ArtistInfo

Jonathan "Mako" Sharkey
West of Malibu

Album US 2016 on The Flying Pyramid label
Blues (Piano Blues, Louisiana Blues)

Hi, Folks, this is Jonathan Sharkey talkin’ to ya. Sometimes called “Mako” thanks to Don Manni all those years ago back at Hyannis Taxi. (Hey, Mako! What’s happenin’, baby?) Started out in Amherst in that long gap between Taj Mahal and Dinosaur Jr.. Played coffeehouses all over Cape Cod. (OK, imagine it’s 1968. Some wispy blonde finishes her set with a truly touching rendition of “Suzanne”. I get up all dressed in black with an organ turned all the way up to oh-so-painful and lay into “Waiting for My Man”. The crowd suddenly runs for the exits, but the few who remain seem to dig it. I wonder about them...) Oh BTW the Massachusetts Daily Collegian named me as one of the top local acts of 1970. (I still remember that!) (Does anyone else?) Got to LA in the Bi-Centennial Year of 1976, too late for that first great wave of psychedelia but just in time for the punk/new wave explosion. I met up with a paranoid madman named Zoogz Rift who pulled me off the assembly line at the Thomas Organ Company and took me all the way across America and on to such exotic locales as Zagreb, Berlin, and Amsterdam. And, oh yeah, Al’s Bar, Be-Bop Records, and Cathay de Grande. (But where’s the money, Zoogz?) God bless SST Records. It always rankled me that bands with keyboards were considered “wimpy” in those days. “They were a pretty good band, but they had a keyboard,” one critic sniffed. Yeah Yeah Yeah. Not when I was playing. Being loud and noisy connected me with some pretty weird (but beautiful!) cats like Eugene Chadbourne, Owen Green, and John Trubee. The joke is that all that Zappa/Beefheart chopsy avant noise wasn’t even my strong suit. Poor Zoogz. He needed George Duke. What he got was Floyd Cramer! I joined up with Marc Mylar and Brick Wahl to work on a small but mighty punk rock label called Trigon Records. (Claw Hammer, Lazy Cowgirls, Thirsty Brats etc etc etc and, oh yeah, the brilliant, wonderful, but woefully short lived Lexington Devils — Guns and Roses opened for them!) I even tried being a concert promoter. What’s that old joke about how to make a small fortune? Eventually moved up the coast to Ventura County, played some blues (The Foster-Sharkey Deal, Big Junior Little) and more or less became the first call bar band piano player for Ventura County. One night I was playing with an oldies band at a hole in the wall bar in Santa Paula and it dawned on me, Hell, this is just about where I came in. I’ve gone all the way around the circle. Time to say goodnight, sweetheart. So I spent the last couple decades in local politics. Been a small town mayor. Lemme let you in on something. Politics is just like rock and roll. Some folks are sidemen playing the cleanest lines they can, some are showing off, everybody’s looking for that better gig or getting signed to a bigger label. Lately it’s gotten so damn ugly crazy that I figured the Hell with this, I’m going back to being a piano player. So after all that, what is this album all about? Well, if you’re looking for Zoogz, Zappa, or Chadbourne, this aint’t it. No, I spring from the roots of American music. Blues, cocktail piano, country and folk. For those who subscribe to a regional theory, there’s my fellow Boston piano thumper Preacher Jack, but he’s way more rock ‘n’ roll than I am. I love Tom Waits and Dr. John, but I ain’t them, either. Not Tom McDermott, but maybe I would be if I could play as good as he does. I guess you’ll just have to judge for yourself. I always thought of West of Malibu as a sort of self-portrait. Just as Rembrandt did self-portraits throughout his life, this my old man portrait. All these songs come from different parts of my life, but now I’m coming back with a whole different perspective. Older, sure. Wiser, dunno, maybe, but hopefully deeper. “Dead End Blues” goes all the way back to 1971. “Everything You Don’t Want” I wrote in twenty minutes sitting out back of my trailer in North Hollywood as the jets roared in on short final to Burbank Airport. “Electra Glide” started out as a guitar strum by Ed O’Bryan back when we were both playing with Zoogz. I started playing along and realized it was a perfect piano showpiece. Ed and “Electra Glide” did a lot to pull me out of a particularly dark place. For that I’ll always be grateful. “Hills of Gold” “The autobiography of Jon Sharkey,” as John Trubee pegged it. A seven minute song about a shipwreck. Who knows where these things come from? Even when I was a kid, I’d always try to find new, different, and sometimes odd ways of playing songs. Other kids were trying to copy the record arraingements, I was trying to mess them up. A blessing and a curse, I guess. It was kind of like taking the long way around, but I get off on taking old chestnuts like “Key to the Highway”, or Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song” and finding a new way to play them. On the 29th of December in 1969, a 20 year old kid went to his first Grateful Dead concert at the Boston Tea Party on Landsdowne St. out behind the Green Monstah. There were maybe 200-300 people there. He got to sit on the floor, leaning against a pole about 20 feet from the stage. “Play ‘St. Stephen’!” he yelled. And they did. A little time ago I found a tape of that show online. Sure enough, there I am yelling “Play St. Stephen”! Coming back at me like a long lost time traveler. Where ya been, kid?

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