Tamra Davis' film about her friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Radiant Child, recently became available on Netflix streaming, so viewings have been pretty frequent around here in the last week or so. One of the main interviewees in the documentary is downtown NYC stalwart, early associate of Basquiat and renaissance man Michael Holman, who tells a funny story about starting a band with his friend at a dance party despite the fact that neither knew very much about music. That band, which also included Nicholas Taylor and Justin Thyme, recorded a handful of genre-less songs that echo early ’80s New York in a specific and rare way, but ultimately drifted into obscurity as a footnote to the art superstar's biography. Holman recently gathered Gray's songs, one of which is the pleasantly creepy "Mockingbird," for a release on Plush Safe Records and you can buy it from Other Music.
Gray, "Mockingbird"