Full Tank of Gas

Bill & Pete, “Full Tank of Gas,”, from La Petite Orange (1992).

The House Carpenters, “Full Tank of Gas,”, from Bill Foreman, The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes (Live Recordings 1991-1997).

The Edsel Brothers + 1, “Full Tank of Gas“, recorded May 16, 2009, in Bill’s living room.

I got a full tank of gas
Got a full tank of gas
Got a body of metal
Got windows of glass
Got my foot on the pedal
It moves so fast
Take you out of my present
Put you into my past
Goodbye to your streetlights,
Cement and your grass
I’m leaving you, babe,
I got a full tank of gas

I got an engine of flame
Got an engine of flame
Call me a misfit
But don’t call me tame
I don’t remember this highway
They all look the same
I don’t remember your face
I forgot your first name
Goodbye to your causes,
Your books, and your games
I’m leaving you, babe,
I got an engine of flame

I got the wind in my face
Got the wind in my face
I can open the sunroof
And stare into space
I can run myself wild
I can go anyplace
I got all my money
I’ve packed my suitcase
Goodbye to your earrings,
Your bells, and your lace
I’m leaving you, babe,
I got the wind in my face

I got my head in the sky
Got my head in the sky
You can ask me what happened
But don’t ask me why
Tell me you’re hurt, girl,
But don’t start to cry
I’ve sprouted my wings
And now I’m going to fly
Goodbye to your movies,
Your dreams, and your lies
I’m leaving you babe,
I got my head in the sky

“Full Tank of Gas” is to me the first really good tune I’d ever written.  I had just finished my freshman year of college and was home in Del Mar, CA, for the summer, so this would have been mid-1988.  I went to the beach one day with my friends Ross and Dave Neglia, using separate cars, and after we’d finished we agreed to meet up for a bite at the Roberto’s taco shack on Carmel Valley Road.  You know the one…

In any event, I remember stopping at the light where Del Mar Heights Road intersected with the 101, and when I paused taking a look at the dashboard of the car.  The tank was full, and I kinda thought, “full tank of gas,” and pondered what a nice feeling it was to have a full tank of gas.  I can’t remember if I started writing the tune that evening or later, but having gotten a 4-track cassette recorder for my birthday that July, I cut a demo of the tune that summer, and it was far and away the best of the lot I had at that point.

The form of the tune is a blues, but it’s worth noting that this is the first time I’d ever done anything original with the blues form.  I was very deep into a fairly stereotypical late-teens-early-twenties white guy blues obsession, compounded by the fact that I could actually play the music and could play slide guitar better than anyone at Pitzer.  That is to say, I was a big tadpole in a small puddle near a little pond.  This to me was a great social advancement, however, and for that reason it meant a lot.

I’d written a couple things in high school that were not bad, and even if none of them were good enough to play publicly, I’d played cassette recordings of them for a few friends, which for me was pretty brave.  Arriving at Pitzer my freshman year, though, I actually formed a band in short order, called The High Plains Drifters, and we played a combination of blues covers, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” in particular, some original blues knockoffs I wrote that are moderately embarassing in hindsight, and some more poppy things, the chorus of one would ultimately become the chorus of “Bad & Good,” which was the second really stellar tune I finished, though that one a couple years later.  It was sort of a mess, actually, the band, largely because I didn’t understand what we were doing, on a social level.  That said, the band was fairly good and it had a harmonica player named Colin Epstein in it which added an authenticity to the proceedings I couldn’t myself provide.

