“Imagine You’re Flying,” from The Little Band (recorded 1992, released 1997).

“Imagine You’re Flying/September,” performed by the Little Band, from The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes (recorded 1993, released 1997).

Late at night, when the sun goes down
And the evening spreads its wings,
I’m sitting down upon the shoreline
Just a-changin’ my guitar strings.
I play, oh I play to the seagulls
Though they can’t know what I say.
It does not begin to bother me.
It doesn’t really matter anyway.
I left from the place where I came from
And I settled in the West.
It just happened like an accident.
It ain’t the worst and it ain’t the best.
The world, oh the world is a wheel
And it spun me ’round and ’round.
When I returned into my senses,
This was the place that I had found.

Back at home, I’m a poor, poor boy
And I play for all the passers by.
When they tossed to me their empty pennies
I didn’t stop to even blink an eye.
My heart, oh my heart’s now a window,
My mind a hall of crystal mirrors
Because I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears.
I left from the place where I came from.
I try to tear it from my mind.
Today, nobody tosses me pennies.
It always seemed to me a bit unkind.
My name, oh my name is now useless.
For it is just another sound
Like my hand across my instrument,
Like the rain that falls upon the ground.

This tune, when I wrote it, seemed like a really big deal to me, and in hindsight I think it actually was.  I was a senior at Pitzer, and by this point I’d actually written a fair number of good tunes, having even cut my first serious demo, which I was sure would have publishing execs clamoring to sign this brave new songwriter, at the end of my junior year.  Obviously, that didn’t happen.  What did happen was that I wrote a bunch of mediocre tunes in the fall of my senior year, trying hard to “progress,” as I conceived it at the time, beyond where I was with those first five good tunes I’d written.  To qualify that last sentence, I’d actually come up with a decent tune in the summer prior to that year, called “I Travel Alone,” which I’ve never included on an album but which is something of which I’m not embarrassed.

It wasn’t a good year for me, that senior year, writing, now that I look back.  I probably would have felt better about myself if I were drinking a lot, but truth be told I’d gotten pretty sick of the college party atmosphere and though I did have a fair amount of Guinness with my friends I really wasn’t overdoing it in the least.  I was gaining weight—20 pounds—but that was because I’d grown so sick of dorm food that I was eating at In-‘n’-Out Burger at least three times a week, and EZ-Out at least once in the same time.

Peter Giuliano and I had a discussion at one point fairly late in our collaboration that our rate of growth as we got along in things slowed as writers.  We’d done La Petite Orange in 1992, after a couple years working together on stuff that in hindsight was crap (at least, I’ll say that my stuff was crap), even though it was the best we could do at the time.  Going from utter crap in my case to really good stuff was the biggest leap.  La Petite Orange still stands up, excepting I think my closing tune.  Hey Rhumbahead! was a huge leap up, though, which at the same time was sufficiently less developed than In the Choir of Primates that the leap to the House Carpenters record would have been unpredictable to anyone not actually in the band.  We felt we had great things in us but you wouldn’t know it from hearing the two Bill and Pete recordings.  That said, the difference between Hey Rhumbahead! and In the Choir of Primates wasn’t nearly as big as the crap I was producing before La Petite Orange and La Petite Orange itself.  Had the House Carpenters made it through our second record, it would have definitely been better than In the Choir of Primates.  All of our new tunes were better than all our tunes on Choir—and I included all but one of the ones I had for that second record on mostly The Bathroom Mirror, with one ending up on The Duck Hunter.

The curve described above was in full effect my senior year, but I had no idea at the time how it worked.  The tunes that ended up on that first demo were a huge leap for me, and because I wrote them within about a four-month period (if you except that a good portion of “Bad and Good” had been written my freshman year), I felt that all of a sudden I’d figured out songwriting and should have been able to keep up that pace of development indefinitely.  Much to my chagrin, that wasn’t the case.  I have a number of tunes from that fall that, I promise you, will not see a general release in my lifetime.  I do not want to hear what people say.  One, “What Your Heart Can See,” was included on Mind Monkey, the compilation of my stuff that came out on the late, lamented Duckweed records, but I defy anyone to plausibly tell me it wasn’t the weakest tune on the record.  In a pretty vain attempt to coast through my senior year, I did an independent study with a prof I really liked in “songwriting,” in which I was to journal my progress.  I ended up getting the worst grade I’d gotten in anything since my freshman year, because I was in no mood to be reflective about my process, such as it was, because everything I was writing was either mediocre or total crap.  I think I was a bit of a disappointment to the prof.

Nothing really changed for me, concretely, in the spring, but in hindsight I mellowed out a little bit which really was what was needed.  If I could point to anything that might have jogged me a bit out of my slump, it was a creative writing class I took.  The professor was interesting.  I’ve talked with other people about him and there seems to be a consensus that he really did not have much to teach: two things, to be precise.  Pretty sweet life for only having two things to teach.  He was a Joyce scholar, too, and as much as I love Joyce I also know that in academia one way a person can carve a niche if you’re not really that bright is to specialize in something that people know of or about but don’t and never will know.  God forbid you should study something people actually engage in, because that would put you in danger of having your bluff called.

