GUADALCANAL DIARY

Across a small black table in the back room at Frijolero's, Poe proudly displays the cover art for his forthcoming indie solo record, WHEN YOUR DEEPEST, DARKEST SECRETS COME TO LIGHT. He turns the deep, dark blue design around in his hand and points to his own photo near the title. "That's the Italian artist," he jokes dryly, "deep in pensive thought. I love the way this looks. I'm so thrilled. I've been waiting for the right moment for it to come out, so I thought this Guadalcanal Diary groundswell would be a good time. Not to mention that it's just READY."

Poe smiles. "It's very different from Diary material. I've just been going through this metamorphosis. It's so intimate that it's been difficult for me to get to a point where I've had the guts to play it. It's very soft. All jazz kind of instrumentation. It's RHYTHMIC, of course."

Today Poe speaks with the calm confidence of a man who's found inner peace, but his past was turbulent. When he mentions that during the 2X4 tour, "things were getting tense," I ask him to explain WHAT was tense. He pauses for a long moment before answering with a single word: "Me."
Poe laughs. "I was probably the most difficult to get along with. Night after night of trying to sing, bad monitors, that kinda thing. Not getting a good night's sleep. Everybody was really mad at me. People were saying, `Look, John, what's your problem?' There was one night in particular in Denver, when I threw my headphones across the stage and Jeff got mad and said, `Are you gonna sing or not?' And I said, `No, I'm NOT gonna sing.' I think that kinda made for an exciting show, something about that `Dammit, Jeff, you're going too fast!' and `You're going too slow!' I think that push-and-pull is what kept everything so electric."

When the Diary disbanded, Poe retreated to a spartan lifestyle. After a divorce he left Athens and eventually wound up in Midtown. "I narrowed everything down to the basics of what I need to do, so I could live at poverty level and have plenty of time to write and kinda go with the flow of life," he says quietly. "Then all of a sudden I'd get a big royalty check outa the blue, from somebody playing some song halfway across the world. That was great."