I CANNOT TELL A LIE

I had a dream last night that I needed to perform “Baby Got Back” for some serious purpose (like a preventing-the-end-of-the-world purpose; like Jeff Goldblum as Quirky Scientist was there, dumbing it down for me, and I slowly repeated it back to him, but in that sassy yet streetwise way that I have, when – oh snap! –it suddenly made sense how the fate of the world depended on me) – and then I could not remember the first line of the song.

Re: Beastie Boys

There are several historic musical moments that are probably destined to make my generation (hitting our mid-30s/early 40s now) the most annoying generation to hear wax poetic about the music of our youth since the Baby Boomers. One of those moments is the mainstreaming of rap and hip-hop: Licensed To Ill (along with Run DMC’s King of Rock) was one of the first albums I felt I little afraid of, that I had to listen to quietly and hide from my parents, because music was dangerous and misunderstood, and prompted soul-churning debates among my elementary school and junior high nerd cohort about what constitutes “music” – while Bon Jovi could clearly play their instruments, the Beastie Boys were “just saying stuff”. My first (ironic airquote) “band” (unairquote) started in the 4^th grade, reaching our commercial peak in the sixth – at which point we decide we should actually learn to play instruments, prompting me to pick up a guitar for the first time. We reached the lunchroom consensus that “rap” was not “music” and therefore we did not like it – and almost immediately we started writing raps. Licensed to Ill was funny, groundbreaking, dumb, and exhilarating. I once had a cassette with Paul’s Boutique on one side and I have no idea what on the other, because I fast-forwarded through Side B every time to get back to Paul’s Boutique. Check Your Head challenged expectations during a time of ever-changing expectations, inspired everyone I knew to start wearing stocking caps year-round, and was a great record. Ill Communication was one of the albums that completely defined the Summer of 1994, my first summer after high school, in all its wonder and awfulness. My 20s arrived and with it a black cloud of depression – not the cool, teenage, Cure-listening, “this makes me more interesting” sort of depression, but a seemingly groundless and frequently debilitating void. I hid it from everyone I cared about, until about four years later, temping at a pharmaceutical I wrote to my brother: “I’ve been depressed.” I spent a little time working for my dad, primarily driving around replacing the fire extinguishers in a drugstore chain in all grayest cities in Upstate New York. It afforded my long hours in the van by myself, which was exactly what I wanted. Drifting between radio stations, I heard “Intergalactic” for the first time. It was that weird drifting time for the collective pop culture of music – hearing the song, which resemble nothing so strongly as the rhymes we wrote in my sixth grade band, with the time honored but dated flow of “Lead-MC-says-a-line, Everyone-else-shouts-the-last-word/the-rhyme” – I assumed I was hearing a Fun Lovin’ Criminals song. My cohort was graduating college and we were all deep in the funk of post-collegiate what-to-do, despite the fact that it was the Late 90s Internet Boom, and we gathered regularly at a local bar that serve 50-cent juice glasses of the local brewery’s bilgiest bilge, playing shuffleboard. Most of my friends were about to enter the cocoon of Law or Medical school – for the next couple years we’d have relateable stories for each other about middle-class subsistence living, but ultimately they emerged as doctors and lawyers, all at once burning the sweatshirts of their undergad universities and buying houses outside Boston about the same time that I – pursuing the music dream without any real gusto – moved into a hallway. Over juice glasses of beer, my friend Ryan, always savvier and smarter than me, explained to me why Hello Nasty was a great record – but it was too late. The nineties – our Goonies-time of chasing buried treasures hidden beneath the ordinariness of our lives – were nearly over, and I simultaneous hit the moment where I didn’t really care for the Beastie Boys and talking about music became a thing I did with my friends instead of listening to it. And so the Beastie Boy has taken me from the first flush of love at 11 years old, through danger, through angst, through unexpected beauty, and there I was at 22 – jaded and unhappy. Looking back, on my involvement in music as a very young man (say 16-26), I realize that I didn’t have the fire, the energy, the good taste, the skill, or the desire for it. Released from those dreams, as a person in my mid-late 30s – I can acknowledge how happy it makes me to be content with being a fan and a dilettante. But I was involved in the music scene, wherever I lived, and I’ve met some very talented people, people much more knowledgeable and skilled than me. Still, even the most famous band that ever travelled in my orbit is just barely famous - making their living on their fifth mediocre album of increasingly banal pop-punk; yet they were the ones who “made it” and in them I can very clearly see a drive for success and slightly brighter spark of talent than anyone else possessed. To that end, I cannot imagine how wonderful it must have felt to live life as Adam Yauch – to be there for those exhilarating moments (the birth of hip-hop, the birth of hardcore, the alternative explosion) and to have leapt into the fray in those moments, to literally be one of the people pointing the direction that the future of music would take. Perhaps because the Beastie Boys so frequently acknowledge – from the plain-spoken, self-centered, and boastful podium of hip hop – that they’re incredibly lucky; that they’re professional goofballs; that they won the lottery, I'm not bitterly envious. Their swaggering always belied an ever-present nervous shrug of “why me?”  As fans we wordlessly answered – in the face of their innovation, their refusal to play it boring or safe, and their open invitation to join them for the length of a record – “because you’re great.”

