Artist returns with tales of strife at Chelsea Hotel
By CHRIS PAGE
Get Out

Tempe guitarist Joe Myers spent much of the ’90s building a local fanbase one beautiful fingerstyle acoustic instrumental tune at a time.

But in 2000, with the East Valley bar scene in a rut, Myers packed up his instruments, his recording equipment and his family and headed for the mecca of bohemian artistry: New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. Where punk icon Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen and Jack Kerouac cranked out “On the Road,” Myers, 43, laid to tape the achingly tender, sometimes sprightly, always lyrical songs that would become his fourth album, “Troubled Notes from the Hotel Chelsea.”

“I didn’t want to do an album about the hotel — to focus on that,” Myers says.

His girlfriend of 16 years, the contemporary artist Casebeer, 38, jumps in: “But it became a love letter to that place.”

“Troubled Notes,” which will be released Saturday at a show in downtown Tempe, takes its title from the novel Casebeer is putting together about their experiences in New York. The couple and their two children — Tosh, 12, and Briannah, 17 — moved there in June 2000 and crammed into a studio apartment in the hotel for six months (before getting a one-bedroom upgrade).

“We were just obsessed and in love with the place,” Casebeer says. “It was like jumping off a bridge and not knowing if there was water underneath.”

While Myers hauled his recording equipment from their room to the hallways, even strumming through new songs late at night in the hotel’s storied lobby, Casebeer worked on building a name in the art community and picked up graphic design jobs.

But there was trouble from the get-go. They burned through their savings in six months. Chelsea landlord Stanley Bard, a rare advocate for bohemian artists, let thousands of dollars in rent slide while the couple tried to get a foothold.

And then 9/11 happened. Graphic arts jobs dried up. A project of art and music for Nickelodeon fizzled. Myers’ singer/songwriter gigs went dead. Six weeks after 9/11 and 17 months after moving to New York, the couple came back to Tempe.

Myers lent “River to River,” the first song he’d written at the Chelsea, to a compilation disc by Scottsdale's Perfect Circle Records, and the small independent label offered to help put out what would become “Troubled Notes from the Hotel Chelsea.”

As she did for Myers’ last three albums, Casebeer created unconventional packaging for the CD. She designed the case and its liner notes to resemble an oversized book of matches.

“There’s a thousand jewel boxes,” she says. “I figure if you can use the outside packaging to suggest the ingenuity and creativity inside, that’s great.”

After returning to the Valley, Myers took a year-long break from playing gigs here.

“I wasn’t ready to be back and go back to doing the things I fought to leave,” he says.

But with “Troubled Notes” and its release party in a space above a hair salon on Mill Avenue, Myers is ready to bring New York’s spirits home for a visit.

In the end, he says, what they learned at the Chelsea is “the more trouble, the more we laughed.”