I felt at the time like I was a really fantastic writer, but I also hadn’t actually written anything that was really any good.  It’s almost bizarre in hindsight that I felt I had something to say.  Nonetheless, I plugged away at tunes, writing lyrics that were alternately inane, maudlin, and on to something they hadn’t yet hit.  I was somewhat surprised, then, when I actually wrote this tune, and in the months, and it turned out, years, that followed, I was completely disturbed by it.  I have no idea why I hit this tune as well as I did, when I did it.  I wrote far above my actual technique at the time.  The whole notion of artistic inspiration is not a useful one when trying to produce art or explain its production, as far as I’m concerned, because it’s not at all concrete.  At best, “inspiration” is a way to shut off a discussion of process, and as such it’s a useful tool.  If an artist is in a conversation and the interlocutor is proving annoying or idiotic, one can turn the discussion to inspiration to avoid actually talking about art.  A real discussion of process necessarily focused on technique, which is concrete, though by no means static.

Realistically, “Full Tank of Gas” was me hitting the absolute limits of my technique at the time for, depending on how one wants to slice it, an entire tune or nearly and entire tune.  Most of the time a person doesn’t do one’s absolute best, but the nice thing about writing songs is that they’re not long, and one can finish a piece during a good stretch and have something finished and amazing.  That’s what happened here.  This tune was vastly better than anything I’d written up until that point, and when I played it for people upon my return to school, and more importantly yet when I started playing with Colin as a guitar and harmonica duo under the name “The Edsel Brothers,” I got more good feedback from that tune than literally anything I’d done in my life.  As you can imagine, that’s a big deal for a 19-year-old who veered from absolute self-confidence to despair, often quickly.  I don’t think I’d have given up on music if people didn’t respond, but it made me feel like I had something special, and I wanted to pursue it.

Colin and I played this tune and a few others at some affair at Pitzer’s Grove House, our first gig as the Edsel Brothers.  We introduced–this is silly and obvious in hindsight, and we laughed about this together a month ago when I was at his pad knocking out tunes (the recording of us above is not from our get-together at his place in June, but from a hootenanny at my pad the month before, and the performance above, ragged, was the first time we had played together since 1989 if memory serves, with Matthew Stratton playing some guitar as well)–the tune as an undiscovered gem by a great, unheralded bluesman named “Deaf Banana Washington,” without of course mentioning Blind Lemon Jefferson.  Washington was “the Beethoven of the Blues,” as the unmentioned Professor Longhair was “the Bach of Rock.”  Honestly, I think it was assumed that the joke would be obvious and probably to some people it was, but we were pleasantly surprised when a review of our performance popped up in the Pomona paper (one of a very few live performance reviews I’ve ever gotten, actually…I thought at the time it might be the start of a trend).  The review was positive generally, but absolutely gushing about our cover of “Full Tank of Gas,” which of course was not a cover and didn’t sound anything like an actual old blues tune–especially the lyrics–if you knew any old blues tunes.  Deaf Banana Washington was credited with authorship of the tune absolutely credulously, seamlessly in fact.

I was ecstatic, because it felt like for the first time I had a musical act that got the kind of attention I felt I deserved, and also that I liked myself.  I have never not absolutely loved playing with Colin Epstein, musically or–just as critically–personally.  However, we didn’t have a set of tunes, and having written such a stellar tune I cranked out a number of relatively inferior pieces to fill out a set.  Only one of those tunes I cranked out in the Fall of 1988 at Pitzer was any good at all, “Invisible Man,” the lyrics of which, admittedly less than “Full Tank of Gas” but solid nonetheless, were the only ones I wrote at that point that didn’t steal blues cliches.  “Invisible Man,” in a 4-track recording, was actually included on a Duckweed Records compilation–my brush with a label–and was well-liked a good ten years after its execution.

I became fairly despondent, and remember very clearly a pep talk by David, the drummer from the High Plains Drifters, who was a senior and who was a guy I really liked and looked up to, who very sensibly told me that I wasn’t a spent force and that I should stop freaking out so much.  Of course he was right, but I will go on record and say that I didn’t write another tune worth keeping until my junior year, in December if memory serves.  That tune was “Heart of Steel,” which was good if not great, but which, very unlike “Full Tank of Gas” actually led to me being able to write good tunes much more consistently.  That tune came out on the one Duckweed full release under my own name, which I plan on getting back up and available for download but which for the moment will have to wait as I tend to more recent projects.

