Matt McCabe (1958-2021), a native of Elizabethtown, NY, was the author and singer of “The APA Song (It’s Insane),” which was released in 1979 and re-recorded and released in 1989. He also released a CD, “These Adirondacks,” in 1993. His dobro player on these recordings is the noted Plattsburgh musician Junior Barber (1944-2017). Matt left Elizabethtown in 1994, moved to Saratoga Springs, and operated the Saratoga Guitar & Music Center there until his death. He was interviewed by phone in 2020.
The APA Song was in my head a long time, and it finally came together in the summer of 1978. I dropped out of Syracuse University and drove west with a couple of friends in a beat-up Grand Torino station wagon. When we got to the west coast, my buddy was going to meet his sister, but she wasn’t there. We had no money. Where are we going to sleep? We drove down to the Pacific Ocean and buried the car in brush and watched the sunset. We had beers and vodka and a couple of cans of beans. We were sitting around a campfire, heating up the cans, and in a moment of elation I reached over and grabbed a hot can and burned the shit out of my hand. I got mad and I said, “this is f**cking insane.” But then I said, “that is the chorus to the song!” I needed a chorus and I got it there. That’s how it all came together.
I had grown up in the Adirondacks and I was angry for the people who were affected. My folks owned 140 acres but were only allowed to subdivide 8 acres. I wasn’t a rabid protestor, but I thought it was unfair.
We tried to record the song in a homemade studio in Willsboro, NY at the end of 1978. I asked six guys to show up at 8:30 am. It was 20 below zero and nobody showed up. It was a catastrophe. But I didn’t want to give up, even though the studio owner took my money. We finally recorded it in Burlington, Vermont. The engineer was James Starbuck, who had a studio in Westport NY. He was by far the best guy I knew. He knew what he was doing. We finally worked it out in the summer of 1979.
I don’t like looking at pictures of myself from those days or even listening to my playing from back then, but we were operating based on what we knew. Roger Benedict and Junior Barber were idols of mine, and I was lucky to get them to play on the record. I played the crosscut saw – that was a gimmick. In live performances, we sometimes fired up a chainsaw just to scare the shit out of people in bars.
I was living above a bar called The Falcon’s Nest, which later burned down. Most of the places I played have burned down. That’s my legacy. I did have a couple of groupies, though.
The photo shoot was interesting. In those days, if you wanted to make a public announcement, you would walk into a bar and yell. That’s what I did. “There’s a photo shoot tomorrow at 10 am in front of my barn.” The man on the sleeve of the 45 who’s holding a gun while sitting in a horse trough is Jerry Pulsifer, an Elizabethtown logger who was a legendary figure. I’m behind the horse on the left.
On the back cover, Pulsiver is sitting in front. On the left with the ax handle is Roger Benedict, and that is his friendly face. Next to him is Tom Beaton, who didn’t play on the CD but was one of my best friends. I’m wearing the trucker cap, and Jim Strong is holding the gun. We just took a picture of whoever showed up. The photo was absolutely crucial to the success of the song.
I had to coordinate the photos and pressing the 45 with no money. Everything had to get back to me before I enrolled at the University of Vermont in the fall of 1979. The boxes arrived two or three days before I was going to go back to school. They came on a Greyhound Bus, which we met in front of the Park Motor Inn in Elizabethtown. My sister and I had to hand-correct the sleeve because the drummer we were expecting didn’t show up for the actual gig. Then we ran around dropping off 45s everywhere we could.
We went to Valley Vending, which owned every jukebox in the Adirondacks. The owner was Bob Prescott, a cousin of Roger’s, and he was patient with me because he was fond of Roger. We went up to his house and loaded the song onto the jukebox at about ten bars, starting in E-town. Bob Prescott took the first couple hundred copies. I don’t know how many jukeboxes they ended up on. Joan Crain was a master blues guitar player and also a part-time DJ in Plattsburgh on WKDR. I gave it to her and she put it on the air. I think we sold 1,000 copies of the song.
I re-recorded the song in 1989 with different musicians and released another batch of 45s. These did not have a photo sleeve. And in 1993 I put out a CD of songs called “These Adirondacks,” which was kind of the other side of the coin. I was not so angry any more, and I was more appreciate of what we have up here.
Matt was a well-known performer in Saratoga Springs who was known for his generosity. In his obituary Sarah Craig, executive director of local music venue Caffe Lena, had this remembrance: “The music community in Saratoga is small . . . and he was certainly one of the key players. He opened his shop on Caroline Street right around the time I moved to Saratoga and so I have always thought of him as one of the anchors of downtown. If you were involved in music in any way in Saratoga, you knew and worked with Matt and thought of him as a colleague.”
In 2020, when Caffe Lena was getting its Music School off the ground, Craig stopped by Saratoga Guitar to see if she could buy some refurbished instruments that could be loaned out to keep costs low for anyone who wanted to be part of the school “[McCabe] took me into this back room where he just had mountains of instruments in cases and just said basically ‘Take what you want. We’ll make sure it’s in good enough condition to play and we’ll get these kids started.’”
Brad Edmondson 