The songs that float up from gutters and grease the flicker-lightbulbed ceilings of dim haunts are rarely recorded, only half-remembered by lovers who paw each other under tables and in the uneasy dreams of sleepers who choose bartops for pillows.

Twenty years ago, Michael Leviton was a two-bit piano player who could barely play; the seedy owners who hired him did so out of lust or pity or both. 

And then she walked in...Brooke Backman, a singer in search of a song. Friend to every bartender in town, she lived off free meals and even freer drinks. Her endless bar-crawl had led her to Hotel Delmano, a ritzy cocktail spot that wasn't a hotel. When they offered her a paid gig, it didn't take much convincing to get broke Leviton to join her band as guitarist and songwriter. His old friend and collaborator Matt Bauder had a dirty job blowing sax for stripteases. Leviton saw Backman as their ticket out of the city's sinful underworld, their big chance to play a joint with real class.

Jazz historians theorize that this group’s local popularity arose from the audience’s certainty that none of the band members would live long. No one remembers how or why their residency ended, whether they announced their final show or were fired for some indiscretion. The band simply evaporated like spit from a sidewalk.

A few decades later, Backman was found stumbling those same streets in an amnesiac daze, no memory of anything since Delmano. Leviton turned up too; it turned out he'd pawned his guitar and eked out a life in the shadows as a low-life fetish photographer. 

When Backman and Leviton reunited, they knew the music of their polluted pasts had to be recorded. They searched for Bauder and found he’d cleaned up and moved upstate. Though he feared the slightest touch of a reed to his lips would slingshot him back into perversion and excess, it was worth the risk.

Now that you know the story, drop the needle and enjoy these songs fated to stick around like flattened street pennies. And I'll end with a note from the musicians:

"Do not romanticize our wasted lives. Resist the siren calls of cigarettes and jukebox slow-dances. Learn from our mistakes and stay far as you can from the vile depravity of showbiz. Love, BB.”