Colin was two years ahead of me, so I lost my musical partner after sophomore year.  Ever the malcontent, I had decided I needed a break from Pitzer and stayed at home for the Fall semester of my junior year, coasted on my AP credit from high school, and took a couple courses at San Diego State University to keep on track, most interestingly one course in electronic music with a fantastic prof named Bob Willey, which basically got me access to a studio with a 4-track reel-to-reel machine.  More importantly, I got a job at Pannikin Coffee and Tea in Del Mar, and there met Peter Giuliano, whose musical interests overlapped but did not exactly coincide with mine, which is actually what makes for a perfect musical collaborator.Peter and I played together until 1997, and it was a truly fruitful collaboration.  We completed three projects together, two as Bill & Pete, La Petite Orange, recorded to my 4-track and released in 1992 and Hey Rhumbahead!, four songs recorded to 16-track reel in 1993, and then one as the House Carpenters, In the Choir of Primates, in 1995.

Playing the accordion, as Peter did, rather than the harmonica took it a bit away from what one expects of blues, which is good of course.  I am particularly pleased with how we end the song, using the flatted fifth of the scale to what to me is great effect.  Pete’s soloing, to which the live recording above will attest, began well in our collaboration and only improved with time.  By the time we’d recorded this I’d written a number of genuinely good tunes and had started to develop a real voice as a writer, and, I’ll note as well, it was only by this point in my life that my singing became a virtue–accepting my limitations–to my music rather than a liability.  I’d learned how to use my instrument.

One of the great problems in music at this point is that most music people actually consume, at least in this county, was never actually played.  Among other things I just finished the new Elijah Wald book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.  If you’re unfamiliar with Wald’s writing, it’s absolutely worth a read.  One point that comes through very clearly in the book is one I’d pondered again and again over the last two decades, namely what is lost when the music we hear was never actually performed, but was rather assembled.  I think I first started thinking about this when I read an interview with Robert Fripp, the last person one would superficially expect to take what some might call a luddite response to the modern recording process.  The second version of King Crimson had broken up a couple years before, and Fripp offered his diagnosis.  Discipline had been the end of a process of performance.  The group had assembled and had worked out its set over a series of live performances before cutting the record.  Indeed, Discipline was the best record that group cut, it’s widely agreed.  Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, Fripp noted, were recorded prior to tours, with diminishing returns.  Fripp, though people talk about his work largely in its technological aspects, has always been about performance and the relationship between the musicians.  For whatever reason he indulges a technological curiosity, but had he chosen to stick with an acoustic guitar I imagine the real import of his work, the attempt to keep the social relationship between players central in musical production, would have remained the same.  Wald mentions an anecdote in which Mitch Miller stresses the importance, in his productions, of actually having musicians together playing his famously idiosyncratic arrangments.  Overdubbing, in critical ways, closes as many doors as it opens.

The version of “Full Tank of Gas” on La Petite Orange was definitely overdubbed, but it was something we’d played together by that time for a couple of years.  It shows.  Overdubbing is not in itself a bad thing, but if it replaces an intimacy between musician and song it’s problematic, at best, and trickery at worst.

More interesting, to me, however, is the live version, taken from the final House Carpenters’ gig, on St. Paddy’s day, no less, 1997.  By that point, the group, which in that format included not only Pete and myself but Danny and Vidal Cesena, bass and drums respectively, as well as Chris Monty on guitar, were absolutely locked into each other.  We would at times count tunes off in performance, but as often as not we simply called them and then someone started.  Arrangements were so solid that we as often as not, especially on a tune like this with its relatively simple structure, discarded all rehearsed details, keeping a sketch, filling in detail off-the-cuff.  I came up with the guitar riff that anchors this performance right as I started playing it–again, the flatted five, but used to a different effect than the 4-track version.  That I cut what is for my money the best guitar solo I’ve ever recorded is to me an added benefit.