Recently, watching Silence of The Lambs and there was something about Anthony Hopkins character so smart without the face conveying emotion that made me feel like I knew this person for real and then it hit me. I don’t know if the back room at the Cameron was ever used for anything in the afternoon but Saturdays in the 80s, from 3pm on it was John Oswald’s for Pool. Not billiards or swimming but a free improv jam session he ran called Pool. Maybe that had something to do with the random pool of whoever showed up. He even had a deal with Herb or Paul to get free draft in exchange for being the entertainment for the audiences that numbered from zero to occasionally as many as four. Finding a seat along the black vinyl bench with the odd gaffer tape repair was not a problem at Pool. He even printed small flyers listing past celebrity participants like Laurie Anderson, Lol Coxhill and Derek Bailey. I arrived in 1983 and for the next three years many of those Saturdays were just me and John. I wasn’t expecting to find the most important exchange ever but that’s what it was, weekly marathons with John, the best training ground possible, my Beatles in Hamburg. I think it was that Hannibal Lecter tone that triggered me when he casually invited me to come sometime. I thought I was going to show him a thing or two, never expected him to be the monster he is, so controlled and lotus like with his posture while exploding fireworks of sound and fingering. Always exhausting the borders of velocity and sparking new techniques, new gestures, new ways of thinking about the music which ultimately was the drug of following this path in the first place.