That said, the two things this guy had to teach were actually worth learning, though so painfully obvious in hindsight.  Basically, he told us, as writers, to edit, and to show rather than say things.  The first should be news only to rock ‘n’ roll songwriters.  There is so much nonsense that gets tossed about to everyone’s detriment when it comes to writing songs that it can be—definitely was—difficult for a young person to use common sense.  I remember reading an article about Neil Young around this time which made the point that Neil doesn’t edit.  He wants—I can’t vouch for the veracity of this report, only that it was reported—to preserve the spontaneity of creation, apparently.  When I read that, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I took this course, I thought to myself, “well, it shows.”  Neil has indeed at times hit it well in his writing, but he’s put more crap out than anyone else I know of with his level of a reputation.  And this all before “Let’s Roll.”  It may be a goal in making art to produce something so internally coherent that it seems or feels to have simply appeared spontaneously, without effort.  Getting there, however, is the result of effort, and cutting off that effort before a piece has achieved the kind of internal coherence art demands is idiotic, as well as dishonest if one tries to pass it off as a serious attempt to communicate.  My take-away, though, from the discussion, was that there wasn’t anything wrong with me if I didn’t hit it on the first try with a tune.  On the contrary, it’s normal to need to edit.  If only rock ‘n’ rollers as a group understood this and practiced it, we’d all be better off.

The second imperative the creative writing prof presented—to show rather than tell—was, I know in hindsight, the most typical lesson one gets in an intro creative writing course anywhere.  That said, I needed the lesson.  If you listen to the words on the songs on that first demo, all good tunes some better than others, they much less than my work since make use of clear imagery.  There’s a lot of emotions bandied about, and clever lines, and even a moderate coherence, structural and thematic, in each tune, but none of them give the sense of place that were I to claim one particular virtue I would claim for my music.  In any event, it was with this tune that I really grounded the song in place—not a particular city or location of some other sort, but a sense left with the listener that actual things were happening in the tune in a particular spot.

Interestingly, the song itself, while one I’ve always liked, isn’t one of my very best.  Some of it is borrowed, lyrically: as much as I hate to admit it, I had bought Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints, understanding little at the time of how problematic his whole project was and how absurd it was for him to take it upon himself to delve into Third Worlders’ spirituality (spirituality, that is, in the abstract, which isn’t spiritual at all, but, rather, a good selling point to disaffected, college-educated white people in Manhattan and San Francisco).  Paul Simon made the biblical reference, to Little Moses, keeping things Judeo-Christian enough not to freak out his record-buying public:

Down among the reeds and rushes
A baby boy was found

Trying to come up with some sort of spiritual vibe in my tune, I cribbed his line, which of course wasn’t really his anyway:

Now I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears

The song itself was about the simplest good tune I’d yet written.  The trick to it, a simple one, is the E7sus4 chord on the vamp and then as the first chord of the verse, which itself contained only four chords, repeated four times.  Very few things are as effective as an interesting chord, repeated at length.

There’s glass in my hand

I’m spilling into the sand

My wife won’t understand

When she hears this

I stumble back on the street

And our eyes meet

I get weak in the feet

And I’m down

I hear the breeze sound

My hair hits the ground

It seems we’re found

From that shouting

I see your chest rise

And your beautiful thighs

My sight’s compromised

So I stop looking

I hear someone’s words

They mix with calling birds

But from what think I have heard

They’re getting distant

Now I wish I knew

If I were false or true

To whomever of you

I was meant for

In my wife’s curling hair

On every step of our stairs

I think there’s more there

Than I’d noticed

I recall that hotel

And your perfume’s smell

Could my wife tell

I’d gone missing?

My hands grab the dirt

I imagine your skirt

And I think this must hurt

But I can’t feel it

I see the world through a veil

As my eyesight fails

I feel I’m entering a jail

Without exit

I feel myself shift

And my body lifts

But I’m gone in some drift

And I’ll stay here

If I could I’d shout:

I sold everything out

I’ve got nothing but doubt

From this miserable tryst

I had had this tune in mind for some time before I finished “Chevy w/Balding Tires” in 2003.  I’d thought of it as the last tune on the record, and keeping with the Riverside County location (the album, it should be noted, consisted of songs that all took place in and around Riverside, CA: I’d for some time wanted to do for my town, Riverside, what Joyce did for Dublin), I imagined the car accident in the tune taking place on the 60 freeway heading east just before you exit on Nason St. in Moreno Valley.  Nason was the exit I took to get to the first school I worked at, so the stretch was very vivid in my mind, and still is.  Why I’d use it for this purpose I won’t try to understand too deeply, but that’s nonetheless what I’d pictured in my head.

