“Body & Soul”

“Body & Soul” (1997) from The Bathroom Mirror.

“Body & Soul (live)” (2005) from Live at Keith Danner’s House.

I smell my pillow and I hear a sound.
My eyelids open and I’m earthward bound.
Pretty soon the sisters wheel me around.
“Body & Soul.”

It’s Tuesday morning so they wash my hair.
The interns greet me as I pass the stair.
I start to mumble and the sisters hear a prayer.
“Body & Soul.”

I hear the Father‘s footsteps up and down the hall.
He’ll take all morning but he’ll see us all.
I hear him whisper and I hear him call.
“Body & Soul.”

The dishes break and then a rolling train goes by.
My head jerks backward and I shut my eye.
My head sees Heaven and the swirling angels sigh.
“Body & Soul.”

The sunburnt courtyard.  The dusty hill.
The metal grating on my windowsill.
The wooden beads and all these crushed-up pills.
“Body & Soul.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tune lately, as I’m going to perform it in a couple weeks and I believe I will be able to convince my harmonica-playing pal, Colin, to up and join me on this one and likely a few others.  He and I played for the first time in 20 years last spring, noted in a previous post on “Full Tank of Gas,” and when I went to his pad one afternoon about a month later this was one of the things we did.  Predictably, it worked well.

One could argue these things, but I don’t think I’ve written a better tune that would fall into the “blues” category than “’Body & Soul.’”  Interestingly, I’ve also not written a tune that I can recall that so completely resists orchestration of any sort.  The House Carpenters recorded this one evening as we taped our rehearsal, and while I was fairly pleased with the results, nobody else liked it.  Most likely, it was the tune I was happy with, not the arrangement.

More than one person, in praising my tunes, has pointed out that I give a sense of place in them, and I’ve always felt I couldn’t get a higher compliment.  I read Vine Deloria’s God is Red a couple years ago, and it really had an impact on me, aside from being a pure pleasure to read because of his prose.  Contrasting Christianity as it is practiced in North America with a generalized Indian—that is, North American Indigenous—religious practice, the fundamental distinction is that North American Christianity has totally abstracted itself from any sense of place while Indian practice is entirely predicated on the specificity of place.  I’ve thought a lot about that, and it really seems to me that things would improve a lot in this country if we (collectively) started to deal with the specificity of place as well as deal with dreams, as in dreaming consciousness.

The place in the tune is specific, if imagined.  There is not to my knowledge any Catholic hospital in Riverside, CA that offers the kind of care described in the tune.  I don’t even think there’s a Catholic hospital.  That said, the land is absolutely there.  The “dusty hills” are the same as in “The Man From Manila”:

These hills rise above me, devoid of all plant life.

The live version of the tune, above, was recorded at a house concert just below those hills as I imagine them in both of these tunes.

I have at times introduced this tune as a blues number about mind/body dualism.  I don’t actually buy into the concept, I’d state clearly, but I imagine that someone who is quadriplegic would find great meaning in it even if one rejected the idea ultimately.  It would seem to reflect one’s life.  It’s interesting to me that some people are placed by circumstance to live in a totally existential sense, certain philosophical or religious concepts that I learned about in school or read in books.  I saw this a lot in Senegal, where I knew some deeply spiritual people, in a very true sense, but also who at some level had so little materially that it seemed that they almost–I know how problematic it is putting this way, but the sense is still there–had no choice but to detach from material things.

I’d read in the few years before I wrote this tune a lot of William Blake, as well as some critical literature on him and his work alongside a biography.  So, Blake had visions.  Of interest to me was a contrast between people who placed his visions into scientific categories–he suffered from some sort of mental illness which may or may not have played a role in his economic difficulties–and those who simply reported that he had visions.  E.P. Thompson, whom I’d discovered in grad school and really liked, wrote what was for him a short book on Blake, and placed him in his very specific religious context, that of radical London religious dissent, that is to say, Protestant but not Church of England, and very much in tune with notions of individual revelation, rather than ecclesiastical authority.  Not only Blake had visions, but lots of people in the fair number or small churches he attended did.  It’s just what you did when you were a radical English religious dissenter in the eighteenth century.

