In this week’s issue, CL takes readers on a journey built around the art of cocktails meticulously pieced together by craftsmen and craftswomen obsessed with the absurd idea that a beverage — plus the state of mind one is in when consuming it — can inherently change the course of your day, night or life. Many of the cocktails incorporate bitters, which are added to heighten the beverage’s flavors. Just a dab or squirt of the extract is usually enough to awake the appetite and tie the ingredients together. Bitters — which utilize dried flowers, leaves, roots berries and barks macerated, or extracted, in high-alcohol solutions — allow their handlers to affect a certain element of alchemy inside of a glass.
Tampa songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John Nowicki has undergone his own, subtle change in the 16 or so years since he first landed at an open mic at the now-shuttered Davis Islands location of Yeoman’s Road Pub. It’s there that Nowicki, 35, met some of his lifelong friends, joined a band called Toast and ultimately entered the always changing lineup of musicians who make up long-running instrumental outfit Poetry ‘n’ Lotion (PNL). At the time, Nowicki was 25 years old and the youngest person in the band. He’s the second oldest now, and a lot has changed.
“I used to play drums like an asshole,” Nowicki tells CL. “Musically, all this time in PNL has taught me restraint, and it has broadened my palette.”
MUSIC ISSUE 2011
Recording for the love of it at Short Circuit Studio
In the coming months, Nowicki, who is also makes his own bitters as a hobby, will put the finishing touches on his solo debut album. The 10-track LP — titled The Holy Terror (and Other Diversions) — is being recorded at Owen Meats’ Best of the Bay-winning Short Circuit Studio, which has moved away from Seminole Heights to Sarasota where it sits on three acres of land in the middle of nowhere. Listeners can expect a wide range of flavors —including jazz, murder ballads, classic country, bluegrass, chamber music, and odd-time signature prog — to be represented and then tied together by what Nowicki describes as “overall sense of twangy dread.”
A mighty roster of Bay area musicians has already contributed to the record, too. Scott Miller of End of Daisies and Swampuss plays lap steel, Melissa Grady (Candy Bars, Same Day Delivery Orchestra, Band of Sorrows) recorded cello and PNL’s Kenny Pullin provides trumpet. Tug Winthrop of Pickford Sundries and String Time Social is supposed to lay down some dobro in February. Other than that, Nowicki played most of the instruments on the album. Lap-steel waltzes like “Driftwood” are painted with piano to accentuate the song’s message about insignificance of humanity in the face of nature’s wrath. It sounds a bit like Tori Amos and Gordon Lightfoot, according to Nowicki.
“Which sounds ridiculous,” he admits. “But I speak the truth.”
The truth also rings loud and clear on a strange song where a banjo in drop-D tuning gets played in 5/4 time. Nowicki says “Occupy Your Head” deals with the horrible people currently in positions of power and the loss of any kind of faith in humanity and jokes that the song is Holy Terror’s feel-good hit. Collectively, all of it contributes to an album that primarily sounds the way being stranded in the middle of nowhere feels.
“On one of those highways that are giant cuts in the surrounding wilderness. Just uncaring, hostile nature, and you,” Nowicki says of the vision. “And maybe a bottle of booze.”
Ah, the booze. There’s a nice stable of spirits on the shelf of Nowicki’s Seminole Heights home, which he shares with his wife Dana, their son Daniel, two cats and a wiry-haired attack terrier named Moses. The whiskey bottles are surrounded by smaller vials and mason jars of bitters in various states of completion. Chocolate Hazelnut, hopped grapefruit, cranberry are a few flavors represented; each separate potion is made with specific liquors in mind. Some of them, like the one made from Spanish needle, have healing qualities — something Nowicki discovered as a love for herbalism infiltrated his bitters-making endeavor. “Stinging Nettle” from Holy Terror was actually inspired by the incredibly useful and nutritious herb.
“You have to boil it down to disarm the spiky hairs that defend it. My song is sort of about the process of befriending a similarly useful, yet guarded, person,” Nowicki says. In his dining room, there’s also a three-panel reprint of “Garden of Earthly Delights.”
“It’s insane,” Nowicki says about the hallucinatory and maddening painting by Dutch draughtsman and painter Hieronymus Bosch. “I love it.”
Nowicki has also lovingly spent an insane number of hours in his music room self-recording — yet never releasing — 10 solo albums. He says that some of the material is pretty good. Some if it, he says, is utterly, and purposefully, unlistenable. According to Nowicki, just over a dozen other people have ever heard what he’s recorded. One of those people is former PNL guitarist/keyboard player Matt E. Lee who remembers the lo-fi bedroom cassettes that were killer but also weird as hell. Lee, 37, lives in New York City now, but he says that there’s no stop button on Nowicki’s creative output.
“He’s tireless. His music has always been unclassifiable and pure gonzo Nowicki, but his voice man, his voice is fucking massive now,” Lee adds. “I can’t wait to hear what’s in store next from my brother Frankus, especially knowing it’s with PNL’s official fifth member Owen Meats tracking and mixing down South.”
Perhaps Nowicki himself is the guarded person from “Stinging Nettle.” But now — after 25 years of learning how to play his instruments in close to ten bands — Nowicki is ready to share and finally lead a band of his own through an album release show. Hopefully, Nowicki’s songs, like his bitters, will add flavor and nuance to the already wonderfully complicated lives most of us already lead. Perhaps — if we’re lucky — they’ll heal us, too.
“It’s always been on my bucket list. I think maybe 15 people in the world have heard any of [my music]. I’m ready to bring that number of listeners up a bit,” he says, adding that one can draw a parallel between herbalism and the healing and cathartic power of putting emotions to words and sound. “There is an astounding amount of power in most of the plants I work with, and they have a history of being used by humans that goes back centuries, perhaps millenia — there’s definitely a connection.”
John Nowicki opens for Willi Carlisle at Crowbar on January 24, 2018. More information on the show is available in our daily live music previews.
This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2018.
