Episode #105: Slow Down and Look with Tris McCall

Written By Nathalie Kalbach

About This Episode

In this episode, musician and cultural historian Tris McCall shares three decades of insights on Jersey City's evolving arts landscape. From the legendary 111 First Street arts center to the current gallery scene, Tris explores how place shapes creativity and how creative communities in turn define our city. Discover his unique perspective on "living horizontally" versus "vertically," the ghosts of lost creative spaces, and his passionate call to recognize overlooked musical pioneers like PM Dawn as essential to Jersey City's cultural heritage.

Meet Tris McCall

Tris McCall has been a fixture in Hudson County's creative scene since 1992. A musician who has performed on virtually every North Jersey stage, Tris has also written for numerous publications, authored fiction exploring place-based themes, and currently serves as an art critic documenting Jersey City's visual arts community. His work received recognition from the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, supporting his continued art criticism through his website Eye Level.

Connect with Tris McCall:

Key Insights

  • Tris's characters often encourage us to "slow down and look carefully at the world around us," an ethos that extends through his songs, fiction, and art criticism

  • The loss of 111 First Street (demolished in 2007) left a lasting impact on Jersey City's arts scene, though its influence continues through spaces like Deep Space Gallery and The Drawing Rooms

  • Jersey City artists often explore environmental themes through adaptive reuse and show a unique relationship between people and place—with figures in artwork often "melding into the landscape"

  • Bergen Lafayette has undergone the most dramatic transformation during Tris's time in Jersey City, from a neighborhood he was warned against visiting to a vibrant community with galleries and music venues

  • PM Dawn, influential 90s hip-hop pioneers from Jersey City, deserve greater recognition as cultural contributors to the city's musical heritage

  • The challenge of integrating vertical tower communities into Jersey City's horizontal street life represents a key tension in the city's development

Visual Documentation

Tris’ first book “the trespassers” published 2012- hard to find nowadays- but keep hunting

Tris McCall’s Almanac - Tris’ latest collection of stories - contact Tris for a copy!

Tris McCall - The Unmapped Man

P.M. Dawn - Set a Drift on Memory Bliss

Related Resources

  • Eye Level JC – Tris McCall's arts criticism website focusing on Jersey City's visual art scene

  • PM Dawn – Jersey City musical pioneers whose 1991 album "Of The Heart of the Soul, and of the Cross, the Utopian Experience" represents an important chapter in hip-hop history

  • Deep Space Gallery – One of several amazing Jersey City artistic spaces carrying on the spirit of 111 First Street

Explore Further

Coming soon to my Substack: an article exploring the legacy of lost creative spaces like 111 First Street and how they continue to influence Jersey City's current arts scene. I'll contrast Tris's insights about 111 First Street with my own experience of artists preserving historic buildings in Hamburg, Germany, and examine what these different outcomes teach us about community-based preservation.

Coming Up Next

Join me on May 9th for a conversation with narrative consultant Thaler Pekar about the power of story collection and how communities preserve their histories through oral storytelling. We'll explore how personal narratives connect to place and why capturing these stories matters for future generations.

Connect with Nat

Music: Our theme music is "How You Amaze Me," composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

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Nat's Sidewalk Stories explores the intersection of place, community, and storytelling through conversations with practitioners, community leaders, and local changemakers. New episodes release on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month through August, with a break in September before Season 2 begins in October.

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while preserving the conversation's content and meaning.

Nat Kalbach: Welcome to Nat's Sidewalk Stories. I'm Nat Kalbach, an artist and storyteller exploring the places, people, and hidden histories that make our neighborhoods vibrant. Today I am talking with Tris McCall, a musician, writer, and unofficial, but amazing cultural historian of Jersey City. Tris has been documenting our city's evolving story from music and prose for over three decades.

His work from albums to novels to art reviews, uses geography as a framework for exploring human connections and urban change. What fascinates me about Tris approach is how he maps emotional and cultural experiences to specific locations. As he describes it, his characters often remind us to slow down and look carefully at the world around us. In our conversation, we explore Jersey City Changing Art Scene, the Ghost of Lost Creative Spaces, and why telling these local stories matter now more than ever.

Hi, Tris, I'm happy to have you. Would you mind introducing yourself to the people who might not know who you are and tell us a tiny bit about yourself?

