It’s a situation not unfamiliar to a lot of New York City musicians: You park your van to grab or unload some equipment and before you know it some meter maid has slapped $150 ticket on your windshield for double-parking, parking too near a fire hydrant or in a bus zone or taxi stand. I myself amassed over $500 in parking tickets in one week on my last visit to New York. The laws are unclear, the signs nearly impossible to interpret. If you become delinquent in paying your tickets, the cops will tow away your wheels without hesitation. The city makes a shitload of money busting drivers for petty non-moving violations that really deserve nothing more than a warning. I got a $175 ticket for parking in a no parking zone while I ran into a deli to get a carrot juice. I left my car for no longer than 60 seconds. Fuck!

Anyway, my good friend Joseph Arthur (a New York-based musician we’ve featured here on DM in the past) had his 2003 Dodge Ram towed for $350 in unpaid parking tickets. When Joseph discovered that his van hadn’t been stolen but towed, critical time had passed and the van had been auctioned off by the city for $1000. The real horror-story though was not losing his vehicle, but what was inside it. The Dodge contained priceless vintage music gear and some of Arthur’s paintings - in addition to being a fine singer-songwriter, Joseph is a highly regarded painter. What a nightmare.

Fortunately, the story has a happy (or at least bittersweet) ending. With the help of a private investigator and Jeff Lebowski’s favorite lawyer Ron Kuby, Joseph tracked down his Dodge and paid $5,500 to get it back, over five times the auction price.

So after all this I got my van back!
I can’t thank y’all enough for your support and help.
It cost plenty, but I’m very happy to have my art and my gear back.
Jose (the guy who had it) drove a hard bargain (Ron calls it a sort of hold up)
and sold it all back to me for $5,500 after he paid a grand for it,
but I’m trying to keep it in perspective,
Things like this can’t be measured strictly with numbers
and the life lessons it taught were of greater value than the dollars and cents.
The main one being the support I got from all of you.
Along with the people,whom without I never would have gotten it back,
Ron, Vic, Lea, Carla, Julie, Peter, Kraig, Ehud and Spencer – THANK YOU!
The list goes on, but now I need to search this four wheel goliath for my tarot cards and try to catch new dreams.
Thanks again everyone and I hope to see you down the road.
I’ll be the one driving a van more famous than me.

much love,
Joseph

Now Joseph is not a wealthy guy. He should be. His albums are among the best released in the past two decades. But the music biz is tough as we all know. So, in order to recoup some of his losses, Joseph will doing a fundraiser at the City Winery in Manhattan on Sunday, October 21st. Joseph will be there with special guests.

I love how Joseph dealt with the bad news of losing his wheels, he wrote a song (which may end up in my top ten of 2012) and made a video. It’s Joseph’s Buddha-nature that keeps him mellow and beautiful.
 

 
In pondering the best music of 2011, one must consider Joseph Arthur’s stunning album The Graduation Ceremony. 

Over the course of the past 15 years, Arthur has created a body of work that is beautiful, mercurial, romantic and touched by more than a little heartbreak and betrayal. Joseph manages to deal with relationships gone bad, loneliness, drugs and New York City with a pained tenderness that recalls Nick Drake. He does so without being maudlin or self-pitying.

No mere poet of despair, Arthur has written songs that shimmer with a sweet spirituality built around big fat Beatlesque hooks and there are moments of deeply solid funkiness to some of his material that is positively Prince-like. As I said, he can be mercurial. From his early collaborations with Peter Gabriel and T- Bone Burnett to his self-produced albums released on his own label, Arthur has never shied away from experimentation while maintaining a consistently high level of artistry. I’ve never been disappointed by a Joseph Arthur album and I own them all.

In recent years, Joseph has become a painter with a growing reputation among gallery owners and art collectors. His paintings have become a part of his live performances. In the course of a set, Joseph will start and finish a painting. The effect is thrilling and the results are astonishingly good. Art at the speed of sound.

Joseph spent an afternoon with me at my house and I filmed him painting and talking about his music, art and poetry. The video features tracks from some of his past albums as well as his latest.

If you don’t already know him, let me introduce you to Joseph Arthur.