Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 31-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Dear friend Pat Maley of Yo Yo Studios made an excellent video for “Waiting For Rudy” with footage of a show we played in the basement of the ABC House in Olympia, Wash. It’s still one of my favorite Mecca Normal videos. It’s about an old man named Rudy who lived in the building where Barbara Manning and Laura Moody shared an apartment in San Francisco. We stayed there many times in the 1990s. There was a boarded-up gas station next door, and I think Barbara and Laura’s building was going to be torn down when Rudy died. It just seemed so brutal to have one’s fate dictated by the death of an old man.
“Waiting For Rudy” from Flood Plain (K, 1993) (download):