Tris McCall: My name is Trish McCall. I live in Jersey City and I've been here for a long time. I've been in Hudson County since 1992 and during that time I have written for just about anything with the word jersey in the title. So if there is a publication, that's the jersey, anything or NJ anything. I've probably written something for that publication during that time. I've also written a lot of other stuff. Some of it has been nonfiction fiction. I've also played with a lot of bands because one of the main things that I've written about is music and I kind of feel like music is my first love and, a lot of groups in many different styles and put out a lot of records. And if there's a stage in North Jersey, I probably played on that stage.

I've been around for a long time. That's maybe the bottom line. I've been around around here for a long time.

Nat Kalbach: You have been telling stories about Jersey City and Hudson County and other places through your songs, your writing and, now also your art reviews. But what first brought you to Jersey City and what keeps you connected to this place?

Tris McCall: I lived in north Hudson for a while. So when we were first out of college, we lived in Weehawken. That was a lot of fun. But I felt more connected to New York than I did to Hoboken just because that's the way the public transit ran. It was easier to get into New York than it was to get into Hoboken. And Hoboken was where Maxwell's was, and Maxwell's was the center of my attention 'cause that's where the music, that's where people were playing music.

So really when we moved to Union City and then to Jersey City, the appeal was that it was very easy to get from place to place, and on a train. And it seemed really important to be able to get quickly into Manhattan and quickly into New York. And once I did, once we made that change, we got off the bus line, basically went to the train line. Life really opened up because I don't really like driving. I don't think it's great and I do like riding my bicycle. So, and this become an easy place to ride my bicycle around.

So we moved down here in 2003. We moved from Union City to Jersey City and I've been here ever since. So that's really what brought me here. Also there always seemed like there was a lot happening here. There was an arts community, there were musicians, there were people playing, doing punk rock shows and abandoned buildings. Some of those were buildings that I kind of learned more about once I moved here, historic buildings. And you would find yourself on a bill and, meet people in Jersey City. So it seemed like the be in Hudson County seemed like that was the right place to be. So it's in, I think it still feels that way.

Nat Kalbach: I love that. I don't have a driver's license. I never had one, so I can totally relate to that. So I always needed to be in a place that's accessible, through public transportation.

I found an article by the New York Times that one said that your songs made New Jersey the center of the world without apology. I really love that. What made you decide to focus so much on local places and stories as an artist and writer, as so many people look somewhere else for inspiration?

Tris McCall: I think it comes down to two figures. One is really obvious. The other is maybe a little less obvious. The more obvious one is Springsteen who wrote very beautifully about New Jersey and I think a lot of us who do make music and write songs we try to put a lot of detail in the lyrics, at the same time that we try to see the hook.

So Springsteen does that really beautifully. Is able to do both at once. So that's the obvious one. And it's probably true for everybody in New Jersey. The other one was really one of my first musical inspiration, Ray Davies. And his group was the Kinks, and the image of the Kinks seems to be fading a little bit for people, but they were extremely popular in influential band in the sixties and seventies. And I learned, really about character study, from listening to his songs when I was young. And it seemed like that was the way that I wanted to write songs.

I wanted to invent characters and I wanted to sing songs from those characters perspectives. And I thought that would be a lot more interesting than writing about me because I don't just don't think that I'm that interesting. But I can invent a character who I think is more interesting and once you invent a character, you want to put that character someplace on the map, and learn where that character has been and how he or she fits into his or her community. It made sense for me to do it here. I have always loved my home state and my hometown. So it was when I started doing music, and I started feeling comfortable as a writer, I figured that the best way to do would be to come up with somebody, set them loose in New Jersey somewhere and then see what happens, and then write a song around that.

Nat Kalbach: Very cool. I'm also curious about, you have all these different entities where you move between music, writing fiction, art criticism. Do you find yourself drawn to different mediums depending on the story you want to tell? Or do they all kind of feed each other?

Tris McCall: It's all kind of the same story. I feel like I'm always writing about the same thing. And I think usually what it comes down to for me is characters who are telling people to slow down and look carefully at the world around them. And really taking the richness of the place, its history, what the buildings, what the streets, what it's all telling us about who we are and how we live.

