at a party at the LOVE TRACTOR band's house in Athens GA… sometime in 89.
A few years later, in 93, I found this wooden pallet on the street in Pilsen, Chicago - and used that photo as a study to paint this portrait of Michael on it - in my old 17th street, Pilsen, Chicago studio.