It’s really troubling to me when I look, from the outside, at Christianity in the United States, though by no means is the following characterization applicable to individual Christians or all churches.  It seems as secular a phenomenon as I could dream up, because it seems more of a social network or social identity then a means to some actual, experiential spiritual or religious anything.  The social network aspect of it can manifest in very good and important ways, as in for example The Catholic Worker movement, or in the business cards I’d find on my door in Riverside for gardeners offering their services, cards with the Christian fish symbol on it.  I imagine that putting that symbol on the card actually worked to drum up business.  The social aspect of modern American Christianity can be seen of course in its most negative aspects as well in some of the hatred people spew in the name of religion, and though I’m well aware that this is a virulent minority I also know that it’s very important to pay close attention to these people.

The tune, to bring the digression above back to the song, contrasts the nuns and priest, who obviously do good work but who are going about their day in a world that seems to them to be exactly as it appears, with the main figure in the tune, who has ecstatic visions.  I suppose that in my life that the satisfactions I’ve found become fewer and fewer as I go up the chain of any hierarchy.  I appreciate Blake more than I do any Christian leaders, and I appreciate that Hui Neng was an illiterate woodcutter.  I had a professor at Pitzer who taught the Tao Te Ching, and when going over the passage that reads something like, “the Tao is like water: it seeks the low places that men disdain,” he asked, “isn’t this a loser philosophy?”  He then added, “I’m not saying it isn’t true.”

Building St. Petersburg

“Building St. Petersburg” (1999) from Building St. Petersburg.

My master sent me here
From Novgorod for half the year
I took with me some pelts and beer
When the harvest was done
All I see is wood and snow
The icebound boats shift to and fro
I work and watch the sky’s deep glow
While the monks say a prayer
The Devil’s come to walk these banks
His eyes are blind to birth and rank
My face becomes a flawless blank
When I see him pass by
How many men from Germany
Have traveled on the Baltic Sea
To vent their anger upon me
In a strange kind of language?

I awoke last Sunday night
Across the sky were flashing lights
My hut came into sight
And I walked for an hour
I saw the face of old Ivan
Who drank his kvass from dusk ’til dawn
The Devil took his soul beyond
And I heard his voice calling
I recalled the lovely time
We stole a keg of Master’s wine
We went to fight after we’d dined
With the neighboring village
I further saw my Master’s face
When he first told me of this place
I can recall the awful taste
That then came from my bile

A mental picture of my wife
Brought me more of my former life
I felt my fingers touch my knife
As I thought of the Swedes
I saw the fires in the trees
I felt the earth beneath my knees
The Swedes were riding on the breeze
And they took her away
I see the pictures on these plans
How on this swamp that statue stands
The engineer barks his commands
And I hear them translated
I count the days of this long year
They say the thaw is coming near
I run my fingers through my beard
And I look toward the forest

At some point, I’ll start blogging about tunes that aren’t actually things I’m most proud of.  At some level, my second tier stuff probably could make for better commentary, as I can dwell on the flaws as well as the virtues.  I’ve only ever put one tune on a record that I’ve released that I truly think in hindsight is a bust, but I’ve always been willing to put out something that, if not perfect, has a spirit of its own and is, therefore, special in its own way.  As long as something has it’s own spirit, it’s worthwhile.

“Building St. Petersburg,” however, is not one of those pieces that’s merely interesting, or that is flawed but worthwhile nonetheless.  I wrote it during my first year teaching, and it was the second piece I properly recorded digitally to ProTools with a good mic.  Flush with cash, I thought, for the first time, I bought a $250 AKG condenser mic, still the one I use for hi-fi recording at home, and I cut this track.

It’s interesting to me, in hindsight, the tunes I’d written for both The Duck Hunter and Building St. Petersburg.  I was fresh out of grad school, studying Russian History, Soviet period, and a lot of the choices I made for settings in my tunes’ situations reflects that.  I think they end up seeming, unless you knew me at the time and knew what I was reading, like something of an exercise in exoticism, which certainly carries an appeal of some sort to a lot of folks but which strikes me as problematic.  I’m at some level guilty, because I actually have never yet made it to either Russia or anywhere else in Eastern Europe (“The Czech Philologist,” on The Duck Hunter, is more fantasy, even beyond the absurd details, than I would probably like).