And I think I've done that in all the writing that I've done. Whether it's been songs or stories or, I have been recently doing, well, not that recently. For the past four years, I've written pretty extensively about visual art in Jersey City, and one of the reasons why I've done this is because there are so many great visual artists in Jersey City. And also it's the language that we use to talk about where we talk about who we are. Jersey City is, there's a visual arts component to almost everything that we do. So this is the best way to understand how we talk internally, and also to the communities around us about who we are.

But yes, slowing down and seeing and really observing, taking a really good, long, hard look at things and changing your way of seeing, your eye level. The name of the website that I just recently put together, I got a grant from the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, was nice enough to give me a grant to continue to pursue this art criticism in Jersey City. Eye level is what I called it, because it really is by changing your eye level and changing your perspective and your focus and really giving something that kind of close read and attention that it deserves.

I feel like I'm always, my characters are always kind of doing it in songs, characters are doing it in stories, and it's what I try to do when I walk into an art gallery around here and listen to or try to really see and understand what artists are trying to tell me, spending so many hours working on sculptures and paintings and putting so much labor into trying to communicate something to me, it's like I feel like the ball is in my court. It's like my responsibility to slow down and really take it in and really try to understand.

Nat Kalbach: I love how you write about the art that you see. It's just very honest. And you take a lot of time. I mean that it feels like you're not just like, yay, beautiful, meh, like you really take a lot of time to explore what you see. That leads me to a question that's probably hard to answer if there is an answer. But as you're focusing on this like local art scene, and we have different artists and different mediums, et cetera, do you see a pattern besides just the place where we live and make the art?

Tris McCall: There've been lots and lots of patterns that I've noticed. One of the most obvious that we continue to return to and it's particularly salient to everything that happens here in Hudson County, and it's also really intense in April is there's an environmentalist theme that runs through tons of what we do. You see this repeated over and over you see an adaptive reuse of garbage in a lot of people's art. I know that's a popular thing that takes place in many old cities, but it's really intense here.

There's a lot of trying to use the raw material, the old environment, brick, stuff you might find in the Meadowlands and repurpose it and try to make it beautiful as a statement about both the beauty of the built environment and also the beauty of the natural environment where we are. And there also is that beauty of the built environment is also something that we return to over and over. We like to show Jersey City how it looks, the uniqueness of the light, the uniqueness of the way that the buildings are, how we're all situated, how our bodies proximity, how we live, and how we've molded ourselves to fit the grid and the landscape.

You see that a lot and also in pictures of human beings, there's a lot of mystery and occlusion here. There's strange, there's always shadows. People are always kind of getting blurred out. There's a way that people are either melding into the landscape, where they're coming out of the landscape. You see that a lot, almost as if the line between who we are and where we are is blurrier than it is in most places.

And I do think that that's a common thing in throughout New Jersey Art. You see that all a lot in the work of many singer songwriters and rappers who write about New Jersey. There's this way that we identify extremely strongly with where we are. Many times you see people and they're coloring, the way that they've been painted or the way they've been drawn is very similar to the brick. You get a lot of earth tones and this idea that we're almost coming with this summoned from the land, there have been a lot of really good shows recently where we've seen that dynamic in place. There are many trends, many things that I've noticed over the years that artists have in common.

Nat Kalbach: That is so cool. I love that. Wow. You were mentioning earlier, an artist place, 111 First Street. I have missed that unfortunately because I came in 2013. So for those of you who don't know, it was this amazing converted warehouse downtown that housed around 200 artists until it was demolished in 2007. What was your connection to that community and how did its loss affect the city's art scene?

Tris McCall: 111 First Street was nicknamed the mothership and for very good reasons, on the front door, it said the heart of the arts. And that was no lie, it was the center of visual arts culture here. But it was more than that because it was something that a lot of towns aspire to, but few towns actually have, which is a genuine collection of oddballs and interlocking pieces, weird individuals doing projects together. And also separately in studios that truly expressed the full personality of the artist.

So when you went into the building, you were knocked over by so many different visions. You walk into people's studios, and this really was the inspiration for the First Studio tours, this idea that you could go studio, front studio and really immerse yourself immediately in the vision of charisma, charismatic visions from charismatic people. So many of the artists, there were big personalities.

