DESCRIPTION:
"Fat City" (c) 1975 Bruce Scofield

I wrote this nostalgic documentary tune "Fat City" after living there. It was recorded in the 1980's on a Tascam cassette recorder using a drum machine for the beat. I put it on a cassette LP I self-published in the early 1990's called "Local Space." This is the only recording I have of it -- I don't remember ever playing it live in a band. The photos are scans of slides I took when I lived there.

Fat City was a couple of old dilapidated duplexes on 88 acres of farmland just outside New Brunswick, NJ. From about 1969 to 1972 a bunch of us suburban hippies lived there, slipping under the radar of the police and health department. The four living spaces were named Consumer, Eggplant, Watchdog and Air Science. There were pets and runaways wandering around, small-scale agricultural projects, band practices, bootleg car repairs, Frizbee tossings, communal feasts and some people even smoked pot. A few residents even went to college. It was freedom for most of us there, and also experience in communal living. Fat City ended when the place was leveled for construction of an industrial park.