My stuff at this point was very bookish, probably because I basically had in my life at the time my job and my books, which overlapped quite a bit, to boot.  This isn’t a bad thing, because what actually counts in writing tunes or, really, doing anything, is that what you write needs to be an honest reflection of where you are or where you have been, defined broadly.  Bird said, famously, that if you haven’t lived it, it won’t come out of your horn, give or take a couple words but keeping the sentiment.

I took my MA in 1995, but grad school didn’t really end for me until 2005, when I got married and left Riverside, with my wife of course, and went to Senegal for a year.  I had the good fortune to get together most fridays with some of the gang from the History Dept. at UCR for beer, and though the group dwindled over time as people moved on–my cohort in Russian History moving to LA with our advisor, who took a gig at UCLA, good for him and everyone.  I think my education on those fridays was as critical to me as any classes I’ve taken, because what you had were a lot of great people, all leaning irreverent, loosening up and talking about things of interest.  So Russia was very much on my mind even though, like I wrote above, I’d never been.

The particular idea for the tune came from a memory of a course I’d taken in my last quarter at UCR when I’d actually started the doctorate I did two quarters of before deciding to take a break and see what the world had to offer me.  It was an Imperial Russia “materials” course, meaning a book a week in a seminar discussion.  I enjoyed it, and enjoyed the prof.  He had, in the class, some themes.  Periodically, he would say things like, “and where does this extraordinary violence come from…” and get quiet for a moment, shake his head slightly and then move on.  Not the most academic point to make, but honest and therefore interesting and human to me.  He would also periodically refer to runaway peasants.  Neither of these themes–or periodic interludes I suppose you might say–showed up in his official research interests, or did so semi-tangentially.  Every so often, though, he would get this far away look and say things like, “yes, and sometimes peasants would just disappear into the forest…”

This of course showed up in the last line of the tune.  The rest of it was really something of a nostalgic catalogue, for me, of interesting memories from my grad seminars, readings, and beer drinking conversations.  There’s the obligatory Pushkin reference, noting “The Bronze Horseman.”  I don’t make as many literary references in my tunes now as I used to.  Really, it’s more important to make sure that the song offers its story and its own truth–whatever that actually means–on its own terms.  I was reading a fair amount of theory at the time, though not too much “post-modern”–curse the lips that first spoke the term itself–stuff, mostly good, honest, Marxist stuff, on up through the Frankfurt School to Habermas.  That said, as someone who went through a Joyce phase in his early 20′s and has never regretted it (I just don’t tend to reread books when there are so many as yet unread), all the hip talk about intertextuality must have sunk in at some level, because in my mid-20′s I did a lot of referencing of other texts in my tunes.  Maybe I just wanted to seem smart, but in my defense I only ever referenced things I’d actually read.  I had then always taken Bird’s admonition very seriously, and still do.

This is one of my older tunes that I still play.  On that note, those of you in the Bay Area can hear it when I do a house concert on Oct. 10, at my pad.  My wife will cook her famous tostadas, to boot, so you have no excuse but to get in touch for directions and come on over.  I will indeed play this tune.

On a related note: I’m feeling quite good about decisions I’ve made regarding my musical output in the past months, and I think after years of hemming and hawing I’ve settled on a method that suits my life.  Light on promo–really, you’re reading the promo–and taking that extra time and spending it on music.  I’d gone this way before, during our year in Senegal, when I couldn’t really do promotion if I wanted to, and in hindsight I’d hit the right note then, for me, as I seem to be doing for myself now.  Dig the tunes, and, locals, do pop in on Oct. 10.

New Tune: A Bed of Roses

“A Bed of Roses,” demo (2009).

Lyrics with chords in .pdf.