The first time I was there, I didn't even know it was an art studio building. I was there to play a punk rock show in the basement, and I still have no idea where all the people came from because we were there at that time, the Warehouse district, which is now the Powerhouse Arts District, which is now some of the most expensive real estate in anywhere. At that time it wasn't, and it was nobody on the street. And it felt like I walked through many blocks of nothing with my musical instruments to get there. And I went into the basement to do the show and suddenly so many people in a big kind of cavernous space that we set up. That was my first exposure.

And then later when we moved to Jersey City, I used to go to just to hang out, meet the artists, see what they were doing, and then just get to know them. By that point, the community was already in peril because the idea of redeveloping that into a condominium tower was irresistible for its owner. The irony of course is that the bricks are still there. The tower was never built, but the community is long gone. It took us a long time to recover from the loss of that community. Many of the artists didn't go far, but many of them did. We lost a lot of them.

It was just intensely demoralizing. And for many years we struggled to find a comparable focus. And in some ways we still have never really gotten back that one focused place, the center that everybody knew that that's where you would go. But you know, what I've learned about the development of cities is that you may never get exactly what you want, but you do get a version of it sometimes.

There's a lot happening in the district. There are theaters, there are galleries there. The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra is moving in. None of that would've happened where not for one 11. And the efforts both to preserve the district and also to make an arts district in the first place, all that was around the effort to save the one 11 community.

Nat Kalbach: It's interesting to me, because as I said, I unfortunately missed it. But I lived in a city before in Hamburg, Germany, which is in Germany, known for people squatting old buildings and streets. And so, in 2009 200 artists squatted 12 historic buildings in downtown Hamburg, very close to where I lived. It was slated for demolition and redevelopment by a Dutch investor and these 200 artists, they organized, squatted the buildings, opened for exhibitions, very similar that what I hear from one 11 and it gained a lot of public support. I was there all the time.

This actually inspired me to the artwork because I was thinking a lot about gentrification and demolition and so my building centric artwork sprang from that place. So I can see how that really must have been such a loss. In this case, this, the city bought back the buildings from the investors and the artist formed a cooperative and it became a recognized cultural center, which they actually now kept and remodeled and they're still there. And now it's in every tourist book that is about Hamburg to go there and see the art and the artists. It makes me sad, I don't wanna put the finger in your wound, but it's so interesting for me to see these two stories that seem to be so parallel, but then it's a very different outcome. Do you think there is something that could have been, is it the city or what, like is that too deep to ask that?

Tris McCall: I don't think so. I think that that what you said is true. And not surprising because we've seen it in other cities as well, that if you have the courage to embrace the community and be like, okay, this is an asset. It's wonderful. People wanna have interesting lives and see interesting things, and we wanna make this city a cool place where people can live and love and have adventures. Like if you just understand this and embrace that asset, it can be a beautiful thing and it can really make your, the place where you're from, a destination, it can give you personality and character that is that's well recognized.

So we had an opportunity that was right there on the board that could have been easily seized, if we had the political will to do it. And unfortunately we just didn't, our leaders were not. They just didn't see it. And no matter how we tried to show it to them. If we had had stronger leadership, we had, you know, a few friends in powerful positions, I think it probably would've gone differently. But it didn't.

And we lost that community and it has taken us a long time to rebuild. Now there's a whole generation, I think there's probably two generations of artists here who don't know that history. I do like to remind them because there would be no powerhouse arts. The patterns of creation would be very different here, if it hadn't existed. And I see, I see its imprint. I see its shadow straight across the art scene. A place like Deep Space Gallery.

Nat Kalbach: I love that place.

Tris McCall: It's one of my favorite galleries. Extremely one 11 style feel. The drawing rooms is, you know, Jim Pastino was involved in the community of one 11. The lineage, the provenance of a lot of we do, we trace back to one 11 first. It is a story of a missed opportunity.

And I think that people, the fact that we were willing to pass the arts and culture trust fund that succeeded, suggest that people do have a better understanding right now of the relationship between making our town an interesting place to be and live. I think back then, there was a divide between people who lived here, and also people who really treated Jersey City as a bedroom community. They didn't really explore more than the downtown, and that's changed. We know that there are great galleries and great things happening all over the city. We're much better integrated. We're much better stitched than we were at that time.

Nat Kalbach: I wanna ask you something about, you have a book.

Tris McCall: Yes, yes.

Nat Kalbach: The trespassers and I haven't read it because it's not available easily, but I got it over eBay. And can you tell us a little bit about the premise? And I would love to hear if you have theoretically explored abandoned buildings.