SOMETHING SOMETHING BURT WARD… THIS THING WRITES ITSELF

We had a baby. From what I’ve heard – and now learned firsthand in the couple weeks – this changes everything. Indeed, I have picked up a guitar about three times in the past two weeks and only when baby is sleeping. The sweet albeit modestly appointed recording space I’d begun putting together – as the oasis, the “me time” escape, the geographical separation of family and music – has been getting more use storing boxes (from car seats, strollers, etc.) than as a home studio. This was probably inevitable. When my wife and I met, working as summer camp counselors, seven years ago, the head counselors described – as staff orientation ended – that the coming weeks would be “the longest days of the shortest summer of your life”. With parenthood the days are ten times longer; the summers will inevitably be shorter.

Eventually, I’m sure we’ll reclaim some semblance of personal time from parenthood. Not much, I’m sure – but I’m actually excited about the prospect of forced time limits on my long-standing Achilles’ Heel of interminable recording, mixing, and remixing. My friends who have some to parenthood before me still make music – the drummer of my last “serious” band toured for three years while raising a 2-5 year old and having another child in that time. I would inevitably be a poor, frustrated, and distracted parent if I failed to continue doing things I love and sharing that aspect of life with my child.

For now though, the Kiddo is King. We sleep in short shifts, we cry unexpectedly, we are thrilled by wet diapers (after an early dehydration scare, you’ve never seen two people give a child with more encouragement for regularly peeing himself), we shower baby with praise over his 1lb weight gain at his two-week pediatric check-up, we survive on water and saltines and the meals that arrive in foil and take-out containers. In the end, I hope that fatherhood makes me a better and more prolific musician – providing me a reason to try to be happy and satisfied with my music and a reason to get things done, in order to get on to the more important job at hand.

MURDERGRAM

I often forget it sometimes but The Misfits' Walk Among Us is one of my favorite albums. I'm not sure exactly how  - because on many, many levels its just terrible. Bad production, bad lyrics, bad playing, bad conceptual idea for a band. Oh god, its awful. But even as I write this, while listening to Walk Among Us straight through for the first time in probably 10 or 12 years (via Spotify), I'm laughing and smiling and utterly transported (I'm off to Narnia! Thanks, Glenn!).

Already past the age of taking The Misfits seriously - in 1999, done with college, living alone for the first time, working a temp job with a giant pharmaceutical company - some friends of mine bought me a copy of Walk Among Us after I looked after their two-year old son one afternoon. The preceding year, I had only listened to one cassette in my car - Radiohead's Ok Computer on one side, Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique on the other. I always fast-forwarded through the Ok Computer side - not sure why. Paul's Boutique is another one of those albums that's absolutely genius but captures some growing pains - the Beasties weren't yet doing ironically terrible lyrics: Paul's Boutique frequently features rhymes that are bad and sincere. The point is that I was obsessing; I was unhappy with music and life in general, and looking backwards. I didn't get TV in my apartment and I was scared to be there by myself, because I'd just seen the Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, so I just listened to The Misfits and read comic books until I was too tired to stay awake anymore.

Holy crap - Spotify's constant commercials are horrible. Their business model must be based on annoying people into paying for their service. Ok - every song on this album is awesome and horrible. Such a come-hither velvety croon on the lyric "collect the heads of little girls and put them on my wall."Also, it takes like 22 minutes to listen to this whole album. I think a brilliant musical undertaking would be reworking all the lyrics to Walk Among Us so that they actually become the romantic-movie cliches that all the horror-movie cliches seem to partially imply.

