Joe Senger

Joe Senger plays drums. He spent eighteen years chasing down the tapes he and his brother cut in a Baltimore basement, then finished the record.

The story reached SALTYmf before Senger did. Dawson, who handles the brand's media, interviewed him by phone and wrote it up, and Senger read it back and passed it to his wife. When the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast came around he drove up instead of doing it over the internet, partly because he was headed to North Carolina that weekend anyway to play the Blind Fox in Kannapolis and an old bank that had been turned into a food hall.

The music came from his older brother Billy, eight years ahead of him, already playing guitar in Baltimore funk and country bands. Joe was fourteen and sneaking down to the basement to tap on the drums when Billy came home early, caught him, and told him he was buying him a drum set and putting him in the band. They went to Tony's Music in Highlandtown in 1979 and came back with a used set of Ludwigs. The basement had cement walls and graffiti from everybody who came over to drink. They started on Stones and Zeppelin covers, then Billy bought a four track and started writing his own. Joe cut his drum parts upstairs in the kitchen so they would not bleed onto the guitar tracks.

Billy had bipolar disorder, which nobody in the family put a name to for years, and he drank. Rehearsals turned into drinking sessions. He had a triple bypass. Senger took a corporate job and moved to Jacksonville in 2005, and by early 2006 he could not reach his brother at all. He flew to Baltimore, looked up at the apartment and saw every window standing wide open, and a woman from the shop next door told him Billy had died three months ago. Billy had been found weeks after his death. The state cremated him as unclaimed, and Senger and his sister got the ashes back with almost no time to spare. The landlord sold off the guitars, the Lionel trains and the records. A prosecutor asked for serial numbers, and without them there was no case.

What Senger wanted back was never the Les Paul. He ran an ad in a Baltimore music magazine asking about the tapes, and months later a stranger met him in a bar, handed them over and left before Senger could buy him a drink. They sat in a closet until 2023, when a place outside Nashville baked them and transferred them to digital. The package arrived on Halloween, which is Billy's birthday. He wrote lyrics over a guitar and drum take the two of them had cut on a whim, called it Trouble, and put the album out on October 1. All he asks is that people listen to it.