Tris McCall: There's nothing theoretical about it. I grew up in North Jersey. We've spent some time looking at places, being places where we shouldn't be, or we weren't invited, being uninvited. Yes, trespassers was, is, even more than anything else that I've done. Well, I sometimes I feel like everything I've ever had to say in the world is in that book and that everything has been reiteration since then.

It's a novel. So it is fiction. The characters are invented. It's about five kids who are in late high school. The narrator's 16 years old, turns 17 while the story's going on. And he is not from New Jersey. He's from North Carolina, but he is spending his summer in New Jersey and falls in with a group of photographers who are breaking up the buildings and taking pictures of buildings from the inside. And that's basically all that happens in the book. And Doran, who's my narrator, gives very dense Tris McCall style descriptions of what he sees inside the buildings.

And I, for me at least, it achieved great emotional weight. I can't say whether it does for anybody who's ever read the book, but it certainly gets me choked up when I think about it. It's my favorite thing that I've ever done. I don't really expect to ever do anything else in my life that approaches it. I don't know. I was just in the zone when I was doing it, and I'm very, very proud of it. That said, it is hard to find because it was pressed in 2012, and that was a long time ago. And since then, I've, you know, it's like snow. You know, there's a layer of snow and then a lot of words by Tris McCall have fallen on top of that snow. And I would love it if people would dig and get down to that strata, but realistically, they're gonna read the most recent thing that I've written, which is probably about something else.

Nat Kalbach: I can't wait to read it. So you have been here throughout so many changes here in Jersey City, which neighborhoods and places do you think have changed the most? And what certain aspects might you miss of the old Jersey City because people are always talking about Old Jersey City, but you have not lived all your life here.

Tris McCall: Jersey City that I think of as Old Jersey City, but there's a whole way older Jersey City that's not very well chronicled. Tons of the city has changed the heights. When I first lived in the city, other than Palisade Avenue at that time, walking into Jersey City on Palisade Avenue, I wouldn't really encounter that much that was tremendously of interest to me, although it was always a nice walk, but now there's Corto, which is a wonderful Italian restaurant, is there, there's bread and salt, plain pizza place. There's the guitar bar there, there's short things there. That's a shop. There's just been a great transformation of that part of the heights. Which totally makes sense because it's got the views.

It's very easy into New York City. It's become a really fun neighborhood to walk around and hang out. And Journal Square is where I'm at right now. I'm on Newark Avenue, which is right across the street from Dickinson and that is, right by the historic cemetery. This neighborhood has changed tremendously both lovely and maybe a little daunting and troubling because there's big towers where they did not used to be really big towers. And getting the communities in the towers, people who live in the towers better integrated into Jersey City and into the civic life here is going to be a challenge because they're kind of living vertically. They're not living horizontally, and that's almost by design.

There are ways in which those towers have been designed not to interact, trying to funnel everybody into the path train and get them into New York rather than out on the street, and deep space and smush and Eonta Space and the really cool nearby. So educating people is part of what I'm trying to do. Getting them out on the street here in Journal Square is, I think important, but I think that a neighborhood that's transformed the most is Bergen Lafayette because it was when I was first here. This was a lie. It was a downright lie. People told me, don't go to Bergen Lafayette. That's dangerous.

And I would go and I'd be like, wow, this neighborhood is gorgeous. It doesn't feel dangerous in the slightest. And I wasn't the only person who recognized that. And now people have brought up, I feel like, really east of Grand Street now on in together, they're building on almost every available lot. There's a new project, so that neighborhood is completely transformed. And there are also interesting galleries like Evening Star, which is a experimental ceramic gallery, restaurants, shops, places where people hang out. It's really a focus for a lot of musicians, who are part of the punk rock scene in Jersey City. A lot of rappers, they have their home studios, practice spaces down there that's really, that neighborhood is almost completely transformed.

And I was told really early that there really is no place in Jersey City that was ever devastated in the way that many other cities were devastated because of the patterns of flight out of cities that happened in the sixties and seventies where you go into places like Detroit and as Danny Brown put it, you get house, field, field, house, field, field. There's no place like that in Jersey City. All of the neighborhoods are pretty much intact. Nothing feels even slightly, I think creepy about Jersey City anywhere. I mean it really is and it's always been that way. It's always, to me, felt really intact. It's always felt really lovely. It just, we just need to slow down and take a look at it and see how much value there is in all of it. People who have been here for a long time and the contributions being made by people who have just come here.

