How Jason Molina Charmed Will Oldham and First Got Signed

In this excerpt from the forthcoming Jason Molina book *Riding with the Ghost, *Erin Osmon traces Molina’s early path from undergrad raconteur to Will Oldham’s pen pal.
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Molina as an upperclassman at Oberlin College, pictured with the four-string tenor guitar he played on Songs: Ohia’s Black Album. (Photo courtesy of Darcie Molina)

In her forthcoming book Riding with the Ghost, Erin Osmon traces the curious path taken by Jason Molina, from his childhood outside Cleveland through his harrowing final days in and out of rehab for alcohol abuse. The beloved singer-songwriter’s life is a now well-worn tale of hard shifts and dark blues: His restless periods of productivity were met by disquieting stretches of silence, his unthinkably sparse solo work turned at one point towards rollicking Southern rock with a rotating cast of vocalists, and his moniker changed to anything but his own name (from Songs: Ohia to Magnolia Electric Co. in 2003). Osmon navigates these twists and turns seamlessly, telling the story with intimacy via Molina’s loved ones. And like Molina’s own writing, Osmon is at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, subtle and visceral.

Among Riding with the Ghost’s most memorable passages are instances of Molina’s fandom, from his unconditional love for Sade and his evangelizing of Kraftwerk to Damien Jurado, to his edict to bandmates to study Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush. Molina’s passion rings through these pages, nowhere more distinctly than in the retelling of the fateful interaction that launched his career while studying at Oberlin College (where he was known as “Sparky”). Will Oldham—AKA Bonnie “Prince” Billy, then operating as Palace Brothers—became one of Molina’s first fans, after being handed a mysterious tape by Molina’s buddies following a show and taking the singer-songwriter’s advice to write him a letter. Two years later, Oldham would release Molina’s first single on his Drag City subsidiary—a thread picked up soon thereafter by Oldham superfans the Swanson Brothers, who co-founded the Secretly Canadian label. “He seemed so mythological at the time,” Ben Swanson recalls of Molina, “We thought his music was perfect.” Needless to say, the Swansons weren’t the only ones who thought so.


In the 1994–95 school year, Molina moved from the dorms into a shared dive at 181 West College Avenue—dubbed “House of Boys” due to its lack of women roommates and the maturity level of its inhabitants. Here, Molina wrote the song “Boys” as a jab at his older roommates who treated him like a little brother. Tom Colley from WOBC lived there, along with Jeff Panall and Dave LaCrone from Chicken Hatchet and a few other roommates. The house was an incubator of creativity and hijinks, where local bands often played in the kitchen or living room. “That house was ground zero for a certain gang,” explained roommate Eoin Russell, who became infamous for wearing his Harley Davidson black leather pants 666 days in a row. “We just started hanging out and overlapping, and here was an extended crew of about 50 people.” Russell and Molina especially bonded over their deep affection for heavy metal and classic rock, acts like Metallica and Motorhead, but also Deep Purple and Boston, “which were not the coolest things in the mid-’90s,” Russell added. Russell and Molina looked the part, too, with their long hair.

The friends bonded over music and art, but also teenage-boy mischief. This often involved drinking, and to excessive amounts. But no one witnessed Molina partaking beyond one or two beers. “I knew him as sort of a teetotaler or a total lightweight,” friend Max Winter said. “In the fall of ’94 some buddies and I went to Cleveland to go to the Great Lakes Brewery, and he wanted us to bring him back a growler of Elliot Ness Porter,” he added. “He drank like a quarter of it and passed out. He seemed really unfamiliar with the process of drinking.”

Though he was surrounded by creative peers, many felt that in general Molina was a loner. Laser focused on music, he rarely spoke of his life outside the artist and musician persona he was cultivating. In college Molina became obsessed with the notion of authenticity, the product of feeling stifled by the conformity that he felt in Lorain, where many of his peers didn’t appreciate the making of art and music. In contrast, at Oberlin Molina was allowed to be anything he wanted. And the blue-collar artist image he became was, to him, his true self, even if others felt it was performative or meticulously crafted. Friends often razzed him for the cowboy hat he wore, as there was nary a ranch to be found in northern Ohio. But Molina developed a lifelong love and fascination with headwear and often asked for recommendations for the best hats to wear onstage and the best haberdasheries in the cities where he toured. He especially admired Hank Williams’s short-brimmed Stetson.

Molina made friends through playing music, but he held most everyone at an emotional arm’s distance. Conversations never ran much deeper than records and the stories that helped shape his personal mythology. “I think Jason befriended me because of my gear,” friend Eoin Russell said. The only person who knew much about Molina’s personal life was Anne Grady. Even then, she never saw where he grew up or met his parents, even though they were a short drive away. Instead they meshed largely under the banner of art and art making. Grady, and her academic cum no bullshit outlook, was at once a very romantic and very grounding presence for Molina. She could accompany him to museums, but also help him with life logistics like financial aid. And oftentimes she did, as Molina was horrible at managing money and often spent his paychecks as soon as they arrived.

Molina’s penchant for storytelling cranked up to ten in the company of his housemates and their extended friend group. One of the most beloved Molina tall tales involved his high school prom photo with then girlfriend Shannon Dickson. His roommates Jeff Panall and Tom Colley found it in a box in their living room shortly after Molina moved in. “He was in a tux and his hair was all done up,” Panall recalled. “So of course we put it up on the wall.” When Molina returned home and received the de facto razzing about the pubescent relic, he responded soberly that it was difficult for him to look at the photograph because his date had died in a terrible car wreck soon after that night. Guilt ridden, Panall and Colley left the photo on the wall but eased up on the teasing. That is, until Shannon Dickson showed up on their front porch. “Our housemate was home one day, and someone knocked on the door,” Colley explained. “It was the woman from the picture.” Dickson was very much alive and living just twenty minutes away in Lorain.