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

There’s nothing simple about the pleasures of this average working American
If you calculate the complex operations I undertake to make ends meet
Keep your observations on your person and it’ll be better for the both of us
So we can smile at each other when we’re passing upon the street

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

Late one evening as I was stumbling through a garden of well-dressed rose bushes
Traveling out of my mind as I was trying to find my homeward pathway come correct
It then occurred to me too plainly to put my finger right upon it
So I rolled up my scruples and lay me down in a bed of roses

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

Who would have thought that these daily trials would have made a man or something out of me
Sometimes I wonder if the good days are gone or just taking a long vacation
So when I ask for your black tooth smile, you’d do right to muster it up for me
And I’ll shake my eyes-closed head in crooked time to the fiddle player

Call off your dogs and hold up your horses and slaughter your sheep
I had my final round and I’m heading into dreamless sleep
I can’t hide how my innards are feeling when I hit my head upon this low ceiling
I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning on the floor

At that time I lay down my mind and kick my shoes off
When I’ve spun my wheels one last time in that wild and great big go-round
I’ll take two portions of my daily bread in preparation for what lays ahead
And take two bottles of the finest vintage I can lay my fists upon

I like making tunes available quickly, which is not a way to monetize my art.  That said, I like it, and I’m fortunate enough to have a revenue stream that, while not a mighty Mississippi, is stable and pleasant enough so that I’d be a fool to try to make music my sole source of income.  So here we go: A Bed of Roses, cut to Garageband on Labor Day, 2009, finished less than an hour ago.

Please note–and this is worth its own paragraph–that there’s a .pdf of the lyrics to this tune, with chords.  I’d hope that any musicians who plan on making it to my house concert on October 3rd (email for directions) will be ready to play or sing along.  Music is meant to be a participatory affair.

I’d written most of this tune about a year ago but left off editing until this morning, quite literally.  I cut one couplet and replaced it, as well as tweaked a word here and there.  The addition fit in fine, actually adding to the tune, and I’ll not indicate which couplet is the new one, letting you instead enjoy it as a piece.

One of the tunes I’ve played for decades now–since I was 18, actually, 22 years and counting–is “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” a perfect, all-purpose hootenanny tune if ever there was one.  This is definitely its own tune, and the melody has been in my head incessantly in the past weeks, but it’s a singalong, which of all genres is the most beautifully Socialist.  I am not the world’s biggest Pete Seeger fan, but I also am aware that the point of Pete Seeger is socio-musical rather than strictly musical.  John Cage was similar: the point with both was the creation of social relationships in music.  Pete Seeger, by all accounts the best leader of singalongs there is (still), is all about diminishing the distance between musician and audience, which is, when one thinks of it, much too hierarchical as it stands.  Octavia Butler points out that humans have two contradictory impulses, that toward intelligence and that toward hierarchy.  The first is good, the second bad.

The recording is of decent quality but not better.  I recorded it using the built-in mic on my Mac laptop, on Garageband.  It sounds disturbingly like my old 4-tracks did.  Musicians should feel free to download the Garageband file above and add to it as you see fit.  Have fun.  None of the solos are particularly great, though the three are functional and this has the first bit of slide guitar I’ve recorded in 20 years.  All of this is made available with a Creative Commons 3.0 license, so you can modify things and add as you see fit.  As I note above, have fun, but let me know.

Enjoy it.

I Know & You Know

“I Know & You Know,” (1993) from ¡Hey Rhumbahead!

“I Know & You Know” (recorded live, with the House Carpenters, 1997) from The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes.

“I Know & You Know” (demo, 1992) from Bill Foreman’s Bill & Pete/House Carpenters 4-track Demos in the General Ludd Music Archive.

I see you walking with Mister So-and-So
And baby, it just breaks my heart
I never thought you’d sink so low
That this would be the way we’d part
We used to talk on the telephone
And all the guys would envy the way you were mine
But these days you pretend you’re not at home
And you leave me dangling on that telephone line
There’s no way that I can take it
I can’t roll on over and try to fake it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
That you keep yourself looking so very fine
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

It’s a flying fluke, a freak of fate
That we ended up opposing factions
But baby, it’s grown too late
To blame your life’s story on chemical reactions
I used to run around and say
About how it was that you really knew the score
But things are different today, baby
Your old tricks just can’t cut it any more
There’s no way that I can take it
I won’t make like one of your leaves and let you rake it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
That your kisses are tasting sweet like wine
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