Nat Kalbach: I agree. The changes in Bergen Lafayette I really feel are the most, again, I'm not that long here, but just in the short time that I've been here in 12 years, insane.

Tris McCall: In 1992 we were really cautioned not to go there. And then we started going there because when you're cautioned not to go someplace, you wanna go, you wanna see it. And I was really impressed by how beautiful all the old houses were, and I was hardly the only person.

Nat Kalbach: When you're walking around Jersey City, or bicycle, and something catches your attention, like a building street corner, something else that happens. Do you know right away that this will become a song or an article or something else? Or does that percolate and then you make connections? How do you work on those stories and music?

Tris McCall: I am always inspired by trips and anytime I take a long bike ride. And when I try to situate myself, I do kind of think about how what I'm looking at relates to whatever it is that the artist that I'm engaging with is trying to express. So yeah, I do try to bring all that together, for music, the more recent suite of songs that I did, that I did a performance of last year at the Art House Productions Theater, that suite was very deliberately done where the idea was, I'm gonna go to a city. And when I went to the city, I would try to immerse myself in the city. And then I was gonna come up with a character who would be the narrator of both the song and a short story that would go along with the song.

So the book, McCall's Almanac, the short stories that are based on. Again, I'm asking people for a lot of attention, maybe more attention than they wanna pay, but, I'm asking people to kind of pay attention to the way that a story might interact with the song and with a place. It all kind of came from the same idea where I made character and put him, it was him because all the characters in the story were male because I felt like American men were in crisis at that point. But I think that it's sort of been, unfortunately, been born out by facts that they were feeling, men were feeling a little, or more than a little, they were feeling irrelevance and lashing out in different ways, either lashing out or internalizing that feeling of encroaching irrelevance.

And that kind of, I put that kind of in all of these characters, many different settings, different American settings. So there's a New Orleans song and story that I like a lot. There's a couple in Florida, there's one in Chicago. There's basically many different American cities. I think there are 23 that I did, and I presented 12 of those at the show. So that's a case where engaging with a geographical location directly inspired both music and words, which is not unusual for me. That's what I do a lot.

Nat Kalbach: What are you working on right now besides the eye level where you continuously write, is there something else that you're working on right now?

Tris McCall: There's a couple of different sites that have my writing on a pretty regular basis throughout New Jersey. I do a column for NJ Arts that, and I do usually once every 10 days. And I've written a lot for Jersey City Times, and I've been covering not just art, but also theater. Every now and then politics and I try to not to do that.

So I've been doing a ton of journalism. Now, will I do another show at the end of the year here? Will I do another show later in the year? In addition to what I'm doing. Because you're right, I need to let people know about the books, the short story collection, and I need to let people know about the trespassers because thing that I'm proudest of though, and I should do a better job know about that. So I may do some book type events, and then I'll probably do a show. There are two whole albums of Tris McCall material that are unreleased that was supposed to be released a couple years ago, and I got engaged in doing other stuff, plus I am, as you know, like I'm not the youngest rocker anymore.

So the idea of getting in a van and going around the country is slightly less appealing than it used to be. I prefer to travel a little more comfortably now as I am in my mid fifties. It's kind of crazy. I mean, musicians do do it all the time. It's just they have maybe have more stamina for that kind of thing than I do. I never really loved the touring part of it. I always wanted to perform at Maxwells. That was the idea, like playing outta town always was exciting, but like the show was in Hoboken, in Jersey City, always for me, New York, it was always for me. It's meant to talk to my neighbors. I would talk primarily to the neighbors. And then anybody else who wanted to listen in were more than welcome to listen in.

Nat Kalbach: Yeah. Come here, man.

Tris McCall: Yes, that's right. Here. But yes. Wanna hear me? You gotta come here.

Nat Kalbach: Well, I hope we get, the word out for trespassers and I definitely will link it up to, I can't wait to dig in. Tris I ask this question in different variations to all my guests. If you could spend an afternoon with anyone from Jersey City's past. Who would it be? Which corner would you choose as your meeting spot or where you have your chat, and what would be the one question that you would ask them?