In any event, I have a version–I would have to dig it up and I think remix it–of “The Caddy,” which currently closes the record in a solo, acoustic version, all done up with a full arrangement, including me playing my patented faux-mambo drums.  I’d intended, actually, to re-record the version I’d finished, to give the arrangement a bit more in terms of dynamics, so the thing I have is not what would have ultimately been released anyway.  The instrumental on the record, “My Favorite Recipie (for Dawn)” would not have been included, though I’d have definitely made it available at some point, and “The Caddy” would have been a strong tune somewhere in the middle of the album, probably the late middle.  “On Every Step of Our Stair” would have been a great closer, I think, in hindsight a bit predictable, as it has a sort-of-1967 climaxing arrangement, or one with my flavor in any event, but a strong one nonetheless, because the tune is quite good, to me a better tune than “The Caddy,” in fact.

My problem was that I’d started hitting something of a wall in my writing, trying to keep everything as taut as possible while at the same time fitting things in thematically to the album.  For the life of me, I couldn’t finish the tune, and for over a year it was very incomplete.  One summer, I did the one tour I’ve ever done, driving up the California coast and doing a few gigs, and playing “The Caddy,” which I’d never thought of as a solo number, felt actually quite good, and I got a good solo arrangement for it, enough so that I, very sensibly, decided that the record, without “On Every Step of Our Stair” (which at the time didn’t have a title yet), was in fact finished.  When I got home from that “tour,” I cut the version of “The Caddy” that’s on the record, inserted “My Favorite Recipe,” and declared it done.

After finishing the record, I went into something of a post-partum depression–not to make light of the real thing–because I had this great piece of work that was done on terms I didn’t really yet know how to deal with, commercially.  I spent a lot of time printing Chevy up, promoting it, etc., when really, in hindsight, my time would have been much better spent finishing this tune and recording it the weekend after I declared Chevy done.  The tune waiting a good six months or more–memory fades–before I sat to work with it.  Bear in mind, this makes it about a year and a half this tune isn’t finished.  The writing, once I got to it, took about two or three weeks of jotting down lines here and there, but fairly diligently.  The tune is quite detailed, but it had nested for so long in my head that I had a good grasp of it in its detail.

The actual recording, when I got it it, is one of the best products I think I’ve done, in terms of getting not only a good tune, but a good arrangement and performance, to a final product.  This was one of the last two tunes I recorded using Cubase, on which I recorded all of Chevy–the other is “Making the Papers,” also on Poison Against Poison–and of the two it is the better.  I never really got the hang of Cubase for whatever reason, partially because it would at times run a bit buggy on my Mac.

I have had a few blind alleys, musically, in my life, that I’ve started to creep down but didn’t travel, so to speak, fully, and this recording is the only example I have of one of them.  I have been a Brian Wilson fanatic since the big press push for his first solo album in 1988, and I fairly quickly after that discovered the whole mythology of “Smile,” which he of course has since finished, to great effect in my opinion.  This was not at all recorded like Smile, sections of tunes recorded at different times and likely different places, and then edited together to create a whole, but I got it in my head that it would be interesting to do a record where the arrangement and instrumentation of the tunes changed not tune to tune, but verse to verse.  This recording does precisely that, and while I can’t see making an entire record that way–it might be intellectually appealing and thus gain some hipster cred–none of the records I really love were ever made that way, beginning with an intellectual proposition and then fitting tunes into it.  The best ones have the intellectual proposition flow from some tunes, from a process already begun, and then in turn re-stimulate the process with the intellectual propostion.  In any event, each of the verses in this recording uses a different arrangement, to great effect.

This was the last recording I made using my Fender Rhodes, which I sold when we moved to Dakar.  I miss the instrument, to be sure, and its voice is on loads of my recordings.  It’s the only instrument I’ve ever parted with that I sometimes wish I still had.  Space is an issue here, to be sure.  I’m considering a harmonium for my keyboard, as I can’t really play an accordion, depending on the cost.

I’d note, to finish, that Poison Against Poison is the only thing I’ve done that is not available to download freely under a Creative Commons license.  Yes, it must be purchased as a physical CD.  It is, as the web page will indicate, my “box set,” not in a box, but a book, assembled by hand, including everything I released on General Ludd Music between 1992 and 2005, except Chevy w/Balding Tires, which I’d thought at the time stood nicely on its own and which I wanted people to buy separately to try to get rid of a few of the CDs I’d had printed up.  It’s a very nice product, and something where actually holding it in your hand while you listen is worthwhile.  So, if you like my stuff, it’s a good way to go.  This is one of a handful of tunes on Poison that aren’t on any of my other albums, and likely I will as time passes write posts about the others and make the recordings available on this blog.  I’m not holding on to them for profiteering, but Poison was intended to be a physical product, and a physical product it will remain.