Camera Obscura is proud to present a long overdue re-issue programme of the Green Pajamas main man's solo work. It takes the form of a box set containing three releases originally done on cassette by the Green Monkey label "Coffee in Nepal" (1987), "Portugal" (1990), and "Private Electrical Storm" (1992) all with extra tracks, and one recent unreleased solo project "The Rosary and the House of Jade". It will all be very simply packaged in a AMPEX 5" reel box with 4 CDs and 24 page booklet. We'll let Jud Cost tell you all about it in his sleeve notes for the box set:

Jeff Kelly recently sent me a package stuffed with cassettes he's recorded under his own name during the past ten years and politely asked if I'd please write something about them for this Camera Obscura Box Set. "Just your impressions of the music, I guess," he explained later that evening on the telephone in that half-distracted way of his. "But make it witty," he added almost as an afterthought. The pleasant side of discussing the music Kelly makes without his Pajamas is that like essay-only Blue Book final exams I took in college decades ago there aren't any correct answers. These intense sometimes warm and funny, sometimes almost desperate outpourings are so personal that listening to them is like reading someone else's diary. At times you look around and think maybe you ought to stop. But you don't.

Maybe it's Kelly's unorthodox blend of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles, obscure Celtic folk artists, Emily Dickinson and film noir soundtrack music (something there for everybody) that will pull you, like quicksand, into his universe. Or maybe it's his musical honesty. In these days of ogling the private escapades of Clinton and Lewinski in the tabloids while loading groceries onto a conveyor belt there's a feeling abroad that we have a right to know everything. As revealing in their own way as Nixon's "smoking gun" tapes, Kelly's cassettes leave little to the imagination. And everything. Someone complained to me once, only half-kidding, that listening to a CD was like carrying around an x-ray of your girl friend. With that in mind, my impressions of Kelly's music might be as helpful as visiting your doctor with someone else's medical charts.

Back in the '60s Bob Dylan reputedly mumbled to a reporter something like, "There's no reason to ask me anything. I don't know any more than you do." But if it furthered his musical purpose (and your enlightenment), Jeff Kelly, whose muse was warmed in the lean years by fan letter response to these cassettes, might go so far as to mail you an x-ray of Bob Dylan. You already have Kelly's dossier.

Jud Cost
Santa Clara, CA 1999

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