Tris McCall: Oh, that's a very easy question for me. And I have a really definitive answer for this. I would really like to have met and I missed out on this opportunity, and I was in a position to do it. I would really like to meet Attrel Cordes of PM Dawn. Now PM Dawn, if you don't know them, PM Dawn had a series of very big hits in the nineties. The first one was called Set Adrift on Memory Bliss. That was the first one that was a smash hit. They had a couple of smaller regional hits, and they came out in the wake of De La Soul. So if it hadn't been through De La Soul, they probably wouldn't have gotten the audience that they did because their version of hip hop was super melodic and very saturated with harmony. And now it doesn't sound unusual at all, but at the time it was extremely unusual.

It was hard for a lot of listeners to accept it. The first album that they did, which was called Of The Heart of the Soul, and of the Cross, the Utopian Experience, it was released in 1991. It's an absolute masterpiece. I mean, it is a brilliant album. It's a gorgeous album. It is just beautiful. All the performances are beautiful. All of the song structures are beautiful, and it really did. I think it augered, I wouldn't go so far to say that it was a direct influence 'cause I don't know. But if you listen to the way that Kanye puts music together, or the way that Drake's producers put music together, they really do think about songwriting in a classical sense, which wasn't always done in hip hop right off the bat, although De La Soul was doing it to a certain degree. Many of the Native Tongues were doing it,.... their producers in doing it.

He was very, very good about choruses, about building the choruses. The songs were really very nicely constructed and I think that, he was way ahead of his time, and he died of a stroke. I never got a chance to interview him or even to tell him how much I appreciated the music that he did.

Jersey City should. There's no street dedicated to him. There's no former arts center dedicated to him, Jersey City, needs to recognize him for what he is. When there's, when you go to Atlanta, you hear outcast, you hear it, it's there every place. And you hear bombs of a Baghdad. You hear their song, hear Ms. Jackson blasted at civic events. We need to do the same thing for P.M. Dawn. We need to own this group, this group with big hits. People would recognize their songs. They were musical pioneers and their very Jersey city. We need to do a better job of acknowledging that they made great music, stand up to anybody's music.

From here now, where should we meet them? Well, I think that, I think a good place to meet would probably be outside the pizza place. Maybe you could to take them to Razza or maybe meet them at Bread and Salt or, you know, or Morty's might be good. Good place to get a sandwich and talk. And I would ask him about all of his instrument sounds, how he got all of those effects. How he was a masterful producer. He and his brother, masterfully masterful album production.

I guess I would ask him how, because I ask everybody this, how the place that he grew up, his neighborhood influenced the music he made and how, and whether that was part of his motivation, whether he was trying to express something about the place where he was from. Now a lot of his music had cosmic themes and I think that he was really in touch with all that stuff. And I think he was thinking about the astral plane more than he was thinking about Communipaw Avenue. And you know, many great artists do. But I still want to know. 'Cause I still feel like that was a project that for many reasons could only have happened here in Jersey City. Where hip hop was at that time. I think it could only have taken place here. And I think we need to own that. I think we really want, we wanna own PM Dawn better than we did.

Nat Kalbach: I learned something. Now I have to dig deeper. Of course. I have to listen to the music.

Tris McCall: They're great.

Nat Kalbach: Thank you so much, Tris. Um, that was amazing, super interesting and I can't wait to read your books and come to your next performance.

Tris McCall: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I always Nice. Yes. Let's see you around.

Nat Kalbach: Thank you Trish McCall for this journey through Jersey City's past and present. Your observations remind us that the stories of a place whether told through music fiction or visual or performance art, help us understand both where we've been and where we are going. Your Call to recognize and celebrate local artists like pm. Dawn speaks to the heart of what this podcast is about.

Acknowledging the cultural threads that weave our community together. All links to connect with Tris can be found in my show notes. You will also find a new article inspired by this conversation next week on my Substack.

So make sure to subscribe to it. You can find the link also in the show notes. Until next time, look up. Look around, and remember to pause occasionally on your daily walks. You never know what stories you might discover when you take the time to notice. Thank you for listening to Nat's Sidewalk Stories.

I'm your host, Nat Kalbach. Our theme music is How You Amaze Me, composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Nathalie Kalbach
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Episode 104: Building Artistic Shelter with Jin Jung