VIA PRESS RELEASE | On March 13th, Saustex Records will release the 20th anniversary edition of Hamell On Trial’s live album Ed’s Not Dead—Hamell Comes Alive! on digital and hyper-limited vinyl format.
March 13th, 2020 will mark Saustex Records’ re-release of the Hamell on Trial live album Ed’s Not Dead—Hamell Comes Alive!. The album is culled from live shows in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego back in 2000, when Ed was the regular opening act for Ani DiFranco and was also on the roster of her Righteous Babe Records. Ani had her front-of-house engineer record Ed’s show nightly, with the unspoken intention of releasing a live album for her label.
Things were going well…Ed was playing for much larger audiences than he was used to and Ani’s audiences were very gracious and receptive. Then, tragedy struck. Following some dates with Ani, Ed resumed his club touring, and had a serious automobile accident that laid him up for nine months. He broke three vertebrae, his wrist, ankle, and had 52 staples in his head. He had to wear an upper body brace for the duration of the nine months.
As a working musician whose bread and butter is live performances, this was devastating. Luckily, some friends came to the rescue, in the form of Ani’s manager Scott Fisher, who gave Hamell the tapes so that he could self-release an album and keep the money, and his good friend George Fontaine (now president of New West Records) who ponied up the money for CD manufacturing. Ed’s longtime road manager Ricki C sifted through the tapes and culled the best performances.
The CD edition is long out-of-print and the March release will mark the first vinyl album and broad streaming and digital release. The LP will be limited to 100 copies on opaque white vinyl and includes an oversized reprint of the cartoon booklet contained in the original CD and a download card with bonus tracks.
On Valentine’s Day, there will be a pre-release single, “Some Hearts”—a song that Hamell describes as “an unlikely tale of love and redemption, compassion and forgiveness” based on the real-life romance of his college-era roadie Bobby and his girlfriend Agnes.
The story goes that Bobby was facing a stiff jail sentence and in preparation he and Agnes were moving all his earthly possessions to a cabin owned by Agnes’ father. Bobby, being a wild man prankster, he decided to give Agnes a good scare by crawling out the back door of the truck and onto the top of the cab, then hanging his head upside down in Agnes’ face. Unfortunately, and fatefully, it worked. Agnes slammed on the brakes and sent Bobby flying into a tree, killing him instantly.
Now, it was related to Hamell by another old friend that he came across Agnes in a bar, not more than a week after the tragic incident, where she sat on the lap of another guy drunk, kissing in an intimate embrace. The friend, never one to mince words, felt it was his duty to his lost colleague to reprimand Agnes loudly for soiling Bobby’s memory in such a fashion—calling her a whore and a slut and other names not nearly so polite.
It is here when Hamell pauses to reflect and try to understand it from Agnes’s point of view. She was hurt, lonely… furious at Bobby’s foolish and deadly prank and most likely traumatized. Judge not lest ye be. Some hearts, Hamell says, need a lot of loving. And there’s a very good possibility that Bobby would do the same thing were the situation reversed.