CRANKYPANTS

In reading over my posts from the past year or so, I noticed I've gone from "moderately cranky" to "super cranky". Considering I pretty much write about myself and music, that's kind of alarming, indicating a much deeper level of unhappiness than I think I'd actually admit to. In the past six months, we've started looking to leave Texas; however, in the current economic climate, and as grown-ups, we can't simply uproot, throw out clothes in a duffle bag and just go. So for the first time in my life, I'm being tortured by the itch to leave a place and the inability to do so. So also, for the first time in my life, my crankiness seems tied to broader Concerns About Life, rather than Generalized Failure as an artist/ musician/ whatever.

But I finished my three songs (see previous post) and that was a load off my back. I did something; I whittled some little sliver off the fencepost of my ambition. The immediate effects - well - I can't really tell. I'm not really any happier I guess, but at this point, music hasn't been a daily focus of my life. But also, I'm not as cranky - on a daily basis - as this blog might lead you to believe.

R.E.M. BREAK UP

Arguing “This is Awesome” vs. “This Sucks” about REM’s “Stand” song and video in my junior high cafeteria drew philosophical lines in my head and heart that went way beyond music and – for better or worse – went on to define my life in probably too many ways. Like many folks, I’ve probably written off REM for at least ten years – but watching this video reminds me how much I love them. Absolutely fell in love with these guys in the last 30 seconds of the video – when they make their only appearance: the bad haircuts, the anti-fashion, the genuine human ugliness of their faces that so clearly separated them from Jon Bon Jovi and George Michael. I remember my best friend in high school calling up after he’d bought Automatic for the People to describe it to me, song by song, and telling me “Everybody Hurts” was the “worst, dumbest, cheesiest song you’ve ever heard – except its incredible.” Though I kind of wish they’d called it quits before Mike Mills started wearing Nudie suits or maybe when Bill Berry quit, that was their decision. Enjoy your break-up, you amazing bastards.

NEW RECORDINGS: ENJOY THE SUMMER...

Enjoy The Summer, It Will Pass By Quickly
Download at Bandcamp | SoundCloud

You're Not Dangerous At All by Sinners, Repent!

The Boys Won't Sleep by Sinners, Repent!

Summertime by Sinners, Repent!

These are the first three songs I'm releasing from the Enjoy The Summer, It Will Pass By Quickly collection. There are going to be more songs, but they'll come piece by piece over the next couple years. It seems like a reasonable way to release an album in these wild days of the not-too-distant future. Flying cars and nanobots and 4th-dimensional record releases. These three songs represent a concerted effort I've made over the past couple months to undo my own bad habits by finishing and releasing my recordings. I had originally intended to complete 5-7 songs and have them properly mastered - but in the interest in handing in my half-assed homework for C- instead of an incomplete F, here are the first three. More will follow. Eventually.

I probably can't adequately stress the importance of "summer" to my childhood and adolescence (which is why, instead, I'm writing a bunch of songs about it). Economy, entertainment, enlightenment, romance, hate, heartbreak, etc. all spun from the summer. My childhood/teenage friends and I - reunited by social media, trading pithy commentary on major life-events and posting YouTube videos of Smurfs or whatever - have been getting a bit misty-eyed and nostalgic about growing up in our very small towns. Its all very quaint and simple and endearing and intangibly American in retrospect, instead of being suffocating, small-minded, boring, frustrating and invariably tragic like it was at the time. In writing these songs, I'm trying to walk the line between the blind pessimism and solipsistic worldview of youth and the selective memory and broad forgiveness of adulthood.

As an adult, its a well-earned right to enjoy a summer day by cracking a beer or stealing away somewhere cool and quiet with your sweetheart - and which is wonderful. As a teenager, it was impossible to crack a beer or find 15-minutes on a couch with your sweetheart without getting hassled - so when you did, that was wonderful, too. But let's not all turn into weeping softies about it, OK?

Specific thanks to Nash Grey and Chris Patterson, who wrote sweet guitar licks for "You're Not Dangerous At All", and Chris Cloud  and Ross who let me record vocals and mix at their house, in the only air-conditioned room, and helped with handclaps and enthusiasm.