The Anne B. Davis One-Way Kitti Experience Players – The Ballad Of the Potato Salad King

Cassette Archive #5078

A joyous home taping occasion of lofi splendor circa 1990 from a trio of stellar cassette culture artists joining forces for fun and silliness. Fioretti (Stephanie Ashlyn) and the Caws-Elwitts (Jonathan and Hillary) are in prime home taping party form here with LOLs scattered throughout. I don’t know any real details about how this came about or any specifics about the recording; whether it was done by sending tapes or if it was the rare cassette culture meetup. I guess that’s my cue to reach out… (which I did – see Jonathan’s telling below)

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt Talks About the Making Of…

Hilary and I were probably led to the amazing Stephanie Ashlyn (at the time known as Dan Fioretti) through the phenomenal Ken Clinger, with whom we’d begun trading tapes shortly after our inauguration into the home-taping network in 1988. Soon we were doing a lot of cassette swaps with Fioretti, so there was a lot of mail going back and forth, including whimsical letters to accompany the tapes. And since both Fioretti and the Caws-Elwitts enjoyed talking to friends on the phone, we did a fair amount of that as well.

I believe the one and only time we met Stephanie in person was in 1990. The occasion was a long weekend that we were mostly going to be spending in NYC; we arranged to stop by her place in NJ while en route from our home in northeastern PA. The idea was to get some tape rolling and do a spontaneous, live collaboration, with whatever instruments were handy (we’d brought some with us, to augment what Stephanie had). We spent a couple of hours recording bizarre new creations and equally bizarre covers, and everything was pretty much improvised. Tracks 3, 8, and 11 on The Ballad of the Potato Salad King (a cassette I released) came from this session, and meanwhile Fioretti used other tracks on Kitti Tapes releases (see gloriously multicolored scans attached).

During the in-person session, we agreed on the ad hoc group name The Ann B. Davis One-Way Kitti Experience. I think Davis was already a recurring presence in the alternate universe of Fioretti’s songs and stories, and she was duly featured in some of the material we improvised that afternoon. The “one-way kitti experience” was Stephanie’s description of a cat door in her house (which the cat could operate in one direction only). Potato salad was another Fioretti theme, and I guess I dubbed her the “potato salad king” somewhere along the line.

Subsequent collaborations occurred in the more typical home-taper-pen-pal fashion: Stephanie would mail me tapes of her instrumental compositions, Hilary and I would come up with the lyrics and vocals (and sometimes add a little in the way of instrumentation), and I’d mix down the results. These tracks tended to be more structured, controlled, and (relatively speaking!) conventional than what we’d
improvised live, and this methodology accounts for the remainder of the content of The Ballad of the Potato Salad King, as well as the mini-album The Incredibly Mellow Summer Tape (J-card attached), which we did the following year.

These two collab tapes were tons of fun for me. Hilary and I love indulging our whimsical/comedic side, but most of our Silly Pillows recordings per se were pop-forward rather than comedy-forward. With the ABDOWKE, we upended that (though The Incredibly Mellow Summer Tape, credited simply to our personal names, was pop-forward, with the exception of its final track). I loved the excuse to apply my mimicry skills to spoofing Justin Hayward, Fred Schneider, and the Bee Gees–not to mention our mutual friend Ken Clinger, who has “cameos” (in my impersonated version) both on this tape’s “Mothers and Otters” and the subsequent one’s “Very Strange Place.” The idea for “You’re My Barlinger,” by the way, originated with a KC piece about misreading “harbinger” as “barlinger”; while “Mothers and Otters” came about because I misread a headline that used the phrase “mothers and others.”