Understand, I got a right to share
All these points I keep pounding into the ground
But how can you compare me, baby,
To all those other boys with whom you run around?
You used to show me your fancy clothes
And the way that they clung to your physique
But these days you just turn up your nose
And you expect me to just sit here and turn my cheek
There’s no way that I can take it
I can’t roll on over and watch you break it
I’ll make it plain so you can’t mistake it
That I know and you know
I could invent a reason to keep on trying
But there’s only one place you’ll go
And you won’t catch me walking that crooked line

“I Know & You Know” has always been one of my favorite tunes to play, and one of those I’m most proudest for having written.  I’m well aware that it’s by no means one of my most ambitious or artsy tunes, and I’d not pretend it would be in my top five or even ten.  I have a fantasy, though, that I wrote this in 1962 rather than 1992, in a climate that actually liked music like this–though maybe I would have held on to it for two or three years.  1965 would be just about right.

I’ve always had a good ear to mimic styles, and this is as good an example of it as any.  At one point in my life I could mimic accents and voices, and would even do imitations of teachers and celebrities at little shows my old high school put on.  Musically, I mimic, but I always still sound like myself.  That’s probably my secret, though I don’t know that I could teach or communicate it.  This tune was stolen in almost every way from any number of sources–George Harrison‘s guitar sound from “Taxman,” for example, the structure from any number of great Stax or Motown tunes, the background vocals an obvious and admittedly thin appropriation of the kind of vocal arrangements that were fairly standard in the ’60′s–but try as I might, which I didn’t, I sound like me.

Above all, and again, this could be taken as a somewhat general rule with me, one reason that I never can quite truly mimic a style is that my lyrics, which tend to be relatively verbose for the form, require a vocal cadence that is very different from all but a few musicians.  From my sound, one would think it would be folk musicians who inspired me to cram a bunch of syllables, like Tom Lehrer pointed out, into a line.  In reality, however, it was Chuck D more than anyone else who was then and is now my lyrical-structural source.  It’s worth noting that, if one excepts “Full Tank of Gas,” which I’d written in the summer of 1988 before I heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, all of the songs I’ve ever written that sound like me come from a post-Public Enemy Bill.

I can’t overstate how much I listened to that album in late 1988 and 1989.  I wasn’t so hip that I was aware of Rakim at that point, outside of having heard the name.  Though a common love for PE gave me a connection to the hip-hoppers at Pitzer College–they were definitely there, and we went to see PE a bit before they released Fear of a Black Planet, at a show in LA–I wasn’t that deeply into the music, much like I never really have gotten that deeply into any one genre.  While it’s true that folkies will cram a bunch of syllables into a line, they usually lengthen the line itself in time, meaning the actual form of the tune changes to accomodate the words.  I never do that, one will note, and neither does my model, Chuck D.

The lyrics of this tune follow the cadence of hip-hop, in 3, but follow the melody, if at times embellishing it to accomodate the words.  That’s my trick, and if one bears that in mind any number of my tunes make sense.  It works because I never set out to do it.  I just listened to a lot of Public Enemy while trying to write tunes that would have fit in the mid-to-late 1960′s.  Words just got piled in at a density that they wouldn’t have forty years ago.

The collection this came from, ¡Hey Rhumbahead!, was, I think, the recording Peter Giuliano felt we did best.  We cut it at Jack Devine’s house in the Valley–Los Angeles–with him at the controls, cut four songs, two each.  For both of us, they were a big leap forward artistically, and the sessions were remarkably fun and stress free.  We cut basic tracks live with me on drums–this incidentally, always makes for a great, live-feeling recording, no matter how many tracks you pile on top of the basics–and then added instrument after instrument.  I don’t think my drums have ever been recorded more beautifully than this set, to be sure, in terms of the actual quality of the sound.  As an additional treat, Alex Kimmel, with whom I’ve had a running correspondence in brief messages in the last few months, helped on the backing vocals.  I think we will record something at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Tomorrow is labor day and I hope to cut a demo to Garageband, which is much easier to deal with than Protools for a demo.  I’m at the point where my last project is basically out of my system and I’m looking forward to my next.  The tune I plan on cutting is one that I wrote a year ago, in Autichamp, the Drome, in France.  It’s the last tune I wrote.  The year passed quickly and my focus was on Adieu, False Heart, which basically took up the extra time I had that would have gone toward writing.  Fair enough.  I’ve been knocking around on my guitar recently and I’m cautiously optimistic that one of my things that I’ve been playing around with will come to fruition soon enough.