“There’s a guy named Molina in the band Crazy Horse [drummer Ralph Molina] that Sparky would say is his uncle or some sort of relative,” Colley said. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. I never figured it out.” Molina told some friends that Cincinnati Reds outfielder Bernie Carbo was his cousin and that his dad was a professional baseball player. He also insisted that he overheard a member of the Oberlin city council saying that their friend Rob Sullivan was going to be evicted from his house, which never happened. “He was this insane instigator and clown who was very attuned to the absurd in everyday life,” friend and future bandmate Dan MacAdam added.

There were also stories that didn’t serve Molina at all. “He claimed that a friend of ours whose last name was Porter, that her family ran an inn called the Porterhouse Inn, and that’s where we got the name of the steak,” Max Winter recalled. “That wasn’t true, but I believed it. It took a while for me to realize that he was constantly making things up.” Molina’s story weaving rubbed some people the wrong way, but most simply accepted it as an extension of his eccentricities—with affection, even. “People love to hear stories, and Jason loved to tell stories,” his friend Geof Comings said. The best raconteurs never allow facts to get in the way of their craft.

Shortly after Molina took up quarters at House of Boys, another roommate, Todd Renschler, moved in. “I was practicing drums in the living room, and Jason came downstairs from his room and plugged in,” he said. “We didn’t say anything to each other, just began playing.” Though the two never spoke much of their process or goals, Molina, most often on ukulele or a four-string Stella tenor guitar he’d grown fond of, and Renschler on drums, traversed campus in search of shows, or not shows, playing anywhere they could, like dormitory commons areas, the radio station, house parties, and the Feve. They became an inseparable duo.

Molina was relentless in his pursuit of music. “I never knew him to be studying,” Renschler added. “I never knew him to be anything but walking around playing his guitar or ukulele.” He often joined Molina in one of his preferred recording locales—the bathroom in the dorm across the street from House of Boys. Molina grabbed a tape recorder and his ukulele, and Renschler a hand drum or a metal pot, and the two worked out Molina’s sparse songs among the sinks and toilets, recording the results to cassette. “He’d song write in any bathroom,” friend Eoin Russell added. “He must have tried 100 bathrooms on campus.”

Before he landed on the name Songs: Ohia, Molina performed publicly under Bleem, his own name, or his nickname Sparky, often recording to cassette tapes adorned with his sketches of crossbows, fleurs-de-lis, or whatever insignia intrigued him at the moment. He often labeled the tapes with the antecedent Songs: and then a successive descriptor of the mood or inspiration of the songs, such as Songs: Goth or Songs: George Jones. At Oberlin he began in earnest his pattern of waking up early to write, sing, and strum, like 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. early. In a 2010 interview he explained, “Sometimes I really do wake up with a song in my head and I have to race to an instrument or write down a few lines.” He certainly didn’t operate on a College Dude Standard Time, which didn’t always bode well with his friends and roommates like Tom Colley, whose bedroom window faced the front porch of House of Boys, where Jason posted up for his morning ritual. “He slept as little as any person I’ve known,” friend Max Winter noted.

**The J-card from the only tape Molina released under the Bleem moniker. (Courtesy of Tom Colley)

In love with Will Oldham’s newest LP at the time, Tom Colley, Jeff Panall, and a few other of Molina’s friends bought tickets for a Palace Brothers show November 13, 1994, at the Euclid Tavern in Cleveland. Molina couldn’t attend because he was about a month shy from twenty-one. The friends had decided that the Palace Brothers and their friend Sparky were kindred spirits, and so Molina placed a demo in Colley’s trust with instructions to hand it to Will Oldham. “I can’t remember if it was his idea or if someone else told him to do it,” Colley added. “But I remember I was somewhat embarrassed and shy at the end of the show when I was like, ‘Here’s my friend’s cassette, you should listen to it.’”

Inside was a note from Molina, which he signed Sparky. He invited Oldham to send him letters. Intrigued by Molina’s demo, Oldham penned a response postcard requesting more songs. Molina sent another tape and labeled it “Songs: Ohia.” Among the two tapes were songs “East Hearts Divided,” “Soul,” “Freedom Pt. 2,” and “September is 17.” Oldham chose “Soul” and “Freedom Pt. 2” for Molina’s debut single on his Palace Records imprint of Chicago-based indie label Drag City, which also doled out sublabels for its artists Jim O’Rourke (Dexter’s Cigar) and David Grubbs (Blue Chopsticks).

The two songs embody the spirit of Molina and roommate Todd Renschler’s bathroom jam sessions. “Freedom Pt. 2” opened with a heaving scream from Molina’s gut, which introduced stripped-down, ghostly ukulele repetitions and Renschler’s hand drumming. “And I must walk these roads to freedom / Cause I can hear them call my name,” Molina sang straight, like a battle cry from a previous era. “Soul” is confessional, Molina explaining much of himself through the lyrical repetition:

I love what I know about passion
I love what I know about mercy

I love what I know about patience
I love what I know about soul
And I know you

*Molina’s voice was pure and unafraid, particularly for an artist who’d never been pressed to record. It was as if that voice had been waiting for the moment since the day Molina summoned it from inside himself that day in his car seat at age three. The opportunity to be on Will Oldham’s record label was the stuff of dreams to Molina and his friends, though Jason, notoriously private, kept the news close to his chest, boasting of it to practically no one. News made the rounds, though. A flier for a 1996 Oberlin house show would even tout Jason as a “Palace Records recording artist.” *


Erin Osmon’s Riding with the Ghost is out May 15.