Conversation with Speak, Free Music

I had lunch yesterday with an old student, Speak, who makes his music available for free on the web, with no strings attached.  Interestingly, he reminded me that I had told him years ago that music was in a process of decommodification due to mp3 compression.  I gather that that conversation I had with him years ago had something of an effect and he’s certainly done well by it.

So I’m taking my own medicine, and I’ve made all of my recordings available without registration.  As you might imagine, of all of them, I’m most pleased with Adieu, False Heart right now (direct link to mp3 .zip file here), and if I would want anything downloaded, it would be that one.

Enjoy, and be in touch–especially locals so we can get together, have some music, and have fun.

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.

Cheap Liquor

“Cheap Liquor,” from Adieu, False Heart (2009)

“Cheap Liquor (demo),” from Adieu, False Heart Demos.

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
I got a bad song coming and I’ll sing it from the witness tree
And they’re saying this time I took it too far
I got a set of bloody knuckes and a dented car
You got a lotta nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down
When you were robbing me blind and you took off out of town
And when I hear any telephone calling
I’m bawling and shouting your name at the walls
You got a mean mind to keep running my good name down

You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me
When you call up the constable, threatening lock and key
But you can serve up your subpoena papers
I’ll still be be escaping to the street below
You got a lot of gall to be bringing up charges on me

You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your letters behind
I can hear the clock ticking and I’m gone out of a healthy mind
I could torch this one-room apartment then watch
The whole block steal away in smoke
You give a lot of grief when you’re leaving your locket behind

You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me
Tell me who does it serve when we’re dishing up misery
Yes if you’re thinking of drinking two-fisted
You’re sinking down in the same hole I’m in
You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me

Yes, this tune was available on the last post.  That was, however, a note that “Adieu, False Heart” was available.  This is the commentary.

The demo above, which is available for listening but not to download, was recorded about two hours after I’d started writing the tune, the quickest thing I’ve written, conception to execution, probably since I was in college, and this of a much better quality (the other one was a tune called “Potato Truck Headlights,” which I wrote to prove to Colin Epstein I could write a tune in one hour, and the carelessness showed in the piece).

At that point–this is sort of how I felt about myself, and I’m curious if anyone else felt this about where I was at that time–I was a bit stuck in my musical production.  Not as bad as I’d been in 2004 or 2005, when I’d just finished Chevy w/Balding Tires, a record of which I was enormously proud and which seemed to me impossible to follow–and of course anything like that is impossible to follow if one attempts to replicate it.  Chevy was a dense piece of work, and up until that point, possibly in an attempt to compensate for a lack of record sales, my work had become increasingly literary, for lack of a better word, and probably for that reason increasingly exclusive, in a literal sense, as in keeping out.  My music I felt then and feel now was completely successful, but successful on terms which, very simply, kept people out.

All kinds of people harbor grandiose ambitions, and this kind of thing is normal and healthy.  Mine at the time was to write the best songs of anyone working remotely in my medium in my generation.  Very particularly I wanted to outclass everyone else my age lyrically while at the same time having better melodies, bearing in mind a more-or-less folk-derived base of source material, than all comers.

These kinds of ambitions are juvenile, but useful.  For starters, I made a lot of good music.  A person needs a measure of ambition, even small ambition, to do anything, and looking back between 1988, when I wrote “Full Tank of Gas,” my first decent song (commentary coming relatively soon) and 2003, when I’d completed Chevy, I wrote 60 or 70 keeper tunes, with probably that many that I put aside but which were nonetheless finished products.  More importantly to me, I put out a number of albums, all homemade affairs but very real nonetheless, and these gave and give me a sense of some accomplishment.

I don’t think I started writing tunes trying to write “literate,” let alone “literary” lyrics: I wanted at all times to write excellent lyrics to tunes, largely because I was and continue to be very easily embarrassed by bad lyrics.  I always wanted my words to actually make some sort of a point, which meant that it was never acceptable to me to be obtuse or incomprehensible.  At the same time, the ideas I tried to express became over time more complex and specific.  Details became more numerous, and the relationships between them more complex.

I have no idea how I compare to other writers my age, but I am sure that if one takes my best tunes and puts them next to others striving for a similar type and level of quality, mine at the very least hold their own with anyone else’s best.  I really felt I nailed this level of quality on Chevy‘s best tunes, above all, to me, “When My Wife Takes Me By My Hand,” which was my favorite among them–commentary on that one forthcoming as well.  You could argue with me about which tune was or is the best on that record, but that one really stuck with me.

I had two problems once I’d finished Chevy.   One, of course, was that once I’d finished the work and was proud of it, it had really tapped, at least temporarily, my imagination of what I was capable of doing.  I wrote some good tunes in 2003, but very literally only a couple, and I did not write a single song in 2004.  You can imagine how demoralizing that was for me.  I have never been particularly prolific, but I’ve usually knocked out at least two tunes a year, and often more.  It’s almost a cliche to suggest that artists often spook themselves after they finish a great work, but I suppose I really did.

A second problem was that I had absolutely no sense of what to do with my music once I’d finished it.  A lot of people heard Chevy, but it never grew legs, commercially.  I have always been from somewhat naive to exceptionally so when it comes to music appreciation.  I’ve never been able to fathom that most people do not have the same relationship to music that I do, though I have come to understand that there’s no reason that people, in this big world, ought to.  I wanted Chevy to be the best hometaper/lo-fi album of all time, and to some extent I feel like I succeeded.  However, I finished it about 5 of 6 years after lo-fi had ceased to be cool, and it had never, with a couple of exceptions, been lucrative.

I suppose I started to ask myself, in 2004, when I didn’t write a single tune, what the point was, and given the assumptions I made about how my trajectory ought to work, I couldn’t give myself an answer.  I sort of assumed that if I kept making good music, things would snowball, and increasing numbers of people would come to appreciate it. It doesn’t actually work that way for anybody, even Paul McCartney.

A few things saved, me, however.  In 2004, I changed an intellectual interest in Buddhist thought into an active meditation practice when my girlfriend (now wife) and I found a fantastic meditation group in Riverside, CA, with a top-notch Dharma teacher, Gilbert Gutierrez.  The Buddhist emphasis on practice had implications for my music, and if initial results were slow to come–I wrote only two tunes in 2005, “Open Door” and “El Chorrillo,” both collected on Begging Bowl–what I did do was decide that music was something that one does.  My wife was a huge help, too.  Above all, she likes my music, to her relief.  I had told her when we started dating I made music and when I burned a CD for her of the works-in-progress from Chevy she was apprehensive lest it not be any good.  Thank God she liked it.  Having someone believe in me, but believe in me not-uncritically is hugely important.

My wife also got me out of the United States for the first time in almost 20 years.  Staying in Dakar for eight months in our first year of marriage was great for us as a couple and for me as a human being, but as a musician it really put me in a position where I felt that, contrary to my negative feelings the year before (this was 2005 when we moved there, in October), I had new and fantastic experiences awaiting me, which inevitably would lead to new musical experiences.  I finished more songs that year in Dakar than I had for some time.  A feeling of forward momentum is essential to me as a musician.

All this put me in a position where I was ready to have breakfast with Matt Nathanson in the Spring of 2007, who as I write this has finally after so many years “broken through” to a huge extent.  Matt and I played in a band together years ago, and he’s always been one of my very best supporters, on a personal as well as a musical level.  In any event, over breakfast, he said to me that he could not accept that someone as literate as me would have trouble writing.  He suggested that I just get the hell out of the way and write.  Very concretely, knowing how I wrote, he suggested that I refrain from editing a tune until I’d completed a draft.  I had evolved an effective but horribly labor intensive writing process by that time with which I would consider a complete line a good day’s work.  Deal with the editing, he said, at the end.  I said, “OK,” that I’d give it a shot because I didn’t really have anything else working for me that well.  Indeed, I said I’d have something by that evening, to which he replied that I didn’t need to feel that much of a rush, but he wished me luck nonetheless.

I drove home from Noe Valley to Crocker-Amazon, and on the way, I started whistling a bit and got the line, “You got a lot of nerve to keep serving cheap liquor to me.”  I understand that this might sound made up, but it really did happen like this.  I got home, got my guitar, and figured out the chords to the melody I’d been humming.  I got pen and paper, and started tossing out a number of lines.  I aimed for completion rather than perfection, and allowed myself to repeat lines, in this case to begin and end each verse with the same line.  This was incredibly liberating to me, as small as it sounds, and I felt–I remember this very clearly–a palpable sense of writing quickly when I got to the end of the fourth line of the first verse and then finished it off with the first line of the verse, already written.  Writing felt easy for the first time in years.

I ended up finishing the tune in a couple hours, as I noted above.  I focused less on an overarching coherence than on a series of lines that each were vivid and, I’d hoped, humorous in a sharp, absurd way.  This is to me a very natural way of working.  I like to say absurd things in normal conversation as people who know me will tell you.  Writing a tune this way suited my temperament.  I won’t say I didn’t edit as I wrote, but the editing was limited to cutting out or adding words to make it possible to sing, given the meter.  Some lines jam in more syllables than others, and I let this be.

I was immediately a bit dumbfounded with the results, because I hadn’t written anything so quickly in years and almost couldn’t believe that after a good three or four years of horribly labored writing I’d tossed off something in a couple hours that was objectively a better piece of work than things I’d put upwards of six months–or more–into in only the recent past.  Within a day I knew that, indeed, the tune was basically finished and good.  The only word I changed between demo and the final version on Adieu, False Heart was “locket” to “letters.”

“Cheap Liquor” had practical implications.  I was, I had thought, about half-way through my follow-up to Chevy, with a good four or five tunes plus a couple instrumentals finished, aiming for ten to call it an album.  I thought, however, that regardless of whether or not “Cheap Liquor” was better than the tunes I had, that it was different, and that I didn’t want to cram it into a group of which it wasn’t really a part, and that I didn’t want to try to force myself to write things to match the other tunes I had–that, of course, being the definition of filler, which I’ve never liked.  So rather than half-way through my next record, I had one song.  I ended up, after having written a few more tunes, taking the first three weeks of the 2007 Summer vacation to record those tunes I’d written between 2005 and late 2006 and release them as Begging Bowl, calling the group of seven tunes a “mini-album” for lack of a better word.  It felt bigger than an EP: I didn’t know what else to call it.

Comparing the demo to the final product is probably not without some interest to some people.  Both have the same instrumentation: solo acoustic guitar and vocal.  The process of production–and this was sort of my point on Adieu, False Heart–was not about making instrumentation more complex or developed, but about deepening the performance.  Both were played live, without overdubbing.  I think we tend to underestimate, given modern production capabilities, how critical it is for a singer to form a relationship with a song, and I can say for myself that in the nearly two years between writing this and cutting the final recording, I’d become very close to the tune.  The listening bears this out.

Adieu, False Heart available

“Cheap Liquor,” from Adieu, False Heart (2009)

Quickly:

My newest album, Adieu, False Heart, is now available at General Ludd Music. Download is free.  One song, “Cheap Liquor,” is publicly available without registration.  It is included in this post, though I will write about it later as well at greater length.

Years ago I blogged a bit about my music, posting music files with commentary, and in hindsight it was good for me personally as well as for a number of other people who in year since have told me they enjoyed what I wrote.  I’ll re-start that process here.

I’ve made music for well over 20 years and good music (as far as I’m concerned) since at least my Junior year in college, and I haven’t done anything better than this, though I’ve done plenty of things that are wonderful and different.  It’s just me and a guitar, cut in a studio, with an emphasis on concision and clarity.  It sounds exactly like I sound when I sit with a guitar and play well.  I haven’t made a record like this before, in that sense.  As far as the tunes are concerned, they are certainly the most directly accessible tunes I’ve written in years–like since 1993 or 1994–but they reflect all the development in my work up through Begging Bowl a couple of years ago.

Enjoy the tunes, and be in touch.